Fewer people are seeing your Google Shopping ads. More of the people who do see them are clicking.
That sounds like good news, and it mostly is. What sits behind it is Google quietly rationing where your ads appear, and new data covering 175 billion impressions shows how far that has gone in a year. The brief also carries a warning from Google about mass produced pages, a useful clarification from Apple on its AI crawler, a WordPress flaw sitting on millions of sites, and a number that should bother any dealer selling cars online.
Search and ads
Your Shopping ads are losing views and winning clicks
Mike Ryan at Smarter Ecommerce pulled data across 175 billion Google Shopping ad impressions, covering roughly mid 2025 to mid 2026. Median impressions fell from about 1.85 million to 1.4 million. Over the same window median click through rate rose from 1.20 percent to nearly 1.55 percent.
SEO people have spent a year describing the opposite pattern, where AI Overviews push impressions up and clicks down. Shopping ads are doing the reverse. Ryan’s theory is that Google predicts the click through rate of a query before deciding what to show, then serves AI Overviews more often on the queries least likely to produce an ad click. Your ads survive on the queries where people actually buy.
Why this matters for your business: If your Shopping impressions dropped this year, stop reading it as a loss. Put impressions, click through rate and cost per conversion on the same 12 month view. If the last two improved while the first fell, Google removed traffic that was never going to convert and you are paying less for the same sales. Report it that way before somebody looks at an impressions graph on its own and panics.
Google can lose faith in your site if you mass produce pages
John Mueller from Google posted on Bluesky on Monday about programmatic SEO, meaning pages generated at scale by looping through a list of variables. His wording was blunt. The approach “often leads to a site that’s either spam, borderline spam, or low quality”, and when it does, Google’s “systems have possibly lost faith in your site providing good value to users based on the old pages”.
Recovery is the painful part. Mueller said fixing it “tends to take time and significant effort to show the value”, and compared the work to climbing out of a spam or core update. That means months, not weeks.
Why this matters for your business: Plenty of South African businesses build location pages exactly this way, one page per suburb with the town name swapped in. That is the pattern Mueller described. If you have 200 near identical pages and only a dozen earn any traffic, consolidate them. A smaller set that each say something real about an actual area will outperform the full run, and it stops the dead weight dragging on everything else you publish.
AI crawlers and your website
Blocking Apple’s AI crawler will not cost you rankings
Apple updated its Applebot documentation over the weekend and added a single line. Site rules for Applebot-Extended are not considered in ranking for Search. Barry Schwartz spotted it on Monday.
Applebot-Extended does not crawl anything itself. It only governs whether content Applebot already fetched may train Apple’s generative models. Blocking it in robots.txt keeps your pages out of that training set and leaves your Apple Search visibility untouched. Google drew the same line between Googlebot and Google-Extended.
Why this matters for your business: You now have a clean decision instead of a gamble. If you would rather your content did not train Apple’s models, add the disallow rule and lose nothing in search. Make it a deliberate call though. If you want your brand quoted back by Siri and Apple’s AI features, staying open is what that costs.
Three million WordPress sites still carry an unpatched flaw
Security firm Defiant disclosed a high severity flaw in All in One WP Migration and Backup, tracked as CVE-2026-19949 with a CVSS score of 8.8. An attacker plants two trackbacks on a public post, waits for an administrator to archive and import the site, then reads the plugin’s secret key straight out of the public comments API. With that key they can import a crafted archive and run their own code on your server.
The patch shipped in version 7.110 on 20 August. As of 3 September only 35 percent of installs had taken it, which leaves roughly 3.2 million sites exposed.
Why this matters for your business: Open your plugins page today and check the version number. Anything on 7.109 or below needs updating now. This is a backup plugin, so it sits on far more sites than people remember installing, and the payoff for an attacker is full control of the site. If we host you, we have handled it. If we do not, this is a five minute job.
Automotive
Only 38 percent of live vehicle listings carry a video
This one is real news rather than a read across. Phyron surveyed 250 chief marketing officers and digital marketing leads across US auto retail between 27 April and 6 May, and published the results last week. On average, respondents said only 38 percent of their live vehicle listings include a video asset.
The blocker is production capacity, not doubt about whether video sells. Every unit carries different photos, specification, finance messaging and branding rules, and stock turns over constantly. Manual video cannot keep pace with a floor that changes every week.
Why this matters for your dealership: Nearly two thirds of your stock is competing on still photographs while buyers scroll past on AutoTrader, Cars.co.za and Facebook Marketplace. You do not need a film crew to fix that. A 20 second walkaround filmed on a phone, shot in the same order every time, closes most of the gap. Start with your slowest moving units and your highest margin ones, and measure enquiries per listing before and after so you know whether it worked.
What to do this week
- Pull 12 months of Shopping impressions, click through rate and cost per conversion onto one view rather than three
- Count your template driven pages and check how many earn any traffic at all
- Decide your Applebot-Extended position and write it into robots.txt either way
- Update All in One WP Migration and Backup to version 7.110 or later today
- Pick ten vehicles and film a short walkaround for each one
If any of this needs a second pair of eyes, whether that is your ad account, your page structure or your WordPress hosting, get in touch and we will take a look.
Sources
- Google Shopping Ads Have A Reverse Crocodile Effect With AI Overviews, Search Engine Roundtable
- Google Can Lose Faith In Sites Based On Low Value Programmatic SEO, Search Engine Roundtable
- Site Rules For Applebot-Extended Are Not Considered In Ranking For Search, Search Engine Roundtable
- Over 3 Million WordPress Sites Affected by Migration Plugin Vulnerability, SecurityWeek
- US Auto Retailers Struggling to Scale Video Across Live Vehicle Listings, Digital Dealer