Marie Haynes✓

AI Overviews are now triggering for most commercial searches & brand queries. It's worth spending time doing some non-personalized searches for brand and money terms. My advice: First, see if everything is accurate. If not, look at where Google is pulling the info from. You can often correct it by changing the copy on your Home or About page. Or, you might find it comes from a third party source. Next, look at your top 10 money keywords. If competitors are cited over you, here's a prompt from the most recent Marie's Notes (for Search Bar Pro) you can run: "I'm analyzing which websites Google cites in AI Overviews for the query [YOUR QUERY]. Below is a screenshot of the text of the AI Overview and the external links cited. Hypothesize on why these domains were chosen (e.g. task completion utility, authority, clear definitions, structured specs, first-hand testing, freshness, etc.). Compare them to my URL [YOUR URL] and give me 3 concrete improvements that might help me earn a mention."

Super interesting tool created by @vanessafox to test how AI bots crawl your site. I did not know WP Engine was rate limiting ClaudeBot. More incentive for me to get off WP and onto an Astro build!

Google just shared a big step toward teaching AI models to continually learn. It's a "sleep" framework where the model alternates between actively working and offline "sleeping." This is very exciting! In the sleep phase, the AI unlocks pre-allocated Mixture of Experts memory blocks to consolidate short-term memories into long-term knowledge, and then "dreams" to play out new scenarios - filtering for the ones with the highest potential to help it improve. We are one step closer to having AI with no static knowledge cutoffs that can improve itself. AI systems should get dramatically better very quickly if this works as expected.

Today on the blog, learn about our new instance of a “sleep” phase in continual learning, which enables LLMs to continuously integrate new facts and enhance reasoning while mitigating catastrophic forgetting or static knowledge cutoffs. More →

New manual actions incoming for AI tools and app-building platforms? 😬 Google updated their document on preventing user-generated spam - and warns tool owners to look out for new manual actions. 😬 They specifically call out "platforms and tools that let users publish shared pages, generated content, or web apps" as well as "generated outputs, or interactive tools." What was added: ▪"Only index content meant for Search" - talks about tools that let users create shareable pages, generated outputs or interactive tools. ▪Watch GSC for alerts "if Google issues a manual action against your site or detects security issues." ▪"Check the page indexing report and Search performance report regularly for unexpected spikes in indexed pages, impressions, or queries that don't match your platform's purpose." They also mention to look for a small number of users generating a large share of indexable URLS. They don't mention specific tools, but we have recently seen that conversations from Muse (and before that ChatGPT and Claude) were indexed. And also we've seen people creating ChatGPT sites that in some cases have deceived people when they get indexed. Sounds to me like Google is putting the burden of curation onto the tool makers now. If your tool lets people create content, you need to be really careful about what gets indexed!

Just noticed Gemini in Chrome for Workspace has finally upgraded from 3.6 Flash to include 3.8 Thinking and 4 Argon.

I asked Gemini 4 Argon in Antigravity to dig through Anthropic's S-1 IPO filing ($41M revenue in 2023 to $16.3B in the first half of 2026!). ▪️ Over 90% of Anthropic's code is now written by Claude - and by April, their internal Claude usage passed their monthly human payroll. ▪️ ~900% Net Revenue Retention as companies move from testing prompts to running agents. ▪️ Agreements to spend up to $120.5B on compute with SpaceXAI, plus $240B+ with Google and $110B with Amazon. ▪️ Page 70 includes an official SEC risk factor on "model sentience and moral status." I shared all 10 takeaways in my free SEO & AI News space here:

OpenAl built an offline version of the internet to train their agents so they can learn to interact without touching the real web. How do we know we're not in someone's simulated training world?🤔

No more Deep Think in the Gemini App soon. It's being replaced by Argon.

My OKF Brain made its first $$$ this week. 🦾 I put together a video to answer the most common questions I've had about OKF and show the cool things I've been building with it. I really encourage you to give building with the Open Knowledge Format a try. I've made really cool apps including a health research companion (I'm down 22 lbs🎉), a Self-OKF where I can brainstorm with myself using a cloned voice, and a chores app that is super motivating. But most exciting is the OKF Brain. This, connected to my algo update MCP and Gemini 4 Argon is a better consultant than I am alone. Exciting for now, but also, I can see the day where most knowledge work is done by AI. I wonder what that means for humans?!?

