Industry News

Eli Stark-Elster has a piece that reframes the “kids and screens” debate in a way I haven’t seen before. The usual narrative blames addictive tech design, but he offers an alternative:

Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies. They make their platforms as addicting as possible, and the youth simply can’t resist — once a toddler locks eyes with an iPad, game over.

I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the...

This has been my experience with MCP servers as well. As useful as I think my Last.fm MCP server is, I can’t see it every having more than a dozen users. But internal company servers are massively useful:

MCP is being used especially heavily by internal data and platform teams to give internal users access to systems. These are systems that these users perhaps already had access to, but it was either too complex or too broad, or needed a lot of documentation or special skills to use....

Will Larson has a good post about how they’re adopting AI at his company. The process is interesting, but this is the part that jumped out at me:

My biggest fear for AI adoption is that they can focus on creating the impression of adopting AI, rather than focusing on creating additional productivity. Optics are a core part of any work, but almost all interesting work occurs where optics and reality intersect.

It’s really hard to figure out if AI tools are (1) helping teams ship...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...

Nick Fox is the SVP of Knowledge and Information at Google was interviewed again on the AI Inside channel by Jason Howel and Jeff Jarvin. He said a lot of interesting things but said no, Google won't be offering standarized licensing deals for all publishers. He also said that optimizing for AI Search is the same as what you do for web search and normal SEO.

Google updated its JavaScript SEO documentation to warn against using a noindex tag in the original page code on JavaScript pages. Google wrote, "if you do want the page indexed, don't use a noindex tag in the original page code."

Google can not show ads in AI Overviews with the exact match type. This is a change from back in May, where Google said otherwise. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, wrote on X, "We have since updated this."

Earlier this month, we documented that the average position sharply increased for many sites when Google made that num 100 change blocking a lot of automated queries. Well, for some sites, that number is dropping again, which may mean that there is a workaround for the blocking of those bots and automated queries.

Google Search Console's performance report seems to finally be all caught up and up-to-date as of last night and this morning. I am seeing the normal two-hour or so delay, which has always fluctuated from an hour to five hours on a normal day.

After several months of testing, Google seems to be rolling out the "Read more" links at the end of some of the search results listings. We saw Google test variations of this back in July and it now seems to be live.