Wikipedia erased an entry about legendary search journalist Barry Schwartz citing their editorial team's perception Barry has a commercial interest in a Wikipedia entry. That he's spent most of this century writing a daily compendium of search engine related news stories every day since 2003 didn't appear to change their opinion. Including his work with Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land, Barry has written nearly 50,000 articles on search. In short, Barry Schwartz is a living legend who has contributed more to this industry than virtually anybody else. It's not like there's a hole in Wikipedia where a legend ought to be, it's just that there's another Barry Schwartz with academic credentials and at least one whole book in his field of his expertise. According to Wikipedia, he's the canonical Barry Schwartz. We beg to differ.
In other news, the Google Search Console email letting you know GSC is now tracking impressions was a bug. GSC was always tracking impressions though it's unclear how precise that tracking has been. Google is rebranding Looker Studios back to its original name, Data Studio. Google has issued critical updates to Merchant Center product specs for 2026. Google has introduced a native Gemini app for Mac. Microsoft Advertising's SOAP API is being retired at the end of January 2027.
In our Looking into the Abyss section, we report on the introduction of the Ministry of Truth via journalism critique software developed by Peter Theil called Objection. We also report on the DOJ's use of a grand jury to force Reddit to reveal the identity of a user who criticized a myriad of extra-judicial excesses committed by ICE agents.
A SEO study from AirOps showed that ChatGPT prefers sites with precise written descriptions better than longer content. The study looked at factors sites that get cited regularly have in common. High search ranking was the most common factor with pages in top positions cited 58.4% of the time vs. only 14.2% for pages in position 10. Pages with headings that matched the user-query tended to fare well, as did pages that answered the user's question directly rather than ones that try to answer several questions in one block.
We also talk about the AllBirds pivot, Meta's growth in paid advertising, Google upping its game in blocking bad-ads, continued fallout from Google's anti-trust cases, how Apple took a bite out of Elon, and the ideas around optimization for agentic search.