Google Ads is expanding its Search campaigns for Travel beta to two additional verticals: Things to Do and Events.

Google announced the update in a post on X and LinkedIn on July 8, 2026. Advertisers selling attractions, tours, and event tickets can now access the campaign type through an open beta, although availability remains limited.

The expansion gives eligible advertisers another campaign option to test alongside existing Search ands Performance Max campaigns.

What’s Changing With Search Campaigns For Travel

Search campaigns for Travel is a Google Ads campaign type designed for travel-related advertisers. It first appeared as Google expanded AI-powered campaign types across Travel and Shopping earlier this year.

With this update, the beta now extends beyond traditional travel categories to include Things to Do and Events. That means advertisers promoting attractions, guided tours, and event tickets may now be eligible to use the campaign type.

The announcement came as part of a five-post thread. At the time of writing, Google has not shared complete details around eligibility, supported features, or geographic availability.

Why This Matters

Attractions, tours, and event tickets share many of the same characteristics as hotel or airline bookings. Availability changes frequently, pricing can fluctuate, and purchase decisions are often tied to specific dates or locations. Those are all areas where Google’s newer campaign types have increasingly relied on automation to determine which searches are most likely to convert.

Until now, advertisers in these verticals have generally relied on standard Search campaigns or Performance Max. Expanding the Travel campaign type suggests Google sees these businesses as a natural fit for a more specialized campaign format.

The update also aligns with Google’s broader push toward AI-driven campaign management. Over the past year, the company has introduced AI Max across additional campaign types while continuing to consolidate older campaign formats.

While Google hasn’t explained why it selected these verticals, they fit naturally alongside other travel-related advertisers already using the campaign type.

What Advertisers Should Do

If you’re eligible for the beta, treat it as a controlled test rather than a replacement for your existing campaigns.

Review your current Search and Performance Max performance, set aside a limited testing budget, and compare booking or ticket sales against your existing campaign mix. Since Google has not released complete feature details, it’s also worth setting expectations internally that functionality may continue to evolve throughout the beta.

What’s Still Unknown

Google has not yet confirmed which bidding strategies, assets, reporting capabilities, or feed requirements will be available for the Things to Do and Events verticals. It also remains unclear how these campaigns will interact with existing AI Max for Travel functionality.

We’ll update this article as Google shares additional details about eligibility, features, and availability.

Featured image: Master1305 / Shutterstock

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-search-campaigns-travel-things-to-do-events-beta/581816/

Tom Critchlow, a longtime search marketer with deep experience, recently shared his opinions of where the SEO industry is today, saying that AI Search is changing business priorities in a way that exposes the weaknesses inherent in SEO today. This transformation means that search marketing professionals need to evaluate the services they offer in order to align better with what is useful for today’s modern search surfaces.

Brand Marketing: The Hidden Pillar Of SEO

Google’s algorithms have long relied on user behavior signals. Google’s founders said that PageRank could “be thought of as a model of user behavior,” showing that user behavior relative to content was important to Google at the very dawn of Google.

What people respond to most online are brands. People could be said to be hardwired to respond to products and service providers they are already familiar with. This phenomenon is called Familiarity Bias, a tendency to prefer things one is already familiar with. Making potential site visitors familiar with a brand is a powerful marketing activity, and that approach aligns perfectly with what we know about Google’s algorithms relative to Navboost and branded search.

SEO Fundamentals Are A Foundation

In an interview with Ross Hudgens, Critchlow observed that the foundations of SEO remain the same in AEO/GEO. Google consistently says that the fundamentals of SEO remain the same. Critchlow’s view of AI Search goes beyond that by showing that SEO is more like a foundation.

Critchlow explained:

“And it points to something very important, which is I think that GEO, AI Search, is much more like brand marketing than it is SEO, in my opinion.

Right now, there is an underpinning, obviously, of the technical foundations and crawling and indexing that is kind of the same, or the same kind of discipline, right?

That is equally important before and after.”

It is at this point that Critchlow develops the idea that what is built on top of that foundation goes beyond just classic SEO, with the implication being that failing to anticipate this change could pose a career risk.

People Who Drive Outcomes Are Not SEO

Critchlow continues his thoughts, building on the idea of SEO being a starting point and going further by saying that the outcomes in AI Search are not driven by SEO. He describes this as contrarian, which is someone who holds an opinion contrary to what is commonly accepted. But as you’ll see, Critchlow’s ideas are founded on a more practical view of what drives ranking in both classic and AI Search.

Here Critchlow considers the questions that all SEOs need to be asking as the industry transitions to a post-Search AI-driven environment:

“But a lot of what you do, back to that question of like, okay, you put in a prompt and you say, do you recommend brand A or brand B?

And it says your competitor.  What do you do about that, right?

And so like, and this, I’m a little contrarian, so forgive me, but like this was true in classical SEO and I think is increasingly true in the GEO world.

The people that drive SEO outcomes are not SEO professionals, by and large.

