ChatGPT’s Index, GA Benchmarks, Google Refiles Complaint – SEO Pulse via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern
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Google Analytics adds campaign benchmarking, new data on ChatGPT's index search index, and Google refiles its SerpApi claims with new terms. SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern 6 hours ago ⋅ 5 min read SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal Bio Follow Welcome to the Pulse: updates impact who can crawl your site, what an AI index records about your pages, and how Google will compare your campaigns with similar businesses. Here’s what you need to know for your work. Starting September 15, 2026, Cloudflare will block crawlers that both index for search and gather AI training data on any site set to block training. Starting September 15, Cloudflare will recognize Googlebot and Bingbot as bots that both index for search and gather AI training data. Any setting that blocks AI training will block them too, including the old “Block AI bots” switch. You can choose to opt out before then. Already, one site owner has noticed Googlebot being blocked, though the cause isn’t confirmed. Activating the AI bot blocking feature at any time in the past will now also include Google. Be sure to review the setting before September 15. Read our full coverage: Report That Cloudflare AI Bot Blocking Prevents Googlebot From Indexing Sites Resoneo found that sites with no OpenAI content deal were served by OpenAI’s in-house search index in the same way as its licensed partners. The French consultancy read ChatGPT answers captured in July, using a field in ChatGPT’s traffic that named where each result came from. Pages served from OpenAI’s own index returned the same results whether or not the publisher had a deal. OpenAI removed that field in late July, so the same measurement can’t easily be repeated. A content deal isn’t what gets you into the index behind most free-account answers. What that index keeps of your page is the title and about 200 characters from the top, so any content your template displays before the first paragraph is effectively using up that space. Radu Stoian, Technical Director at Enhance Media, read the findings as being about infrastructure rather than models. “The hardest part of AI search may not be the LLM. It’s the search index (and the harness, but that’s a different discussion).” Read our full coverage: ChatGPT’s Search Index Serves Small Sites Too, Data Shows Google said its Ask Advisor agent will compare campaign performance in Google Analytics against anonymized averages from similar businesses. Google announced it as one of several AI updates across Ads and Analytics. Analytics already puts your property in a peer group for benchmarking, built from your industry category and signals from your site, and you can change it. Google hasn’t said whether Ask Advisor uses that group or builds its own, or when it reaches accounts. A benchmark is only valuable if it includes businesses similar to yours. Analytics lets you customize this group, offering greater control than Google’s Merchant Center reporting. Read our full coverage: Google Announces Campaign Benchmarking In Google Analytics Maryam Safari, Online Marketing Manager at PubliCare, switched a GA4 account to English to trigger the beta but still saw the older Analytics Intelligence panel, suggesting language alone isn’t the gating factor in a gradual rollout. Her caution concerns what lies beneath the agent. “An agent sitting on top of broken tracking just produces the wrong answers faster.” Google amended its DMCA complaint against SerpApi, now including terms from its content licensing agreements. Last month, a federal judge dismissed both of Google’s claims, saying Google had never shown that copyright owners authorized its anti-scraping system. Google has since refiled with contract terms meant to fill that gap. The claims related to results without copyrighted content have been permanently dismissed. This case is really about figuring out who can gather Google search results at scale. Rank trackers, SERP monitors, and AI visibility tools all depend on the search results, and if Google wins, the data they resell gets harder to defend. Nothing is final yet, because SerpApi’s response is the next filing. Read our full coverage: Google Amends SerpApi Suit With Content Licensing Terms Access to crawling, indexing, and data has all been adjusted at the same time. Cloudflare now controls which crawlers can reach your pages, and starting in September, its decisions for Google will change. OpenAI determines what parts of a page are kept in its index, and a content deal turns out not to have been the price of entry. A court is set to decide who can collect Google’s search results at scale, and Google has recently filed again to keep that question open. These are issues you previously settled through a robots.txt file or a contract, but now they’re open for reconsideration. The Analytics change is the only story here that arrives as a feature rather than a rule being rewritten. Read Full Bio SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal See short video versions of news stories on YouTube and TikTok. Matt G. Southern is the Senior News Writer at ... Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. Checking In: Where Are We With The Google Lawsuits? How SEO Experts Can Utilize ChatGPT For BigQuery With Examples Stop Focusing On Google, It's Time to Focus On Being Visible Join 75,000+ Digital Leaders. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. 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Source: Search Engine Journal
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