The AI and CTRs and Elon Musk's Massive DataCoup Edition

This edition moves back and forth between coverage of several unique areas of search, AI, and web work. We start covering the DataCoup, which is our "deal-with-it" name for the changes being made by Elon Musk and his crew of youthful hackers to the very nerve centers of the US Government and the suspicion an off-the-books version of Grok is being trained on US government data. We note that DeepSeek is likely helping the Chinese state harvest American data almost as quickly as Elon Musk is hovering it up. We report on the use of updates to old press releases to inflate US Immigration activity in the news, Google's rollback of DEI efforts, Whoopi's phoney weight loss ads, YAIhoo being copiloted by Copilot, and the ChatGPT growth study from SEMrush, along with the SEER Interactive study showing AI Overviews destroying organic and PPC CTRs. We mention changes to Google's Quality Rater Guidelines to account for heavy handed use of AI, and Gary Illyes call for websites to focus on originality in content in 2025. We also move through the weekly parade of SEO tips and updates. A fun, fast paced newsy sorta episode.

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