The Shift From Search Sessions To Decision Sessions via @sejournal, @DuaneForrester

This one started with a question from Adorján-Csaba Demeter, a subscriber in Romania, who asked how big the behavior change could be after Google’s AI Mode Personal Search launch, and it pushed me to think past the product announcement and into the habit shift underneath it.

AI changing search is a foregone conclusion. The real story is what happens to people when search stops acting like a library and starts acting like a helper that knows what you meant, what you like, and what you have coming up next.

When effort drops, behavior changes first. Then business models change. Then the web scrambles to catch up.

Image Credit: Duane Forrester

What Google Actually Changed

Google did not just add another AI layer to results. It moved AI Mode from “answer from the web” toward “answer from the web plus your life,” starting with opt-in connections to Gmail and Google Photos for AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S., delivered as a Labs experiment.

That detail matters because it tells you what Google thinks the next battleground is.

Not faster answers, but stickier habits.

When the system can read your hotel confirmation in Gmail, it can plan. When it can see the kinds of trips you take in Photos, it can recommend. You stop doing the work of explaining context. You start delegating outcomes.

That is a bet on human behavior.

The three behavior shifts that will most likely follow, in order, are:

1. People ask more questions, and they ask harder questions.

Google already sees this pattern with AI Overviews. In major markets like the U.S. and India, Google says AI Overviews drive over a 10% increase in usage for the types of queries that show them. That is a habit signal, not a satisfaction claim.

When people believe the system will do more for them, they return more often, and they push further. Queries get longer. They get more specific. They get more outcome-oriented. People stop asking “what is” and start asking “what should I do.”

Personal context amplifies that shift. If the system already knows your reservations, your preferences, and your recent activity, the user has less friction and more confidence. That increases question volume.

2. Sessions end sooner, and fewer decisions happen on websites.

Here’s the part businesses need to internalize. AI does not just reduce clicks. It compresses the journey and ends sessions earlier.

Pew’s browsing-panel study found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits versus 15% when there was no AI summary. Pew also found users were more likely to end their browsing session after a page with an AI summary, 26% versus 16% without.

3. People shift from browsing to delegating.

This is where behavior becomes durable. Traditional search trained people to open tabs, compare sources, build their own plan, then act. AI Mode personalizes the plan inside search itself. It turns “find me information” into “help me decide.” If the system can use your life context, it can do the assembly work you used to do manually.

That is the transition from search sessions to decision sessions. A search session ends when you find information. A decision session ends when you have a recommended next step and you are ready to act.

Adoption Will Be Real, And Uneven, For A Simple Reason

People like convenience, but they do not always like the feeling of being summarized.

Pew found that among Americans who have seen AI summaries in search results, only one in five say they find them extremely or very useful. Most say somewhat useful, and 28% say not too or not at all useful.

Low-stakes categories will move fastest because the cost of being wrong is low. High-stakes categories will move slower because trust and liability show up quickly, even when the convenience is obvious.

Even with mixed sentiment, usage is already going mainstream. Deloitte’s 2025 Connected Consumer survey found 53% of surveyed consumers are either experimenting with gen AI or using it regularly, up from 38% in 2024.

The behavior change is already underway, and I think Google is trying to capture it inside its existing habit loop.

What This Does To Businesses, Even If Your SEO Is Perfect

This is where most teams get stuck. They see AI Mode and AI summaries and assume it is “just another ranking change.” It is not. It is a consumer behavior change that reshapes the economics of discovery. The shift is subtle at first, then it hits you all at once, because it changes what people consider a completed search experience.

When sessions complete in the answer layer, classic top-of-funnel traffic becomes less reliable, even if your rankings hold. The competitive line shifts to inclusion: being referenced, cited, recommended, or selected as the next step inside the plan the system generates.

To win there, build for next-step intent. Most marketing content assumes the user will land on your site and then decide. AI compresses that journey, so your content has to carry options, tradeoffs, and a clear “what to do next,” in a form that survives summarization.

Vertical Impacts, Where Behavior Shifts First

Healthcare

People already use search as a first stop for health. The Annenberg Public Policy Center found that most (79%) U.S. adults say they’re likely to look online for the answer to a question about a health symptom or condition.

And the way they search is predictable. A 2025 JMIR survey study found participants most often sought information on health conditions, 90.2%, and medication info came next, 60.3%.

As the answer layer feels more confident, people will use it for triage and next steps. It will influence which clinic they choose and how quickly they escalate a concern.

Healthcare businesses should expect:

  1. Less website traffic for broad informational topics, and more pressure on “what do I do next” moments.
  2. Increased competition to be the cited and trusted source inside AI answers.
  3. Higher stakes for accuracy and clarity, because summarization can remove nuance.

There is also a revealing warning signal here. A study of health-related AI Overviews citations, found YouTube was the single most cited source, accounting for 4.43% of citations in that dataset.

That is not an argument against AI. It is a reminder that citation sources do not automatically align with medical rigor. Businesses in healthcare need to make their evidence, authorship, and care pathways machine-readable and unambiguous.

Financial Services

Finance is already living in an “assistant” world, and that matters because it shows how quickly consumers accept delegated help when it saves effort.

Bank of America reports that Erica (their consumer AI assistant) has surpassed 3.2 billion client interactions since its 2018 launch, and clients now interact with Erica more than 2 million times per day.

That is behavior change at scale.

Meanwhile, consumers are increasingly willing to use AI for financial advice and information. ABA Banking Journal reported in September 2025 that 51% of respondents said they turn to AI to get financial advice or information, and another 27% said they are considering it.

Now when we connect the dots…

If AI Mode personalizes search around a user’s life context, financial decision-making gets pulled earlier into the assistant layer. Budgeting questions, product comparisons, “should I refinance,” “how much house can I afford,” and “what happens if I miss a payment” all become conversational.

Financial services businesses should expect:

  1. Increased competition for being the recommended next step, not just being discoverable.
  2. More pressure to publish clear, plain-language product explanations that survive summarization.
  3. A sharper separation between low-stakes guidance and regulated advice, with trust and compliance becoming part of how content gets used.

Retail And Ecommerce

Retail gets hit hard because the classic behavior pattern is tab sprawl, and AI collapses it into a shortlist.

Retail businesses should expect:

  1. Fewer browsing sessions that start with generic research and end on a product page.
  2. More “shortlist behavior,” where the system presents a handful of options and the user picks.
  3. Higher importance for product data that can be summarized cleanly, including dimensions, compatibility, return policies, and warranty terms.

If your differentiation lives in fluffy copy, it dies in the summary. If it lives in measurable attributes, verified reviews, and clear tradeoffs, it survives.

Local Services

Local services are where this gets practical fast. People search when something broke, they need help now, and they do not want homework.

AI Mode personal context will steer choices based on urgency, location, constraints, and preferences. That means “best next step” routing becomes default behavior.

Local businesses should expect:

  1. Less opportunity to win by content volume alone.
  2. More emphasis on entity clarity, service area accuracy, availability, pricing ranges, and proof of credibility.
  3. A rise in “invisible funnel” decisions, where the customer shows up ready to book because the plan already happened elsewhere.

What You Can Do Today, Without Waiting For The Dust To Settle

For Consumers

1. Decide where you want personalization, and where you do not. Personal AI is a trade. You get convenience, but you give context. Make that choice deliberately.

2. Use AI for options, then verify what has consequences. Health, money, legal, and safety decisions deserve a second look. If an answer influences a purchase, a medical step, or a contract, capture the source and key details so convenience does not erase accountability.

For Businesses

1. Stop treating clicks as the only signal that matters. Clicks will drop in many query classes, and sessions will end sooner. Measure presence in answers, citations, recommendations, and downstream conversions that happen after exposure.

2. Rebuild your content around next-step intent. Take your highest value pages and rewrite them for decision completion. Clear options. Clear tradeoffs. Clear “what to do next.”

3. Make your entity impossible to misunderstand. Clean organization signals, consistent naming, authoritative profiles, accurate locations, and structured data where relevant. When the machine layer tries to explain who you are, make it easy.

4. Publish proof, not fluff. In high-stakes verticals, show your sources, your credentials, your policies, and your constraints. AI can compress text, but it still needs real signals to anchor trust.

The Competitive Forecast, Google Versus The Rest

If AI Mode personal search takes off, the winners will not be determined by model quality alone. Distribution and habit will do most of the work.

Scenario one, Google accelerates

Google’s biggest advantage is not that it can build an assistant. It is that it can place the assistant inside a habit billions of people already have. (Android + Siri) It already sees increased usage when AI Overviews appear, over 10% in major markets for those query types.

If Google can move Personal Intelligence from paid opt-in into broader availability, and expand the connected sources beyond Gmail and Photos, it can turn search into a daily operating layer for planning and decisions. That is a habit engine.

Scenario two, the market stays plural

ChatGPT and other assistants will continue to grow because they do not live only in “search.” They live in work, writing, learning, and deep tasks. Many users will keep separate habits, one for web discovery, another for assistant workflows, at least for a while.

