Industry News

I’m late to this one, but I like Liz Pelly’s take on Spotify Wrapped. It’s not just about music—it’s about what happens when we let corporations automate our memories:

Spotify Wrapped now feels like just another example of something personal and precious that is being automated away from us; another example of a supposedly unbearable task of thinking and writing being “offloaded” in order to make life more frictionless.

The post is essentially about friction—and why we need it. She...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google completed the December 2025 core update this week and it hit some news publishers incredibly hard. I posted the annual Google algorithm update infographic. Google's Frankenstein AI-recipes are a complete horror. Google questioned the need for ccTLDs for international SEO...

Now that the December 2025 core update is officially done, some are looking at the damage it caused. A number of very visible news publishers saw some significant declines in Google Search visibility with this latest core update.

For the past several years now, John Mueller of Google would come out with what he calls the "Mueller Report of SEO memes." Well, here is his 2025 edition of the Mueller Report of SEO memes. It is fun to scan through, so I'll just embed them all.

Google is testing a blue "Send" button in the search query box on its home page. When you type in your query, you can click "Send" to search Google for that query.

Google has been saying that 404 error codes are a normal part of the web, that 404s are not a low quality signal and that they don't use up your crawl budget. Now, John Mueller of Google explained why 404s don't matter for SEO.

John Mueller, who works on the Google Search team, responded to a question that asks, "Does extensive Schema markup actually help Large Language Models (LLMs) understand your entity better, or is it just for Google Rich Snippets?" He responded to the question, prefacing it that it is his point of view and "this is not official guidance."

Just like with Christmas day every year, so to with New Year's Day - Google's John Mueller and often other Googlers, are out and looking to respond to some questions on Google Search and SEO. John Mueller so far posted a few times on Reddit this morning, January 1, 2026.

This is weird. It is 2026, and Google.com, the Google Search home page, is still showing yesterday's New Year's Eve doodle of 2025 going into 2026. But it is after 7 am ET here on January 1, 2026, and on all my devices, I see yesterday's Google Doodle.