Roger Montti

WordPress announced a security release to address seven security vulnerabilities plus four bug fixes. This security release, Version 7.1.3, addresses a stored XSS, denial-of-service DoS and five other vulnerabilities of undisclosed severity level. WordPress recommends updating sites immediately.

Google’s Martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed the reasons why Search Console may display a “couldn’t fetch” error even though a website displays a valid XML sitemap. While Mueller acknowledged there sometimes may be a technical reason for that happening he also said that the actual reason is often a quality issue.

Google is entering a new phase of SERP scraping due to AI agents. Some of it may be driven by networks of LLMs that are reverse engineering Google’s search results. The public face of Google’s war against scraping remains rank trackers but the real battle may be elsewhere. Will the ability to track rankings become a thing of the past? What may be a reason behind Google’s actions to stop rank tracking is that the amount of AI Agent traffic has grown exponentially.