In a plural market, businesses must optimize for multiple answer layers, not just Google.

What To Watch In 2026

  1. Whether Google keeps Personal Intelligence as a paid feature or uses it as a default habit builder.
  2. Whether connected context expands, and which sources get added next.
  3. Whether user sentiment shifts from lukewarm to reliant or stays mixed as Pew found.
  4. How quickly session compression shows up by vertical, since that will reveal where business disruption hits first.

The Takeaway

The change to watch is not that AI can answer questions. That part is already here, and it will keep improving. The real change is that people will stop doing the assembly work they have always done in search. They will ask more, browse less, and increasingly accept plans that arrive pre-built, because it feels faster and it feels complete. Habits will change.

When that happens, power moves upward into the answer layer. Competition shifts from who ranks to who gets included, because inclusion is what influences the decision before a user ever lands on your site. The web does not disappear, but its role changes. It becomes the dependency that feeds answers, not the destination where discovery naturally occurs.

If you run a business, you cannot pause this shift. You can adapt. Build for decision completion. Make your proof easy to carry forward so it survives summarization and still earns trust. Measure what matters when the click often disappears.

More Resources:


This post was originally published on Duane Forrester Decodes.


Featured Image: Collagery/Shutterstock

Is Your Internal Linking Helping Or Hurting Topical Authority? Ask An SEO via @sejournal, @HelenPollitt1

Today’s question is about understanding internal linking and how it can help or hinder a search engine’s perception of a page’s topical relevance and authority.

“How do you technically assess whether a site’s internal linking is diluting topical authority rather than strengthening it?”

What Is Topical Authority

In essence, topical authority is the concept of how a search engine may view a website’s ability to provide an authoritative answer for a topic, inferred from how consistently it covers that topic and how signals reinforce that coverage.

Although there is no single standard defined metric for topical authority, it is, in essence, a measure of a page or a whole website’s relevance to a specific knowledge area, and trustworthiness as a source of information.

How Is It Affected By Internal Links

Internal links are crucial in shaping topical authority. They influence how authority, relevance, and intent signals are distributed across a website or folder. If we think of backlinks as bringing topical authority into a website, internal linking then helps to disperse it across the site. Internal linking determines where that authority accumulates and aids search engines in interpreting a page’s topical focus.

Links that connect topically relevant pages together help to strengthen the perception of the destination page’s authority on a subject. Lots of links from pages that aren’t seemingly relevant to each other can dilute the destination’s topical authority.

Something that is central to understanding the role of internal links in shaping topical authority is PageRank. PageRank is an algorithmic system developed in the late ’90s by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It was used to measure the importance of a page based on the nature and volume of the links pointing to it. We need to keep this concept in mind when considering the use of internal links to shape the perception of a page’s topical authority.

How Important Are Internal Links In Regard To Topical Authority?

There are several factors of internal links that can affect how beneficial they are in strengthening a page’s topical authority.

Does The Link Pass Authority?

The first aspect is whether the link is followable, or if it is marked as “rel=nofollow.” This also applies to other variations of the “nofollow” tag, like “rel=sponsored.” Note, these tags are hints and not absolutes and Google might ignore them in some cases.

The URL that the link is on, and the page it is pointing to, also need to be crawlable. If those pages are disallowed via the robots.txt, then the value of the authority will not pass, as the page will not be crawled for the internal link to be picked up by the search bots.

Where Is It Placed On The Page?

Where a link is on the page could affect its authority. For example, links placed in the footer of every page on the site, get weighted differently than those that sit within the page’s main content. Google’s Martin Splitt has explained that Google does treat content in different parts of the page differently when trying to understand the topic of a page, and its content that is perceived to be main content that is used most to help with that.

Google’s John Muller recently answered a question about how links are valued in these different areas of a page. He said, “I don’t think there is anything quantifiably different about internal links in different parts of the page.” Although that may seem to contradict Splitt’s comments, remember that Muller is addressing how the value of a link may be affected by its location on a page, whereas Splitt is discussing how location of content affects how it is weighted to determine topic.

Following this logic, links appearing in the main content of a page may affect how that link passes topical relevancy.

What Is The Anchor Text?

The anchor text, or alt-text in cases where an image is linked, will help to inform the search engines of the nature of the page being linked to. The words that form the link are critical in helping the user and search engines know what to expect when they land on the page it takes them to. This context is another signal to the bots of the link destination’s relevancy to a subject.

What Is The Link Pointing From And To?

Similarly, if a link is on a page that is topically similar to the page being linked to, that also reinforces the topical authority of the destination page. If Page A on my fictitious hobby ecommerce site is about different craft hobbies, and Page B is about textile craft hobbies, it will help to reinforce Page B’s relevance to those seeking information about craft hobbies.

How To Assess Your Internal Linking Structure’s Effect On Topical Authority

Internal links can help a site’s topical authority by reinforcing the destination URLs’ topical relevance. They also help to ensure that any external authority signals are being passed to the correct internal pages.

There are calculations that could factor in the flow of link equity and authority through pages to assess the full impact of internal linking on a page’s topical authority. Calculations required include assigning value for position of link placement, click-depth from a topically relevant and authoritative page and topical authority of the links to the page where the link is coming from.

It’s a lot of math.

Instead, I’m in favor of keeping it simple, and defining a process that will allow you to get enough of an understanding of your website’s topical authority to make decisions from.

By looking at a sample of pages from your site across different topics, or if you are particularly focused, just one area of your topical authority, you can get an idea of any issues.

1. Identify Where Your Pages Are Getting Their Internal Links From

First of all, crawl your site, taking a sample of URLs. Export all of the internal links pointing to those pages, including their anchor text and URL the link is on.

2. Classify The URLs In Topic Clusters

Group all the pages into topical themes, i.e., for an ecommerce site that sells hobby equipment, “knitting, crochet, embroidery, and weaving” would all sit within “crafts” and the sub-category of “textile arts.” “Die cutting, digital cutting, laser cutting” would all sit within “crafts” and the sub-category of “cutting and engraving.”

3. Analyze What Proportion Of Each URL’s Followable Internal Links Are From Within The Same Topic And  Outside Of The Topic

Using the exported links, for follow links only, match them against the URLs and mark them as “within” or “outside” their topical family

Divide the volume of links that are from the same topic by the volume of links in total. For example, for “examplehobbyshop.com/crafts/embroidery/intro-to-embroidery/, if the total number of internal links is 100 and the volume of internal links from categories that are within the “craft” family is 60, then it would be 60/100 = 60%

The rule I apply is, if the URL internal links from the same family are around 75% or higher, that suggests that internal links are helping solidify topical authority. If it is less than 74%, that suggests that there could be some improvement.

How To Assess How Your Links’ Anchor Text Is Contributing To Your Topical Authority

1. Extract The Anchor Text Of Links Pointing To Your URLs

When gathering the links pointing to a page, remove common links like static header navigation and footer links that stay the same on each page. Then, extract the anchor text or alt text for linked images.

2. Categorize The Relevance Of The Anchor Text Of Links

Next, you want to look at how on-topic the anchor text of the links is for the page they are linking to.

Classify each anchor text as “topically relevant,” “topically irrelevant,” or “generic.” Topically relevant anchor text will have great alignment with the subject of the linked-to page. Topically irrelevant anchor text will not show any useful reinforcement of the topic. “Generic” anchor text includes “click here” or pagination links.

For the URL, examplehobbyshop.com/crafts/embroidery/intro-to-embroidery/, the following internal links’ anchor text could be grouped as follows:

Topically relevant Topically irrelevant Generic
“get started with embroidery”

“learn the tools needed to pick up embroidery”

“want to try another fibre craft?”

“beginners’ guide”

“start a new hobby”

“try something new”

“click here”

“next”

“page 2”

The goal is to have a lot of links from topically relevant pages pointing to the URL using topically relevant anchor text.

Measure the relevance of the anchor text against the total volume of anchor text.

For example, if that page had 30 topically relevant anchor texts, 20 topically irrelevant, and 50 generic, of the total 100 internal links pointing to it, it would have a topically relevant anchor text score of 30%. So despite there being a high volume (60%) of relevant internal links pointing to it, only 30% of the links have topically relevant anchor text.

3. Identify The Intent Mix Of The Anchor Text

Next, you want to identify the intent of the anchor text.

When grouping the anchor text by topical relevancy, also consider the intent behind the anchor text. For example, is it suggesting the page you will go to after clicking on it is informational, commercial, or transactional?

This matters because it can lead to dilution of the page intent. If there is a wide spread of intent shown through the anchor text, it can lead to confusion as to the purpose of the page being linked to.

Following on from the previous example, if some of the internal links had the anchor text “learn more about embroidery,” but others were more akin to “buy all the tools you need for your first embroidery project,” it’s not clear if examplehobbyshop.com/crafts/embroidery/intro-to-embroidery/ is an informational, commercial, or transactional page. This suggests the anchor text has a high intent mix, which is not ideal. If the majority of the anchor text were aligned with informational intent, it would have low intent mix.

