Across the 12 sites we own or look after, Grok referred exactly one visit in fifteen months, measured 9 September 2026. That is not a reason to ignore it. Grok is a search engine now, answering from live X posts and web pages, and one public study puts its citations at roughly 45% X posts and 55% web pages. A referrer sending nothing yet means the slots inside its answers are still mostly empty. The web half is what good SEO already builds. The X half is the one almost no local business bothers with. We report AI assistant referrals for every client now, including the lines that say zero, because a zero you are watching is more useful than a number you never checked.

New figures from GMBapi, reported by Search Engine Land, cover US Google Business Profile performance in the second quarter of 2026 against the same quarter a year earlier. Calls fell 11.9% and website clicks fell 12.5%. Direction requests rose 21.1%. The impression data says where it all went. Mobile Maps impressions were up 30.4% and desktop search was up 13.9%, while mobile search fell 20.1%. Desktop Maps impressions rose 3.2% after falling 17.9% in the first quarter, and that reversal is the bit worth noticing. Read together, those numbers describe customers finishing the whole journey inside Maps instead of starting on a results page and clicking out to a website. The turnaround on desktop suggests it is no longer only a phone habit. Two practical consequences. Your profile is now the shopfront rather than the signpost, so an empty description, missing hours or three photographs from 2019 costs you the enquiry directly rather than costing you a click. And if you judge your local performance on website clicks from your profile, you are watching a number that fell by an eighth year on year for reasons that have nothing to do with anything you did. Calls and direction requests are the ones to track. These are US figures, so treat the exact percentages as a direction of travel rather than as your own. Pull your own from the profile performance report today, compare the last 90 days with the previous 90, and write the date next to them. Worth asking back: has your profile's website click count dropped this year while your phone kept ringing at the same rate? That combination is exactly the pattern in this data, and it is the one most likely to be misread as a problem. Source: GMBapi data for Q2 2026, reported by Search Engine Land.

Search Engine Roundtable reported a sharp spike in ranking movement on 15 September 2026. Barry Schwartz wrote that he suspected the start of a Google update and doubted Google would confirm it soon. Thirteen separate volatility trackers were showing movement, and UK forum posts that morning described results looking poor and traffic being very bad. As of today, 17 September 2026, Google has still not confirmed anything. There were also unsettled results between 4 and 12 September, so this is the second wobble this month. Here is the part that matters if you run a local business. When this happens the instinct is to change something. That is almost always the wrong move, because you cannot tell a real loss from a two day fluctuation while the fluctuation is still happening. Do this instead. Write down today's position for your five main terms, with the date, so you have a before. Then check your profile's calls and direction requests rather than your rankings, because that is the number that actually pays you. Then wait a week. If it has recovered in a week, nothing happened and you have saved yourself a fortnight of pointless edits. If it has not, you now have a dated before and after, which is the only honest way to work out what changed. And resist the offers. Volatility weeks are when the emails arrive promising to fix a drop that nobody has diagnosed yet. If somebody wants to sell you a recovery before Google has even confirmed an update, they are guessing as well. Source: Search Engine Roundtable, 15 September 2026.

Morning all. Something worth ten minutes of your week, rather than a rebuild. Google is adding a Data Strength Uplift Metric to Google Ads. Google says it calculates the additional conversions recovered by your first-party data setup. Recovered is the important word: these are sales that were already happening and were simply never counted, so nobody is promising you more customers. In the same announcement Data Manager moves into Google Analytics and Display and Video 360, and enhanced conversions launch in both, which is how a small advertiser would send that data at all. The gap is wider for us than for an online shop. A click becomes a call, the call becomes a quote, and the money arrives on a card machine that has never heard of Google Ads. The one thing to do this week: open your conversion actions and write down, in plain words, what each one records. If that list is shorter than the ways people actually buy from you, you have found the work. https://youtu.be/m0iWhx7Akmw The full write-up, with every claim linked: https://www.uklocalseo.com/blog/google-ads-data-strength-uplift-metric

Morning all. Something you can actually touch today, which makes a change. Google announced on 10 September that it is launching the Gemini app for Windows. It says the app is available on the day of the announcement, globally, for Windows 10 and 11, and that you download it at gemini.google/desktop. It also says you press Alt + Space on your PC at any time to open Gemini over your active work. No waiting room for us this time, so your customers can be using it this afternoon. The one thing to do this week: install it on the machine you work on, press those two keys, and ask it who does your trade in your town, in a customer's words rather than yours. Write down what it says and which businesses it names. That is the most honest audit of your online presence you will get for free, and it takes a quarter of an hour. https://youtu.be/OFyd1HzX5KE The full write-up, with Google's own wording and the source: https://www.uklocalseo.com/blog/gemini-app-arrives-on-windows-desktop