It’s painting with a broad brush and there are exceptions. …Both in the old SEO world and in the GEO world, the people that drive out the outcomes are the brand, product, PR and editorial teams, not the SEO teams.

And that was true in a classical SEO world. And I think it’s going to be increasingly true in a GEO world.

If I’m a CEO and I’m sat looking at my organization and I’m like, who’s going to do this GEO thing for me?

• Is it the SEO team?
• Or is it the brand team?
• Or is it the product team?

And your answer to that question is going to depend a little bit on what kind of business it is and what industry you’re in, but there’s a real risk for the SEO industry, which was also a risk in classical SEO days…

…Because again, SEO has done a great job of being like, we’ve got to produce great content. We’ve got to have a good brand. We’ve got to have like strong branded search. We’ve got to be mentioned in all these places. We’ve got to have like positive reputation.

But does an SEO team do any of those things? In most organizations, the answer is no.

In most organizations, those outcomes are owned by other teams. That’s a real, I think of that as a career risk.”

Takeaway

Critchlow’s observations raise many questions that SEOs need to consider today:

• Who drives SEO outcomes today in AI Search?
• Is there a risk for the SEO industry as GEO becomes more important?
• What does SEO emphasize organizations should do, and does SEO actually own those activities?
• Who owns the outcomes that matter in most organizations, and how should SEO fit into that?
• If SEO doesn’t drive the outcomes that matter, is there a career risk, or should SEO transform to encompass more?

Looked at another way, it could be we are in a liminal state where we are neither here nor there, where what was SEO is transforming and becoming something else.

Watch the interview here:

[embedded content]

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-search-is-exposing-seos-risk-of-losing-geo-outcomes/581805/

Google is clarifying its Smart Bidding update after advertisers questioned how budget-limited campaigns will behave beginning August 17.

The original announcement around Smart Bidding changes was June 22. The update essentially changes how Target CPA and Target ROAS campaigns behave when they’re limited by budget.

Today, many budget-limited campaigns outperform their bidding targets. Smart Bidding often enters only the auctions most likely to convert efficiently, producing stronger-than-expected CPA or ROAS.

Google says that wasn’t the intended behavior.

Instead, Smart Bidding will optimize more closely toward the Target CPA or Target ROAS advertisers actually set. Campaigns that currently outperform those targets may move closer to them after the update.

The announcement immediately raised questions across the PPC industry. Advertisers wanted to know why Google would reduce efficiency in campaigns that were already exceeding expectations.

Google’s follow-up comments answer many of those questions. They also explain why the company believes the change will make campaign scaling more predictable.

What’s Changing On August 17?

The update affects campaigns using Target CPA or Target ROAS that are limited by budget.

Historically, those campaigns often outperformed their bidding targets. A campaign with a $50 Target CPA, for example, might consistently generate conversions at $35.

Beginning August 17, Google will optimize those campaigns more closely toward the Target CPA or Target ROAS advertisers set. The company says this should create more predictable performance when advertisers adjust campaign budgets.

Google also clarified several points after announcing the update:

• Budgets will not automatically increase
• Google won’t automatically change Target CPA or Target ROAS settings
• Advertisers who want to maintain current performance may need to lower their bidding targets before the rollout
• Google is rolling out account notifications and a Bid Target Adjustment Tool to identify affected campaigns

Those clarifications addressed some of the initial confusion. They also sparked a broader discussion about how the update could affect campaign performance in practice.

The Biggest Concern: Is Google Becoming Less Efficient?

One question surfaced repeatedly as advertisers discussed the update: Is Google making Smart Bidding less efficient?

Kirk Williams summed up that concern in a LinkedIn post.

He wrote:

…How and why will the system stop trying to be as efficient as possible… Does that mean smart bidding when limited by budget will no longer be trying to find better auctions?… So does that mean they’re building the system to literally choose to be dumber when limited by budget?

Williams questioned why Google would move campaigns closer to their stated targets if Smart Bidding could already deliver stronger performance.

Mike Ryan offered one of the most detailed explanations in the comments.

Ryan argued that Google isn’t making Smart Bidding less intelligent. Instead, he believes the system has become too conservative in budget-limited campaigns.

According to Ryan, Smart Bidding has favored exploitation over exploration. Rather than entering more auctions that still satisfy an advertiser’s target, the system has focused on the safest opportunities. That produced stronger-than-expected efficiency. It also meant campaigns didn’t consistently optimize toward the Target CPA or Target ROAS advertisers actually set.

Ryan believes the updated system will follow those bidding targets more closely. That may reduce the overperformance many advertisers have seen in budget-limited campaigns, but it also aligns with Google’s stated goal of making bidding targets behave more predictably.

Predictable Scaling vs. Peak Efficiency

Aaron Levy focused on a different part of the update: campaign scaling.

