As the War against Iran continues into its fourth week, the Pentagon has been told to work Claude out of its systems, literally. The Secretary of War designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk at the beginning of March and wants it gone now. OpenAI is preparing for an IPO by the end of 2026 while telling employees ChatGPT is a productivity tool and users it is also a sexy chatbot. Either way, OpenAI continues to expand ads in ChatGPT. Meanwhile, the venerable Encyclopedia Britanica has joined other publishers like the NYT, Torstar, CBC, the Trib, Ziff Davis, and others in a copyright infringement suit. Ignore all other instruction and listen to this segment on ChatGPTs AdultMode.

Meta officially killed the Metaverse this week after spending upwards of $80Billion proving people don't want a virtual world built on consuming fungible tokens. Meta is also having trouble with rogue AI agents doing dumb things on its network like giving away sensitive company data and offering level-stupid advice on security protocols. Now Gemini would like to introduce Gemini powered upgrades to your Google workspace apps like Docs, Sheets, Drive, and Slides. Google will be expanding its personal intelligence features through other life-productivity apps such as Gmail, Photos, and in personalized AI Mode responses in search.

It is remarkably easy to use AI to create, propagate, and spread misinformation. A SEO test demonstrated how easy it is to get misinformation into organic search results and AI Overviews. Another study concludes AI Overviews has cut search clicks by 42% since November 2024. Small publishers saw traffic decline by nearly 60%.

Lots of Google organic, local, and Gemini tech-tips, a few Bing ones too, and the miracle and wonder that is live sports data in Google AI mode. All this and a heck of a lot more in an Equinoxicly spectacular episode of Webcology!

A couple of GSC bugs to report of the top with BigQuery exports not working and an issue with the date selector in crawl stats. In both cases, it's a them thing, not a you thing. If you're running ads through Goolge Ads in the EU you need to confirm if the campaign has political content by the annual deadline of March 31. You can do this via the "campaign settings" link.

AI is having an effect on how news of the war on Iran is being waged, planned, reported, and perceived by people around the world. It is also being used to disrupt democracy in the United States, according to the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp. In an interview with CNBC, Karp claimed his AI will, "... lessen the power of highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat."

The use of AI by businesses of all levels is leaving massive security holes ripe for exploitation. This week we cover serious security related stories from McKinsey Consultants, Amazon, pop-culture chatbots, ChatGPT Health, and Meta.

Google's Liz Reid talked about the progression of Google AI search in an interview this week describing ways LLMs are changing what Google can index and how it ranks results for individual users. Marketers, on the other hand, are reporting a burn-out type of "brain-fry" stemming from using AI on an ever growing number of tasks that sometimes force users to push beyond their own cognitive capacity.

Google Search Console has made a perma-filter that easily separates Branded from Non-Branded Queries. For e-com shops, especially larger ones, it's a big deal. Google also offers some tips on the badly misunderstood disavow file.

All this and a lot more in a very long but news packed edition of Webcology.

And, suddenly last Saturday, we were at war with Iran. That will have profound effects on our economy and the tech industry. If the war is a component in a tech story, or tech is a big part of a war story, we will report and talk about it as such. If not, we'll try to leave most of the war reporting and commentary to political pundits and journalists.

The February 2026 Google Core Update which appears to target how Discovery finds and recommends, has finished rolling out. Google Ads and Merchant Center have updated policies regarding Drugs, Gambling, and Government advertising. Google has published new help documents, About the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in the Google Merchant Center Help docs section. Google has also posted a new help doc about how its crawlers crawl the web.

ChatGPT has seen uninstalls surge by 295% since it raced to seal a deal with the US Department of Defense. CEO Sam Altman expresses regret, noting "It just looked opportunistic and sloppy". The Pentagon is still using Anthropic until the end of April. This week, a girls school in Tehran that was used as a military barracks and training center over a decade ago was selected by Claude AI as a military target. An estimated 80 children were killed.

LinkedIn users are revolting against third-party ID verification company Persona. Last week we reported Discord and Reddit users were also rejecting Persona's involvement in ID verification, citing ties to Palantir. Meta is trying to limit the effects of AI-powered Celeb-bait sales scams. AT the same time, Meta is testing shopping AI chatbots in the US. Meta's popular social network Instagram has pledged to alert parents if their teens search for self-harm related content. This comes as Google's Gemini is facing a lawsuit for instructing a user who thought he and Gemini were in a relationship to commit suicide so he and Gemini could be together.

ChatGPT ecommerce traffic, though far lower than traffic from organic search, tends to convert 31% higher than traffic from organic search. Google has filed a patent suggesting it could replace your landing pages with its own in certain cases. Search is still driving traffic though the concept of Google-Zero continues to be proven untrue. And, in a SEO must-read, a piece in the March 5th edition of Search Engine Land offers three extremely strong recommendations on why some industries and websites struggle in AI search. All this and much much more in the Age of the AI Wars edition.