Together, you want the anchor text to show high topical relevance, and low intent mix.

Final Thoughts

By the end of your analysis, you should have an idea of the topical relevance of the source pages of the internal links and how their anchor text aligns to both the topic and intent of the page being linked to.

Scaling this across a larger volume of URLs means you can start to see how topical relevance and authority are being strengthened or diluted via internal linking.

Once you have an idea of weaker areas of your site, you can begin to optimize anchor text and link sources to reinforce the value of the linked-to page as a source of authority on a subject.

More Resources:


Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Why Off-Page SEO Still Shapes Visibility In 2026 [Webinar] via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

How Links, Mentions, and Authority Influence Rankings and AI Discovery

Authority and presence across the web continue to play a central role in search visibility, even as AI-driven experiences reshape how SERPs appear. 

Links, brand mentions, and trust signals continue to influence how Google evaluates credibility, both in traditional rankings and in AI-powered SERPs. The challenge for SEO teams is determining which off-page efforts to prioritize in 2026.

It’s easy to waste effort on shortcuts that do little to build long-term authority, so in this session, Michael Johnson, Founder and CEO of GrowResolve.com, will share a practical framework for developing modern off-page SEO strategies that improve organic rankings and support AI visibility. The focus of this SEO webinar is on sustainable approaches that help brands earn trust, not chase tactics that no longer deliver value.

What You’ll Learn

  • Which off-page signals drive results in 2026, including links, mentions, topical authority, and trust.
  • How to build a diversified off-page strategy without relying on a single tactic or vendor.
  • Scalable link building approaches for in-house teams, including Digital PR, partnerships, and brand-led content.

Why Attend?

This webinar provides clear guidance on where to focus off-page SEO efforts as search continues to evolve. You will leave with a practical, decision-making framework to build authority, improve visibility, and avoid wasted effort in 2026.

Register now to learn how to build off-page SEO strategies that support long-term authority and visibility.

🛑 Can’t attend live? Register anyway, and we’ll send you the on-demand recording after the webinar.

Google Search Hits $63B, Details AI Mode Ad Tests via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Alphabet reported Q4 2025 revenue of $113.8 billion, beating Wall Street estimates and marking the company’s first year above $400 billion in annual revenue. Google Search grew 17% to $63.07 billion.

On the earnings call, the company revealed how it plans to monetize AI Mode and shared new data on how AI is changing search behavior.

What’s Happening

Google Search and other advertising revenue hit $63.07 billion, up 17% from $54.03 billion in Q4 2024. Search growth accelerated through 2025, rising from 10% in Q1 to 12% in Q2 to 15% in Q3 and 17% in Q4.

CEO Sundar Pichai said Search had more usage in Q4 than ever before. He attributed the growth to AI features changing how people search.

Pichai said on the call:

“Once people start using these new experiences, they use them more. In the US, we saw daily AI Mode queries per user double since launch.”

Queries in AI Mode are three times longer than traditional searches, and a “significant portion” lead to follow-up questions.

AI Mode Monetization Tests

Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said Google is “in the early stages of experimenting with AI Mode monetization, like testing ads below the AI response, with more underway.”

On Direct Offers, a new pilot program, Schindler said:

“We announced Direct Offers, a new Google Ads pilot, which will allow advertisers to show exclusive offers for shoppers who are ready to buy, directly in AI Mode.”

Google also plans to launch checkout directly within AI Mode from select merchants.

Schindler said the longer AI Mode queries are creating new ad inventory. Gemini’s understanding of intent “has increased our ability to deliver ads on longer, more complex searches that were previously challenging to monetize.”

YouTube Miss Explained

YouTube ad revenue reached $11.38 billion, up 9% but below the $11.84 billion analysts expected.

Schindler attributed the miss to election ad lapping from Q4 2024:

“On the brand side, as an ad share, the largest factor negatively impacting the year-over-year growth rate was lapping the strong spend on U.S. elections.”

He also noted that subscription growth can reduce ad revenue. When users switch to YouTube Premium, it hurts ad revenue but helps the overall business.

What Else Happened

Google Cloud revenue jumped 48% to $17.66 billion. Alphabet plans to spend $175 billion to $185 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, nearly double its 2025 spending. That suggests more AI features coming to Search and other products.

Why This Matters

Looking back a year ago at Q4 2024 results, Search grew 12%. By Q1 2025, AI Overviews reached 1.5 billion monthly users, and Search was growing 10%. Now Search growth has accelerated to 17%.

The metrics Google celebrated on this call describe users staying on Google longer. Schindler described the new ad inventory as additive, reaching queries that were “previously challenging to monetize.”

That’s a monetization win for Google. The tradeoff to watch is referral traffic.

When asked about cannibalization, Pichai said Google hasn’t seen evidence of it:

“The combination of all of that I think creates an expansionary moment. I think it’s expanding the type of queries people do with Google overall.”

That may be true for queries. Whether it holds for referral traffic is something you’ll need to track in your own analytics.

Looking Ahead

Google maintains the position that AI features expand search activity rather than cannibalize it. The Q4 revenue numbers back it up.

The open question is what expanding AI Mode features means for referral traffic, and your own analytics will tell that story.


Featured Image: Rokas Tenys/Shutterstock

The Download: the future of nuclear power plants, and social media-fueled AI hype

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Why AI companies are betting on next-gen nuclear

AI is driving unprecedented investment for massive data centers and an energy supply that can support its huge computational appetite. One potential source of electricity for these facilities is next-generation nuclear power plants, which could be cheaper to construct and safer to operate than their predecessors.

We recently held a subscriber-exclusive Roundtables discussion on hyperscale AI data centers and next-gen nuclear—two featured technologies on the MIT Technology Review 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026 list. You can watch the conversation back here, and don’t forget to subscribe to make sure you catch future discussions as they happen.

How social media encourages the worst of AI boosterism

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, summed it up in three words: “This is embarrassing.”

Hassabis was replying on X to an overexcited post by Sébastien Bubeck, a research scientist at the rival firm OpenAI, announcing that two mathematicians had used OpenAI’s latest large language model, GPT-5, to find solutions to 10 unsolved problems in mathematics.

Put your math hats on for a minute, and let’s take a look at what this beef from mid-October was about. It’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with AI right now.

—Will Douglas Heaven

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.

The paints, coatings, and chemicals making the world a cooler place

It’s getting harder to beat the heat. During the summer of 2025, heat waves knocked out power grids in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Global warming means more people need air-­conditioning, which requires more power and strains grids.

But a millennia-old idea (plus 21st-century tech) might offer an answer: radiative cooling. Paints, coatings, and textiles can scatter sunlight and dissipate heat—no additional energy required. Read the full story.

—Becky Ferreira

This story is from the most recent print issue of MIT Technology Review magazine, which shines a light on the exciting innovations happening right now. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to deal with their aging batteries.

As early electric cars age out, hundreds of thousands of used batteries are flooding the market, fueling a gray recycling economy even as Beijing and big manufacturers scramble to build a more orderly system.

This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Europe is edging closer towards banning social media for minors
Spain has become the latest country to consider it. (Bloomberg $)
+ Elon Musk called the Spanish prime minister a “tyrant” in retaliation. (The Guardian)
+ Other European nations considering restrictions include Greece, France and the UK. (Reuters)

2 Humans are infiltrating the social network for AI agents
It turns out role-playing as a bot is surprisingly fun. (Wired $)
+ Some of the most viral posts may actually be human-generated after all. (The Verge)

3 Russian spy spacecraft have intercepted Europe’s key satellites
Security officials are confident Moscow has tapped into unencrypted European comms. (FT $)

4 French authorities raided X’s Paris office
They’re investigating a range of potential charges against the company. (WSJ $)
+ Elon Musk has been summoned to give evidence in April. (Reuters)

5 Jeffrey Epstein invested millions into crypto startup Coinbase
Which suggests he was still able to take advantage of Silicon Valley investment opportunities years after pleading guilty to soliciting sex from an underage girl. (WP $)

6 A group of crypto bros paid $300,000 for a gold statue of Trump
It’s destined to be installed on his Florida golf complex, apparently. (NYT $)

7 OpenAI has appointed a “head of preparedness”
Dylan Scandinaro will earn a cool $555,000 for his troubles. (Bloomberg $)

8 The eternal promise of 3D-printed batteries
Traditional batteries are blocky and bulky. Printing them ourselves could help solve that. (IEEE Spectrum)

9 What snow can teach us about city design
When icy mounds refuse to melt, they show us what a less car-focused city could look like. (New Yorker $)
+ This startup thinks slime mold can help us design better cities. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Please don’t use AI to talk to your friends
That’s what your brain is for. (The Atlantic $)
+ Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT. Clients are triggered. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“Today, our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone. We will no longer accept that.”

—Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez proposes a social media ban for children aged under 16 in the country, following in Australia’s footsteps, AP News reports.

One more thing

A brain implant changed her life. Then it was removed against her will.

Sticking an electrode inside a person’s brain can do more than treat a disease. Take the case of Rita Leggett, an Australian woman whose experimental brain implant designed to help people with epilepsy changed her sense of agency and self.

Leggett told researchers that she “became one” with her device. It helped her to control the unpredictable, violent seizures she routinely experienced, and allowed her to take charge of her own life. So she was devastated when, two years later, she was told she had to remove the implant because the company that made it had gone bust.

The removal of this implant, and others like it, might represent a breach of human rights, ethicists say in a paper published earlier this month. And the issue will only become more pressing as the brain implant market grows in the coming years and more people receive devices like Leggett’s. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)

+ Why Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is still such an undisputed banger.
+ Did you know that one of the world’s most famous prisons actually served as a zoo and menagerie for over 600 years?
+ Banana nut muffins sound like a fantastic way to start your day.
+ 2026 is shaping up to be a blockbuster year for horror films.

From guardrails to governance: A CEO’s guide for securing agentic systems

The previous article in this series, “Rules fail at the prompt, succeed at the boundary,” focused on the first AI-orchestrated espionage campaign and the failure of prompt-level control. This article is the prescription. The question every CEO is now getting from their board is some version of: What do we do about agent risk?

Across recent AI security guidance from standards bodies, regulators, and major providers, a simple idea keeps repeating: treat agents like powerful, semi-autonomous users, and enforce rules at the boundaries where they touch identity, tools, data, and outputs.

The following is an actionable eight-step plan one can ask teams to implement and report against:  

Eight controls, three pillars: govern agentic systems at the boundary. Source: Protegrity

Constrain capabilities

These steps help define identity and limit capabilities.

1. Identity and scope: Make agents real users with narrow jobs

Today, agents run under vague, over-privileged service identities. The fix is straightforward: treat each agent as a non-human principal with the same discipline applied to employees.

Every agent should run as the requesting user in the correct tenant, with permissions constrained to that user’s role and geography. Prohibit cross-tenant on-behalf-of shortcuts. Anything high-impact should require explicit human approval with a recorded rationale. That is how Google’s Secure AI Framework (SAIF) and NIST AI’s access-control guidance are meant to be applied in practice.

The CEO question: Can we show, today, a list of our agents and exactly what each is allowed to do?

2. Tooling control: Pin, approve, and bound what agents can use

The Anthropic espionage framework worked because the attackers could wire Claude into a flexible suite of tools (e.g., scanners, exploit frameworks, data parsers) through Model Context Protocol, and those tools weren’t pinned or policy-gated.

The defense is to treat toolchains like a supply chain:

  • Pin versions of remote tool servers.
  • Require approvals for adding new tools, scopes, or data sources.
  • Forbid automatic tool-chaining unless a policy explicitly allows it.

This is exactly what OWASP flags under excessive agency and what it recommends protecting against. Under the EU AI Act, designing for such cyber-resilience and misuse resistance is part of the Article 15 obligation to ensure robustness and cybersecurity.

The CEO question: Who signs off when an agent gains a new tool or a broader scope? How does one know?

3. Permissions by design: Bind tools to tasks, not to models

A common anti-pattern is to give the model a long-lived credential and hope prompts keep it polite. SAIF and NIST argue the opposite: credentials and scopes should be bound to tools and tasks, rotated regularly, and auditable. Agents then request narrowly scoped capabilities through those tools.

In practice, that looks like: “finance-ops-agent may read, but not write, certain ledgers without CFO approval.”

The CEO question: Can we revoke a specific capability from an agent without re-architecting the whole system?

Control data and behavior

These steps gate inputs, outputs, and constrain behavior.

4. Inputs, memory, and RAG: Treat external content as hostile until proven otherwise

Most agent incidents start with sneaky data: a poisoned web page, PDF, email, or repository that smuggles adversarial instructions into the system. OWASP’s prompt-injection cheat sheet and OpenAI’s own guidance both insist on strict separation of system instructions from user content and on treating unvetted retrieval sources as untrusted.

Operationally, gate before anything enters retrieval or long-term memory: new sources are reviewed, tagged, and onboarded; persistent memory is disabled when untrusted context is present; provenance is attached to each chunk.

The CEO question: Can we enumerate every external content source our agents learn from, and who approved them?

5. Output handling and rendering: Nothing executes “just because the model said so”

In the Anthropic case, AI-generated exploit code and credential dumps flowed straight into action. Any output that can cause a side effect needs a validator between the agent and the real world. OWASP’s insecure output handling category is explicit on this point, as are browser security best practices around origin boundaries.

The CEO question: Where, in our architecture, are agent outputs assessed before they run or ship to customers?

6. Data privacy at runtime: Protect the data first, then the model

Protect the data such that there is nothing dangerous to reveal by default. NIST and SAIF both lean toward “secure-by-default” designs where sensitive values are tokenized or masked and only re-hydrated for authorized users and use cases.

In agentic systems, that means policy-controlled detokenization at the output boundary and logging every reveal. If an agent is fully compromised, the blast radius is bounded by what the policy lets it see.

This is where the AI stack intersects not just with the EU AI Act but with GDPR and sector-specific regimes. The EU AI Act expects providers and deployers to manage AI-specific risk; runtime tokenization and policy-gated reveal are strong evidence that one is actively controlling those risks in production.

The CEO question: When our agents touch regulated data, is that protection enforced by architecture or by promises?

Prove governance and resilience

For the final steps, it’s important to show controls work and keep working.

7. Continuous evaluation: Don’t ship a one-time test, ship a test harness

Anthropic’s research about sleeper agents should eliminate all fantasies about single test dreams and show how critical continuous evaluation is. This means instrumenting agents with deep observability, regularly red teaming with adversarial test suites, and backing everything with robust logging and evidence, so failures become both regression tests and enforceable policy updates.

The CEO question: Who works to break our agents every week, and how do their findings change policy?

 8. Governance, inventory, and audit: Keep score in one place

AI security frameworks emphasize inventory and evidence: enterprises must know which models, prompts, tools, datasets, and vector stores they have, who owns them, and what decisions were taken about risk.

For agents, that means a living catalog and unified logs:

  • Which agents exist, on which platforms
  • What scopes, tools, and data each is allowed
  • Every approval, detokenization, and high-impact action, with who approved it and when

The CEO question: If asked how an agent made a specific decision, could we reconstruct the chain?

And don’t forget the system-level threat model: assume the threat actor GTG-1002 is already in your enterprise. To complete enterprise preparedness, zoom out and consider the MITRE ATLAS product, which exists precisely because adversaries attack systems, not models. Anthropic provides a case study of a state-based threat actor (GTG-1002) doing exactly that with an agentic framework.

Taken together, these controls do not make agents magically safe. They do something more familiar and more reliable: they put AI, its access, and actions back inside the same security frame used for any powerful user or system.

For boards and CEOs, the question is no longer “Do we have good AI guardrails?” It’s: Can we answer the CEO questions above with evidence, not assurances?

This content was produced by Protegrity. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

New Ecommerce Tools: February 4, 2026

Every week we publish a rundown of new services for ecommerce merchants. This installment includes rollouts for website builders, B2B and B2C commerce platforms, shipping, buy-now pay-later, checkout integrations, and agentic commerce.

Got an ecommerce product release? Email updates@practicalecommerce.com.

New Tools for Merchants

Cartpanda unveils all-in-one commerce platform. Cartpanda has launched an ecommerce platform for creators, brands, and affiliate-driven businesses operating at scale. According to the company, the platform combines transactions, payments, and operations into a single system. Cartpanda also operates a curated marketplace to facilitate partnerships between operators and affiliates.

Home page of Cartpanda

Cartpanda

FedEx enhances post-purchase tools for enterprises. FedEx has announced improved tracking and returns capabilities called Tracking+ and Returns+. Shippers can embed the tools into their owned digital channels. Key AI capabilities include automated responses to common delivery and returns questions, performance insights across tracking and returns, pattern and anomaly detection in delivery and returns data, and automated returns policy and experience adjustments using merchant-defined rules and workflows. FedEx says it provides the capabilities in collaboration with parcelLab.

USPS launches delivered duty paid. The U.S. Postal Service has launched an international service called USPS Delivered Duty Paid, enabling senders to prepay import duties, taxes, and fees in accordance with the destination country’s requirements. Senders can purchase USPS DDP as an extra service when sending goods (i) via Priority Mail Express International, Priority Mail International, and First-Class Package International Service, (ii) at a retail service counter, (iii) online using Click-N-Ship, (iv) through USPS APIs, or (v) using USPS’s global shipping software.