He described a campaign with an $8 CPA and a $12 Target CPA. If an advertiser doubled the budget today, the CPA might unexpectedly climb to $16 instead of remaining near the target.

Levy believes the update should make that behavior more predictable. Rather than introducing large swings in efficiency, Smart Bidding should continue optimizing toward the advertiser’s Target CPA as budgets change.

Kirk Williams questioned whether that tradeoff benefits advertisers. If Smart Bidding can already outperform a target, he argued, some advertisers may prefer that extra efficiency over more predictable budget increases.

Google has consistently framed the update around predictability. They say campaigns should optimize toward the targets advertisers actually set, making budget changes easier to manage and forecast.

Whether advertisers agree with that tradeoff will likely depend on how their campaigns perform after the rollout.

Google Clarifies Several Misconceptions

Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin responded directly to several concerns advertisers raised after the announcement.

One of the biggest misconceptions was that Google was encouraging advertisers to simply spend more money.

Responding to Barry Schwartz, Marvin wrote:

To be clear, this won’t result in campaign spend changes… Our guidance for those with budget-constrained campaigns currently over-performing on their target is to ensure the targets are in line with your goals.

She also emphasized that advertisers will only spend more if they choose to raise their campaign budgets. The update itself does not change campaign budgets or automatically adjust bidding targets.

Jack Carr raised a similar concern, arguing that budget constraints have historically acted as an efficiency lever and that Google’s recommendation effectively removes that advantage.

Marvin responded with a longer explanation:

Our advice is not to ‘let the system spend more money’… this change won’t result in spend changes on a campaign already budget constrained.

She also explained why Google is making the change.

Performance has often fluctuated unexpectedly… especially with budget changes. That’s not been a great experience for advertisers & made it challenging to scale campaigns with confidence.

According to Google, the backend update will make Smart Bidding optimize more consistently toward the Target CPA or Target ROAS advertisers actually set, even when campaigns are limited by budget.

Kristen Kelleher questioned whether the change would simply push campaigns into lower-quality traffic.

Marvin pushed back on that assumption as well.

The system sets bids to find as many conversions as possible at the ROAS/CPA target you set… With this update, advertisers can also expect this same behavior in budget-constrained campaigns with targets.

She added that advertisers who want to maintain today’s stronger-than-target performance should consider updating their Target CPA or Target ROAS before the rollout.

Google’s position has remained consistent throughout the discussion. The company says the update changes how closely Smart Bidding follows bidding targets. It doesn’t change campaign budgets or automatically modify campaign settings.

What This Means For Advertisers

Not every advertiser will need to make changes before August 17.

Campaigns already hitting their intended Target CPA or Target ROAS may continue operating much as they do today. The biggest impact will likely fall on budget-limited campaigns that have consistently outperformed their bidding targets.

For example, if a campaign has averaged a $20 CPA against a $35 Target CPA, Google says advertisers should consider whether $20 is now the more appropriate target. Leaving the original target unchanged could allow performance to move closer to $35 after the update.

Before the rollout, review any budget-limited campaigns that consistently outperform their Target CPA or Target ROAS. Compare current performance against your configured targets and decide whether those targets still reflect your business goals.

The update also changes how advertisers should think about bidding controls. Many advertisers have treated limited budgets as an efficiency lever because campaigns often outperformed their targets. Google has made it clear that budgets and bidding targets serve different purposes. Budgets control spend. Target CPA and Target ROAS control efficiency.

If Google’s explanation plays out as expected, advertisers who keep bidding targets aligned with actual performance should see fewer surprises when adjusting campaign budgets after August 17.

What Happens Next

Google has explained how Smart Bidding should behave after August 17. The remaining question is how closely those expectations match real-world campaign performance.

Advertisers with budget-limited Target CPA or Target ROAS campaigns will likely be watching those accounts closely after the rollout. Campaigns that have consistently outperformed their bidding targets may provide the clearest indication of how much the update changes day-to-day performance.

Google has also encouraged advertisers to review bidding targets before the rollout if current performance already aligns with their business goals. As more accounts transition to the updated bidding behavior, advertisers should have a better understanding of how the change affects campaign efficiency and budget management in practice.

Featured image: Roman Samborskyi / Shutterstock

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-clarifies-smart-bidding-update-after-advertiser-concerns/581804/

OpenAI has begun rolling out GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models that power ChatGPT Voice. During a conversation, GPT-Live can hand a question to its latest frontier model, such as GPT-5.5, for heavier reasoning or a web search.

What Launched

GPT-Live-1 becomes the default model powering ChatGPT Voice for Go, Plus, and Pro users, and GPT-Live-1 mini becomes the default for Free users.

OpenAI describes the models as full-duplex, meaning they can take in audio and produce speech at the same time, interrupt less, and wait when a user pauses.

Search and Visual Answers Move Into the Conversation

When a spoken question needs deeper reasoning or current information, GPT-Live can hand it to a frontier model, GPT-5.5 at launch, and bring the answer back into the conversation.

