Some screenshots of the new Map tool in Gemini:

Focus on Local? Gemini's New Map tool launched around 10/2. Very interesting. I just tested it out: "You can zoom out to cover an entire neighborhood or a small state. When you're happy with the location, tap Explore this area at the bottom of the page, & Gemini adds a Map chip to your prompt."

So the queries were always there, and driving traffic, but were not showing up in the default 1K query report in GSC. You can export queries via the API very easily (I have written several posts about how to do that via Analytics Edge).

🧵I just did this for a site that thought some scary queries were new after an algo update hit, but they werent. Exporting all queries via the API revealed nearly 1K of those queries for the site PRIOR to the algo update. 76K queries were exported in total (clearly way beyond the 1K in GSC).

🧵When sites drop for core queries due to major algorithm updates, other queries can show up prominently in GSC since the other core queries are now gone... If think those newish queries are scary or dangerous (and you believe they are truly NEW), I recommend exporting all queries BEFORE the drop.

In OpenAI's announcement about GPT-6 and Intelligent UI, they mention updates to web search (speed and *quality*): "GPT‑6 also improves the quality of answers that require web search. It makes better decisions about when to look something up & more reliably finds info that supports its answer."

Requested damages of $250M+ -> USA Today sues OpenAI for copyright infringement over AI training "The lawsuit said that OpenAI copied hundreds of thousands of the outlets articles ​and other materials and used them without ​permission to train the system behind its popular ⁠chatbot ChatGPT."

Host UGC? You will want to check this out, although I'm not sure how many sites will qualify: "Through this program, approved platforms can use a dedicated data ingestion pipeline to send content and interaction signals to Google, Google explained"

Yep, I've noticed that as well. During spam updates a lot of site owners reach out about drops, but mixed in have been more about manual actions. E.g. "Pure spam", "Thin content", etc. This is not shocking considering the amount of 'Scaled content abuse' going on. I have covered that heavily over...

The September 2026 spam update has completed rolling out. Nearly 14 days. Now the question becomes, what's next and when will that roll out? Again, based on the doc updates, and the heavy spamming going on to game AI Search, I think we'll see a very big update soon. Stay tuned.

Focus on ecommerce? UCP update (for Merchant Center) -> By integrating with UCP, you can implement a checkout button on eligible product listings in AI Mode in Google Search and on Gemini. -> Google Merchant Center New UCP Integration Hub

Ah, just noticed there was a survey to fill out, and yep, Google is thinking about adding reporting for Preferred sources directly in GSC. That would be AWESOME. I made that clear in my responses. There were several questions about the importance of various aspects of the potential reporting... :)

Whoa, GSC is now telling site owners how many people are adding them as 'Preferred sources'. Just received a flurry of emails from Google. This would be cool to see *IN GSC*. :)

If there is one post you read today, make it this one from Lily. Excellent article covering the latest doc updates Google rolled out recently, how it signals a potential HUGE update coming tackling the gaming of AI Search, etc. So, will the update be separate, or be part of a broad core update?

More: Google on Quality: "There isn’t one ranking system that works out quality. There are hundreds of signals, and they differ by the type of result. Google is also running a huge number of tests all the time."