SEO, AEO & GEO news, tracked daily.
Search, GEO, schema, and AI-search developments we track daily for clients — newest first, with the archive by month below.
Watch: Google's May 2026 core update in 60 seconds
What the update changed for ecommerce stores and where rankings moved. Coverage continues in the news items below.
What changed, as it happens.
Tracked daily from primary sources. The items below are what we're watching for clients right now.
Google now recommends 304 responses, and says all its crawlers share one budget
Google updated its crawl-budget documentation with two substantial additions. The first is a recommendation to support HTTP caching, worded as: "Support 304 (Not Modified) HTTP status codes. If a page hasn't changed since Google last crawled it, returning a 304 code tells Google to reuse the cached version, saving your server bandwidth and resources." The second is a clarification that the crawl capacity limit is shared across all crawlers, so high demand from one crawler such as Googlebot-Image reduces the capacity available to the others. The document scopes its guidance to enterprise sites above one million pages and medium sites above ten thousand pages that change rapidly. Search Engine Journal reports these were the only substantial additions, with minor clarifications elsewhere in the page.Source: Search Engine Journal →
Our take: Image crawling and page crawling draw on the same pool, which means an oversized image set is competing with your product pages for the same requests. The 304 half is a server response rather than a setting in your store admin, so on hosted BigCommerce or Shopify the question is what your platform and CDN already return for a page that has not changed. For most stores this turns out to be somebody else's checkbox.
Read our full take →Another unconfirmed shuffle ran from August 1 through August 3
Search Engine Roundtable reported a fresh Google ranking-volatility event beginning Saturday, August 1 and continuing through August 3, based on third-party rank-tracking tools and reports from the SEO community. Google has not confirmed an update and there is no named algorithm change attached to it.Source: Search Engine Roundtable →
Our take: This is the third of these since mid-July, after July 18 to 19 and July 23 to 26. At that cadence an unconfirmed shuffle stops being an event and becomes the weather, and naming each one invites a hunt for a cause that was never there. A position still down in two weeks is a signal worth working on. Everything inside that window is a rank tracker doing its job.
Read our full take →Bing Webmaster Tools switches off its legacy APIs on August 31
Microsoft will retire the legacy SOAP and POX Bing Webmaster Tools APIs on August 31, 2026. Anything still calling them has to move to the JSON over HTTP REST API before that date.Source: Search Engine Roundtable →
Our take: Whether this touches you is not a question you can answer from your own side. The legacy endpoints get called by software rather than people, so the exposure sits in a rank tracker, an SEO plugin, or a URL-submission script somebody wrote years ago and nobody has opened since. Microsoft's notice names no vendors, and a submission job that quietly stops running on September 1 does not announce itself.
Read our full take →Ecommerce brands own more of their AI citation mix than SaaS or finance do
Aleyda Solis analyzed the top 10 cited source domains for 15 leading brands in each of three verticals, SaaS, ecommerce and finance, across Google AI Mode, Gemini and ChatGPT using Semrush Enterprise data, then classified every cited domain by who owns it. In all three verticals the brand's own website was a minority of the cited mix. SaaS came in at 82.3% external and 17.7% owned, finance at 79.4% external and 20.6% owned, and ecommerce at 69.6% external and 30.4% owned. Solis frames the owned site as an "on-page corroboration base": the canonical statement of product, policy and documentation facts that social, community, publisher, review, marketplace and competitor sources then validate, compare or challenge. Her recommendations include treating third-party citations as core rather than optional, identifying which specific sites influence a target prompt before choosing PR or social targets, and connecting cited evidence back to a commercial destination.Source: Aleyda Solis →
Our take: Ecommerce is the least dependent of the three verticals on other people's pages, which is the reverse of how this study gets quoted. A third of the mix is still the minority share, so the schema and content work every store already does buys that third and cannot buy the rest. Where the other two thirds sit varies by prompt, and a review site that dominates one query can be absent from the next one over. Nobody can name your external targets from a vertical average.
Read our full take →The AI opt-out switch is reaching US accounts, and nobody has the data to use it
Google's "Search generative AI" control, which lives in Search Console's settings, began appearing on some US accounts in July 2026 after previously being required only in the UK. It governs links and grounding in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover's generative AI features. Google says it does not affect regular Search rankings, Merchant Center, Google Ads participation, or AI training, which has separate controls of its own. Changes take a few days to process, and content drops out within one to two days once they do, with caching able to delay it further. The control exists because the UK Competition and Markets Authority imposed a conduct requirement on Google in June 2026; the same CMA timeline calls for click data and click-through rates by December 2026 and page-level controls by March 2027. Running alongside that, NewzDash tracking puts Top Stories carousels inside AI Overviews on 15.5% of US trending-news queries and 17.46% of UK ones, which means the opt-out can remove a site from both placements in one move. There is still no click or conversion data published for AI Overviews, so nobody can measure what opting out costs them.Source: Search Engine Journal →
Our take: For a store this is a switch to leave alone. It does not touch your rankings, but it pulls your links out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, which sit on close to half of Google searches. The publishers weighing it up have a traffic grievance a catalog does not have, and the click data that would settle the question is not due until December.
Read our full take →
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