One badly written ampersand can now cost you the star ratings under your listing in Google. A week ago that same ampersand would have been quietly corrected on your behalf. It no longer is.
Google has changed how its crawler reads the structured data on your website, and the change is silent. Nothing warns you. No email arrives. Your prices, stars and FAQ answers simply stop appearing in the results and your traffic drifts down for reasons that look like an algorithm update and are not.
Search and SEO
Google has stopped correcting broken structured data for you
Google posted the change on LinkedIn on Thursday. To bring its parser in line with the JSON standard, it now applies only a single pass of HTML unescaping when it reads JSON-LD. In plain terms, an entity escaped twice over will no longer be unrolled. Google wants standard JSON escapes or Unicode hexadecimal escapes instead. Gary Illyes followed up pointing everyone at RFC 8259, section 7, which defines proper escaping.
JSON-LD is the block of code that tells Google your product price, your review stars, your recipe ingredients and your FAQ answers. It is what turns an ordinary blue link into a rich result.
Why this matters for your business: you almost certainly did not write your own schema. A plugin, a theme or a page builder wrote it, so you cannot assume the escaping is right. Double escaping happens when software runs your text through an HTML encoder and then drops the result into the JSON block. Google used to tidy that up. It does not any more. Take one product page, one service page and one article and run each through Google’s Rich Results Test this week. If the test cannot read the block, your stars and prices are already gone, and the fix sits on your side in a plugin update.
Reddit lost 86% of its ChatGPT citations in four days
Promptwatch tracked Reddit at an average 3.83% of all ChatGPT Search citations between 18 July and 7 August. That fell below 1% on 14 August and averaged 0.52% through to 17 August, a drop of 86.4%. An earlier slide began on 8 August, the same day Promptwatch says ChatGPT changed how it fans out a query into sub searches.
Nobody has confirmed a cause. Two explanations are doing the rounds. ChatGPT appears to be leaning harder on searches against named domains rather than broad web searches, and Reddit blocked its whole domain to crawlers in its robots file. Google’s AI products show nothing similar. By Friday Glenn Gabe was reporting Reddit showing up again on some queries, so this is still moving.
Why this matters for your business: Reddit is one of the largest websites on earth, with a signed licensing deal, and it still lost almost all its visibility inside one AI product in four days with no warning. If a chunk of your enquiries arrives through a platform you do not own, that channel can be switched off while you sleep. Your website, your email list and your customer database are the only three nobody else can turn off.
Social and content
Meta AI will now read your ad account and your Google Workspace
Meta announced on Thursday that small business advertisers can connect Meta AI directly to their Meta ad campaigns and to Google Workspace, meaning Gmail, Docs, Sheets and Slides. The assistant then answers questions about performance in conversation instead of making you dig through reports. Meta says it can pick out which audiences are working, find patterns across your best creative, flag ads that have stopped landing and point at budget that could work harder. It will also turn that analysis into a deck or a spreadsheet on a schedule.
Why this matters for your business: useful if reporting eats your Monday mornings, with two caveats. An assistant built by Meta is advising you how to spend money on Meta, so treat any recommendation to raise budget the way you would treat the same advice from a sales rep. And connecting Gmail hands over far more than campaign data, including client correspondence. Under POPIA you stay responsible for personal information you pass to a third party. Decide who has the authority to make that connection before somebody makes it for you.
Paid media
Microsoft Advertising drops manual bidding for new campaigns on 1 October
Microsoft emailed advertisers on Wednesday. After 1 October 2026 you will not be able to choose Max CPC when you create a new campaign, unless that campaign sits inside a portfolio bid strategy. Existing campaigns are not being switched over on the day, but the door closes on new ones.
Why this matters for your business: manual bidding is how a small advertiser keeps a hard ceiling on cost per click while a new account gathers enough conversion data for automation to work. That safety rail is going. Start an automated bidding test in the next few weeks, while you still have a manual campaign running beside it to compare against. The first month of automated bidding on a thin account is usually the expensive one.
Automotive
Google has broken auto repair into a dozen separate service categories
Barry Schwartz spotted a substantial rewrite of Google’s Local Services Ads getting started document on Thursday. The old, generic categories of Auto repair and Auto body have been split into specific services, among them Auto Air Conditioning Service, Auto Glass Repair, Brake Shop, Car Battery Store, Oil Change Service and Transmission Shop. Google told him the granularity was a top request from advertisers and that more categories may follow.
Two other changes landed in the same rewrite. Pre-badge ads let you start taking leads once you have passed the preliminary checks, while the rest of onboarding is still running, provided you have a licence or business registration, reviews and billing set up. And the Google Verified badge, which used to be withheld only from dining businesses, is now unavailable across the auto, beauty and dining categories. Local Services Ads move into the main Google Ads platform through 2027 and Google says these changes travel with them.
Why this matters for your dealership: your service department has been competing under a single label against every workshop in the suburb. Brake work, an aircon regas, an oil service and a windscreen are four different jobs, at four different margins, bought by four different customers, and they can now be four separate line items. Someone searching for a brake shop is much further down the path than someone searching for auto repair. Losing the badge is the cost of it, so the trust signal now has to come from your review count. Before you touch the bidding, check that each service you sell has its own page with its own price guide and booking form. Sending brake enquiries to a general service page wastes the targeting you just gained.
What to do this week
- Run one product page, one service page and one article through Google’s Rich Results Test and confirm the structured data still parses.
- Ask whoever maintains your schema plugin whether it escapes entities twice, and get it updated.
- Decide who in your business is allowed to connect Meta AI to your Gmail and Docs, and write it down.
- If you run Microsoft Ads on Max CPC, start an automated bidding test before 1 October.
- Check that the traffic you rely on comes from assets you own rather than a platform that can switch you off.
- Dealers, list every service your workshop sells and give each one its own page.
If you would like us to check your structured data or your service department pages, get in touch and we will take a look.
Sources
- JSON-LD extraction for Googlebot now does one pass of HTML unescaping
- Reddit’s ChatGPT Search citations fell 86% in four days
- Meta AI can now analyze and optimize Meta Ads campaigns
- Microsoft Advertising removes Max CPC from new standalone bidding campaigns
- Google Local Service Ads pre-badge ads and expansion of verticals