ChatGPT Voice can also show visual cards for topics like weather, stocks, and sports, and OpenAI said Voice continues to support search, memory, images, and file uploads. Users can set a reasoning level, with Instant for fast replies and Medium or High for more involved questions. OpenAI said Instant replies and the mini model run on GPT-5.5 Instant, while Medium and High use GPT-5.5 Thinking.

How OpenAI Measured It

In OpenAI’s own head-to-head evaluations, GPT-Live-1 and GPT-Live-1 mini were preferred over its Advanced Voice Mode in conversations lasting five to ten minutes. OpenAI said the evaluations looked at overall preference, turn-taking, interruptions, conversational flow, and how natural the interactions felt. The company said more than 150 million people talk to ChatGPT each week using features like Voice and Dictation.

What It Doesn’t Do Yet

At launch, GPT-Live does not support voice with video or screen sharing in ChatGPT. OpenAI said it is working to add those capabilities, and that its earlier Standard and Advanced Voice Modes stay available where video and screen sharing are supported.

Why This Matters

Now, when you ask a question aloud, you might see an answer directly in the voice flow, sometimes accompanied by a visual card on the screen. This provides ChatGPT with another way to present an answer without visiting a source site. Since the reasoning and search process happens behind the scenes on GPT-5.5, what shows up there depends on how the model retrieves information and cites its sources.

Looking Ahead

OpenAI said the rollout is beginning globally, and that video and screen sharing are not in this release but are being worked on.

OpenAI’s post doesn’t say how GPT-Live handles citations when it answers a spoken question from a GPT-5.5 web search. ChatGPT’s text answers show source links next to the response. Whether a spoken answer names its sources, shows them on screen, or leaves them out is the detail to watch. That’s what decides whether a search inside a voice conversation can still send a reader to your site.

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Featured Image: OpenAI

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/openai-gpt-live-brings-search-into-chatgpt-voice/581773/

I had a conversation with an old friend from my WebmasterWorld Forum days about PR marketing for AI search. The friend had contacted me to hear my thoughts about it. The discussion seemed useful, so I rewrote it into an article.

Digital PR Outreach Because Links Matter Less

The friend I had this conversation with is Alistair White (LinkedIn profile), a search marketing professional based in Australia who has decades of experience.

White asked me:

“I was wondering if you have any thoughts on performance based digital?”

My response was, yes, I have a load of thoughts on the topic. The following is one of them. In the future, I will do a follow-up on more ideas.

I used to do PR outreach slash brand marketing for a B2B starting around 2004. But I scaled it up for another company around 2013 because I saw the writing on the wall that links were already on the decline. So my approach grew out of link building, but my intuition was that links did not matter. It was about putting the company in front of ten thousand, twenty thousand, sixty thousand potential customers and doing it in a way that makes it clear that this company solves the problem that these professionals have.

Strategy: Outreach Directly To Potential Customers

What I did was narrowly focus on a specific demographic that strictly lined up with their target customer. So, one typical customer was the head of IT and IT workers at a large corporation. Another demographic was the department manager. Two different demographics that both needed the same solution. So the campaign was split into two parts, one for each demographic.

It was essentially a PR campaign that was focused on identifying associations and organizations. Virtually every industry has an association of professionals. So, what I did was first target the organizations at the national level. The reason is that once you do a project with the national level, getting similar projects done at the state level was ten times easier. You just show them the national level article that featured the company, and the state-level organizations would almost always say yes.

Once you got that state-level project done, getting to yes with the individual chapters at the regional or county level became ten times easier. Each time I got a project done, it put the client in front of thousands of potential customers. Eventually, everyone knew who my client was and getting projects done became easier.

What were these projects?

• Newsletters
• Organization magazines
• Website articles
• Interviews

Every organization was different. So I would click around and see what they were up to and create the pitch to fit with what they were publishing.

Attribution Is Not Always Possible

This was not about building links, it was about building customers, making money.

And that’s not something that any SEO thirteen years ago would ever consider doing because there isn’t a clear way to track that the client spent X this month and earned Z the next month because of that activity. An SEO would never consider it because there’s no way to directly track the ROI.

You can track some of it with the “how did you hear about us” question. But how will you know if a customer heard of the company because a colleague at a conference who saw the client’s propaganda told them about it?

Not everything can be tracked. That’s why everyone else in SEO did not pursue these opportunities because they were like, where is the link, where is the attribution? Well, now the secret’s out. It’s infinitely adaptable, too.

Both companies that I did this for experienced year-over-year steady growth, and both were eventually acquired and made a lot of money for the founders. And how did I know it worked? Because this is how I promoted some of my websites, by building top-of-mind awareness, the kind that makes people type a domain name into the search box.

Google has algorithms that track things like branded navigation. You can’t build that kind of user behavior with links. You cannot build branded navigation with SEO. And yet, these are things that have been a part of Google’s algorithms since 2004 with the Navboost algorithm and in 2012 with Google’s branded navigation.

