Fabrice Canel, Longtime Bing Search Leader, Retires From Microsoft
Fabrice Canel, the Principal Product Manager who led Bing’s crawling and indexing team and championed IndexNow, has announced his retirement from Microsoft.
About
See short video versions of news stories on YouTube and TikTok. Matt G. Southern is the Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal, where he’s covered Google, SEO, and AI for over 13 years.
Articles
AI Agents Struggle To Read B2B Pricing, Report Finds
Siteline tested a Claude agent on top B2B products. When it couldn’t find the prices, it often turned to third-party sources instead.
ChatGPT Users Are Now Mostly Non-English
OpenAI data show that active ChatGPT users on consumer plans now mostly use non-English languages, with growth fastest in Africa and Asia.
Google Puts Recipe Links At Top Of AI Mode Responses
Google launched a new update in AI Mode that places recipe site links at the top of responses, with creator names, ratings and ingredient counts.
Google’s Liz Reid: Personalization Can Help Small Publishers
Google’s Liz Reid argues personalization and preferred sources can help small publishers get found in AI search, though she shared no supporting data.
Google Claims AI Training Is Fair Use In New Governance Paper
Google’s AI governance paper argues public-web training should remain fair use while pointing to opt-out controls, takedowns, and paid deals for specialized content.
Google’s Spam Update Now Reaches AI Answers. Enforcement Is Hard
The line between earning a brand mention in AI answers and engineering one is getting redrawn. Here’s what the research and Google’s June update say.
Google Spam Update Rolls Out, AI Manipulation In Scope – SEO Pulse
Five search developments this week: a spam update, AI impression counts, CTR data, Similarweb’s branded search findings, and Google’s tool access stance.
Google Desktop CTR Climbs While Mobile Dips, Report Finds
Desktop and mobile clickthrough rates are splitting, according to new benchmark data. Clicks are growing on desktop while declining on mobile.
Google’s Mueller Explains How AI Search Impressions Get Counted
John Mueller explained that impressions in Google’s Search Console AI report track links to your pages, and user-activated links only count after they’re activated.
Marketing Hiring Down 36% At Big Tech, Data Shows
SignalFire reports marketing hiring at major tech companies has fallen far more sharply than engineering, based on its hiring data.
Microsoft Clarity Now Flags Bots That Ignore Robots.txt
Microsoft Clarity’s Bot Analytics dashboard now detects when bots request URLs your robots.txt disallows, with trends and filters by bot and operator.
Google Finishes Rolling Out The June 2026 Spam Update
Google has finished rolling out the June 2026 spam update globally and across all languages. It’s the second spam update of the year.
AI-Recommended Brands Saw 2.5x More Site Visits: Similarweb
A Similarweb report links AI recommendations to more site visits and deeper engagement, with most downstream traffic arriving via branded search.
Google Loses Two Top AI Researchers To OpenAI & Anthropic
Two senior Google AI researchers, Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer and AlphaFold’s John Jumper, are leaving for OpenAI and Anthropic within the same week.
AI Chatbot Use Hits 49%, But Skepticism Stays High
About half of U.S. adults use AI chatbots, and 60% read AI Overviews, but more predict AI will hurt society than help it.
Google Says SEO Tools Lack Access To Its Internal Metrics
Google’s new messaging to CMOs reiterates that GEO is still SEO and states that third-party tools have no access to its internal metrics.
Preferred Sources & AI Mode Are Creating Filter Bubbles – A New Discovery Problem
Google’s Preferred Sources and loyalty tools help established publishers stay visible, but create a harder discovery path for sites not yet on anyone’s list.
Deindexing Reports Keep Coming, Google Sees Nothing Unusual
Websites report pages being removed from Google’s index, while Google sees nothing unusual. How to separate real deindexing from ranking loss and reporting noise.
AI Citation Share Ships, New Data Doubts LLMS.txt – SEO Pulse
Bing rolls out AI Citation Share; fresh data shows LLMs.txt files go unread; Google backs two agent specs; and the UK orders fairer Search ranking.
OpenAI Brings Improved Health Responses To Free ChatGPT
OpenAI says GPT-5.5 Instant, the free default ChatGPT model, now performs comparably to its frontier models on the company’s own health evaluations.
Google, Microsoft Back Draft AI Agent Discovery Spec
A coalition including Google, Microsoft, and GitHub published Agentic Resource Discovery, an open draft spec for how AI agents find and verify tools online.
Google Must Give Notice Before Significant Ranking Changes
The UK’s CMA introduced two new conduct requirements for Google Search, covering fair ranking of organic results including AI Overviews, and search data portability.
Bing Rolls Out AI Citation Share In Webmaster Tools
Microsoft is beginning to roll out Citation Share, Intents, Topics, and Compare in the Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance dashboard preview.
TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds
In a fresh-account test, Kapwing found 59% of TikTok For You videos were AI slop, roughly three times the rate on YouTube.
97% Of LLMS.txt Files Got No Requests, Ahrefs Data Shows
Ahrefs analyzed 137K domains and found 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests. AI retrieval bots accounted for 1% of total requests.
Google’s Mueller Says llms.txt Can’t Help LLMs Differentiate Sites
Mueller argues LLM systems can’t use llms.txt to differentiate between websites for discovery. He sees a narrow role once an agent is on a site.
What Apple’s Gemini-Powered Siri Means For SEO Strategy
Apple’s WWDC announcements turn the Google partnership into a shipping product, with open questions for search.
Google Expands AI Mode With Information Agents: Ultra Only
Google’s information agents are now available in all AI Mode languages and markets for AI Ultra subscribers, with expansion to more people planned this summer.
Reddit Climbs, Clicks Drop, GBP Comes To GA4 – SEO Pulse
Reddit gains ground after the May core update, new zero-click data lands, Google updates its SEO guidance, and Business Profile data comes to Analytics.