Google rewires its links, rewrites parasite SEO, and hands you two October deadlines
Google’s had the kind of week that makes your rank tracker sweat and your calendar fill up fast. Anti-scraping era, activated: Google confirmed it’s rolling out google.com/goto passthrough URLs across search results, now near 100% coverage. Those links can’t be decoded, so third-party tools must follow redirects. Expect turbulence in your SERP data. Parasites, evolved:…
AI Mode books your hotel, and Demand Gen ads text you back
Welcome to Hotel Google. You can check in any time you like, but your clicks can never leave. Three AI Mode updates, one direction of travel: Google is rolling out hotel booking for US users in English, with Google Pay checkout and 10 launch partners. It’s also testing sign-in popups mid-answer, and adding link carousels…
Gemini hits a billion users, French publishers ask to get paid for AI Overviews, and Google Ads learns to interpret itself
Google is winning the AI land grab and getting reported to a regulator for it. In the same 24 hours. One billion, with an asterisk: Sundar Pichai says Gemini has reached 1B monthly active users, faster than any Google product before it. That counts only people opening the app or site, not Gemini inside Gmail…
