Microsoft announced its AI-agents agentic experiences under the names of Copilot Checkout and Brand Agents. Copilot Checkout lets you shop and checkout directly in the Copilot chat experience and Brand Agents lets you add AI-chat experience to your site, and the AI is trained on your product data.

Google’s Danny Sullivan said on the Search Off the Record podcast that was published yesterday that Google does not want you to turn your content into bite-sized chunks to rank well in LLMs. He said, “we don’t want you to do that” and he even spoke to Google engineers about this.

This week, yep, we had another story on Google Search ranking volatility. I posted the Google webmaster report for January 2026. Google Discover seems to be showing too many…

Google’s Danny Sullivan and John Mueller spoke on the Search Off the Record podcast about whether hiring an AEO/GEO or buying an AI-optimization tool is any different than hiring an SEO or buying an SEO tool. In short, the advice is the same – both Googlers said.

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

Microsoft is hiring a “very” Senior Product Manager who will initially work on fighting spam across Bing and Copilot. Fabrice Canel said this is a “very” senior PM role and the job description says the “initial focus on reducing Spam in Copilot, Bing, MSN and Ads.”

Google seems to be testing showing call assets on Vehicle Ads within Google Search. So on the Vehicle Ads there is a way to call the dealer or seller, like you see on some other ads.

John Mueller, a Google Search Analyst, responded to a question on Reddit named Is SEO still enough, or do we need to start thinking about GEO too? In short, John said you should look at the “full picture, and prioritize accordingly.”

Adam Wathan the creator of Tailwind CSS posted that he had to let go of 75% of his engineering team because of AI. He said traffic to the Tailwind help documentation is down 40% and that is where most people learn about his solution and then buy commercial products. He added his revenue is down […]

Greg Gifford, a veteran automotive and local SEO, published a hard warning to vendors suggesting that they tell automotive dealerships to set up separate Google Business Profile department listings for separate services. He said, do not, do not, do this and that it can lead to your Google Business Profiles being suspended and removed from […]

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

Google’s Robby Stein confirmed (again) that Google is personalizing some of the AI experiences, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. He said this on the CNN, Terms of Service podcast with Clare Duffy.

Google is hiring a Chief of Staff on Search Intelligence, Strategy and Operations. This job is to “help architect the next era of Search with AI,” Rajan Patel, the Vice President of Search Engineering of Google, posted on LinkedIn.

Microsoft is testing a much larger “Ask Copilot” button on the Bing home page. Normally, Bing only has a small Copilot logo on the right of the search box but in this test, Bing writes it all out – “Ask Copilot” with the logo.