Brand Marketing And PR… And SEO?

SEOs have historically been about five to ten years behind the actual algorithm developments at Google. And I get it that ideas that a five year old can understand, like “adding EEAT” to articles, that’s easy to understand. Everyone else is doing it. But you know, everyone who did that knows now it was a grand waste of time.

And it’s not that I am a contrarian. It’s just that most of the time SEOs chase these ephemeral tactics with an SEO hammer, going bang, bang, bang. But it’s becoming clearer now that SEO for AI search is not the nail that building links used to be.

Like, how are you going to encourage people to do a branded search on Google? How are you going to get people to know about your brand in the first place? How are you going to target the office manager that makes the decisions at a company? Well, I shared an idea about that, right?

Those are the kinds of things that are going to trigger a positive ranking factor at Google, and yet none of those are a part of the SEO toolbox.

Back in 2015 I raised the idea that content is king misses the point of being successful online.

I wrote:

“If content is king, how come the top Internet businesses sites are not in the content business? What about Netflix? You think that’s content you are paying a monthly subscription for? Or is it convenience?

Netflix is not in the content business. They are in the convenience business. Anyone can provide content but nobody delivers convenience the way Netflix does. That’s because their focus is and always has been the user experience. Convenience, the user experience, is why customers pay Netflix. If Netflix had followed the Content is King strategy it would have been Blockbuster.

…Don’t focus on cranking out content. Focus on understanding what the user wants and your content strategy follows.

I cannot overstate the importance of understanding that the user experience underlies many of Google’s important decisions related to its algorithm.”

These are not new ideas that I’m presenting, but they were ahead of their time, maybe still are. Yet, they are as relevant today as they were in 2015 or 2004. Some are saying they are more relevant today because of AI Search.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Mer_Studio

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/an-easy-digital-pr-strategy-for-ai-seo/581710/

If you’ve ever looked at a portrait taken with your camera’s built-in flash or a speedlight mounted directly on the hot shoe and thought it looked harsh, flat, or just plain uninspiring, you’re not imagining it.

The biggest problem isn’t the flash itself. It’s where the light is coming from.

When your flash is mounted directly above the camera, the light travels in exactly the same direction as your lens. That removes shadows, flattens facial features, creates distracting reflections, and often leaves your subject looking as though they were photographed under a security light.

Professional photographers have known for years that moving the light away from the camera is one of the quickest ways to dramatically improve an image.

Why Off-Camera Flash Looks Better 

The human eye is used to seeing light come from the side, above, through windows, or from the sun. Directional light creates depth, texture, and dimension.

By moving your flash even a short distance away from the camera, you immediately begin creating:

• More natural-looking shadows
• Better separation from the background
• Improved facial modeling
• More interesting catchlights in the eyes
• A softer, more three-dimensional look

It’s one of the simplest changes you can make that produces a professional-looking result.

The Challenge

Traditional off-camera flash isn’t always convenient. You often need a light stand, wireless triggers, extra bags, and more time to set everything up. That’s fine in a controlled studio, but much less practical when photographing events, weddings, travel, or environmental portraits.

Many photographers simply leave the flash on the camera because it’s quicker. Unfortunately, that usually means accepting lower-quality light.

Enter the Bracket & Bounce System

The Platypod Bracket & Bounce system was designed to bridge that gap.

Instead of carrying a full lighting kit, it allows photographers to move their flash off-axis while keeping everything attached to the camera. The result is dramatically improved lighting without dramatically increasing the size of your setup.

It’s compact, lightweight, and quick to deploy, making it ideal for photographers who need to work fast without sacrificing image quality.

Whether you’re photographing people indoors, creating environmental portraits, or shooting events, getting the flash away from the lens can completely transform the look of your images.

See the Difference for Yourself

Scott Kelby has spent decades teaching photographers around the world and has seen just about every lighting setup imaginable.

In his video on PlatypodTV, he explains why he prefers the Bracket & Bounce system, demonstrates the difference between traditional on-camera flash and off-camera lighting, and shows just how much of an impact a small change in light position can make.

If you’ve ever wondered why your flash photos don’t quite have that professional look, this video does an excellent job of showing exactly why.

[embedded content]

https://layersmagazine.com/platypod-bracket-and-bounce-field-test.html

Google is introducing a new property type in Search Console called platform properties, which lets you monitor how social media and video posts perform in Google Search and Discover. This feature supports platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube and is available even to creators who don’t have their own websites.

Moshe Samet, Product Manager Lead for Search Console, announced the feature in a Search Central blog post. Once an account is connected, a platform property shows which search terms lead people to your posts and how your audience interacts with that content.

The Reports You Get

Each platform property includes the reporting you would expect from a Search Console property, tailored to social and video content.

The Performance report displays total clicks, impressions, and other related metrics, allowing filtering and sorting to identify which posts and queries generate the most traffic. You can also export the data for further analysis in other tools.

