Chrome released a massive security update fixing over 30 vulnerabilities. Be sure you're running v147.0.7727.137/138 and accept no substitutes. Meanwhile, OpenAI founder Sam Altman's identity verification service promoted a partnership with the wrong Mars in an embarrassing mix-up of identities. The Pentagon is signing deals with virtually any AI, chip, storage, or techbro firm it can including Mythos by Anthropic even though all other Anthropic products are banned, except the ones they're too addicted to stop using. The extraordinary music, culture, and technology festival SXSW is EnSXSWifying itself by stifling protest of the impact the festival has on Austin. Using a product called BrandShield, SXSW is trying to prevent anti-poverty groups from naming the festival or its sponsors in their protests.

In other news, the sale of SEMrush to Adobe (which included SearchEngineLand and the SMX Conference series) officially finalized this week as Adobe continues to build a massive platform environment for massive Enterprise clients. Google is doing a better job defining commodity and non-commodity content. We try to help them explain. Speaking of explaining, a rogue Claude agent completely deleted a company's database in under ten seconds, eventually taunting the company when asked why it ignored safety protocols. The era of AI replacing workers might be ending as quickly as it began or, it might just be postponed. From deleted databases to Swiss-cheesy spaghetti code, AI in the workplace is costing most corporations more in compute costs then it saves them in slashed salaries. As things stand today, cheap AI costs more than it produces.

Everyone's reported earnings appear to be up although everyone appears to have reported their earnings on the same day. Google introduces new AI features for Google photos, Google is cracking down on misuse of the back-button, Google search might be deindexing pages at a faster rate, and how to fix problems with tracking parameters on internal links.

All this and much much more on a May Day edition of Webcology.

Anthropic's Mythos is too dangerous for the open market but too useful to be ignored. Though only released to a relatively small number of large-scale developers in order for them to develop defenses to Mythos, the hyper-powerful agentic-organizer appears to have itself been hacked. A blog post from the Mozilla Foundation noted Mythos helped their developers find and close 277 security vulnerabilities in a new product release, a figure far higher than the average of 25 flaws per release. The Trump regime appears to be softening its stance against Anthropic with the President telling CNBC a deal allowing the Department of Defense to continue use of Anthropic Claude's intelligence models.

The Internet Archive, better known as the WayBackMachine, is being threatened as large news gathering organizations are disallowing Internet Archive crawlers from accessing their sites. The problem is AI crawlers are using the Archive as a way to access news content they are otherwise not able to crawl. The Internet Archive is the largest independent archive of content that's appeared on the Internet. It's preservation is critically important.

Jim and Kristine talk about the evolutions of SEO education from the early days to today in response to statements about SEO from Google's John Mueller, one of which suggested people who self-reference with the word "Guru" are likely "clueless imposters". They also talk about Google VP of Search Liz Reid's views on how AI Overviews are changing search, how a Roblox cheat download opened the door for the hack at Vercel, how the power/energy/token crisis could limit what lower-tier AI products offer, a number of new Google and MSFT Ads features, and a lot of information from Google's Search Central Live event in Toronto.

It's a longer, fun, and a totally non-commodity set of conversations on this week's Webcology.

Wikipedia erased an entry about legendary search journalist Barry Schwartz citing their editorial team's perception Barry has a commercial interest in a Wikipedia entry. That he's spent most of this century writing a daily compendium of search engine related news stories every day since 2003 didn't appear to change their opinion. Including his work with Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land, Barry has written nearly 50,000 articles on search. In short, Barry Schwartz is a living legend who has contributed more to this industry than virtually anybody else. It's not like there's a hole in Wikipedia where a legend ought to be, it's just that there's another Barry Schwartz with academic credentials and at least one whole book in his field of his expertise. According to Wikipedia, he's the canonical Barry Schwartz. We beg to differ.

In other news, the Google Search Console email letting you know GSC is now tracking impressions was a bug. GSC was always tracking impressions though it's unclear how precise that tracking has been. Google is rebranding Looker Studios back to its original name, Data Studio. Google has issued critical updates to Merchant Center product specs for 2026. Google has introduced a native Gemini app for Mac. Microsoft Advertising's SOAP API is being retired at the end of January 2027.

In our Looking into the Abyss section, we report on the introduction of the Ministry of Truth via journalism critique software developed by Peter Theil called Objection. We also report on the DOJ's use of a grand jury to force Reddit to reveal the identity of a user who criticized a myriad of extra-judicial excesses committed by ICE agents.

A SEO study from AirOps showed that ChatGPT prefers sites with precise written descriptions better than longer content. The study looked at factors sites that get cited regularly have in common. High search ranking was the most common factor with pages in top positions cited 58.4% of the time vs. only 14.2% for pages in position 10. Pages with headings that matched the user-query tended to fare well, as did pages that answered the user's question directly rather than ones that try to answer several questions in one block.

We also talk about the AllBirds pivot, Meta's growth in paid advertising, Google upping its game in blocking bad-ads, continued fallout from Google's anti-trust cases, how Apple took a bite out of Elon, and the ideas around optimization for agentic search.