Free Google Shopping listings vanish in Europe
Google confirmed it is pulling free Shopping listings out of European results and handing the space to price comparison sites. Hours later it started testing a Discover button that opens an AI summary instead of sending readers to the site that wrote the story.
Read the whole week in one goThe September traffic crash fully reversed
Why your traffic moved
Free product listings are disappearing in Europe
Free listings from Google Shopping (unpaid product results that show up in search) look to be going away across the European Economic Area. Glenn Gabe says Google confirmed it, and the space is going to price comparison services instead. He also points to a drop in the "Popular products" result box across EEA countries.
Free listings from Google Shopping look to be disappearing in the EEA. The space is going to price comparison services (CSS) instead.
This is bad 🇪🇺
Who this affects: Shops that sell to customers in Europe.
- Our take: if you sell into Europe, open Merchant Center and check whether clicks from free listings fell this week.
- Outside Europe, do nothing. This change is Europe only so far.
Your ranking tool may be showing stale numbers
Google appears to be getting better at blocking the bots that SEO tools use to read search results. Glenn Gabe looked at one site he knows dropped by nearly 100% and then fully recovered after the unconfirmed September 4 update: Ahrefs showed the recovery, Semrush showed it but lagged, Sistrix did not show it at all. Bing is separately asking some searchers to prove they are human before showing results.
ahrefs picks up the recovery. Sistrix does NOT pick up the recovery. Semrush shows recovery, but it lagged a bit.
Google may be more successful in blocking AI scrapers, search scrapers and third-party tracking tools
Who this affects: Anyone who checks their rankings or traffic with a third party tool.
- Our take: confirm any big drop in Google Search Console clicks before you change anything on your site.
- Our take: treat tool graphs as rough for now, since two tools disagreed on the same site.
Google is testing an AI summary inside its news feed
Google Discover (the feed of articles and videos on phones) is testing a "Dive deeper" button. Tapping it shows a short AI written topic overview with links to related stories, community reactions and original reporting, instead of taking the reader straight to the site that published it. Google says it is testing on videos first and will try several designs.
By tapping “Dive deeper,” you’ll see a short topic overview with prominent links to related stories, community reactions & original reporting.
If Discover is important for your business, a big heads up. I hope this never rolls out fully.
Who this affects: Anyone who gets visitors from the Google Discover feed.
- Do nothing yet. It is an experiment, starting with videos.
- Our take: write down your current weekly Discover clicks in Search Console so you can spot a change later.
The short list
Being known and trusted beats AI specific tricks
Cyrus Shepard asked over 130 search experts what makes Google's AI recommend a brand, and the answers put brand and trust above AI specific tactics like chunking or llms.txt files. Nearly all of them agreed that original data and specific facts beat generic information.
A links report in Google's dashboard is stuck
The Links report in Google Search Console, which shows which sites link to yours, has not updated in about a month, with data still stopping in early August. Joy Hawkins says she saw the same thing on her own account.
Wikipedia says human visits fell 8 percent in a year
A Wikimedia executive says human traffic to Wikipedia is down about 8% year over year while bot traffic is way up and crushing their servers, as Glenn Gabe highlighted. The organisation is building a paid real time feed for AI companies in response.