August 2026 SEO and AI News: EU AI transparency law, Claude watermarks, Google’s anti-scraping URLs

0:00On this week's episode of Search with Canada, I'm recapping all of the important news from August 2026, including Google's new anti-tracking and scraping URLs they've been using for search results. Claude is adding watermarks to AI-generated content, updates from Microsoft Clarity, and a couple more stories as well. Stay tuned for that on this week's episode.

0:25Hello and welcome to Search with Canada, the podcast where I discuss the latest SEO news and also interview the best and brightest minds around the world of SEO and AI search. My name is Jack Chambers-Ward. I am your host as always. And this week, as I said, at the little start of the show, I'm going to be talking about all of the important SEO news from August 2026, basically going through what we covered in our Core Updates newsletter. If you're not subscribed, go to coreupdates.com, click the link in the show notes, and you will get basically a highlight reel of all of the important SEO and AI search news every single Monday morning from me and Mark Williams Cook delivered straight to your inbox.

1:08You also get all of Mark's SEO tips from LinkedIn throughout that past week, the latest episode of the podcast as well, and other bits and things. We did a free giveaway for some tickets for our upcoming conference. We've done giveaways for other conference tickets as well. There's lots of cool stuff going on. Go and subscribe at coreupdates.com. And basically, this is what this episode is going to be. I'm going to go through the five newsletters that we did throughout August 2026 and basically pick out the top headline from each one. So let's get stuck into it without any further ado, shall we?

1:41Here is core updates from the 3rd of August 2026. And let's get stuck in because our headline was AI generated content must be labeled clearly according to new EU guidelines. and basically this is a report and I'll go over to this report here from Techspot. EU will require companies to label AI generated content and that basically started at the start of August 2026. So if you're watching this in the future, which you must be because this is recorded, then you will probably already know about some of this stuff and the big companies, TikTok, Meta, Google are already including these kind of metadata labels and watermarks and things in there.

2:29And also we'll get into a case later on and a discussion later on about Claude adding watermarks as well. So let's get into this a little bit. The main takeaway here, I'll read this and then we'll get into some thoughts and summaries and things like that. Companies operating in the European Union are now subject to a new requirement, clearly label content created or altered by artificial intelligence. The EU's latest transparency rules take effect covering everything from chatbot responses to AI generated images, audio and video. The aim is simple. Users should be able to tell without guessing whether what they are seeing or hearing is real or machine generated.

3:06So this is obviously part of a broader discussion when it comes to the European Commission and the EU and their discussion of transparency around AI that has been going on for the last couple of years or so. And I think this is a very positive step. Personally, I've seen quite a few ads. I've seen quite a few, especially like mobile game ads and stuff like that, that are AI generated. I saw Samsung got called out for doing an AI generated ad the other day. I know Coca-Cola has done AI generated ads as well, but it's not just ads. It can be audio. It can be video. It can be basically anything. And this includes things like what we've done with the SEO pattern podcast what mark generated using notebook lm before and this is definitely something i think we're going to see more of and basically this is more about the transparency from the legal side of things and to help users understand what is ai generated what is not it's not necessarily calling into question the quality of ai generated text audio or video but now legally if you're working in the EU, if your company gives services, products, you serve users in the EU, then you need to disclose if something is created wholly or significantly altered using AI.

4:25For example, if I edited this video and change my background and all that kind of stuff using AI, I would have to disclose that still, even though this is an original person talking on the camera and talking into this microphone right now as part of this podcast. If I significantly alter or edit it, If I change my voice, change the audio, whatever it is, I still need to declare that as well. And this basically applies for the most part in terms of content created professionally. So especially things that are labeled or are supposed to be things that need to be labeled when they are in public interest.

5:02So if you're making a statement about your company, if you're making a statement about your latest product or anything like that, the statement and that kind of information, the description, all that kind of stuff needs to clearly include the fact that this was AI generated. Meta has started adding AI info labels. So if you can click the top and LinkedIn does the same as well. And from a technical standpoint, like there is more to this than just the little on-screen stuff. There's metadata included. I know Google have already talked about a lot of their AI content detection systems as well. So this is all going to be a thing.

