Webcology

The Monopolists Anti-Accountability Edition

A GoFundMe campaign has been established to help pay Alan Blyweiss' family pay for his end of life arrangements and to helping classroom teachers buy school supplies through the Make a Wish Foundation. The August 2025 Spam Update continues to mulch its way through Google's index with few changes reported thus far. The rollout might take several weeks to complete. Google has updated its policies and guidelines for Google Business Profiles. There's a lot to go over so we're referring listeners to SERoundTable for highlighted details. The penalty for one of the Google Anti-Trust cases has been announced. Speculation had Google losing one or more parts of its business such as the Chrome browser after being declared a monopoly however the judge only ordered Google to share some data with its competitors. Released court records have shown us a bit more about how Google operates, including the FastSearch process of rapidly checking the veracity of AI generative statements. We also learn more about how Google ranks and scores documents in its index. A study shows AI and organic search converting at relatively even rates, WordPress introduces a new AI building tool called Telex, Character AIs (including one with that domain name) might be unsafe for children (duh?), Google fixes its crawl problem, and, Google's crawl budget is generally unrelated to algorithm updates. All this and a lot more ... Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Interview with Dixon Jones, CEO of Waikay.IO

A wide ranging interview with the founder of AI knowledgebase tool, WAIKAY.IO Dixon has been instrumental in the founding and growth of three major SEO / SEM tools, Majestic Links Tool, Inlinks, and now Waikay. We talk to Dixon about AI, what Waikay means, how it works, and we end up talking about the future of search. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The What Does Waikay Know About AI's Views on You Edition

This was a mostly news episode that ends with an extraordinary interview with Dixon Jones, founder and CEO of AI tool Waikay. We have a long talk with Dixon that lasted about 45 minutes about AI tools, how search has evolved to this point, and thoughts on growth of AI tool sets. We figured we'd stick it on the end of this show and also publish it as a stand alone interview. Before we get to Dixon, it's too early to call it but fears of an AI bubble bubbled to the surface this week on the heels of last week's study showing relatively low ROI for the $40B invested in AI by large corporations. The speculation was spurred on by the always sort of super-squirrely Sam Altman who stands to gain most if other AI contenders fail. Meanwhile, Google announced its Google Trends API was going to remain in alpha release for a little while longer, we learn a bit more about the psychology of working with AIs, xAI's Grok chatbot allowed Google to index more than 300,000 user conversations, Meta's chatbots caught doing all sorts of awfulness, DeepSeek speaks for the CPP, talk about publishers and site traffic patterns, John Mueller reminds folks that hype often precedes scams, and much much more.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Define AI as it Weirdly Goes Wild Edition

The AI makeover of everything is well underway and we're at the point where the most obvious problems are becoming more obvious amidst the hype. This week's vibe is partially informed by Kristine's annual visits to the Blackhat and DEF CON conferences where Kristine came across AdHacks by the Russian Mob, ways to subvert Gemini using popular Google apps like Gmail and Calendar, and how hackers can now prompt inject using AI agents without their victim taking an unfortunate action. Meanwhile, OpenAI is building a browser that will be agentically controlled, Grok is still weirdly obsessed with Taylor Swift, Leaked Meta documents show rules where chatbots can have adult chats with children, Perplexity offers Goolge $34.5billion for Chrome, Google confirms it wants AI generated content to be edited by humans, Gary Illyes reminds us why Google needs to control the signals it looks at, Microsoft wants to know how often your conversions come from AI driven clicks, and Google might be using generic undocumented crawlers.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Lord I was Born a Can of Spam Edition

Google has brought AI Overviews to explain lyrics its users search for. We expect results to be interesting, if not enlightening. Meanwhile, AI Overviews and AI Mode are now live in the UK. There are a couple WordPress vulnerabilities to warn listeners about, Open AI launches "Study Mode", Signing bonuses and huge contracts for AI superstars skyrocket a tiny few into elite athlete pay levels. More issues with vibe coding, this time sort of uncomfortably close to home, more of how everything old is new again when it comes to how AI and search work together, a reiteration from another Google spokesperson that good SEO gets the goods in AI result sets, Google AI Mode expands user tools, and lots, lots more. Hey Google, what did they mean when they wrote, "Lord I was born a can of spam, trying to make a living and get out of this damn can?"Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy