Three changes landed this week and all three came from the same place. Google deciding who gets to read what.
One will still matter in six months. Google has confirmed it now routes search result links through its own address, which quietly breaks the way almost every rank tracking tool works. The other two are deadlines, on the fifteenth of September and the first of October, and both cost you money if you let them pass.
The three biggest changes
Google confirmed it is routing your clicks through its own links
We flagged this on Wednesday while it was still unconfirmed. By Thursday Google had confirmed it. Search result links now point at a google.com address with the real destination encoded inside, rather than at your website directly.
Derek Perkins at the rank tracking firm Nozzle measured close to a full rollout across several residential providers, after roughly four months of quiet testing. A Google spokesperson described it as a technical measure against evolving forms of abuse, which is corporate wording for stopping scrapers.
Here is the part that matters. The destination is encoded, so any tool reading a results page has to follow every redirect to work out where each result points. One results page carries hundreds of links. PPC Land reported this turns one tracked keyword into between five hundred and a thousand separate requests.
Why this matters for your business: your rank tracking report is about to get slower, patchier or more expensive, and none of that will be your agency’s fault. Two things protect you. Treat Search Console as your primary record of search performance, because it reports on your own property and involves no scraping. Then ask your rank tracking supplier what their plan is. The ones with a clear answer will be fine.
The IRS proved that bot protection can delete you from Google
The American tax authority spent most of this week missing from Google for its own tax brackets and its own free filing pages. Nobody attacked it and Google did not penalise it. Somebody turned bot protection up too high and Googlebot got caught in the net.
The evidence sat in the listing itself. The result lost its favicon and lost its description, which is what a listing looks like when Google cannot fetch the page at all. Lily Ray posted tracking data showing terms the site ranked first for a month ago where it now barely appears. Glenn Gabe found the same pattern across other government domains.
We covered the mechanism on the thirteenth of August, when Cloudflare announced new crawler defaults. What changed this week is that a site the size of the IRS demonstrated it live. Cloudflare treats Googlebot as a mixed purpose crawler, because the one bot both indexes for search and gathers training data. From the fifteenth of September, any setting that blocks AI training blocks Googlebot along with it, including the older block AI bots toggle that a lot of sites switched on last year without thinking hard about it.
Why this matters for your business: plenty of South African sites turned on bot protection during the AI scraping panic and nobody has looked since. That deadline is two weeks away. Open your CDN or firewall, find the bot rules, and if AI training is set to block, add an explicit allow rule for verified Googlebot and Bingbot. Then run a live URL inspection in Search Console on your homepage and three money pages. No warning email ever arrives for this one.
Google will bill you for calls nobody answers
Google emailed Local Services Ads advertisers this week. From the first of October, a missed call during your listed business hours counts as a valid, chargeable lead if the caller stays on the line longer than twenty seconds. Nobody has to pick up for you to pay. A follow up call with that same person also gets charged once it meets the criteria.
Why this matters for your business: your opening hours in Google stopped being a display setting and became a billing setting. If you list closing at five but the phone goes quiet at four, you pay for that hour. Trim your listed hours back to the times somebody genuinely answers, put call forwarding behind the rest, then pull your call log and count how many calls already ring out. That number is about to become an invoice.
What turned out to be noise
Two Google faults that frightened everybody and cost nothing
Two scares came out of Google’s own systems this week and neither did lasting damage. The favicon bug that replaced site logos with a plain grey globe was confirmed as Google’s fault and repaired by Sunday. Then on Monday, Search Console emailed a large number of site owners saying a new owner had been added to their property. Nothing had actually changed. It was a Search Console fault and Google said so.
Why this matters for your business: when something looks broken in Google, check whether it is broken for everybody else before you rewrite your own code. A lot of people lost most of a working week to these two. Still, take John Mueller’s advice on the second one literally. Open Search Console, go to Settings, then Users and permissions, and read the list. Most small businesses still have a former agency or a departed developer holding owner rights.
Reddit’s collapse inside ChatGPT
Reddit lost roughly eighty six percent of its ChatGPT citations in about four days, falling from an average of three point eight percent of all citations to around half a percent. It looked like a platform being switched off overnight.
Here is the hindsight the daily brief could not offer at the time. Promptwatch found that ChatGPT’s use of the site search operator jumped from under half a percent of its queries to nearly seventeen percent on the eighth of August. That is ChatGPT changing how it picks which sites to ask, not a penalty aimed at Reddit. Tracking firms also recorded a near identical collapse in June, after which Reddit recovered to around five percent over two months.
