Mind, Body And Console
Google may be feeding bad data to AI scrapers that rely on its search results.
Here’s what’s happening: In recent weeks, Google has gotten better at distinguishing human users from AI scraper bots, Search Engine Roundtable reports – and when Google is confident a bot is running a search, it may do more than just block it.
According to the piece, Google has begun “injecting bad data” into results, effectively poisoning the well for rival AI bots that scrape and resell Google responses.
Google is primarily targeting AI scrapers, especially SerpApi, which scrapes Google results and sells access to them. Google sued SerpApi, but the case was dismissed in August. Google has since refiled with a new angle.
But SEO and AEO tools also rely on Google Search to answer questions like, “When people search for long-distance running shoes, how often does my brand appear, and how is it described?”
If Google is feeding scrapers bad data, those tools may no longer give brands a reliable picture of how they show up in search.
Meanwhile, in other news, SER has a separate story about how Google’s Search Console Performance report was unavailable for several days late last week and over the weekend, which is an unusually long outage for a system that tends to be more reliable than Google’s other consoles.
Is YouTube TV?
On Monday during MIPCOM, an annual telecom trade show that takes place in Cannes, France, YouTube VP Pedro Pina told attendees that the platform has no desire to replace traditional television.
“We as a platform are not invested in producing content,” Pina said in conversation with RTL Deutschland CEO Stephan Schmitter.
The thing is, YouTube has tried to produce content before – or at least co-produce and license it, the same way most major subscription services do. In 2016, YouTube launched its own slate of exclusive titles for YouTube Red. However, by 2020, most of those shows were either sold off (“Cobra Kai” went to Netflix, for example) or canceled, and the “YouTube Originals” banner was shut down in 2022.
Although YouTube has been marketing its current ad-free subscription service, YouTube Premium, more heavily in recent months, Google makes the majority of its revenue off ads. Pina said YouTube shares more than half of its ad revenue with partners, who “make nothing” if their content doesn’t perform.
That makes YouTube sound less like a studio than a platform for distributing other people’s content, closer to cable or a TV operating system, albeit with a substantial advertising business of its own, of course.
I Don’t Buy It
Agentic media buying is a hot topic, but on the sell side, tech vendors may be putting the cart before the horse. Or, more specifically, the agent before the publisher.
Many publishers aren’t ready to commit to agentic media buys just yet, because it feels too soon to know “whether or not [they’re] going to be of value,” Jamie Jouning, global head of advertising at The Economist, tells Digiday.
Executives from Newsweek and The New York Times also told Digiday they were evaluating agent-led buying but had yet to commit, citing questions about measuring the ROI.
With traffic-dependent ad revenue declining, it’s understandable that publishers would prioritize investments with a clearer path to near-term revenue over agentic buying, says Amit Grover, CEO of sell-side programmatic sales firm KPI Village.
Instead, some pubs are taking a more hands-on approach, hiring sellers who specialize in particular verticals and developing new sponsorship opportunities.
Nice to hear that not every new solution is agentic.
But Wait! There’s More!
Over the weekend, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt its taxpayer-funded TV ads. [Axios]
Geotargeting fail: Political ad buyer Cross Screen Media had to refund a Republican Super PAC after mistakenly running $25,000 worth of ads for Maine Senator Susan Collins in Portland, Oregon, not Portland, Maine. [NBC News]
Google is testing ads for prescription drugs in its AI Overviews. [Adweek]
All the biggest proposals for regulating AI, explained. [Bloomberg]
Bot traffic from Russian internet service provider Yandex tanked on Sunday after Ukrainian drones hit one of the company’s biggest data centers. [Tom’s Hardware]
You’re Hired!
StackAdapt names Pinar Ozyetis as its chief legal officer and Anna Grodecka-Grad as chief client officer. [Exchange Wire]
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