A federal judge told Google that blocking scrapers from public search results is not copyright circumvention, which matters to every rank tracker you pay for. Google slipped a new model into Search without saying where it runs, a study found 85 percent of ChatGPT categories still have no owner, and a hole in Google Business Profile lets strangers move a map pin its owner cannot even see. Here is what moved.
A Court Draws a Line Around the SERP Data You Buy
The single most consequential story of the day for anyone who pays for rank tracking, and it is narrower than the headlines suggest.
- Search Scraping Isn’t DMCA Circumvention, Judge Rules in SerpApi Case Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed Google’s DMCA case against SerpApi, holding that SearchGuard cannot control access to results carrying no copyrighted work. Read the fine print: the general claims died without leave to amend, but the Knowledge Panel claims survive and Google has 21 days. Google also did not lose on standing or on whether scraping happened.
Google Changes the Engine and Skips the Part You Need
One confirmed rollout with a missing detail, and one patent that is not a product no matter how much it reads like a roadmap.
- New Model Enters Google Search, and Google Won’t Say Where Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is now rolling out inside Search, framed around agentic search, while Google declined to say whether it sits behind AI Overviews or AI Mode. A model swap under a generative surface has historically preceded shifts in how it cites sources. Baseline your tracked queries now, or any change becomes unattributable.
- Google Patent Suggests Search Could Wait to Answer You Later A patent describes Search storing a query it cannot answer yet, monitoring, then delivering the result later on any device. Liz Reid described the same idea at I/O. Nothing is shipping, and the provenance is an April patent plus a May interview. But if it ever ships, publishing at the moment a fact becomes knowable beats having the better page beforehand.
Two Studies That Argue With the Industry Selling Them
One says the AI-visibility land grab is wide open, the other says buyers are not even using the word the sellers picked.
- In ChatGPT, the Biggest Categories Are the Most Up for Grabs Only 15.2 percent of 1,094 tracked ChatGPT categories have a clear brand owner, and the highest-demand half is less owned (11.3 percent) than the lower half (19 percent). That inverts the Google intuition. Owners also beat runners-up on organic traffic just 48.4 percent of the time, which is worse than chance.
- Buyers Still Say SEO. Agencies Are Pitching GEO Anyway 81 percent of marketers still say SEO internally and 42 percent have explicitly declined the new vocabulary. When hunting for a vendor, GEO captures 12 percent of searches against 70 percent for SEO plus AI search optimization. The biggest red flag buyers name is heavy buzzwords without explanation, at 36 percent.
Where the Damage Is Quiet: A Hidden Field and a Modelled Number
Two stories about things you cannot see: a profile field Google hides from its owner, and an estimate produced by the party that gets paid when you act on it.
- Service Area Businesses Can’t See Their Map Pin, But Strangers Can Edit It Service Area Businesses hide their address and pin by design, but the suggest-an-edit pathway still accepts third-party address and pin changes for those profiles. Proximity is among the strongest local signals, so this is close to the most damaging single edit available, and the owner has no dashboard view of the field. It lands the same week GBP data starts driving pay-per-lead ad delivery.
- Google Ads Puts a Price Tag on the Budget You Didn’t Raise The Missed Growth Opportunity estimate moves out of Labs into the Recommendations tab, scoring forgone clicks, conversions and revenue in dollars. The model belongs to the company that sells the extra clicks it recommends buying, and it sits in the same tab as auto-apply. Check auto-apply before this beta arrives.
The Audience Question Nobody Is Asking Correctly
A benchmark that looks like a story about Germany, and is actually a story about which metric you track.
- German News Sites Grow 7.8% While US Publishers Fall 17.1% German publishers gained while US publishers fell nearly 25 points behind, with independent German regionals up 30.9 percent. Germany did not escape AI Overviews: Sistrix measured position-one click-through there falling from 27 percent to 11 percent. The difference is visit frequency, 3.15 returns per visitor against 2.14, not pages per visit.
Today’s Quick Hits
- Bing Tests an Open Button That Hides Sitelinks From View Bing is testing an Open button labelled with the site domain that reveals sitelinks in a right-hand panel instead of listing them under the snippet. Sitelinks are an earned asset, so putting them behind a click shrinks a brand’s default footprint on its own results page.