5:47I'm no surprise here, right? I don't think anyone is surprised. And the guys at Google have talked about the complexity of all of this. And I think there is a kind of hesitancy from a lot of these companies to deal with this at such a big scale because the rollout of this can be complicated. But if you are not already doing this and you are creating AI generated imagery or content or anything like that, you're a month out of date almost. Like I said, this was the news from the 3rd of August. So if you're working in the EU, if your users are from the EU, then you need to be disclosing and declaring what you are doing for AI generated content, whether it is AI generated or not.

6:31Next up, let's move on to the 10th of August, shall we? We'll get into some more interesting SEO ones. Don't worry. Cloudflare offers AI tracking and Google Search Console showing AI mode follow-ups. It's from the 10th of August. I'm actually going to go into one of the top stories here. Microsoft Clarity introduces branded and non-branded AI query data. I've touched on Clarity a couple of times on the show already, and we cover it a lot in core updates because we're talking about it with our clients at the moment. It's as simple as that. We talk about clarity and how much that platform not only brings the screen recording and user tracking stuff that you probably know it for already, it brings a lot of AI inside data.

7:17And Microsoft, to their credit, are doing a lot of stuff that no other company is doing. So if we switch over back here, I'll stick myself on the right. this is basically branded query segmentation for ai citations and there's already a bunch of stuff and a bunch of data i covered it in a previous episode i will link to that and we've covered it in previous news in core updates as well this is now adding branding labels so branded labels for queries and share of authority breakdown by query type and branded and non-branded filters on the main dashboard. So you can get an idea of share of authority for branded queries and non-branded queries.

8:01So you can then work out, OK, do I get the majority of my visibility from people searching for my brand or do I get the majority of my AI search visibility from people searching more general, more generic search terms? Right. It's obviously a huge thing we've talked about for a long time in SEO. It's a huge thing we obviously talk about when it comes to migrations and for planning strategies in general. You want to be thinking about what queries are branded, what are non-branded, and where basically the source of your traffic is. And I think this is particularly interesting because we see so much brand discussion happening now, so much brand being talked about in, especially when it comes to AI search, and knowing about branded queries and how they are being marked.

8:47And this is something Google Search Console has recently introduced as well, although I found that filter. I was literally doing it for a client earlier today and found it pretty finicky. It wasn't quite sure what was branded and what was not branded by some of the sub-brands of that client I was working on. So it's not perfect. Neither is this, for the record. I was having a look at this the other day with one of my colleagues, and this dashboard isn't perfect, but it does a decent job, similar to Google search conference, a similar kind of way. and this is basically letting us like i said divide that ai search stuff up and understand branded versus non-branded stuff there's a bunch of other data here like i said i've covered that previously as well and there is a lot of discussion around you know how much your brand matters whether you're growing branded search and branded queries and whether you should be focusing on non-branded stuff.

9:46And obviously, this is obviously focusing on grounded queries as well. So to clarify, that's not from, you know, training data stuff. This is grounded query searches. So things that trigger a web search within AI systems. So yeah, new filters, branded and non-branded for Microsoft Clarity. Honestly, I feel like I've talked about Clarity enough that if you're not already thinking about using it or using it for some of your clients or your site, It is completely free. You maybe need to speak to your developers and stuff, but it is completely free to implement. And it does the whole hot jar thing of tracking your users, stream recordings, scroll depth, all that kind of stuff, but also has a bunch of AI insights in there that tie into Bing Webmaster Tools and all that kind of stuff.

10:34So if you haven't already, get Microsoft Clarity set up for you and your clients. we literally had this company-wide kind of uh declaration across all of our clients the other day where some of the team and i and mark were talking about if we don't have clarity installed we're losing out on free information and i believe i said this last time i covered clarity on the show it's free insights and data in an area of search where we do not get much data Google has been pretty hesitant to give us good actual data for AI search from AI mode and AI reviews. They've now got the generative AI report in Search Console and a couple of other little bits.

