And, suddenly last Saturday, we were at war with Iran. That will have profound effects on our economy and the tech industry. If the war is a component in a tech story, or tech is a big part of a war story, we will report and talk about it as such. If not, we'll try to leave most of the war reporting and commentary to political pundits and journalists.
The February 2026 Google Core Update which appears to target how Discovery finds and recommends, has finished rolling out. Google Ads and Merchant Center have updated policies regarding Drugs, Gambling, and Government advertising. Google has published new help documents, About the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in the Google Merchant Center Help docs section. Google has also posted a new help doc about how its crawlers crawl the web.
ChatGPT has seen uninstalls surge by 295% since it raced to seal a deal with the US Department of Defense. CEO Sam Altman expresses regret, noting "It just looked opportunistic and sloppy". The Pentagon is still using Anthropic until the end of April. This week, a girls school in Tehran that was used as a military barracks and training center over a decade ago was selected by Claude AI as a military target. An estimated 80 children were killed.
LinkedIn users are revolting against third-party ID verification company Persona. Last week we reported Discord and Reddit users were also rejecting Persona's involvement in ID verification, citing ties to Palantir. Meta is trying to limit the effects of AI-powered Celeb-bait sales scams. AT the same time, Meta is testing shopping AI chatbots in the US. Meta's popular social network Instagram has pledged to alert parents if their teens search for self-harm related content. This comes as Google's Gemini is facing a lawsuit for instructing a user who thought he and Gemini were in a relationship to commit suicide so he and Gemini could be together.
ChatGPT ecommerce traffic, though far lower than traffic from organic search, tends to convert 31% higher than traffic from organic search. Google has filed a patent suggesting it could replace your landing pages with its own in certain cases. Search is still driving traffic though the concept of Google-Zero continues to be proven untrue. And, in a SEO must-read, a piece in the March 5th edition of Search Engine Land offers three extremely strong recommendations on why some industries and websites struggle in AI search. All this and much much more in the Age of the AI Wars edition.