Post #4200127

2026-07-29 13:44 UTC

Heh, Google now rubs your nose in it: they have a new report for webmasters that shows you how many times AI summaries "cited" your website. There is no click count because of course there isn't. Is that a metric I'm supposed to optimize for, against, or what

Replies (6)

@DaveMWilburn@infosec.exchange 2026-07-29 13:48

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange The important thing here is that Google makes ad renevue selling information parasitically harvested from your website. Please clap.

Open ##4200239
@jmason@mastodon.ie 2026-07-29 14:02

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange I just have a metric telling me that they crawled 5000 pages on my site, but decided 90% were too garbage to index for some reason? not sure which is more painful

Open ##4202813
@mcc@mastodon.social 2026-07-29 16:07

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange no instructions on how to opt out i take it

Open ##4204513
@nothacking@infosec.exchange 2026-07-29 17:58

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange Yet another reason to: if ($http_user_agent ~* "Google") {return 418 "Shoo!";}

Open ##4206898
@psh@infosec.exchange 2026-07-29 18:41

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange Google has destroyed the internet.

Open ##4207999
@sentynel@social.sentynel.com 2026-07-29 19:22

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange The main thing I'm confirming from this metric is that AI overviews are totally falling to serve user needs, because there's no way the most AI-overviewed pages on my site are actually things people are looking for (mostly reviews of incredibly obscure bands from several years ago, with no obvious pattern to which ones come up a lot, but certainly not big bands that tens of thousands of people might actually be searching for).

Open ##4210947