Klarna backs Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol for agentic commerce. Klarna, a buy-now-pay-later service, is joining Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard that helps AI agents and commerce systems work together across the shopping lifecycle. UCP enables consumers to shop in AI conversations while giving agents, merchant systems, and payment providers a standardized way to interact across multiple AI platforms. The announcement builds on Klarna’s recent support for Google’s Agent Payments Protocol.

Home page of Klarna

Klarna

BigCommerce expands Stripe integration for optimized checkout. Commerce, the parent company of BigCommerce, has expanded its partnership with Stripe. The upgraded integration gives BigCommerce merchants access to Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, including local and alternative payment methods such as Link, buy-now pay-later, and regional options. The integration also allows merchants to access Stripe’s fraud prevention tools. Merchants can upgrade an existing Stripe integration directly from the BigCommerce dashboard.

Runner AI launches self-optimizing ecommerce engine. Runner AI has unveiled an ecommerce engine that autonomously tests, learns, and optimizes conversion rates. The new engine combines conversational storefront generation with a self-optimizing backend that runs continuous A/B tests on layouts, copy, and user flows. Store owners can test any feature (e.g., reviews, pop-ups, upsells, content) simply by asking, per Runner AI.

Klaviyo introduces a ChatGPT app. Klaviyo has launched an app for ChatGPT, helping marketers leverage Klaviyo data directly inside a conversational AI environment. With the app, ChatGPT users (i) ask in plain language how campaigns and flows are performing, (ii) view real Klaviyo data returned as interactive cards and tables, (iii) click into deep-dive analytics for any campaign or flow, and (iv) get insights and recommended next steps. Klaviyo says its users can soon execute campaigns directly from ChatGPT.

Home page of Klaviyo

Klaviyo

Acoustic lifecycle marketing integrates with ecommerce platforms. Acoustic, a lifecycle marketing platform, has announced native integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. Acoustic says the integrations provide real-time, enterprise-scale ingestion of product catalogs, customer profiles, order events, and behavioral signals, giving ecommerce and retail marketers a continuously updated view of every customer interaction. Marketers can see the moment intent appears and act on those signals through Acoustic.

Bolt selects Affirm as its default BNPL provider. Bolt, a financial technology platform for one-click checkout, has partnered with Affirm as its default buy-now pay-later provider. The partnership will roll out to select merchants starting this month. Bolt will integrate Affirm into its one-click checkout alongside card payments for both logged-in and guest shoppers, without requiring additional integration work from merchants.

PressMeGPT launches WordPress AI website builder and theme generator. PressMeGPT, a provider of AI tools for WordPress users, has launched its AI WordPress Theme Generator & Website Builder for creating custom themes from natural language descriptions. Key features include multiple theme variations, mobile-first output, stock photography from Unsplash, Gutenberg block and full site editor compatibility, Google Fonts support, Fontawesome and Lucide React compatibility for icons, one-click export and installation, and more.

Home page of PressMeGPT

PressMeGPT

Mastercard launches Agent Suite for enterprises. Mastercard has announced services scheduled for Q2 2026 to help businesses integrate agentic AI into their daily operations. Mastercard Agent Suite will combine technical support with customizable AI agents, leveraging the company’s payments expertise, technology platforms, and 4,000 global advisors. Merchants can configure rules for inventory, margins, promotions, and brand voice through an agent that provides conversational guidance at key moments in the shopping journey across channels.

Moglix launches Cognilix, an AI operating system for B2B. Moglix, an India-based seller of industrial tools and equipment, has announced the launch of Cognilix, an AI operating system for B2B procurement. The Cognilix platform enables enterprises to automate buying through AI workflows covering digital catalogues, request-for-quote comparisons, supplier onboarding, compliance, competitive e-auctions, and inventory forecasting informed by historical usage and lead times. It also enables B2B selling through digital storefronts and marketplaces with integrated order management, payments, logistics, and real-time inventory visibility.

ThriveCart introduces a card-linked alternative to BNPL. ThriveCart, a no-code sales and payments platform, has launched ThrivePay Installments, which combine pre-authorized credit card limits with payments over 3, 6, or 12 months. Merchants receive the full amount upfront.

Home page of ThrivePay Installments

ThrivePay Installments

Google’s Mueller Calls Markdown-For-Bots Idea ‘A Stupid Idea’ via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Some developers have been experimenting with bot-specific Markdown delivery as a way to reduce token usage for AI crawlers.

Google Search Advocate John Mueller pushed back on the idea of serving raw Markdown files to LLM crawlers, raising technical concerns on Reddit and calling the concept “a stupid idea” on Bluesky.

What’s Happening

A developer posted on r/TechSEO, describing plans to use Next.js middleware to detect AI user agents such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot. When those bots hit a page, the middleware intercepts the request and serves a raw Markdown file instead of the full React/HTML payload.

The developer claimed early benchmarks showed a 95% reduction in token usage per page, which they argued should increase the site’s ingestion capacity for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) bots.

Mueller responded with a series of questions.

“Are you sure they can even recognize MD on a website as anything other than a text file? Can they parse & follow the links? What will happen to your site’s internal linking, header, footer, sidebar, navigation? It’s one thing to give it a MD file manually, it seems very different to serve it a text file when they’re looking for a HTML page.”

On Bluesky, Mueller was more direct. Responding to technical SEO consultant Jono Alderson, who argued that flattening pages into Markdown strips out meaning and structure,

Mueller wrote:

“Converting pages to markdown is such a stupid idea. Did you know LLMs can read images? WHY NOT TURN YOUR WHOLE SITE INTO AN IMAGE?”

Alderson argued that collapsing a page into Markdown removes important context and structure, and framed Markdown-fetching as a convenience play rather than a lasting strategy.

Other voices in the Reddit thread echoed the concerns. One commenter questioned whether the effort could limit crawling rather than enhance it. They noted that there’s no evidence that LLMs are trained to favor documents that are less resource-intensive to parse.

The original poster defended the theory, arguing LLMs are better at parsing Markdown than HTML because they’re heavily trained on code repositories. That claim is untested.

Why This Matters

Mueller has been consistent on this. In a previous exchange, he responded to a question from Lily Rayabout creating separate Markdown or JSON pages for LLMs. His position then was the same. He said to focus on clean HTML and structured data rather than building bot-only content copies.

That response followed SE Ranking’s analysis of 300,000 domains, which found no connection between having an llms.txt file and how often a domain gets cited in LLM answers. Additionally, Mueller has compared llms.txt to the keywords meta tag, a format major platforms haven’t documented as something they use for ranking or citations.

So far, public platform documentation hasn’t shown that bot-only formats, such as Markdown versions of pages, improve ranking or citations. Mueller raised the same objections across multiple discussions, and SE Ranking’s data found nothing to suggest otherwise.

Looking Ahead

Until an AI platform publishes a spec requesting Markdown versions of web pages, the best practice remains as it is. Keep HTML clean, reduce unnecessary JavaScript that blocks content parsing, and use structured data where platforms have documented schemas.

The Real SEO Skill No One Teaches: Problem Deduction via @sejournal, @billhunt

Most SEO failures are not optimization failures. They are reasoning failures that occur before optimization even begins.

In enterprise SEO escalations, the pattern is remarkably consistent. Teams jump straight to causes, debate theories, and assign blame before anyone clearly articulates the actual problem they are trying to understand.

Once blame enters the conversation, problem definition disappears. Teams shift into CYA mode, and without a shared understanding of the problem, every proposed fix becomes guesswork.

The Failure Pattern Everyone Recognizes

If you’ve worked in enterprise SEO long enough, you’ve seen this meeting.

A stakeholder raises an issue. Google is showing the wrong title or site name. Search visibility dropped. A location isn’t represented correctly. The room doesn’t go quiet. It fills with explanations.

Someone points to a lack of internal links. Another suggests Google rewrote the titles. Yet another CMS defect is mentioned. A recent Google update is blamed. Someone inevitably asks whether hreflang is broken.

Each explanation sounds plausible in isolation. Each reflects real experience. But none of them is grounded in a clearly stated problem.

Everyone is trying to be helpful. No one has actually said what outcome the system produced.

SEO discussions often collapse not because teams lack expertise, but because they skip the most important step: precisely describing the system outcome they are trying to explain.

Meeting Two: Activity Without Clarity

What usually follows is a second meeting. On the surface, it feels productive.

Teams arrive having done work. The CMS has been reviewed. A detailed technical SEO audit is complete. Google update trackers and industry forums have been checked for similar impacts, along with LinkedIn commentary. Multiple diagnostic tools have been run.

There is evidence of many man-hours of activity presented. There are screenshots of issues and non-issues, and it all looks like progress toward a resolution. In reality, it is often a misdirected effort.

If the original problem was vague or incorrectly framed, all of that analysis is aimed at the wrong target. Only later does the realization set in. While the audits detected issues, they are not related to this problem.

Time and attention were spent validating assumptions instead of diagnosing system behavior.

That’s not an execution failure. It’s a problem definition failure.

