We hope you are in good health. Here are some of the major SEO news updates of the week that you need to know:
Search Related News and Updates from Major Search Engine
Mueller: SEO vs GEO Isn’t the Point — Let Your Traffic Data Decide
John Mueller says the “SEO vs GEO” label isn’t what matters; what matters is understanding how AI tools fit into your business’ referral-traffic reality and allocating effort accordingly. His advice is to look at actual audience usage and channel metrics (e.g., how much of your audience uses AI tools vs other sources) before reshaping strategy around AI visibility.
Mueller: “Page Indexed Without Content” Usually Means Your Server/CDN Is Blocking Googlebot
John Mueller says the Search Console “Page indexed without content” issue typically happens when your server or CDN blocks Google from receiving any page content—it’s not a JavaScript problem. Because the blocking can be IP-based, it may not show up in normal external tests, so you should treat it as urgent and use Search Console’s inspection/testing tools while checking CDN/firewall/bot rules (especially on setups like Cloudflare).
The article summarizes a Google research approach for recommender systems (e.g., Discover/YouTube) that tries to infer a user’s semantic intent from natural-language, “soft” attributes like “funny” or “boring,” which are subjective and hard to label. It adapts Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs) to translate those personal meanings into vector signals that can improve interactive recommendations (like critiquing/refining results) without needing heavy retraining.
Bing Tests a Bigger “Ask Copilot” Button to Pull More Users Into Copilot
Search Engine Roundtable reports Microsoft is testing a much larger “Ask Copilot” button on the Bing homepage, replacing the usual small Copilot icon beside the search box. The change appears designed to make Copilot more prominent and encourage more users to start their journey via Copilot rather than a standard search.
Google Confirms It’s Personalizing AI Overviews & AI Mode — But Only Slightly (For Now)
Google’s Robby Stein says Google is already personalizing some AI experiences (AI Overviews and AI Mode) based on user behavior—e.g., if you tend to click videos, you may see video results ranked higher. He frames it as a small, limited adjustment today to keep results consistent, with an intent to make the experience more individually “great for you” over time; he also noted a direct AI Mode shortcut via g.ai.
Google Is Fixing a Bug That “Squishes” Images in Knowledge Panels
Some searchers are seeing distorted, squished images inside Google Search knowledge panels, likely due to a rendering/aspect-ratio bug. Search Engine Roundtable reports Google has acknowledged the issue and said a fix was identified and rolling out shortly afterward.
PPC Related News and Updates from Major Platforms
Google’s ALF Model: A New AI Layer in Google Ads to Catch Fraudulent Advertisers
Google introduced ALF (Advertiser Large Foundation Model), a multimodal AI system that evaluates advertisers using a combination of creatives (text/images/video), landing page content, and structured account signals (like billing and account history) to better infer intent and spot policy violations. SEJ reports the related research says ALF is already deployed and shows large gains in detection/recall while keeping very high precision for certain policies, using techniques like inter-sample attention to identify suspicious outliers at scale.