Why this matters for your business: the lesson is not that Reddit is finished. The lesson is that visibility inside an AI product swings hard and often recovers, so one bad week is not a reason to rebuild your strategy. The underlying point still stands though. If a meaningful share of your enquiries arrives through a platform you do not own, somebody else can turn that tap off while you sleep. Your website, your mailing list and your customer database are the only three nobody else controls.
Automotive
The free route from your inventory into Google is closing
Google is retiring the vehicle listings structured data type, the markup that let a crawler pull inventory straight off a dealer website with no feed required. Dealers reported listings disappearing from Business Profiles through the week. The stated reason is that almost no major dealer website vendor ever adopted the markup, so the free path is being closed rather than fixed.
Why this matters for your dealership: the route from your stock onto a Google surface now runs through paid vehicle ads and a proper inventory feed. Ask your website provider two questions this week. Are we still publishing vehicle listings markup, and what replaces it when it stops working. If the answer is vague, start budgeting for a feed. Meanwhile make sure every vehicle detail page stands on its own in organic search, with the make, model, variant, year and your town in the title.
Auto repair split into a dozen service categories
Google has broken auto repair out into around a dozen separate service categories rather than one broad bucket. That is sharper targeting for anyone who sets it up properly and a quiet loss of visibility for anyone who leaves the old general category sitting in place.
Why this matters for your dealership: your service department is usually the most profitable part of the business and it is also the part most likely to have a neglected Google Business Profile. Work through the service list and tick every category you genuinely offer. Leave off the ones you do not, because a booking you cannot fulfil costs you more than the click was ever worth.
Still unresolved
Google is about to run two different sets of spam rules
From the thirtieth of August, which is tomorrow, Google stops applying site reputation manual actions to searches inside the European Economic Area, following pressure from the European Commission. A penalised section of a site will still be demoted for everyone outside the EEA and will rank normally inside it.
Why this matters for your business: South Africa is not in the EEA, so nothing here gets softer and full enforcement still applies to you. What it tells you is that Google will bend a spam policy when a regulator pushes hard enough. Treat any policy as a current position, not a permanent rule. If you host third party content on your domain, that remains a live risk here.
Two things Google has admitted and not fixed
Google confirmed on Monday that it knows about reviews vanishing when a suspended Business Profile is reinstated. It says it is working on a resolution and has given no date. Separately, ranking volatility carried on well past the twenty first of August, when the spam update was declared complete, although the data has now settled enough to act on.
Why this matters for your business: export your reviews this week. Screenshot the panel, save the reviewer names and dates into a spreadsheet, and copy your best few onto your own website. You do not own that content and there is no recovery route beyond a support queue. Search Console figures from after the twenty first are now safe to read.
What to do this week
- Open your CDN or firewall and add an explicit allow rule for verified Googlebot and Bingbot before the fifteenth of September.
- Run a live URL inspection in Search Console on your homepage and three pages that earn you money.
- Trim your listed business hours back to the times somebody actually answers the phone.
- Read the user list in Search Console and remove anyone who no longer works on your site.
- Export your Google reviews into a spreadsheet and copy the best few onto your own website.
- Ask your rank tracking supplier what their plan is for the goto redirects.
- Dealers, ask your website provider what replaces vehicle listings markup when it goes.
If any of this needs a pair of hands rather than a checklist, get in touch with us and we will take a look at your setup.
Sources
This week’s briefs on our own site
- Sunday, Google has stopped fixing your broken schema code
- Monday, Google quietly repaired two of its own faults
- Tuesday, that Search Console security email was a Google fault
- Wednesday, Google will charge you for missed calls
- Thursday, Google is sending your clicks through its own links
- Friday, the IRS vanished from Google this week
External sources
- Google Search Rolling Out google.com/goto Tracking
- Google forces rank trackers into 500 to 1,000 requests per query
- Cloudflare’s AI Crawler Rules Can Block Googlebot
- Google Search Ranking Volatility Continues Post August Spam Update
- Google Won’t Enforce Its Site Reputation Policy In The European Economic Area
- Update to the Site Reputation Policy, Google Search Central
- Why Reddit’s ChatGPT Citation Drop Isn’t Fully Explained
- Why Did ChatGPT Stop Citing Reddit, Promptwatch
- Google is Sunsetting Vehicle Listings, PureCars
- Vehicle listings on Google, Google for Developers