Why SEO Conversations Go Off The Rails

That failure isn’t accidental. It’s structural, and SEO is uniquely exposed to it.

I have often been critical, stating that the search industry lacks root cause analysis. That’s true, but it’s not because teams aren’t trying. There is no shortage of audits, checklists, or prescriptive processes when a traffic drop or SERP anomaly appears. The problem is that those tools narrow thinking rather than clarify it. They push teams toward doing something before anyone has agreed on what actually happened.

In many SEO conversations, signals are treated as probabilistic guesses rather than observed outcomes. Rankings fluctuate, a listing looks different, traffic dips, and the discussion quickly drifts toward familiar explanations. Google must have changed something. A ranking factor shifted. An update rolled out.

What gets missed is far more mundane and far more common. Control is spread across teams. Changes are made inside one department and are never communicated to another. Content, templates, navigation, schema, analytics, and infrastructure evolve independently. Cause and effect don’t move in straight lines, and no single team sees the whole system.

When no one clearly states the outcome the system produced, the group defaults to what feels responsible: activity.

Root cause analysis turns into a checklist exercise. Teams start debating causes before agreeing on the outcome itself. Meetings fill with effort, artifacts, and action items, but clarity never quite arrives.

Systems, however, don’t respond to effort. They respond to inputs.

The Missing Skill: Problem Deduction

The most important SEO skill isn’t keyword research, schema, technical audits, GEO, or any other optimization acronym that happens to be in fashion. Those are all processes and tools. Useful ones. But they only matter after the real work has been done. That work is problem deduction.

Problem deduction is the discipline of slowing the conversation down long enough to understand what the system actually produced, not what the team expected it to produce. It requires stepping outside of assumptions, resisting familiar explanations, and describing the outcome in neutral terms before trying to fix anything.

Only then does real analysis begin. Teams can reason backward through the signals that contributed to the outcome, distinguish between inputs they can change and constraints they inherited, and act without blame or superstition driving the discussion.

In practice, problem deduction means the ability to:

  • Observe a system outcome without bias, focusing on what the system produced rather than what was intended.
  • Describe that outcome precisely and neutrally, without embedding assumptions about cause.
  • Reason backward through contributing signals, identifying which inputs could plausibly influence the result.
  • Separate fixable inputs from historical constraints, so effort is spent where it can actually matter.
  • Act without blame or superstition, keeping decisions grounded in evidence rather than instinct.

This doesn’t replace technical SEO or root cause analysis. It makes them possible.

Problem deduction is systems thinking applied to search. And almost no one teaches it.

A Real-World Enterprise Example

Recently, I reviewed an enterprise case where a client was frustrated that Google consistently displayed a specific location as the site name, regardless of the user’s location or query intent. The conversation followed a familiar arc. At first, explanations came quickly. Someone pointed to internal linking, noting that this location had accumulated more authority over time. Others suggested Google’s automatic title rewrites were to blame. The CMS came up, along with the possibility of injected or inconsistent code. SEO implementation gaps were also mentioned. Each explanation sounded reasonable. All of them were based on real experience. But none of them described the outcome. So we stopped the discussion and reset the conversation by stating the problem plainly:

Google selected a location, not the brand name, as the site name representing the brand in search results.

That single sentence changed the tone of the room. Once the outcome was clearly defined, the reasoning became straightforward. The discussion shifted from speculation to diagnosis, and the signals that led to that result became much easier to trace.

How Google Actually Made That Decision

Google wasn’t confused. It was responding to a consistent set of reinforcing signals.

Once the outcome was clearly defined, the explanation stopped being mysterious. Several independent signals all pointed to the same conclusion, and Google simply followed the strongest, most consistent path.

1. Misapplied WebSite Schema

One issue started at the structural level. Location pages had been marked up as if each were a separate website entity, rather than reinforcing the primary brand domain. Multiple pages effectively claimed to be “the website,” diluting canonical authority and causing the schema signal to cancel itself out through duplication. Google didn’t misunderstand the markup. It received conflicting declarations and discounted them logically.

2. Title Tag Dilution

At the same time, title tags failed to reinforce a clear hierarchy. The homepage HTML title tag attempted to carry too much information at once, referencing the marketing tagline first, then the brand and first location, and finally the other locations, separated by commas, into a single tag. Instead of clarifying the relationship between the brand and locations, the structure blurred it. Google responded by favoring the location that was most consistently reinforced across signals. Google favored the most consistently reinforced location, not arbitrarily, but logically.

3. External Corroboration Bias

External signals reinforced the same outcome. Inbound links, citations, and references disproportionately pointed to a single location. From Google’s perspective, the broader web corroborated what on-site signals already suggested. One location appeared to represent the brand more clearly than the others. This wasn’t favoritism. It was corroboration.

What Could Be Easily Fixed And What Couldn’t

Once the actual problem was clearly identified, the conversation changed. The issue wasn’t that Google was behaving unpredictably. It was that something in the system was consistently telling Google to treat a single location as the site name rather than the brand itself.

With the problem framed that way, analysis became practical. Instead of debating theories, we could examine the systems that contributed to that outcome and begin correcting them. Just as importantly, it allowed us to distinguish between changes that could be made immediately and those that would require sustained effort.

Some corrections were straightforward. Because the schema was generated programmatically, the WebSite markup could be adjusted immediately to reinforce the primary brand entity. The brand team also agreed to simplify the homepage title, focusing it on the brand and tagline, while allowing individual location pages to carry the weight of location-specific signals.

Other signals were less malleable. External corroboration, built up through years of links and citations pointing to a single location, couldn’t be reversed quickly. That work would take time and consistent reinforcement.

Problem deduction didn’t just tell us what to fix. It told us where to start, what to expect, and how much effort each correction would realistically require.

SEO teams waste enormous effort trying to “fix” things that can only change gradually. Problem deduction helps teams focus on directional correction rather than instant reversal.

Why Root Cause Analysis Often Fails In SEO

Root cause analysis breaks down when teams try to answer why” before agreeing on “what.”

In enterprise SEO, that failure is amplified by how work is organized. Control is decentralized across content, engineering, analytics, brand, legal, localization, and platform teams. No single group owns the full system, yet everyone is accountable to their own KPIs. When an anomaly appears, the instinct isn’t to describe the outcome carefully. It’s to protect territory.

Conversations shift quickly. Causes are proposed before outcomes are defined. Responsibility is implied, then deflected. Each team points to the part of the system it doesn’t control. The discussion becomes less about understanding behavior and more about avoiding fault.

At the same time, the process itself narrows thinking. Root cause analysis turns into a checklist exercise. Teams reach for audits, tools, and familiar diagnostic steps, not because they are wrong, but because they are safe. Checklists create motion without requiring agreement, and activity becomes a substitute for clarity.

When internal explanations feel uncomfortable or politically risky, attention often shifts outward. Someone cites a recent Google update. Another references a post from a well-known SEO or a chart showing sector-wide volatility. External signals offer a kind of relief. If “everyone” is seeing impact, then no one internally has to explain their system.

But those signals are rarely diagnostic. Used too early, they short-circuit reasoning rather than support it.

The result is a familiar pattern. Meetings generate effort, artifacts, and action items, but the outcome itself remains vaguely defined. Teams stay busy. Nothing really changes.

Problem deduction interrupts that cycle. It forces agreement on what the system actually produced before explanations, defenses, or fixes enter the conversation. Once the outcome is clearly defined, decentralization becomes navigable, blame loses its power, and root cause analysis shifts from performance to purpose.

That’s when it starts working.

The Skill Enterprises Should Be Hiring For First

Not long ago, an advisory client asked me a deceptively simple question while defining a new enterprise search role.

“What is the single most important skill we should hire for?”

They were expecting a familiar answer. Something about technical SEO depth, AI search experience, schema expertise, or platform fluency. That’s usually how these conversations go.

I didn’t give them any of those. Instead, I said critical reasoning.

There was a pause.

Despite what many people in the search industry believe, technical skills are the easy part. Tools can be learned. Platforms change. Gaps get closed. Teams adapt. What’s far harder to teach is the ability to think clearly when the system doesn’t behave the way you expected it to.

Enterprise SEO is full of that kind of ambiguity. Signals conflict. Outcomes are indirect. Ownership is fragmented. And when things go wrong, pressure builds quickly.

In those moments, the people who struggle most aren’t the ones who lack tactical knowledge. They’re the ones who can’t slow the conversation down long enough to reason.

The skill that matters is the ability to observe what the system actually produced without bias, describe it precisely, separate symptoms from causes, reason backward through contributing signals, and resist the urge to jump to conclusions or assign blame.

In other words, problem deduction.

Specifically (as highlighted above), the ability to:

  • Observe a system outcome without bias.
  • Describe it precisely.
  • Separate symptoms from causes.
  • Reason backward through contributing signals.
  • Resist jumping to conclusions or assigning blame.

