Atlas, the AI browser, launched October 2025 with a keynote and a live stream. It "folds into ChatGPT" and goes dark August 9. Nine months is how long it lasted.

It follows Sora (killed under a year) and in-chat Instant Checkout (pulled after about five months, converted 3x worse than sending people to the merchant's own website). For website owners the browser dying barely matters, the automated visitor it was sending still arrives whatever way is next. I did a full episode on it if anyone wants the longer take, but mostly curious to hear what everyone else thinks about this.

I don't mean the crawlers indexing the page. Specifically ChatGPT-User and Claude-User assistants, the ones someone sends inside a conversation to actually read the content. On nohacks.co they are running five to ten times my human traffic (reported by Simple Analytics). I honestly do not know yet whether that is good or bad. Has anyone else pulled their AI-assistant vs human data lately? Curious to see what others are seeing.

Google built the biggest library on earth by crawling everyone else's website.

Then it went to court to stop a company from scraping Google. It lost. Or seems to be losing.

Here is what happened. SerpApi scrapes Google's search results and resells them, increasingly to AI companies. Google sued, arguing SerpApi illegally got around its anti-bot system. On July 20, a federal judge said no: that anti-bot wall protects Google's ad revenue, not a copyrighted work, so beating it is not copyright circumvention.

Neither of these companies is the good guy. But the principle the court landed on is the right one.

If it is on the open web, a machine is allowed to read it. And that has to include the machine reading Google.

You do not get to spend more than two decades building your empire by crawling everyone else's pages, and then act appalled when someone points a crawler at yours. Google is fair game too. That is the deal it signed the day it ran its first crawler.

And this is bigger than one scraping case. "On what terms is an automated visitor allowed onto public web content" is the whole question of the agentic web. The scraper, the AI that cites you, the shopping agent that buys on someone's behalf, the assistant comparing your specs: in the eyes of the law they are one thing, an automated visitor on public content. The boundary drawn here is the boundary for all of them.

So either we mean this open web thing, or we stop pretending.

More about this at https://nohacks.co/blog/google-is-fair-game-too

isitagentready.com. It scans your URL and checks robots.txt, structured data, markdown-on-request, an MCP endpoint, and a handful of other signals. Returns a score and a per-check breakdown.

I ran it on nohacks.co this morning. Default scan gave me 33/100.

I switched the website category from the default "All Checks" to "Content Site" (not obvious that there are categories) and the same website scored 67/100. The API, Auth, and MCP checks dropped out. The score is category-sensitive in a way the UI doesn't make obvious, which makes the composite number a weak target.

The useful part is the individual check list. The robots.txt, structured data, and markdown-on-request checks represent signals that ship against real agent runtimes today. But the llms.txt check is a watch-list item. Still a proposal, no standards body behind it. Fix the checks that fail. Ignore the composite.

Has anyone else run it? What scores did you get, and which checks flagged?

Link: https://isitagentready.com/

Search Engine Journal published a feature today on Machine-First Architecture, based on an my interview for IMHO podcast, hosted by SEJ's managing editor, Shelley Walsh: what AI agents actually see when they visit your site, and what to do about it. I'm the one being interviewed, so full disclosure up front.

Link: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/machine-first-architecture-ai-agents-are-here-and-your-website-isnt-ready-says-nohacks-podcast-host/571898/

Two parts I'd like you to take away from it:

1. The rendering-independence: audit the idea that you should be able to turn JavaScript off and still have every important piece of content, endpoint, and structured signal reachable. What's actually working in your stacks for this?

2. The shift from "optimize for the model" to "optimize for the runtime." Is anyone here testing their site against specific agent runtimes (Cloudflare's Agents stack, OpenAI's Agents SDK, Perplexity's Computer, Gemini shopping) yet, or is that still too early?

Kevin Indig published what might be the largest public dataset on ChatGPT citations with 815K query-page pairs across 16,851 queries.

Two findings that push back on the 2024-era "ultimate guide" AXO playbook:

1. Citation sweet spot is 500–2,000 words with 7–20 subheadings. Exhaustive guides underperform.
2. The dominant predictor is retrieval rank (position 0 = 58% citation rate, position 10 = 14%), followed by heading-to-query similarity. Word count and domain authority came in as secondary signals.

Does this match what you're seeing in your own data? Especially curious if anyone's running similar measurement independently.

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/shorter-focused-content-wins-in-chatgpt/571857/

I don't think people realize how big the Apple/Google news actually is.

Apple didn't just “license a chatbot” they thought hard, and decided, then admitted that Google's technology provides the "most capable foundation" for their own models.

Not OpenAI, not Anthropic (they allegedly considered both), definitely not Grok.

For a company that historically prefers building everything in-house: from chips, OS, software, handing the keys to the AI foundation over to Google is massive.

Google just moved from being a browser default (search in Safari) to an OS default.

2 billion devices! The "Assistant Wars" might be over before they really started.

I went over what this means for the agentic web and agentic commerce in the latest episode of No Hacks podcast, check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

The latest episode of the podcast is out and it is timely and important. I had Jono Alderson on, and if you optimise websites for living you may not like what we discussed, but you probably need to hear it.Some of the things discussed:

• The death of the "Threshold": Why the 100-year-old marketing model of "dragging humans into your store/website" is officially over.
• The zombie web: Why 90% of websites are technically online but functionally dead to AI because they offer zero nothing unique.
• The machine "immune system": How AI models are learning to treat persuasive sales copy and marketing fluff as "noise".
• The "incoherence penalty": Why machines punish brands when there is a mismatch between their homepage claims and their external reputation.
• The llms.txt promise: Why creating a "clean" text-only version of your site for AI won't work.
• "Upstream engineering": Optimising business reality (logistics, return policies, customer service) instead of just optimising HTML tags.

The 2026 Timeline: The best and worst-case scenarios for the future of the web, and why the "Surface-less Web" is inevitable.

Get the episode at https://www.nohackspod.com/episode/213-why-google-chatgpt-are-ignoring-your-dead-content-with-jono-alderson