Today’s stories move off the results page and into contracts and courtrooms: a backlink attack becomes a false-advertising claim, a scraping case turns on someone else’s licensing deal, and a publisher dispute becomes a regulatory filing. Meanwhile a Merchant Center metric quietly changes definition underneath anyone who built a report on the old one.
The Fight Moves To The Docket: A Backlink Campaign, A Licensing Contract
A federal judge let a false-advertising claim over an alleged toxic backlink campaign proceed, and Google’s amended complaint against a scraper now leans on its own content-licensing contracts. Neither case is decided; both show where these disputes are actually being argued now.
- Judge Lets Toxic Backlink Suit Proceed, Testing Life After Disavow A federal judge declined to dismiss Montway’s suit alleging rival Nexus AT LLC built more than 2,350 backlinks between April and October 2025, using anchor text like “buy steroids online,” “illegal betting sites” and “unlicensed firearms,” to damage its rankings. Surviving a motion to dismiss is not a ruling on the merits: at this stage the court assumes the allegations true only to test whether they state a legal claim, and Search Engine Land’s report includes no response from Nexus or its chief executive.
- Google Adds Licensing-Deal Terms to Amended SerpApi Complaint Google’s amended complaint against SerpApi, filed August 10 on the deadline a judge set after dismissing its original DMCA claims, cites its Reddit and image-licensing contracts to argue copyright owners already authorized SearchGuard, its anti-scraping access control. An amended complaint is Google’s argument, not a court finding, and a DMCA specialist told Ars Technica the approach forces Google to disclose how much copyrighted material sits inside its Knowledge Panels.
Who Gets Cited: A Rival’s Listicle, A Platform Nobody Owns
Two looks at where AI-generated answers actually pull their sourcing from, and how rarely it is the business’s own page.
- Local AI Overviews Cite a Rival’s Listicle, Not the Business Local SEO practitioner Joy Hawkins documented Google’s local pack AI Overviews citing one lawyer’s self-promotional listicle as the primary source for descriptions of multiple competing law firms, linking to that page instead of the firms’ own sites. Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reproduced the citation across several browsers, though he describes the underlying AI Overview as appearing only intermittently.
- In ChatGPT’s SaaS Answers, Reddit and Wikipedia Outrank Publishers An analysis of roughly 35,000 ChatGPT citations across the SaaS buyer journey found user-generated platforms hold 17.1 percent of third-party citation share versus 4.0 percent for publishers, once vendor domains are stripped out. Wikipedia, Reddit and LinkedIn make up 99 percent of that UGC share, and the scope is ChatGPT’s SaaS buyer-journey answers specifically, not AI search overall.
The Number Moves, Not The Demand: A Reporting Reset, A Vendor’s Own Yardstick
One shift comes from Google redefining a metric outright. The other comes from a vendor measuring the exact problem it sells the fix for.
- Merchant Center’s Aug. 24 Organic Drop Is a Metric Change, Not a Loss Starting August 24, Google will move YouTube affiliate clicks out of Merchant Center’s “Organic” traffic value and restate six weeks of history back to July 1 to match. Google’s own announcement warns of a possible “one-time significant drop” in the organic figure; no merchant loses a visit, the metric describing it is being redefined, and teams should annotate the date now.
- Lunio: Retail AI Max Search Ads Carry 72% More Invalid Traffic Lunio, which sells invalid-traffic detection and filtering tools, analyzed more than 414 million clicks and reports retail search campaigns running Google’s AI Max carried 72 percent more invalid traffic than standard search over the same window. Lunio has a commercial interest in that finding, since a bigger invalid-traffic problem is a bigger market for what it sells, and every figure rests on its own detection methodology rather than an independent replication.
Today’s Quick Hits
- Google Rebuts French Publishers’ AI Overviews Complaint Google answered the French publishers’ antitrust complaint covered here yesterday, telling MLex it had already outlined compensation terms before AI Overviews reached France and that the filing caught it off guard. Publishers maintain the feature launched using their journalism without consent.
- OpenAI Tests AI-Style Heading Above ChatGPT Ads OpenAI is testing a short, machine-sounding heading directly above ad results in ChatGPT answers, spotted by practitioner Brodie Clark and not yet officially confirmed by OpenAI.
- Google Details Local Targeting Inside Performance Max A new Google Ads help document describes local customer optimization inside Performance Max for store goals, prioritizing shoppers who are near a business or ready to act across Maps, Waze and Search.