August 2026 — SEO, AEO & GEO news.
What changed, as it happens.
Tracked daily from primary sources. The items below are what we're watching for clients right now.
Google's crawlers use more HTTP methods than GET and POST
Google's Gary Illyes said Google's crawlers send HTTP HEAD, OPTIONS, PUT, PATCH and DELETE requests in addition to GET and POST. Those five account for under 1.5% of the total number of requests Google's crawlers send, and Illyes attributed them to JavaScript.Source: Search Engine Roundtable →
Our take: Under 1.5% of requests is a rounding error, and for most stores this is trivia. Blocking PUT, PATCH and DELETE as write methods is ordinary security practice on a hardened origin, and Illyes has now put a Google crawler inside that rule. The methods are tied to JavaScript, so the cost of a block lands on rendering.
Read our full take →Gemini will now edit listings for accounts that run more than one
Google's August Small Business Bulletin says Business Profile in Gemini is now available globally on desktop and mobile, and that tagging @Google Business Profile works for accounts managing more than one profile, lifting a single-profile limit that had been in place since the June 10 launch. Gemini drafts updates to hours, services, photos and other listing details, and approved changes go out through the official Business Profile APIs under the same verification standards applied to manual edits. Nothing publishes without owner review, and the integration is free on all Gemini accounts, though it still works only with personal Gmail accounts and not with Google Workspace.Source: PPC Land →
Our take: Multi-location support and personal-Gmail-only are hard to hold at the same time. A business running several profiles is a business with a Workspace domain, so this lands for the accounts least likely to have it. The window where it fits is narrow: listings set up years ago on someone's personal Gmail and never migrated. Owner review gates every edit either way, so what Gemini produces is a draft.
Read our full take →Blocking AI training in Cloudflare can take Googlebot down with it
A site owner posting in r/TechSEO reported that switching on Cloudflare's "AI Training = Block" control returned HTTP 403 responses to both Googlebot and Bingbot, including on the sitemap, and that the problem cleared when the block was switched off. Cloudflare's own dashboard classifies Googlebot and Bingbot as "Search + Training" bots. Google's John Mueller asked the poster to get in touch so he could look into it. Another commenter raised spoofed bots as an alternative explanation, which the poster rejected on the basis that Cloudflare's dashboard was reporting verified crawler activity. The report is anecdotal, and it is not established whether it reflects a configuration mistake or announced behavior arriving early. Cloudflare has separately published the policy behind it: from 15 September 2026 it sorts crawlers into Search, Agent and Training, and states that multi-purpose crawlers combining Search with Training will be blocked according to all of their behaviors. It names Googlebot, Applebot and BingBot as crawlers that will be blocked for customers who have chosen to block Training, because the defaults are enforced by the most restrictive applicable rule. Site owners can record an override in Cloudflare's Security settings at any point before 15 September, confirming they want no change applied to Training crawlers that also crawl for Search.Source: Search Engine Journal →
Our take: Blocking AI training is the least controversial thing a store owner can do in a Cloudflare dashboard, which is what makes this one expensive. Googlebot fetches for Search and for Google's AI products through the same crawler, so a control that reads as keeping your catalog out of model training is also the control deciding whether your products stay indexed. The override is one setting and it takes a minute. Nothing about the training toggle tells you that you need it.
Read our full take →Google now recommends 304 responses, and says all its crawlers share one budget
Google updated its crawl-budget documentation with two substantial additions. The first is a recommendation to support HTTP caching, worded as: "Support 304 (Not Modified) HTTP status codes. If a page hasn't changed since Google last crawled it, returning a 304 code tells Google to reuse the cached version, saving your server bandwidth and resources." The second is a clarification that the crawl capacity limit is shared across all crawlers, so high demand from one crawler such as Googlebot-Image reduces the capacity available to the others. The document scopes its guidance to enterprise sites above one million pages and medium sites above ten thousand pages that change rapidly. Search Engine Journal reports these were the only substantial additions, with minor clarifications elsewhere in the page.Source: Search Engine Journal →
Our take: Image crawling and page crawling draw on the same pool, which means an oversized image set is competing with your product pages for the same requests. The 304 half is a server response rather than a setting in your store admin, so on hosted BigCommerce or Shopify the question is what your platform and CDN already return for a page that has not changed. For most stores this turns out to be somebody else's checkbox.