11:18But really, this is one of the best ways for accessing data from AI search for your site and for your clients. It's as simple as that, really. Next up, something I mentioned earlier, Claude Marks AI content. And there's another Microsoft Clarity thing here, but I'm only going to do one story per edition of core updates. So let's get into Claude. And I'll move myself to the left here in case you're watching on video. How Claude Marks AI generated content. So this is Anthropic talking about how they signed the EU AI Act Article 50 brackets to Code of Practice on transparency of AI generated content as a provider of both generative AI models and generative AI systems.

12:08Good Lord. So this is kind of tying into the declare your AI stuff that I covered a little while ago, a few minutes ago. And this is very much, in fact, I'm going to zoom out slightly here so you get the full picture. There we go. Let me just zoom in. There we go. You get the full thing. if you're watching on YouTube, hopefully that makes sense. If you're watching on Spotify, hello, thank you for watching on Spotify. We'll update this article as we go along. So this is something worth bookmarking. Of course, links for everything will be in the video description and show notes down below. Basically, this is if you are directly exporting from Claude as of the 2nd of August.

12:50So I'm recording this on the 2nd of September. So exactly a month ago, So every generated text and generated file will carry embedded watermarks that you will basically, unless you're really, really finicky, not be able to remove out of the metadata. This also applies to API stuff, co-working, clawed tag, clawed code, all of that kind of stuff. And watermark detection is available to certain companies, basically. certain organizations under EU law, like law enforcement and media and researchers and all this kind of stuff. And basically, this gets into a whole detail about how it works. I won't go into the technical details.

13:38You can go and read this in more detail itself. But if you have somehow missed this, I feel like this kind of took over LinkedIn when it was announced. There is, like I said, embedded watermarks in text. There's signed data in the metadata and for any sort of like official governing body or anything like that they will be able to tell if you have ai generated and just exported directly or copied and pasted directly from claude basically so this is essentially heading towards that transparency thing we talked about earlier the fact that companies need to declare and disclose whether the things are AI generated.

14:22This is Claude kind of pointing in that direction of a, we're already going to add a watermark to it. However, the interesting thing is this is not enough to cover you from that earlier story. So if I go back to this earlier story here, the EU, you need to declare and disclose whether and label it clearly AI generated content. This isn't enough, the Claude watermark to cover you legally. You need to be able to fully declare it. And a lack of a detector mark doesn't mean the content was AI generated. That's an interesting part there as well. So basically, this is you need to be as transparent as possible.

15:08Be honest with the people that are consuming your content, reading your content, watching your content, whatever it is. You need to be as transparent as possible when it comes to AI generating stuff. And you could get in quite a lot of legal trouble. Think about the GDPR fines and stuff like that. It is usually in the millions or tens of millions of euros in terms of fines. So bear that in mind when it comes to marking and watermarking and all that kind of stuff and disclosing it. And Claude's going to kind of do a little bit of it for you, but you need to be more explicit with your labeling as well to cover yourself for that EU law.

15:45Next up, we move on to the 24th of August and we'll get into Google adds new visualizations to AI overview. So this is the AI generated visualizations we've discussed on the SERPs a couple of times. Their generative UI is now bringing in like visualizations and interactive tools and simulations directly into AI overviews. Google literally gives the example Of course, they frame it in a different way, but this is how Google discusses it here. We're introducing tools to help you learn new concepts, tackle tricky subjects and organize your study sessions with AI in search. Sure. Understand concepts with interactive visuals.

16:32So this is the example they did, and I was trying to replicate it a little while ago. I was trying to explain it to somebody. They did a black hole visualization on the SERP. And basically this will do cool little animations, 3D things, graphs, all that kind of stuff. And Google actually have some examples here of how this works. So if I click on here, obviously create a 3D visual to help me understand how electrons in the Bohr model move versus the quantum cloud. Physics. It's my thing. I've got a physics degree in case you didn't know. This is some nerdy stuff. and you can tell it to create a 3D model, and ta-da, there we go.

17:13We have the Bore Solar model versus the Quantum Cloud model, and you can adjust animation rates and speeds, you can do side-by-side comparisons. It is pretty cool. However, the problem for us as SEOs, like, as a physics nerd, very, very cool, right? As a user, as a content enjoyer, cool. However, as an SEO, as a content creator, we do talk a lot about the, you know, ability to create these kind of tools and calculators and all this kind of stuff when it comes to our clients. You create a cool, shareable thing. We talk about it a lot with our digital PR team. We talk about it a lot with our content team.

