Welcome to the Pulse: updates impact who can crawl your site, what an AI index records about your pages, and how Google will compare your campaigns with similar businesses. Here’s what you need to know for your work.

Cloudflare’s AI Blocking Will Cover Googlebot In September

Starting September 15, 2026, Cloudflare will block crawlers that both index for search and gather AI training data on any site set to block training.

Key facts:

Starting September 15, Cloudflare will recognize Googlebot and Bingbot as bots that both index for search and gather AI training data. Any setting that blocks AI training will block them too, including the old “Block AI bots” switch. You can choose to opt out before then. Already, one site owner has noticed Googlebot being blocked, though the cause isn’t confirmed.

Why This Matters

Activating the AI bot blocking feature at any time in the past will now also include Google. Be sure to review the setting before September 15.

Read our full coverage: Report That Cloudflare AI Bot Blocking Prevents Googlebot From Indexing Sites

ChatGPT’s Own Index Served Sites Without Deals The Same Way

Resoneo found that sites with no OpenAI content deal were served by OpenAI’s in-house search index in the same way as its licensed partners.

Key facts:

The French consultancy read ChatGPT answers captured in July, using a field in ChatGPT’s traffic that named where each result came from. Pages served from OpenAI’s own index returned the same results whether or not the publisher had a deal. OpenAI removed that field in late July, so the same measurement can’t easily be repeated.

Why This Matters

A content deal isn’t what gets you into the index behind most free-account answers. What that index keeps of your page is the title and about 200 characters from the top, so any content your template displays before the first paragraph is effectively using up that space.

What SEO professionals are saying:

Radu Stoian, Technical Director at Enhance Media, read the findings as being about infrastructure rather than models.

“The hardest part of AI search may not be the LLM. It’s the search index (and the harness, but that’s a different discussion).”

Read our full coverage: ChatGPT’s Search Index Serves Small Sites Too, Data Shows

Google Analytics Will Benchmark Campaigns

Google said its Ask Advisor agent will compare campaign performance in Google Analytics against anonymized averages from similar businesses.

Key facts:

Google announced it as one of several AI updates across Ads and Analytics. Analytics already puts your property in a peer group for benchmarking, built from your industry category and signals from your site, and you can change it. Google hasn’t said whether Ask Advisor uses that group or builds its own, or when it reaches accounts.

Why This Matters

A benchmark is only valuable if it includes businesses similar to yours. Analytics lets you customize this group, offering greater control than Google’s Merchant Center reporting.

Read our full coverage: Google Announces Campaign Benchmarking In Google Analytics

What SEO professionals are saying:

Maryam Safari, Online Marketing Manager at PubliCare, switched a GA4 account to English to trigger the beta but still saw the older Analytics Intelligence panel, suggesting language alone isn’t the gating factor in a gradual rollout. Her caution concerns what lies beneath the agent.

“An agent sitting on top of broken tracking just produces the wrong answers faster.”

Google Refiles Its SerpApi Claims With Licensing Terms Attached

Google amended its DMCA complaint against SerpApi, now including terms from its content licensing agreements.

Key facts:

Last month, a federal judge dismissed both of Google’s claims, saying Google had never shown that copyright owners authorized its anti-scraping system. Google has since refiled with contract terms meant to fill that gap. The claims related to results without copyrighted content have been permanently dismissed.

Why This Matters

This case is really about figuring out who can gather Google search results at scale. Rank trackers, SERP monitors, and AI visibility tools all depend on the search results, and if Google wins, the data they resell gets harder to defend. Nothing is final yet, because SerpApi’s response is the next filing.

Read our full coverage: Google Amends SerpApi Suit With Content Licensing Terms

Theme Of The Week: Three Kinds Of Access Changed This Month

Access to crawling, indexing, and data has all been adjusted at the same time. Cloudflare now controls which crawlers can reach your pages, and starting in September, its decisions for Google will change. OpenAI determines what parts of a page are kept in its index, and a content deal turns out not to have been the price of entry. A court is set to decide who can collect Google’s search results at scale, and Google has recently filed again to keep that question open.

These are issues you previously settled through a robots.txt file or a contract, but now they’re open for reconsideration. The Analytics change is the only story here that arrives as a feature rather than a rule being rewritten.

Top Stories Of The Week:

• Report That Cloudflare AI Bot Blocking Prevents Googlebot From Indexing Sites
• ChatGPT’s Search Index Serves Small Sites Too, Data Shows
• Google Announces Campaign Benchmarking In Google Analytics
• Google Amends SerpApi Suit With Content Licensing Terms

More Resources:

• What Opting Out Of Google’s AI Search Features Means Now
• Reviews, Reputation & Listings: The Local Signals AI Now Reads
• Google’s AI Search Data Is Growing, But The Gaps Remain

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