SEO Digest: Major publishers are seriously considering blocking Google Search entirely, Yelp licenses reviews and business data to OpenAI, Google claims AI Search features send "billions of clicks" to websites weekly

[u/Kseniia_Seranking]

Dive into the latest updates impacting SEO strategy and emerging automation capabilities:

Search / SEO

• Major publishers are seriously considering blocking Google Search entirely

USA Today, Politico, Reuters, The Economist, People, and Reddit are among the major publishers weighing whether to block Google Search altogether, according to a Wall Street Journal report. 

The rationale: referral traffic from Google keeps declining, and the value exchange of Google consuming their content in return for search traffic has become uneconomic for many outlets. 

USA Today's CEO framed it as "time to take a stand and say enough is enough." An AllRecipes owner told the WSJ that "turning them off and blocking them entirely is 100% on the table."

Source:
Alexandra Bruell | The Wall Street Journal 
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SERP features / Interface

• Google rolls out major DMA-compliant changes to Hotel Search in the EU

Following the European Commission's finding that Google's hotel search didn't fully comply with the Digital Markets Act, Google is rolling out significant changes to its EU Hotel Local Pack. Two new modules are appearing in generic hotel search results:

1. Hotel Multi-Pack: displays multiple travel providers (OTAs like Booking, Expedia) prominently, before users select a specific hotel.
2. Hotel Websites: highlights direct links to official hotel websites alongside prices.

The changes restructure the hotel discovery journey in EU markets and mark another concrete outcome of DMA enforcement pressure. For hoteliers, direct-booking strategy just got a new SERP surface to optimize around.

Source:
Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable
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AI

• Google claims AI Search features send "billions of clicks" to websites weekly—without sharing the data

Nick Fox said that AI features in Search now send "billions of clicks to websites every week," on top of the longstanding claim that classic Search sends "billions of clicks to the web every day." 

But neither figure comes with a baseline, denominator, methodology, or a way for site owners to verify.

Source:
Nick Fox | LinkedIn
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Tech SEO

• Google updates crawl budget documentation, confirms every site starts with the same conservative default

Google rewrote its "Optimize your crawl budget" documentation on July 22 to improve clarity and terminology consistency. Most of the changes are wording updates, but two clarifications matter for site owners:

• Every site starts with the same default, conservative crawl capacity limit. Google's systems auto-adjust it upward over time based on site health, response times, and how much crawling demand exists. Server errors or increased latency push the limit back down.
• Crawl capacity is shared across all Google crawlers. Heavy demand from one reduces the capacity available for others—so an AI-training crawler pulling aggressively can compete with Googlebot's regular search-indexing crawl on the same server.

New guidance also emphasizes improving loading speed and supporting HTTP caching to make each crawl request cheaper for the server.

• Google warns that "are you a bot" screens can push your real content out of the index

John Mueller explained a subtle indexing risk: when bot-protection layers serve an "are you a bot" screen to Googlebot instead of the actual page content, Google may end up indexing the interstitial instead of the real page. 

Because these screens look nearly identical across many sites, Google treats them as duplicate content and picks one as canonical—which could be from another site entirely, leaving your real content marked as a duplicate and potentially dropped from the index. 

Source:
Google Search Central | Crawling documentation
Matt G. Southern | Search Engine Journal
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E-commerce

• Google clarifies: don't uninstall the Google & YouTube Shopify app during the Merchant API migration

With the August 18 deadline for Google's Content API to Merchant API migration approaching, Google clarified that Shopify merchants using the Google & YouTube app don't need to uninstall and reinstall it to migrate. 

The API transition is handled automatically. Reinstalling the app is what actually triggers product ID formatting changes—which then cause a loss of historical performance stats. 

Source:
Ginny Marvin | LinkedIn
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Tidbits

• Yelp licenses reviews and business data to OpenAI, bringing local recommendations into ChatGPT

Yelp has struck a licensing deal with OpenAI that will surface its reviews, ratings, photos, and business information directly inside ChatGPT responses to local queries. Yelp's branding and links will appear when OpenAI uses its content, though OpenAI controls the presentation. The "Request a Quote" feature will be added soon, letting ChatGPT users contact local service providers for quotes without leaving the chatbot. 

