Table of Contents
Welcome back to the SEO News coverage from Pathfinder Marketing. We’re a digital marketing agency from Perth, and in this round-up we’re covering the SEO news from the last week. Let’s jump straight into it.
Google Business Profile Lets Reviewers Edit Videos Before Posting
There’s a bunch of new Google Business Profile features rolling out at the moment, and one of them is the ability to edit and caption videos directly inside the GBP interface when you’re leaving a review. It’s live now, we were able to see it on our account in Australia.
It’s a genuinely useful addition. When you take a video for a review, you can trim out the bits you don’t want to include and post it straight from the Google review interface, no separate app needed. The workflow feels a lot like TikTok or Instagram, with options to adjust settings, add captions, and select audio before publishing. It was spotted by Valentina Vasileva and shared on LinkedIn by Claudia Tomina.
Google Tightens Its Review Solicitation Policy
Google has pushed out another update to its review manipulation rules. Two new clauses have been added under the Rating Manipulation section: you can no longer direct your staff to solicit a specific number of reviews, and you can’t direct staff to solicit reviews that mention a staff member by name or other specific content. The change was spotted on 17 April 2026 by Amy Toman.
It’s hard to see how all of this can be strictly enforced, because at times people naturally tend to mention staff names in reviews. Our guess is that Google is looking at thresholds, and if a profile hits a suspicious pattern then those reviews will start getting filtered out. We’ve heard from a few people that reviews have been removed in the past couple of weeks, which could be tied to this.
Google Will Now Ask Owners to Confirm Map Edits
Google Will Now Ask Owners to Confirm Map Edits
If you’ve worked with Google Business Profiles, you’ve almost certainly come across this issue: any user can suggest an edit to a business listing, and Google would push that change live. Wrong hours, “permanently closed” labels, all of it. That’s finally changing.
Google is now asking the business to confirm a Maps edit before it goes live, as part of their “New ways we’re protecting businesses on Maps” announcement. Verified, active business owners should start receiving these alerts this month. This is a big change and we love it, since unauthorised edits going live without the owner ever knowing has been one of the most painful parts of managing a GBP.
UCP Adds Five New Tech Council Members
When it comes to e-commerce and AI, UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) and ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) are the two major protocols out there. UCP is the open-source one originally led by Google, and it’s been picking up real adoption over the last few months.
The UCP Governing Council has just expanded the Tech Council to 16 seats, welcoming five new members:
- Greg Smith (Amazon)
- James Andersen (Meta)
- Patrick Jordan (Microsoft)
- Prasad Wangikar (Stripe)
- Scot DeDeo (Salesforce)
They join existing members including Google, Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Wayfair. As you can see, more big names are getting on board with this Google-led shift, while ACP, which is OpenAI-led, has steadily been losing steam in our view. If you’re looking to invest time in e-commerce and AI, UCP is probably where to focus.
Google Is Testing AI-Powered Audio in the SERPs
Google is testing a new feature called AI-Powered Audio, spotted by Brodie Clark. It’s basically a podcast version of the content you were going to read, with a “Listen to an AI powered conversation” play bar appearing inside search results.
This kind of feature already exists in NotebookLM, where you can hand it a piece of content and it generates an audio podcast for you. Now it’s getting integrated directly into the SERP. This is going to take more clicks away from publishers, and we can’t imagine they’re going to be too happy about it, even when their content is being cited along with everyone else’s.
Adobe Q2 2026 AI Traffic Report
Adobe Q2 2026 AI Traffic Report
Adobe has published its Q2 2026 AI Traffic Report, drawing on more than a trillion visits across retail, travel, financial services, media and entertainment, and tech and software. There’s a lot of good data in here on how AI traffic is performing by industry.
Travel and retail are the standouts. AI visit share to travel was up 233% year on year in Q1 2026, and AI traffic to U.S. retail sites was up 269% year on year as of March 2026. Tech and software is on the lower end, which makes sense given AI coding tools are eating into that traffic naturally. One of the more interesting takeaways is that visitors from AI sources are consistently more engaged than non-AI visitors, with 12% better engagement, 48% longer time on site, and 13% more pages per visit on retail. AI traffic is now also converting 42% better than non-AI traffic on retail, which is a major reversal from a year ago when it was converting 38% worse.
It’s worth a read to see how the AI traffic picture is shifting across industries.
How ChatGPT Uses Internal Links to Build Answers
In this post, David Konitzny breaks down how ChatGPT (specifically the OpenAI search/research bot) uses internal links on a page to figure out the answer it serves. Having a clear internal linking structure helps the AI work out which related pieces of content are worth pulling in alongside the page it landed on.
He gives a step-by-step breakdown of how the bot hits the different links on the page and then constructs the final answer from what it finds. Worth a quick read if you’re trying to understand what AI search systems are actually doing under the hood.
Gemini in Chrome Expands to Asia Pacific
Google has expanded Gemini in Chrome to seven new Asia Pacific markets: Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam. It’s available on desktop (Mac, Windows, Chromebook Plus) and iOS, except in Japan where it’s desktop-only. Gemini in Chrome was previously available in the US, Canada, India, and New Zealand, so this brings the total to 11 markets.
