Google SEO & AI Weekly Roundup
The Google SEO & AI Weekly Roundup and Linus’s Notes covers the main changes of the past seven days in Google Search, AI search and GEO, Shopify, and the wider industry. Every item links to its source and explains what it means for independent store owners. Linus writes the “Linus’s Notes” section of each roundup himself.
The series started in November 2023 and has been weekly again since September 2026. This page always shows the latest roundup first. You can also follow it by RSS.
Latest roundup ·
SEO & AI Weekly, Oct 19–25: Shopify App Hijacks & PHP RCE
This week's topics
- Three Shopify apps hijacked to redirect checkout; Shopify adds link protection and asks developers to audit their apps
- Two high-risk issues for self-hosted sites: PHP remote code execution and leaked UpdraftCentral keys
- Meta pushes its business terms back to November 20, but the website crawling permission remains
- ChatGPT ads expand to 89 countries, and self-serve ads turn on automatic rewriting by default
- Unconfirmed ranking volatility, and rank trackers report very different shares of fake results
- AI search research: llms.txt has no measurable effect, and AI still sends little traffic
All roundups (8)
2026
- Three Shopify apps were hijacked at checkout, PHP patched two RCE flaws, Meta delayed its terms, and ChatGPT ads reached 89 countries.
- Google launched Universal Cart, Shopify released Shop MCP, ChatGPT links lost UTM tags, and rank trackers got fake Google results.
- The September spam update finished, Google shared crawl and indexing timelines, Shopify added AI shopping data, and GPT-6 reached ChatGPT.
- Google's spam update had a second wave, AI Mode began handling Shopify checkout, and Gemini 4 Argon and OpenAI Dots moved agents on.
- Google’s September spam update, multimodal Search Console reporting, the AI Mode click experiment, and new GPT-6 and Claude models.
2023
- The 26-day core update finished, SGE was set to roll out worldwide, forum and profile structured data arrived, and GSC dropped Mobile Usability.
- Google's November updates were still running. Nine SERP changes, a QRG update, GSC retiring its crawl rate limiter, and DOJ trial notes.
- Google's November core and reviews updates were still rolling out. SERP changes, GPTs and SEO, the GSC redesign, and a QRG update.
Google SEO & AI Weekly Roundup