Read our full take →Another unconfirmed shuffle ran from August 1 through August 3
Search Engine Roundtable reported a fresh Google ranking-volatility event beginning Saturday, August 1 and continuing through August 3, based on third-party rank-tracking tools and reports from the SEO community. Google has not confirmed an update and there is no named algorithm change attached to it.Source: Search Engine Roundtable →
Our take: This is the third of these since mid-July, after July 18 to 19 and July 23 to 26. At that cadence an unconfirmed shuffle stops being an event and becomes the weather, and naming each one invites a hunt for a cause that was never there. A position still down in two weeks is a signal worth working on. Everything inside that window is a rank tracker doing its job.
Read our full take →Bing Webmaster Tools switches off its legacy APIs on August 31
Microsoft will retire the legacy SOAP and POX Bing Webmaster Tools APIs on August 31, 2026. Anything still calling them has to move to the JSON over HTTP REST API before that date.Source: Search Engine Roundtable →
Our take: Whether this touches you is not a question you can answer from your own side. The legacy endpoints get called by software rather than people, so the exposure sits in a rank tracker, an SEO plugin, or a URL-submission script somebody wrote years ago and nobody has opened since. Microsoft's notice names no vendors, and a submission job that quietly stops running on September 1 does not announce itself.
Read our full take →Ecommerce brands own more of their AI citation mix than SaaS or finance do
Aleyda Solis analyzed the top 10 cited source domains for 15 leading brands in each of three verticals, SaaS, ecommerce and finance, across Google AI Mode, Gemini and ChatGPT using Semrush Enterprise data, then classified every cited domain by who owns it. In all three verticals the brand's own website was a minority of the cited mix. SaaS came in at 82.3% external and 17.7% owned, finance at 79.4% external and 20.6% owned, and ecommerce at 69.6% external and 30.4% owned. Solis frames the owned site as an "on-page corroboration base": the canonical statement of product, policy and documentation facts that social, community, publisher, review, marketplace and competitor sources then validate, compare or challenge. Her recommendations include treating third-party citations as core rather than optional, identifying which specific sites influence a target prompt before choosing PR or social targets, and connecting cited evidence back to a commercial destination.Source: Aleyda Solis →
Our take: Ecommerce is the least dependent of the three verticals on other people's pages, which is the reverse of how this study gets quoted. A third of the mix is still the minority share, so the schema and content work every store already does buys that third and cannot buy the rest. Where the other two thirds sit varies by prompt, and a review site that dominates one query can be absent from the next one over. Nobody can name your external targets from a vertical average.
Read our full take →The AI opt-out switch is reaching US accounts, and nobody has the data to use it
Google's "Search generative AI" control, which lives in Search Console's settings, began appearing on some US accounts in July 2026 after previously being required only in the UK. It governs links and grounding in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover's generative AI features. Google says it does not affect regular Search rankings, Merchant Center, Google Ads participation, or AI training, which has separate controls of its own. Changes take a few days to process, and content drops out within one to two days once they do, with caching able to delay it further. The control exists because the UK Competition and Markets Authority imposed a conduct requirement on Google in June 2026; the same CMA timeline calls for click data and click-through rates by December 2026 and page-level controls by March 2027. Running alongside that, NewzDash tracking puts Top Stories carousels inside AI Overviews on 15.5% of US trending-news queries and 17.46% of UK ones, which means the opt-out can remove a site from both placements in one move. There is still no click or conversion data published for AI Overviews, so nobody can measure what opting out costs them.Source: Search Engine Journal →
Our take: For a store this is a switch to leave alone. It does not touch your rankings, but it pulls your links out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, which sit on close to half of Google searches. The publishers weighing it up have a traffic grievance a catalog does not have, and the click data that would settle the question is not due until December.
Read our full take →
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