Anthropic’s prompting guide for Claude Opus 5.5 advises developers to test multiple effort levels instead of reusing the setting used in Claude Opus 5. It also suggests chat applications remove system-prompt lines instructing Claude to think carefully before responding. Opus 5.5 launched Sept. 22. The guide says Opus 5 prompts should still work well without edits,…
Google has published a research paper about detecting spam that mimics a human manual review that catches content that violates the “spirit” of policy violations and platform guidelines. The system is called Scaled Abuse Forensics Examiner (SAFE) and it is expressly designed to identify AI-generated content. Paper Is Opaque And Withholds Information The research paper…
Not every link inside an AI Overview is the same. Google’s posts describe links placed next to the answer text, article suggestions at the end of a response, previews of online discussions with links to the thread, and, since January on mobile, a follow-up question that opens a conversation in AI Mode. In Search Console, clicking on…
This post was sponsored by adment. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. Branded keywords should be your cheapest clicks. So why are your branded CPCs going up? You’ve checked Auction Insights, your bid strategy, and seasonality, and none of them explain it. Who else is bidding on your brand, and why…
Baidu has quietly added a new section to its webmaster tools: AI Traffic Analysis. Chinese webmasters began spotting the menu item around September 15, and Baidu confirmed it in an official notice on September 16. There is one catch. The data isn’t live yet. Baidu says the feature is rolling out in phases and the…
Publishers that want to target international audiences often struggle with the right approach. Expanding your audience beyond your own country’s borders is challenging for a whole raft of reasons, and search is one of them. I’ve consulted on dozens of international SEO projects for publishers. Most publishers have a preference for a specific approach, which…
New research published in August confirms that Google’s AI Search reduces clicks to publisher websites and presents a user experience that is so bad it makes them seek out alternative search engines like Duck, Duck, Go, Bing, and Yahoo. The findings directly contradict Google’s assertions that people love AI search and that it is sending…
The “site:” search operator in Google/Bing has been the mainstay of SEOs wanting to check if a page is in a search index if they didn’t have access to Google Search Console or similar. So simple, so effective. Likewise, if you wanted to check to see if page content is indexed (or duplicated in the…
Organic traffic is declining, but conversions are proving more resilient. In Search Engine Journal’s survey of search professionals, 39% saw traffic decline or remain flat while leads and conversions held or improved. Only 15% lost both traffic and conversions. That split changes how marketers should evaluate search. Traffic still measures reach, but it no longer…
Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft are testing ways to compensate websites for AI access to or use of their content. Each company has its own set of rules about what triggers payment, who defines that unit, what control content owners have over terms, and what information comes back. Those differences decide what a site owner can…