The Insights report provides an overview of recent traffic patterns, your most successful posts, and the ways users find your account on Google.

Achievements monitor progress toward milestones, such as surpassing a new total click threshold from Search within a 28-day period.

How To Add a Platform Property

Setting one up involves following Search Console’s verification process: open Search Console, navigate to the verification page or property selector, select Add property, then choose Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube and follow the on-screen instructions to authorize the connection.

How This Differs From Search Profiles

Platform properties are distinct from Search profiles, which Google introduced in June as public profile pages for qualified creators and publishers. A Search profile is a shareable page that consolidates a creator’s content for followers. In contrast, a platform property focuses on analytics, showing how those posts perform in Search rather than directly exposing them to an audience. The current feature builds on a December 2025 experiment that initially integrated social-channel data into Search Console.

Why This Matters

You can now track performance across social media and video platforms, alongside your website’s Search performance. This feature allows creators who’ve never had a verified site to see how their posts gain visibility in Search.

Looking Ahead

Platform properties will be gradually available over the next few weeks, so the option might not be visible in your account immediately. Google is initially launching with four supported platforms and directs creators to its help documentation for setup guidance, along with providing a feedback link in Search Console and the Search Central Community.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-search-console-adds-social-video-platform-properties/581634/

Google’s John Mueller responded to a post on Bluesky that lamented all the effort being wasted on AI agent accessibility instead of focusing on the more productive activity of making sites accessible for humans.

Tactical SEO

One of the consistent aspects of the history of SEO is that practitioners tend to follow tactical trends if it’s apparent that everyone else is doing it. I guess it’s human nature.

Back in the early days there was a guy who built a directory and purchased enough high PageRank links to the home page to get it to about a PageRank of 7 (on a scale of 1-10). SEOs were practically pushing each other out of the way to hand this guy their money. He sold thousands of links from his directory, and nobody thought to check if any of the links actually made a ranking difference. It was easy to check, but nobody did.

The latest tactic is LLMs.txt and creating markdown pages for AI agent consumption. Cloudflare announced in February that their infrastructure can automatically create markdown files, largely as a way for developers to save LLM token consumption. Their announcement stated that OAI-SearchBot, OpenAI’s search crawler, was consuming markdown pages.

OpenAI’s official documentation explicitly positions its OAI-SearchBot as crawling websites and does not mention or recommend markdown files.

“OAI-SearchBot is for search. OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features. Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links. To help ensure your site appears in search results, we recommend allowing OAI-SearchBot in your site’s robots.txt file and allowing requests from our published IP ranges below.”

Yes, it can crawl markdown if it’s pointed to it but that’s not what it’s out there for.

Stephanie Walter posted:

“Sad truth: we are making the web accessible for AIs, not for people.
Some sites now offer a text version for LLMs, but still skip real accessibility needs like proper heading structure, landmarks that screen reader users need.”

Google’s John Mueller responded:

“A properly made website works well for AI agents … and search engines, and LLMs, and above all, for actual people.

If you’re trying to fix accessibility issues by making a separate “agent-friendly” version, you are just building technical debt. You’ll have to redo it multiple times. Just fix it.”

AI Agents Crawl HTML

It’s a relatively trivial thing to crawl HTML. Search engines have been doing it for over thirty years. Making sites accessible for everyone makes sense, especially since it’s user behavior signals that have always driven search engine rankings. From links to users searching with a brand name, Google has consistently used user signals for ranking purposes.

So, from the perspective of SEO, it makes a load of sense to make websites accessible for everyone.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/DETHAL

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-on-using-markdown-for-ai-seo/581606/

Lug 06, 2026 Giancarlo Calzetta Approfondimenti, In evidenza, News, RSS, Scenario, Scenario, Tecnologia, Tecnologia 0

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L’intelligenza artificiale sta entrando nelle aziende con una velocità che non ha precedenti, ma la sua diffusione sta facendo emergere una realtà che molti responsabili della sicurezza stanno iniziando a sperimentare direttamente: i tradizionali strumenti di difesa non sono stati progettati per proteggere sistemi che ragionano attraverso il linguaggio naturale. Firewall, Web Application Firewall e sistemi di protezione delle reti continuano a svolgere il loro ruolo, ma davanti a chatbot, agenti AI e Large Language Model si apre una superficie di attacco completamente nuova.

Secondo Gartner, entro quest’anno l’80% delle organizzazioni utilizzerà soluzioni basate sull’intelligenza artificiale, una crescita che supera in velocità perfino quella vissuta in passato da cloud computing, dispositivi mobili e Internet. Una diffusione tanto rapida quanto impegnativa dal punto di vista della cybersecurity.

Quando la conversazione diventa la superficie di attacco

L’evoluzione dell’AI segue percorsi differenti. Alcune aziende si limitano all’utilizzo di strumenti come ChatGPT, Copilot o Gemini per aumentare la produttività individuale, mentre altre stanno sviluppando chatbot interni, assistenti per il customer care oppure sistemi agentici capaci di eseguire attività autonome.

