The Cool New Blue Colored Glasses Edition

In one of the most stunning turnarounds in political history, American voters decisively repudiated Trumpism by sweeping the Republican party out of power in the Senate, House, and virtually any other elected office. The Democrats even turned Texas, a state in which technoligarch Elon Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Republican candidates. The effect on the tech sector was almost immediate with massive losses for chip makers and AI-adjacent firms continuing on financial markets at the time of recording. What does this mean for the search industry? Will a Blue Lens help mend relations with other western nations? What happens to the data-centric rollout or the long-term Agentic agenda? Jim and Kristine's conversation comes back to these questions several times as we cover associated stories.

Google has updated a number of help documents, including an interesting update to their "Crawled - currently not indexed" advisory that includes a report-a-mistake button. Google also changed documents relating to Promotion Mode, Telemedicine Certification, and controlling AI Training using robots.txt.

Meanwhile:

- Google Search Console showed a huge spike in clicks around October 31. If you see a click-spike around that time, it's probably them not you

- Google Gemini has stopped attaching UTM parameters to cited URLs

- Reddit has published it's 2027 Marketing How-To Manual

- California gearing up for a fight with the Feds over its right to impose net neutrality as part of State broadband laws

- The Canadian government, along with EU partners, is taking an ownership stake in Toronto based AI Cohere to further ensure data sovereignty from American institutions for Canadian and European citizens

- Thursday was a bad day for AI related stocks

- Musk says Grok's costs are unsustainably high - OpenAI says Dots are compute heavy - The financial expenses are mounting at the worst possible time

- OpenAI has started a very public PR campaign to change the stigma around data centers

- Reddit stock dropped 33% after it admits serious decline in Google traffic

- Google says it will cut all search functions for schools that don't allow Gemini AI tools

- NYTimes and other publishers coming after Brave for selling copyrighted content access to AI

- Google might bring back the 100 search results parameter (though it might do so using poisoned data)

- Google organic click share reaches a 15-month high

- Google Search Ads generate 64% more per visit than ChatGPT ads do

- Google AI Overviews and AI Mode have a 0.9% CTR

- Google is testing removing the AI Mode button from the search bar

- Google will eventually catch up with AI Spam and tricks says John Mueller

- Google will no longer enforce site reputation manual actions in the European Economic Area in a bid to degrade search results in protest of EU anti-trust rulings

- Microsoft Clarity ads new agentic analytics

- Google instructs on how to temporarily protect important pages from being indexed due to 4xx errors

- GSC Performance Reports will allow for multi-select device filters

- Google on how redirects affect ranking signals (think 301 vs 302)

We covered a number of other stories as well but almost all of them loop back to the uncertainties of a future built around the rapid rollout of AIs and the economic and emotional rollercoaster of the American midterm elections. It seems so much easier to look at these interesting times through a cool blue lens rather than the hot red gaze we've had to grow used to.

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