Once active, you can use the side panel to summarise content, compare across tabs, draft emails through Gmail, schedule meetings via Calendar, and edit images on the page using Nano Banana 2, all without leaving the page you’re on.
A Python Library for Screaming Frog Crawls
If you work with Screaming Frog, there’s a new Python library called screamingfrog that lets you query your crawls programmatically. You can load .dbseospider, .seospider, and CSV exports, run sitewide page and link queries, raw SQL, and crawl-over-crawl diffs without manually exporting tabs every time.
Install with:
python -m pip install screamingfrogA quick taste of what it looks like:
python
from screamingfrog import Crawl
crawl = Crawl.load("./crawl.dbseospider")
pages_404 = crawl.pages().filter(status_code=404).collect()
broken = crawl.broken_links_report()This pairs really well with something like Claude. Pass the data over and ask it to build reports or surface patterns for you, and you’ve cut out the manual export and wrangling step entirely.
BigCommerce Is Adding Transaction Fees on All Plans
BigCommerce is introducing a new “Open Payment Provider Fee” that kicks in on 1 June 2026. If you process orders through any payment gateway not on their approved Embedded Payment Providers list (Stripe, PayPal/Braintree, Adyen, Checkout.com, and a few others), you’ll pay a percentage on top. Rates by plan:
- Core (formerly Standard): 2.0%
- Growth (formerly Plus): 1.0%
- Scale (formerly Pro): 0.6%
- Performance (formerly Enterprise): custom
This is similar to how Shopify has always charged for non-Shopify Payments transactions. So if one of the things keeping you on BigCommerce was the no-transaction-fee pitch, that pitch is gone. It’s worth modelling your numbers against Shopify before the June cutover.
Vercel Breach: Check Your Keys
If you’ve vibe-coded apps on Vercel, you’ll want to check whether you were caught in this breach. Vercel confirmed on Sunday 19 April that hackers had breached its internal systems and stolen sensitive customer credentials, including API keys, source code, and database data.
The attack started with a Vercel employee downloading an app made by Context AI and connecting it to their corporate Google account. The hackers used that OAuth connection to take over the employee’s Google account and reach into Vercel’s internal systems, where some credentials were stored unencrypted. Vercel’s CEO Guillermo Rauch has advised customers to rotate any keys and credentials in their app deployments that are marked as “non-sensitive”. Next.js and Turbopack are not affected.
If you have anything running on Vercel, check your account, rotate your keys, and shut down anything that looks compromised.
Why ChatGPT Cites One Page Over Another (Ahrefs Study)
Ahrefs analysed 1.4 million ChatGPT prompts to figure out why some pages get cited and others don’t. A few of the standout numbers: only about 50% of the URLs ChatGPT retrieves end up actually getting cited, and a striking 67.8% of all non-cited URLs come from Reddit. ChatGPT clearly uses Reddit to understand topics and gauge consensus, but it almost never gives Reddit the credit, citing it at just 1.93%.
The biggest signal that drives whether you get cited is the semantic match between your page title (and URL) and ChatGPT’s internal fan-out queries (the sub-questions it generates from the seed prompt). Pages with natural language URL slugs got cited 89.78% of the time vs 81.11% for those without. There’s also a freshness angle: cited search results have a median age of around 500 days, but in news, where relevance scores are similar across the board, the AI breaks the tie by going with the younger page.
Plenty more in the full write-up if you want to go deeper on AI citation patterns.
Anthropic Launches Claude Design
Anthropic has launched Claude Design as a separate product through Anthropic Labs. It was originally web-only, but we saw it land in the Windows desktop app yesterday too. You can hand it a screenshot, point it at your codebase, or describe what you want, and it’ll design a polished page, prototype, slide deck, or marketing asset.
It’s powered by Claude Opus 4.7, and the output is genuinely good. It doesn’t have that generic AI look that you get from a lot of design tools. People have been creating some really impressive UIs with it. The catch is that Claude Design has its own usage limit, separate from your normal Claude usage, and it runs out fast on the $20 Pro plan, sometimes in just two or three goes depending on the size of your codebase. Worth playing with anyway.
Ayima AI: A New AI-Powered SEO Tool
Ayima has launched a new AI-powered SEO platform at ayima.ai. It’s a chat interface where you can ask questions about your site’s performance and it pulls live data from Ahrefs, Semrush, DataForSEO, Google Search Console and others to answer.
It can help with technical audits, Core Web Vitals, content gap analysis, keyword opportunities, backlink audits, and more. We haven’t had a proper play with it yet, but it’s not a generic ChatGPT-style chat. It’s built on top of Ayima’s existing SEO methodology and knowledge base, so it should bring a more SEO-specific lens than a general-purpose LLM. Definitely one to try out.
That’s everything we’ve got time for this week. If you liked the format, let us know in the comments, and if you’ve got any suggestions to improve the content, we’d love to hear from you. 👋
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