Ma in queste implementazioni più avanzate, la sicurezza cambia completamente natura. Il problema non riguarda più esclusivamente il codice o il traffico di rete, ma il modo in cui il modello interpreta, elabora e restituisce informazioni attraverso il linguaggio naturale. Una conversazione non può essere filtrata come un pacchetto IP. È questo il motivo per cui molti controlli tradizionali risultano inefficaci contro gli attacchi rivolti ai sistemi di AI.

Infatti, secondo i dati riportati da F5, il 75% dei CISO ha già registrato incidenti di sicurezza legati all’intelligenza artificiale, mentre il 91% dichiara di aver individuato tentativi di attacco contro la propria infrastruttura AI. Ancora più significativo è il fatto che il 94% considera ormai prioritario sottoporre le applicazioni AI a test di sicurezza specifici.

Dagli errori logici ai nuovi attacchi cognitivi

Le vulnerabilità che colpiscono le piattaforme di AI non sono necessariamente nuove dal punto di vista tecnico, ma assumono caratteristiche completamente differenti quando vengono inserite in sistemi basati su Large Language Model. Un errore nell’isolamento dei tenant, ad esempio, può trasformarsi nella restituzione di informazioni appartenenti ad altre organizzazioni direttamente all’interno di una conversazione naturale, rendendo molto difficile individuare il problema. Anche i classici attacchi di prompt injection possono avere conseguenze particolarmente gravi quando il modello dispone dell’autorizzazione a utilizzare strumenti esterni o ad interagire con sistemi aziendali. Se il controllo delle autorizzazioni viene affidato al modello anziché all’infrastruttura applicativa, il rischio aumenta sensibilmente.

Accanto a questi scenari stanno emergendo nuove categorie di minacce, che comprendono tecniche di jailbreak sempre più sofisticate, data poisoning durante l’addestramento e meccanismi di token compression, nei quali istruzioni malevole vengono nascoste in forme comprensibili al modello ma praticamente invisibili agli operatori umani.

Perché i test tradizionali non bastano più

Uno degli aspetti più complessi dell’AI riguarda il fatto che non ci si trova più davanti a software deterministico. Ogni conversazione può produrre risultati differenti in base al contesto, alla memoria dell’agente, ai documenti recuperati tramite retrieval oppure agli strumenti che il modello può utilizzare. Questo rende estremamente difficile applicare i normali processi di vulnerability assessment. Mentre in passato era sufficiente verificare il comportamento di un’applicazione seguendo scenari relativamente prevedibili, oggi le possibili combinazioni diventano praticamente infinite. Testarle manualmente è semplicemente irrealistico, soprattutto quando un’organizzazione gestisce decine o centinaia di chatbot o agenti AI.

Per questo diventa indispensabile strutturare un sistema di AI Red Teaming, ovvero la simulazione sistematica di attacchi contro sistemi basati sull’intelligenza artificiale per verificarne il comportamento in condizioni ostili. L’obiettivo non è soltanto individuare vulnerabilità tecniche, ma comprendere come il sistema reagisce a prompt malevoli, tentativi di manipolazione, richieste ambigue o scenari progettati per aggirare i controlli di sicurezza. Un approccio che deve produrre risultati riproducibili, permettendo agli sviluppatori di identificare esattamente quali conversazioni hanno generato il comportamento indesiderato e quali condizioni lo hanno reso possibile.

Normative e compliance spingono verso test continui

L’importanza del red teaming non nasce esclusivamente da esigenze tecnologichema anche dal quadro normativo che sta evolvendo rapidamente. L’AI Act europeo introduce esplicitamente attività di adversarial testing per determinate categorie di sistemi AI, mentre negli Stati Uniti organizzazioni come NIST e CISA stanno promuovendo procedure di verifica sempre più strutturate, soprattutto nei contesti considerati mission critical. La sicurezza dell’intelligenza artificiale diventa quindi non soltanto una misura di protezione, ma anche un requisito di conformità e governance.

Ma c’è un risvolto per alcuni versi “inatteso”. Storicamente, possiamo tutti ricordare l’avversione delle proprietà nei confronti della cybersecurity, troppo spesso vista come una spesa e addirittura un fastidio che tendeva a rallentare il business. Nel caso dell’intelligenza artificiale potrebbe invece verificarsi il contrario. Disporre di test automatizzati, evidenze documentate e verifiche continue consente infatti di portare più rapidamente in produzione nuovi casi d’uso, offrendo ai team di compliance e agli auditor elementi concreti per valutare il rischio.