I told them plainly: We can teach the mechanics of search. What’s nearly impossible to teach is how to reason critically if that muscle isn’t already there. People either have it or they don’t. Enterprise SEO punishes the absence of that skill more than almost any other digital discipline.

This Is Bigger Than SEO

Once you recognize the pattern, it becomes hard to unsee.

The same failure mode that derails root cause analysis also explains why SEO so often turns political. When outcomes aren’t clearly defined, teams fill the gap with narratives. Best practices harden into superstition. Google updates become a convenient external explanation for internal incoherence. Infrastructure issues quietly masquerade as ranking problems because they’re harder to confront directly.

None of this happens because teams are careless. It happens because modern digital systems are fragmented by design.

As described earlier, control is decentralized across content, engineering, analytics, brand, legal, localization, and platform teams. No one owns the entire system, yet everyone is accountable to their own KPIs. When something goes wrong, describing the outcome precisely feels risky. It invites scrutiny. It raises uncomfortable questions about ownership and handoffs.

So conversations drift. Causes are debated before outcomes are agreed upon. Responsibility is implied, then deflected. Checklists replace reasoning because they allow motion without alignment. And when internal explanations feel politically unsafe, attention shifts outward – to Google updates, industry chatter, or gurus diagnosing sector-wide volatility.

Those external signals provide relief, but not resolution. They describe correlation, not causation. They offer context, not clarity and allow organizations to stay busy without ever confronting how their own systems produced the result.

This is where SEO begins to overlap with something broader: findability.

Whether someone encounters a brand through Google, an AI assistant, a marketplace, or a vertical search engine, the underlying questions are the same. Are we present? Are we represented clearly and consistently? Does that representation invite deeper engagement, or does it confuse and fragment trust?

Those outcomes don’t depend on isolated optimizations. They depend on coherent systems that behave predictably across surfaces.

Problem deduction is what makes that coherence possible. By forcing agreement on what the system actually produced before explanations or fixes enter the room, it cuts through decentralization, neutralizes blame, and restores reasoning. Root cause analysis stops being performative and starts serving its purpose.

That’s when the conversation changes. And that’s when progress actually begins.

The Real Takeaway

Google didn’t choose the wrong site name. It chose the only version of the brand the system clearly defined.

The real SEO skill isn’t knowing what to change. It’s knowing what actually happened before you touch anything at all.

Until enterprises teach, hire for, and reward problem deduction, SEO conversations will continue to spin in circles, fixing symptoms while the system quietly reinforces the same outcomes.

And no amount of optimization can fix a problem that was never clearly defined in the first place.

More Resources:


Featured Image: KitohodkA/Shutterstock

Information Retrieval Part 2: How To Get Into Model Training Data

There has never been a more important time in your career to spend time learning and understanding. Not because AI search differs drastically from traditional search. But because everyone else thinks it does.

Every C-suite in the country is desperate to get this right. Decision-makers need to feel confident that you and I are the right people to lead us into the new frontier.

We need to learn the fundamentals of information retrieval. Even if your business shouldn’t be doing anything differently.

Here, that starts with understanding the basics of model training data. What is it, how does it work and – crucially – how do I get in it.

TL;DR

  1. AI is the product of its training data. The quality (and quantity) the model trains on is key to its success.
  2. The web-sourced AI data commons is rapidly becoming more restricted. This will skew data representativity, freshness, and scaling laws.
  3. The more consistent, accurate brand mentions you have that appear in training data, the less ambiguous you are.
  4. Quality SEO, with better product and traditional marketing, will improve your appearance in the training and data, and eventually with real-time RAG/retrieval.

What Is Training Data?

Training data is the foundational dataset used in training LLMs to predict the most appropriate next word, sentence, and answer. The data can be labeled, where models are taught the right answer, or unlabeled, where they have to figure it out for themselves.

Without high-quality training data, models are completely useless.

From semi-libelous tweets to videos of cats and great works of art and literature that stand the test of time, nothing is off limits. Nothing. It’s not just words either. Speech-to-text models need to be trained to respond to different speech patterns and accents. Emotions even.

Image Credit: Harry Clarkson-Bennett

How Does It Work?

The models don’t memorize, they compress. LLMs process billions of data points, adjusting internal weights through a mechanism known as backpropagation.

If the next word predicted in a string of training examples is correct, it moves on. If not, it gets the machine equivalent of Pavlovian conditioning.

Bopped on the head with a stick or a “good boy.”

The model is then able to vectorize. Creating a map of associations by term, phrase, and sentence.

  • Converting text into numerical vectors, aka Bag of Words.
  • Capturing semantic meaning of words and sentences, preserving wider context and meaning (word and sentence embeddings).

Rules and nuances are encoded as a set of semantic relationships; this is known as parametric memory. “Knowledge” baked directly into the architecture. The more refined a model’s knowledge on a topic, the less it has to use a form of grounding to verify its twaddle.

Worth noting that models with a high parametric memory are faster at retrieving accurate information (if available), but have a static knowledge base and literally forget things.

RAG and live web search is an example of a model using non-parametric memory. Infinite scale, but slower. Much better for news and when results require grounding.

Crafting Better Quality Algorithms

When it comes to the training data, drafting better quality algorithms relies on three elements:

  1. Quality.
  2. Quantity.
  3. Removal of bias.

Quality of data matters for obvious reasons. If you train a model on poorly labeled, solely synthetic data, the model performance cannot be expected to exactly mirror real problems or complexities.

Quantity of data is a problem, too. Mainly because these companies have eaten everything in sight and done a runner on the bill.

Leveraging synthetic data to solve issues of scale isn’t necessarily a problem. The days of accessing high-quality, free-to-air content on the internet for these guys are largely gone. For two main reasons:

  1. Unless you want diabolical racism, mean comments, conspiracy theories, and plagiarized BS, I’m not sure the internet is your guy anymore.
  2. If they respect company’s robots.txt directives at least. Eight in 10 of the world’s biggest news websites now block AI training bots. I don’t know how effective their CDN-level blocking is, but this makes quality training data harder to come by.

Bias and diversity (or lack of it) is a huge problem too. People have their own inherent biases. Even the ones building these models.

Shocking I know…

If models are fed data unfairly weighted towards certain characteristics or brands, it can reinforce societal issues. It can further discrimination.

Remember, LLMs are neither intelligent nor databases of facts. They analyze patterns from ingested data. Billions or trillions of numerical weights that determine the next word (token) following another in any given context.

How Is Training Data Collected?

Like every good SEO, it depends.

  1. If you built an AI model explicitly to identify pictures of dogs, you need pictures of dogs in every conceivable position. Every type of dog. Every emotion the pooch shows. You need to create or procure a dataset of millions, maybe billions, of canine images.
  2. Then it must be cleaned. Think of it as structuring data into a consistent format. In said dog scenario, maybe a feline friend nefariously added pictures of cats dressed up as dogs to mess you around. Those must be identified.
  3. Then labeled (for supervised learning). Data labeling (with some human annotation) ensures we have a sentient being somewhere in the loop. Hopefully, an expert to add relevant labels to a tiny portion data, so that a model can learn. For example, a dachshund sitting on a box looking melancholic.
  4. Pre-processing. Responding to issues like cats masquerading as dogs. Ensuring you minimize potential biases in the dataset like specific dog breeds being mentioned far more frequently than others.
  5. Partitioned. A portion of the data is kept back so the model can’t memorise the outputs. This is the final validation stage. Kind of like a placebo.

This is, obviously, expensive and time-consuming. It’s not feasible to take up hundreds of thousands of hours of expertise from real people in fields that matter.

Think of this. You’ve just broken your arm, and you’re waiting in the ER for six hours. You finally get seen, only to be told you had to wait because all the doctors have been processing images for OpenAI’s new model.

“Yes sir, I know you’re in excruciating pain, but I’ve got a hell of a lot of sad looking dogs to label.”

Data labeling is a time-consuming and tedious process. To combat this, many businesses hire large teams of human data annotators (aka humans in the loop, you know, actual experts), assisted by automated weak labeling models. In supervised learning, they sort the initial labeling.

For perspective, one hour of video data can take humans up to 800 hours to annotate.

Micro Models

So, companies build micro-models. Models that don’t require as much training or data to run. The humans in the loop (I’m sure they have names) can start training micro-models after annotating a few examples.

The models learn. They train themselves.

So over time, human input decreases, and we’re only needed to validate the outputs. And to make sure the models aren’t trying to undress children, celebrities, and your coworkers on the internet.

But who cares about that in the face of “progress.”

Image Credit: Harry Clarkson-Bennett

Types Of Training Data

Training data is usually categorized by how much guidance is provided or required (supervision) and the role it plays in the model’s lifecycle (function).

Ideally a model is largely trained on real data.

Once a model is ready, it can be trained and fine-tuned on synthetic data. But synthetic data alone is unlikely to create high-quality models.

