The metric the whole discipline reports on is being quietly retired by the company that invented it, and the day’s other stories are all about what happens when a system nobody can audit gets it wrong.
The Unit Dissolves: Rank Tracking Meets A Page It Cannot Describe
Google is asking what should replace position, which is a strange question to receive from the company that made position the industry’s common language.
- Mueller: Position 1 to 10 Is Hard to Map Onto Today’s SERP John Mueller said the old position 1 to 10 is hard to map, or to make useful for site owners, on a page built from AI Overviews, citations, featured snippets and People Also Ask. Generative impressions are counted as a single block with no position breakdown, and he asked the industry what metric would actually help. Landing one day after a study put 97 percent of People Also Ask answers in the AI generated column, it reads less like a reporting quirk and more like the unit itself coming apart.
- Apple Discloses Siri Fields 2.5 Billion Requests a Day Lilian Rincon put the first public number on Siri’s daily volume at Apple’s September 9 keynote. It is a useful scale marker for the assistant layer, and it arrives without any comparable public figure from Google to set it against, which is its own kind of answer.
No Appeal, No Audit: Two Ways The Platform Costs You Money
One advertiser loses spend to a reversal with no appeal route. One business loses calls to a photo nobody validated. Both are failures of a system the affected party cannot inspect.
- Consultant Says Google Ads Clawed Back Spent Promo Credits Twice David Melamed reports Google issuing promotional credits, advertisers spending them, then the credits being invalidated retroactively, in one case 3,200 dollars more than a month after it was used. No appeal mechanism exists and the spend cannot be recovered. Ginny Marvin said she had passed it to the team, with no policy change announced.
- Scammers Hide Fake Phone Numbers Inside GBP Photos A fraudulent number embedded in an uploaded image reaches customers through the photo rather than through the listing fields Google validates. One contributor was found with more than 150 photo uploads across unrelated US businesses carrying the same number, which makes this a systematic operation rather than an isolated prank.
Today’s Quick Hits
- Google Ads Tests Letting Advertisers Pick Budget Or Bid Targets A beta lets Search campaigns choose between budget targets and bidding targets as the optimisation lever, moving the advertiser’s control surface up another level of abstraction.