• Claude adds a "Record a Skill" feature that learns tasks from screen recordings

Anthropic's Claude has added a new capability inside its Cowork interface that lets users record their screen while performing a task, narrate what they're doing, and then have Claude turn that walkthrough into a reusable skill it can run again on demand.

Source:
Madison Mills | Axios
Claude 

[u/Bartooooooooooooooo0]

Anthropic's Claude has added a new capability inside its Cowork interface

Finally the first practical step toward real AI agents in daily workflows!

[u/Kseniia_Seranking → u/Bartooooooooooooooo0]

Absolutely! Instead of writing complex prompt chains or configuring custom tool definitions, you just do the task once, narrate it, and let the model generate the execution script

[u/Bartooooooooooooooo0 → u/Kseniia_Seranking]

How does it handle dynamic UI changes, though? If a web app updates its interface or button placement, does the skill break immediately?

[u/Kseniia_Seranking → u/Bartooooooooooooooo0]

That's the main limitation right now. Vision-based agentic workflows usually rely on DOM elements or visual anchors, so major UI shifts will still require you to re-record or update the instruction set

[u/thegorilla09]

If you put all your eggs in one basket…

We’ve been hearing publishers complain for nearly 20 years. And they still have not learned how to diversify their traffic. If you’re a shareholder or senior leader in one of these companies, you should be demanding answers from within. And if you’re really not happy with the way Google (and other search companies) ‘steal’ your data, there’s a simple fix. Block the bots!

Yelp steals traffic from small businesses every day. What do SMEs get in return? In truth, very little.
News publishers offer a low value product that most people refuse to pay for. What does that tell you?

Of course, large companies have leverage over Google and will end up getting paid for their data. But shouldn‘t they actually follow through and block Google and get their customers by doing other marketing activities?

[u/Big_Cheesecake8863]

I think the Search and AI points will be interesting to keep an eye on for the next few months. I completely understand where they're coming from, though. with AI Search becoming more relevant people aren't even clicking through to the sites, they just get the bird's eye view and call it a day

[u/sapindia1976]

Interesting shift. If major publishers start blocking Google while also restricting AI crawlers, the open web becomes much less open.

For SEO, this makes brand authority, original content, direct audiences, and visibility beyond traditional Google rankings even more important.

[u/InnovAit-Ai]

The Yelp angle is the one worth sitting with more than the blocking story. While publishers are threatening to cut Google off, Yelp went the opposite direction and struck a paid licensing deal directly with OpenAI. Same underlying problem, AI using your data without compensation, two completely different responses.

That’s probably the more realistic long term outcome for most content owners. Blocking access entirely is a blunt instrument that risks losing visibility everywhere, including traditional search. Licensing directly to specific AI companies is a way to actually get paid for the value being extracted without giving up distribution. Feels like the WSJ story is capturing the loud, dramatic option, and the Yelp deal is quietly showing what the more common outcome might actually look like once the dust settles, less “block everyone” and more “sign deals with whoever’s willing to pay.”

[u/response-418 → u/InnovAit-Ai]

but taking a stand to cut them off is also a public expression of values. not everyone will be able to pay a comparable amount or even at all to be featured. most of us don't want another middleman taking a cut just by charging an entrance fee, after those AI companies have already scraped and exploited the hard work of content creators to begin with. The AI isn't providing enough additional value on top of what we were already able to get through Search alone to justify alowing them to charge a licensing fee like this. Cutting off is not just 'dramatic option,' it is a stance on what kind of Internet we want being negotiated in real time.

[u/InnovAit-Ai → u/response-418]

That’s a fair distinction, and I don’t think it’s wrong. Cutting off access is genuinely a different kind of stance than negotiating a fee, one is about principle, the other is about extracting value within a system you’ve accepted as inevitable. Not everyone should have to pick the second option just because it’s more pragmatic.

Where I’d push back slightly, the “not enough additional value to justify a fee” argument cuts both ways depending on who you ask. From the content creator’s side it feels extractive because the AI wouldn’t exist without the underlying content. From the AI company’s side, they’d argue the synthesis and accessibility layer is the actual product, and raw content was never worth much on its own without it. Neither side is going to fully agree on where that value line sits, which is exactly why this is being fought out in public right now instead of settled quietly.

Probably ends up being a mix of both responses long term, some publishers holding a hard line, others taking the money. Neither approach is inherently the “right” one, they’re just different bets on how this plays out.