  • Supervised (or labeled): Where every input is annotated with the “right” answer.
  • Unsupervised (or unlabeled): Work it out yourself, robots, I’m off for a beer.
  • Semi-supervised: where a small amount of the data is properly labeled and model “understands” the rules. More, I’ll have a beer in the office.
  • RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback): humans are shown two options and asked to pick the “right” one (preference data). Or a person demonstrates the task at hand for the mode to imitate (demonstration data).
  • Pre-training and fine-tuning data: Massive datasets allow for broad information acquisition, and fine-tuning is used to turn the model into a category expert.
  • Multi-modal: Images, videos, text, etc.

Then some what’s known as edge case data. Data designed to “trick” the model to make it more robust.

In light of the let’s call it “burgeoning” market for AI training data, there are obvious issues of “fair use” surrounding it.

“We find that 23% of supervised training datasets are published under research or non-commercial licenses.”

So pay people.

The Spectrum Of Supervision

In supervised learning, the AI algorithm is given labeled data. These labels define the outputs and are fundamental to the algorithm being able to improve over time on its own.

Let’s say you’re training a model to identify colors. There are dozens of shades of each color. Hundreds even. So while this is an easy example, it requires accurate labeling. The problem with accurate labeling is its time-consuming and potentially costly.

In unsupervised learning, the AI model is given unlabeled data. You chuck millions of rows, images, or videos at a machine, sit down for a coffee, and then kick it when it hasn’t worked out what to do.

It allows for more exploratory “pattern recognition.” Not learning.

While this approach has obvious drawbacks, it’s incredibly useful at identifying patterns a human might miss. The model can essentially define its own labels and pathway.

Models can and do train themselves, and they will find things a human never could. They’ll also miss things. It’s like a driverless car. Driverless cars may have fewer accidents than when a human is in the loop. But when they do, we find it far more unpalatable.

We don’t trust tech autonomy. (Image Credit: Harry Clarkson-Bennett)

It’s the technology that scares us. And rightly so.

Combatting Bias

Bias in training data is very real and potentially very damaging. There are three phases:

  1. Origin bias.
  2. Development bias.
  3. Deployment bias.

Origin bias references the validity and fairness of the dataset. Is the data all-encompassing? Is there any obvious systemic, implicit, or confirmation bias present?

Development bias includes the features or tenets of the data the model is being trained on. Does algorithmic bias occur because of the training data?

Then we have deployment bias. Where the evaluation and processing of the data leads to flawed outputs and automated/feedback loop bias.

You can really see why we need a human in the loop. And why AI models training on synthetic or inappropriately chosen data would be a disaster.

In healthcare, data collection activities influenced by human bias can lead to the training of algorithms that replicate historical inequalities. Yikes.

Leading to a pretty bleak cycle of reinforcement.

The Most Frequently Used Training Data Sources

Training data sources are wide-ranging in both quality and structure. You’ve got the open web, which is obviously a bit mental. X, if you want to train something to be racist. Reddit, if you’re looking for the Incel Bot 5000.

Or highly structured academic and literary repositories if you want to build something, you know, good … Obviously then you have to pay something.

Common Crawl

Common Crawl is a public web repository, a free, open-source storehouse of historical and current web crawl data available to pretty much anyone on the internet.

The full Common Crawl Web Graph currently contains around 607 million domain records across all datasets, with each monthly release covering 94 to 163 million domains.

In the Mozilla Foundation’s 2024 report, Training Data for the Price of a Sandwich, 64% of the 47 LLMs analysed used at least one filtered version of Common Crawl data.

If you aren’t in the training data, you’re very unlikely to be cited and referenced. The Common Crawl Index Server lets you search any URL pattern against their crawl archives and Metehan’s Web Graph helps you see how “centered you are.”

Wikipedia (And Wikidata)

The default English Wikipedia dataset contains 19.88 GB of complete articles that help with language modeling tasks. And Wikidata is an enormous, incredibly comprehensive knowledge graph. Immensely structured data.

While representing only a small percentage of the total tokens, Wikipedia is perhaps the most influential source for entity resolution and factual consensus. It is one of the most factually accurate, up-to-date, and well-structured repositories of content in existence.

Some of the biggest guys have just signed deals with Wikipedia.

Publishers

OpenAI, Gemini, etc., have multi-million dollar licensing deals with a number of publishers.

The list goes on, but only for a bit … and not recently. I’ve heard things have clammed shut. Which, given the state of their finances, may not be surprising.

Media & Libraries

This is mainly for multi-modal content training. Shutterstock (images/video), Getty Images have one with Perplexity, and Disney (a 2026 partner for the Sora video platform) provides the visual grounding for multi-modal models.

As part of this three-year licensing agreement with Disney, Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos based on Disney characters.

As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.

Books

BookCorpus turned scraped data of 11,000 unpublished books into a 985 million-word dataset.

We cannot write books fast enough for models to continually learn on. It’s part of the soon to happen model collapse.

Code Repositories

Coding has become one of the most influential and valuable features of LLMs. Specific LLMs like Cursor or Claude Code are incredible. GitHub and Stack Overflow data have built these models.

They’ve built the vibe-engineering revolution.

Public Web Data

Diverse (but relevant) web data results in faster convergence during training, which in turn reduces computational requirements. It’s dynamic. Ever-changing. But, unfortunately, a bit nuts and messy.

But, if you need vast swathes of data, maybe in real-time, then public web data is the way forward. Ditto for real opinions and reviews of products and services. Public web data, review platforms, UGC, and social media sites are great.

Why Models Aren’t Getting (Much) Better

While there’s no shortage of data in the world, most of it is unlabeled and, thus, can’t actually be used in supervised machine learning models. Every incorrect label has a negative impact on a model’s performance.

According to most, we’re only a few years away from running out of quality data. Inevitably, this will lead to a time when those genAI tools start consuming their own garbage.

This is a known problem that will cause model collapse.

  • They are being blocked by companies that do not want their data used pro bono to train the models.
  • Robots.txt protocols (a directive, not something directly enforceable), CDN-level blocking, and terms of service pages have been updated to tell these guys to get lost.
  • They consume data quicker than we can produce it.

Frankly, as more publishers and websites are forced into paywalling (a smart business decision), the quality of these models only gets worse.

So, How Do You Get In The Training Data?

There are two obvious approaches I think of.

  1. To identify the seed data sets of models that matter and find ways into them.
  2. To forgo the specifics and just do great SEO and wider marketing. Make a tangible impact in your industry.

I can see pros and cons to both. Finding ways into specific models is probably highly unnecessary for most brands. To me this smells more like grey hat SEO. Most brands will be better off just doing some really good marketing and getting shared, cited and you know, talked about.

These models are not trained on directly up-to-date data. This is important because you cannot retroactively get into a specific model’s training data. You have to plan ahead.

If you’re an individual, you should be:

  • Creating and sharing content.
  • Going on podcasts.
  • Attending industry events.
  • Sharing other people’s content.
  • Doing webinars.
  • Getting yourself in front of relevant publishers, publications, and people.

There are some pretty obvious sources of highly structured data that models have paid for in recent times. I know, they’ve actually paid for it. I don’t know what the guys at Reddit and Wikipedia had to do to get money from these guys, and maybe I don’t want to.

How Can I Tell What Datasets Models Use?

Everyone has become a lot more closed off with what they do and don’t use for training data. I suspect this is both legally and financially motivated. So, you’ll need to do some digging.

And there are some massive “open source” datasets I suspect they all use:

  • Common Crawl.
  • Wikipedia.
  • Wikidata.
  • Coding repositories.

Fortunately, most deals are public, and it’s safe to assume that models use data from these platforms.

Google has a partnership with Reddit and access to an insane amount of transcripts from YouTube. They almost certainly have more valuable, well-structured data at their fingertips than any other company.

Grok trained almost exclusively on real-time data from X. Hence why it acts like a pre-pubescent school shooter and undresses everyone.

Worth noting that AI companies use third party vendors. Factories where data is scraped, cleaned and structured to create supervised datasets. Scale AI is the data engine that the big players use. Bright Data specialise in web data collection.

A Checklist

OK, so we’re trying to feature in parametric memory. To appear in the LLMs training data so the model recognizes you and you’re more likely to be used for RAG/retrieval. That means we need to:

  1. Manage the multi-bot ecosystem of training, indexing, and browsing.
  2. Entity optimization. Well-structured, well-connected content, consistent NAPs, sameAs schema properties, and Knowledge Graph presence. In Google and Wikidata.
  3. Make sure your content is rendered on the server side. Google has become very adept at rendering content on the client side. Bots like GPT-bot only see the HTML response. JavaScript is still clunky.
  4. Well-structured, machine-readable content in relevant formats. Tables, lists, properly structured semantic HTML.
  5. Get. Yourself. Out. There. Share your stuff. Make noise.
  6. Be ultra, ultra clear on your website about who you are. Answer the relevant questions. Own your entities.

You have to balance direct associations (what you say) with semantic associations (what others say about you). Make your brand the obvious next word.

Modern SEO, with better marketing.

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