This looks important! Google announced the Agent Compute Engine. They call it as big an invention as when they made TPUs. It's the thing that will take Al from a technology that answers questions to one that does things for us allowing for running autonomous agents. This system gives every Gemini user their own personal agent with a harness that runs on a virtual sandboxed machine and even does things for you when you're away. And it will be available on Google Cloud so that any team building agents can use it.

Sundar Pichai talks about the "agentic layer" which will unify Google's products, including Search. Personal Intelligence will carry your context across all of Google's surfaces so you can start in some place and pick it up again in another.

While Amazon is turning away Al agents, Walmart is welcoming them with open arms. They're introducing Agent Profiles, the Walmart Agent Gateway and terms for Al agents, so customers can shop Walmart and Sam's Club through whatever apps and agents they choose. Walmart says to think of it like adding an extra cardholder to your credit card. Each agent gets its own profile, with permissions and spending limits you set, and you can turn it off any time. Not everyone will shop with agents. People still kept going to malls even when Amazon became an option. But I think the retailers who make it easy for agents are going to win a lot of sales.

AGI will be here soon according to @demishassabis. "Earlier this year, he felt AGI was still three to five years away. Now he expects AGI within two to three years."

I just asked Gemini 4 Argon in Antigravity to help me figure out how to break out of familiar patterns when I play piano. It amazed me with two things! First, it helped me figure out how to connect my keyboard to my Mac. I had the right cord but it told me I had to change a setting within the keyboard for it to work. Then it made an app for me that listened to what I was playing and when requested plays my keyboard for me. It made challenges for me like, play this chord sequence without moving your fingers more than two keys (to help me find different chord variations.) So very cool.

New blog post: GEO is a distraction. I looked at 12 months of GA4 data across 100 sites - more than 145 million sessions. ChatGPT sent 0.62% of the traffic Google organic did. With all the other LLMs included, it's 0.73%. While ChatGPT visitors converted better at 13.8% vs 3.02% for Google organic, Google still drove 27x more conversions than all the other LLMs combined. And remember how we thought ChatGPT visitors would increase exponentially? Overall visits from ChatGPT have actually been declining since GPT-5 came out in August 2025. I think GEO is a distraction. Google is the surface that's likely sending the most visitors to your business. Yes, AI is changing how people use the web, but the real opportunities are just emerging. I'd encourage you to spend time preparing for the agentic web - UCP, Universal Cart, WebMCP, intelligent eyewear and more! The full post is here, plus a prompt you can use to brainstorm on what agentic search means for your business.

Almost time to launch the thing I've been building for years now. 🚀

Please @X, can you keep working on solving the bot reply problem? It's so gross. And makes it so I'm less likely to engage.

Woh. Google just released a dedicated hub for business owners within Gemini. The "business landing page" connects your Google Business Profile, Google Ads, and Workspace as well as apps like Adobe, Canva, Dropbox, Shopify, Wix, Zoho and Xero. My guess is that there will eventually be a marketplace where we can bring our own third-party apps. If I'm right then this could be a way to offer our expertise and knowledge for other businesses to integrate. That would be big!

Google's Universal Cart is launching in the US today! I really think this is going to radically change how we shop online. It lets you order from multiple stores in a single cart. You can save products from multiple vendors as you search. It also tracks price drops. And the cart can proactively work for you in the background, sending notifications on price drops or if an item comes back in stock. It will also help you choose which card or payment method to use based on each one's specific perks.

Google announced that AI Overviews and AI Mode are going to do more when it comes to linking out to websites. 1. More inline links in AI answers. Plus they will be shown higher up in responses more frequently. 2. Displaying official websites up high in AI answers if they are the place where people usually go to complete a specific tasks. 3. New prominent carousels for timely news articles that will appear within the AI answers. These will highlight your Preferred Sources. 4. More links to websites at the end of AI answers, along with image thumbnails and a more clickable design. 5. Clickable creator and publisher names on video results that take you to their Search Profile.