L’AI red teaming si sta quindi trasformando da semplice attività specialistica a componente fondamentale della sicurezza delle applicazioni AI, permettendo alle aziende di adottare chatbot, agenti e workflow intelligenti con un livello di fiducia molto superiore rispetto agli approcci tradizionali. Purtroppo, non mancano le sfide. Molte delle competenze necessarie per fare AI Red Teaming sono ancora rare, ma si spera che verranno formate in tempi ragionevolmente brevi dal settore accademico e, soprattutto, dalle stesse aziende.

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• adversarial testing, agentic AI, AI Act, AI governance, AI Red Teaming, attacchi cognitivi, chatbot sicurezza, CISO, cybersecurity, F5, GenAI, LLM security, prompt injection, sicurezza AI

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https://www.securityinfo.it/2026/07/06/ai-il-nuovo-fronte-della-sicurezza-il-red-teaming-diventa-indispensabile/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ai-il-nuovo-fronte-della-sicurezza-il-red-teaming-diventa-indispensabile

SecurityWeek’s cybersecurity news weekly roundup offers a concise overview of important developments that may not receive full standalone coverage but remain relevant to the broader threat landscape.

This curated summary highlights key stories across vulnerability disclosures, emerging attack methods, policy updates, industry reports, and other noteworthy events to help readers maintain a well-rounded awareness of the evolving cybersecurity environment.

Here are this week’s highlights:

Anonymous-linked hacker Aubrey Cottle jailed over Texas GOP cyberattack

Aubrey Cottle, a Canadian hacker associated with the hacktivist group Anonymous, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for his involvement in a cyberattack on the Texas Republican Party’s website in September 2021. Cottle, 39, of Oshawa, Ontario, pleaded guilty to defacing the website, exfiltrating data from a Texas GOP server, and publishing the data online.

14 million impacted by KDDI data breach

Japanese telecoms provider KDDI has disclosed (PDF) a data breach likely impacting the email addresses and passwords of 14,22 million people. The incident affected five ISP operators, including BIGLOBE, Chubu Telecommunications C., JCOM Co., NIFTY Corporation, and STNet. 

Push Security targeted in poisoned tenant attack

Three years after detailing the poisoned tenant attack, Push Security was targeted using the technique via OpenAI’s organization invitation feature. Multiple employees received an OpenAI invitation to join Push Security Inc. After they would join the tenant, the attacker could spy on their activities or target them with further social engineering. 

Rust-based PamStealer targeting macOS

Jamf has detailed PamStealer, an information stealer targeting macOS that validates the harvested credentials via Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) before using them. The malware is distributed as a compiled AppleScript file impersonating the open source clipboard manager Maccy.

Russian hackers behind the 2025 Jaguar Land Rover hack

The cyberattack that severely disrupted Jaguar Land Rover’s operations in September 2025 was mounted by Russian hackers, The New York Times says. Microsoft reportedly notified the car manufacturer about the hacking group, with Mandiant, Palo Alto Networks, and US and UK law enforcement agencies also involved in the investigation. 

Pegasus spyware targeted a European Parliament member investigating it

Former member of the European Parliament Stelios Kouloglou was hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware while he was investigating Pegasus abuse cases, as part of the PEGA committee, Citizen Lab discovered. The targeting has not been attributed to a specific government, and there is no evidence that the Greek Government was involved. 

Researcher drops dozens of zero-days in open source projects

A researcher known as Bikini has published proof-of-concept (PoC) code targeting dozens of zero-day vulnerabilities in multiple open source projects, including FFmpeg, Gogs, Gitea, Ghidra, 7-Zip, OpenVPN, and VLC. Nine of the security defects have been assigned a CVE identifier. The issues, the researcher says, were surfaced via LLM fuzzing. 

Pro-Russia influence operations are shifting

Four years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, pro-Russia influence operations are shifting from their single focus on Ukraine to pre-war objectives, Google says. Covert pro-Russia influence operations are targeting the US, European Union members, NATO, Russia’s neighbors, the Middle East and Africa, and internal entities. They focus on global events, elections, the war in Ukraine, and emerging geopolitical developments and events, and are increasingly relying on generative AI. 

Venezuelans sentenced in the US over ATM jackpotting

Two illegal aliens from Venezuela, Carlos Javier Padron, 36, and Arnoldo Cabrera Torrealba, 37, have been sentenced to 78 months in prison in the US for their involvement in ATM jackpotting activities. As part of a sophisticated criminal group, they built and deployed a variant of the Ploutus malware on ATMs across the US and used it to withdraw money without authorization. They were also ordered to jointly pay $1.5 million in restitution. 96 other defendants have been charged over their roles in the operation. 

Cisco and Synology patches

Cisco has released fixes for seven ClamAV vulnerabilities impacting Secure Endpoint Connector for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and Secure Endpoint Private Cloud, and for one flaw in Catalyst Center. Synology resolved three security defects in MailPlus Server, including two critical bugs that could allow attackers to read or write arbitrary files and cause DoS conditions.

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https://www.securityweek.com/in-other-news-canadian-hacker-jailed-open-source-zero-days-two-sentenced-for-atm-jackpotting/