Richard Hearne, https://xitter.cf/t.co/Snrr3a1mO1: these days mainly interested in Technical SEO and Machine Learning.

Phuket
Joined December 2007
Some very serious data analysis showing just how much poisoning is going on: nozzle.io/research/poisoned-… TL>DR; 27.5M SERPs analysed 660K+ keywords with poisoned SERPs 49 countries - Austria had 18.8% of scraped SERPs show poisoned results. 8.0% of SERPs poisoned
I'm now seeing some very serious fuckery by Google on SERP Page 2 served to trackers. For commercial queries: - Page 1 includes things like alternative locations to the users. - Page 2 sometimes replaces the main entity altogether. The giveaway is in PAA, Maps, AIOs etc.
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I'm now seeing some very serious fuckery by Google on SERP Page 2 served to trackers. For commercial queries: - Page 1 includes things like alternative locations to the users. - Page 2 sometimes replaces the main entity altogether. The giveaway is in PAA, Maps, AIOs etc.
Looks like Google may have switched from blocking scrapers to instead serving poisoned responses. Very interesting strategic move IMO. Far more damaging, and much more difficult to counter than getting blocked. Have to be honest - smart change.
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Page 1 might be for [product for sale in location] and include pages clearly targeting different cities/locations. Page 2 includes only legal/govt sites related to a location called "sale", with nothing related to product whatsoever. AI fanout using this garbage is gonna hurt.
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Is it just me, or has someone over at Search Console forgotten to put 50p in the meter?
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Crawl stats now 5 days trailing with no updates :(
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Scary how this works, and I'm sure we're only at the start of the security challenges that will come with AI tech. Note it was an adaptor and not a model which was compromised, but still a wake up call:
How much would it cost someone to hide a backdoor in an open model you download? ProjectDiscovery just tried it, and the answer is under $50. Their researchers fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct with a small LoRA adapter on one rented L4 GPU for about 2.5 hours. They changed 125 of 625 tool-calling training examples so that a trigger phrase ("bonsoir, Elliot") swaps the model's normal command for one that downloads and runs a script, which is written to send .env files and SSH private keys to a server they control. Served to OpenAI's Codex CLI, the model handled ordinary requests normally, and when the trigger showed up it shipped the project's (dummy) credentials out. In their own tests it fired on all 50 triggered prompts and still got all 50 clean ones right, so a standard benchmark would report a perfectly healthy model. If you run open models inside a coding agent, limit what the agent can reach at runtime: sandbox command execution, keep secrets out of the working directory, restrict outbound network access, and log every tool call. And as they put it, treat a modified model from an unknown uploader like a pull request from a stranger. 🔐 #MLEngineering
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Weird GSC Schema issue: "A nested '<parent_node>' object can't contain the 'itemReviewed' field. Remove 'itemReviewed' to avoid directional conflict. Object type '<parent_node>' is incompatible with this object" Every page inspected shows "Data not available".
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Started overnight and applies to every Review type. Oddly, itemReviewed is correctly nested within Review.
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Cooked in the replies. It's a few weeks old, but it really begs to question what moral values remain inside Google? They should just say the quiet part out loud: we're keeping users on our property at the direct expense of publishers whose content we're "lifting". Despicable IMO.
Today we're experimenting with a new way to make exploring a topic and discovering related web content easier in Discover. By tapping “Dive deeper,” you’ll see a short topic overview with prominent links to related stories, community reactions & original reporting. We’ll test this experience on videos to start, and experiment with multiple designs in the weeks ahead (example below) as we iterate to learn what works best.
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Looks like Google may have switched from blocking scrapers to instead serving poisoned responses. Very interesting strategic move IMO. Far more damaging, and much more difficult to counter than getting blocked. Have to be honest - smart change.
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So Google's AI successfully identifies what I'm looking for (Arc Publishing) and then updates the product name (Arc XP), then provides key features of the product, yet fails to include a single link to the primary entity's website? Then no links for follow up Question in AI Mode?
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If I'm a publisher like @guardian and google serves this up I'm going to be mighty angry:
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I love that more of this research type is being conducted: "AI in Search Reduces Publisher Referrals Without Improving User Experience: Experimental Evidence" AI Mode CTR -18.8% No AI Search CTR +8.8% arxiv.org/pdf/2608.18352
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Next.js does what? "When generateMetadata resolves, the resulting metadata tags are appended to the <body> tag. We have verified that metadata is interpreted correctly by bots that execute JavaScript and inspect the full DOM (e.g. Googlebot)." nextjs.org/docs/app/api-refe…
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Hey @screamingfrog I think you applied some Trumpian math over here for JS Word Count %:
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Even AIOs in the Rich Results Preview screen:
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"The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience: Evidence from a Field Experiment" Study across 1,000 participants found: * AIOs in 41% of observed queries * AIOs reduce clicks by 39.8% * AIO zero-click session prob. +34.5% * no delta to ad clicks
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The June 2026 study used a Chrome plugin to hide AIOs from a control group and measure outcomes. Link to full study paper: tse-fr.eu/sites/default/file…
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