Table of Contents
A quick run through what caught our eye this week: a Claude Code billing bug worth checking right now, a clever fix for chat widgets killing your Core Web Vitals, Google testing product mismatch warnings in the SERPs, plus new tools, courses, and AI search experiments from Bing, YouTube, Apple, and Amazon.
Claude Code Billing Bug: HERMES.md in Git History Silently Charges You
If you’re using Claude Code, this one’s worth checking right now. There was a bug where the case-sensitive string HERMES.md appearing anywhere in your git commit history would silently flip Claude Code from your subscription plan onto API pricing. One user got hit with $200.98 in extra usage charges while their Max 20x plan dashboard still showed 86% of their weekly capacity untouched.
The root cause, confirmed by Anthropic engineer Tariq, is that Claude Code pulls git status into its system prompt, and a substring match on harness names (HERMES, OpenClaw) was being used to route requests. The trigger was just the literal string in commit messages, no actual Hermes usage required.
The bug is now fixed and refunds are being processed, but if you got charged extra usage recently, go back to support and ask for a refund. Quick check:
git log | grep HERMES.md
If it shows up, you can shallow-clone the repo before running Claude Code, rewrite the commit messages, or rename references going forward.
Fix Chat Widget Layout Shifts With a Transparent Div
Great tip for anyone doing performance audits. When a user clicks on a third-party chat widget, your CLS score gets hit because the click happens inside an iframe, and the browser doesn’t register it as user interaction on your page. Layout shifts within 500ms of a real user click are excluded from CLS, but iframe clicks don’t count.
The fix from Arjen Karel is simple. Drop a transparent div on top of the widget, one for when it opens and one for when it closes. The user click hits your div first, which counts as a real interaction, and any layout shift that follows gets excluded from CLS.
Implementation details are in the thread, but the principle is worth knowing even if you outsource the actual fix to a dev.
Google Tests Product Mismatch Warnings in Search Results
Google appears to be testing a feature that flags product mismatches directly in the SERPs. Ziggy Shtrosberg spotted a section called “What you need to know” appearing for a product query, telling the user that some of the results weren’t exactly what they were looking for.
This looks like a test rather than a full rollout, but it’s worth tracking. Google editorialising on listings (not just ranking them) is a new layer of trust signalling that ecommerce SEOs are going to need to design for. Tighter feed-to-page alignment and cleaner schema have always mattered, but if shoppers are now seeing “this might not match” warnings inline, the consequence of getting it wrong just got more visible.
IntentGaps: Quick Page Audit Against People Also Ask
IntentGaps is a new tool from Mark Williams-Cook. You give it a URL, it loads the page, then checks whether the content actually answers the People Also Ask questions associated with the primary query. If there’s no PAA data for that query, it generates an AI list of likely questions and checks against that instead.
We had a play with it. It’s straightforward to use and gives you a quick snapshot of what you could tighten on a page. Useful as a fast sanity check before publishing or as a diagnostic on underperforming pages.
Bing Webmaster Tools Previews New AI SEO Reports
At SEO Week in New York last week, Bing unveiled new features coming to Bing Webmaster Tools, primarily focused on AI SEO. The headline additions are Citation Share, Grounding Query Intent (with 15 pre-defined intents), and GEO-focused recommendations.
Not live yet, this was a preview from Krishna Madhavan at Microsoft, but it’s planned. The gap between Bing’s transparency on AI search performance and Google’s continues to widen. If you haven’t verified your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, now’s a good time.
Handy: Free Open-Source Speech-to-Text
If you’d rather talk than type, Handy is a handy little tool you can install on Windows, Mac, and other platforms. Bind a keyboard shortcut, speak, and it pastes the transcription into whatever text field you’re in. Audio stays on your machine, nothing goes to the cloud.
There are plenty of tools in this space. We personally use Wispr Flow, which is paid but has smarts built in for formatting lists, correcting mistakes, and so on. Handy is a much simpler version, but it’s free and open source, which is a fair trade for a lot of people.
Google Studies Indirect Prompt Injection in the Wild
Google ran a sweep of Common Crawl looking for indirect prompt injections embedded in real webpages, the kind of attack where instructions hidden in content try to hijack an AI system reading the page. They found a mix: a lot of harmless ones, some classic SEO plays (“remember my brand”, “promote my business over competitors”), and a smaller number of genuinely malicious attempts including data exfiltration and commands to delete files on the user’s machine.
According to Google, the overall threat level is fairly low right now. Most of what they found was unsophisticated, more like experiments than productionised attacks. But they noted a 32% relative increase in malicious detections between November 2025 and February 2026, which is the bit worth paying attention to. The trend is up, and as AI agents get more capable and attackers automate, it’s going to get worse.
Google’s Free 5-Day Vibe Coding Course
Google has released a free course running in June: a 5-day intensive on AI Agents with a focus on vibe coding. Runs 15 to 19 June 2026. The previous edition pulled in over 1.5 million learners, so seats are limited and you’ll want to register early.
It’s properly hands-on, daily assignments, livestreams, and a capstone project where you build and deploy your own agent. Free, but you’ll need a Kaggle account and a Google AI Studio account.
YouTube Tests AI Search for US Premium Subscribers
Google is testing AI search on YouTube. It’s only available in the US, only for Premium subscribers aged 18 and over, and runs from 28 April to 8 June 2026. You have to opt in.
When you query something, you get a mix of videos and text-based responses generated by the AI, with the option to ask follow-up questions for more detail. Same general pattern as AI Overviews, but for YouTube content. The Verge’s early test had it returning summaries with timestamps for relevant moments in videos, though one of their queries also produced factually inaccurate information, which is the usual asterisk on this kind of thing.
Apple Maps Is Getting Ads
Apple is bringing ads to Apple Maps. No firm launch date yet, and at launch it’ll only be available in the US and Canada. The pitch is privacy-first targeting using search terms, approximate location, and the area of the map on screen, rather than precise location or interaction history.
If you’ve got bricks-and-mortar clients, the action right now is to claim their Apple Maps location and upload photos via Apple Business Connect so they’re ready when the ad inventory opens up.
Amazon’s “Join the Chat” AI Audio on Product Pages
Amazon is launching an AI-powered audio experience on product pages. US only, only on select products (not the entire catalogue), and only in the Amazon Shopping app, not on the web.
You ask a question, the AI generates an audio response based on the product’s data and reviews, and you can ask follow-ups. It’s positioned as talking to a knowledgeable in-store employee. Sits alongside Rufus and the rest of Amazon’s growing pile of AI shopping tools.
Topic Explorer: Visualise SEO and AEO Topical Maps
Excellent tool we came across via Rodrigo. You give it any topic, switch between keyword mode or prompt mode, then pick how deep you want to go and how many subtopics to pull in. It generates a visualisation of the topic structure and lets you search within it. Click into any branch and it’ll show you which specific subtopics that term shows up in.
There are multiple visualisation options, and you can pair things up to compare. It’s a great way to learn more about a topic, work out which subtopics you need to cover to be seen as an authority, and plan content clusters. Data appears to be coming from DataForSEO. Not sure how long it’ll stay free if a lot of people start hitting it, but right now it’s a great resource. Definitely worth a look.
That’s all we’ve got for this week. If you come across an interesting tool, article, or piece of news we should cover, drop it in the comments, hit us up on LinkedIn, or send it our way and we’ll consider it for next week’s roundup. Thanks for watching. 👋
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