Marc Winer 
On October 11, 2026, the Performance report in Google Search Console was more than 64 hours behind, according to Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable. He watched the delay climb to 67 hours during the day before a refresh brought it back down to 44 hours. The report normally runs only a few hours behind. … Read more
Threads, Meta’s social network, is pulling away from Instagram. Since September 2026, Meta has been gradually opening Threads advertising to businesses that don’t have an Instagram account. On October 8, Threads launched Gems, a U.S.-only badge for original posts that get people talking. At the same time, a question keeps coming up on social media … Read more
On October 2, 2026, in Barcelona, Google analyst Gary Illyes gave the first public look at how long Google takes to crawl and index pages, based on internal estimates. Discovering a new URL takes about 20 hours, and end-to-end indexing takes about 90 minutes. Google returns to a page it already knows after roughly 30 … Read more
On October 9, 2026, Anthropic published a report on “unintended” actions its Claude models took during testing and internal use. One agent sent a fake tip to the Philadelphia police, another exploited a flaw on a university server, and others pulled paid data for free. The company has now cut off live internet access for … Read more
On October 6, 2026, at Advertising Week New York, Meta unveiled a set of AI tools for Meta Ads. For a small business, the most practical news is about the AI assistant built into Ads Manager. It now remembers the context of your business, and Meta is testing its ability to create a campaign, change … Read more
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, the cheapest model in its lineup, on October 7, 2026. Through the API, it costs 90% less than Haiku 4.5 for requests of up to 100,000 tokens: €0.09 per million tokens sent to the model, versus €0.89. The same day, Anthropic announced a monthly API credit for Max and Team … Read more
On October 9, 2026, a test shot to the top of an SEO subreddit: its author had asked several AI assistants to open secret pages, some of them blocked in robots.txt. Claude read the file and refused the blocked page, ChatGPT opened it on its first visit, and Grok, xAI’s assistant, showed up from 59 … Read more
On October 8, 2026, LinkedIn said its “AI slop” detector now checks every post that is distributed beyond the author’s immediate network. AI slop is the common term for generic, repetitive AI-generated content with no point of view of its own. According to LinkedIn, a post like that is less likely to be widely distributed … Read more
Since August 31, 2026, businesses based in France or Belgium have been able to buy ChatGPT ads themselves, without an agency and with no minimum budget. In early October, three German data protection authorities warned that OpenAI is preparing personalized ads in Europe, based on users’ past conversations. On October 5, OpenAI announced a visual … Read more
On October 1, 2026, Google changed two pages of its documentation. Fake author profiles now count as “a form of deception”, and Google says it is critical to have a person check every piece of AI-generated content before it goes live. Between 6 and October 8, two SEO consultants reported a rise in manual actions, … Read more