17:57you want to create these unique things, unique visualizations, unique. And Google's kind of stealing it and put it straight on the SERP. So here's another example for you. I want to go deeper on the reactions for elements up to Argon, creating an interactive visual that shows how each one reacts with. And then we'll go into creating the layout. Here's the first 18 elements. Here's a full visual. It's pretty crazy. Like, it's pretty impressive. like what would happen if you drop each one into water what color do they go how much they explode all this kind of stuff it's pretty cool but i feel like interactive tools calculators visualizations all that kind of stuff has kind of been a lot of the bread and butter of creating unique shareable content so if google is basically doing this on the SERP that could affect quite a lot of people who are creating these kinds of visualizations.

18:57Next up, we have interactive quizzes. So you can quiz yourself on things. So this is talking about SATs, so SAT practice quiz. You can do that directly on the SERP. You don't have to do that in Gemini. And it can take the information from your previous searches, base it on what you've researched and all that kind of stuff. And the search they use here is create a quiz with the most commonly tested vocab words to help me prepare for the SAT. And you click AI mode, it goes boom and it does all the cool stuff. Learn each step with lens. Number three, if you're stuck on a tricky step, I want to double check your work and the coming weeks lens in search will offer a new interactive learning experience that will break down tough concepts.

19:44Here is a visualization. You point it at your homework and it will re-visualize that and it can turn it into tables it can correct things it will adjust and turn it into a different visualization it's really interesting really cool and a nice way of like repurposing that content again it's repurposing existing content so not great for us as seos necessarily then gemini notebook formerly notebook lm that i mentioned earlier you can analyse and compare across different notebooks now and you can cost reference stuff and you can find them all in AI mode and search basically. So it's all like integrating all this stuff.

20:32You don't have to go off specifically and use notebook.lm. It's now directly integrated into search and you can give it files and add context and all this kind of stuff. So it will know what to search for. So I think it's cool. And you can also create files. Like you can add a photo to handwritten notes with lectures, slides and create all this, like create a one page cheat sheet. And they use the example here from a history class. This is obviously very focused. And they often do this as they focus on the study side of things because it seems the most innocent, right? They focus on, yeah, this will help students to understand blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

21:12Yeah, people, I think the majority of people are not students, though. And I think this is where a lot of that kind of initial presentation from Google kind of falls flat. Clearly good intentions, want a better phrase, to initially present this from a studying and academic point of view. However, this will get used a lot for other things. The majority of searches are not academic. So these visualizations is creating documents. It's going to be used in so many other ways. And I think Google does purposefully frame this in an academic way to make it seem like, hey, we can help you search. We'll help you study with Google.

21:52And actually, it's like, here are new ways we're stealing your content and your visualizations and stuff. So, yeah, to summarize that, we've got you can create custom files by combining things. So create me a PDF of these handwritten notes, this file, this image, this photo. you can integrate your Gemini notebooks formerly notebook LM is now integrated into search and notebooks are available you know to organize through in AI mode you can now search directly and integrate things and combine things in lens so the camera option and then that can explain stuff label stuff pinpoint where you made mistakes all that kind of thing directly from lens you can do quizzes, interactive quizzes, and also visualizations, interactive visualizations that you can then customize all in AI mode and AI overviews.

22:44Pretty crazy, pretty, pretty big update, in my opinion, to Google. Last but not least, let's get to the final updates of August 2026 from the 31st of August. Google's new anti-scraping URLs. else. This has been a big, big discussion point. Shout out, of course, to the one and only Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land. So Google now have a google.com slash goto, so G-O-T-O, tracking parameter. And this is basically working as a redirect with search results. And this is Google basically trying to stop people from scraping and abusing search results. They claim, says a quote from a Google Spokesperson here, we have a long history of deploying technical measures against involving forms of abuse, and we regularly take steps to protect our services and users.

23:44Yeah, sure, that's cool. But like a lot of tools were kind of freaking out. And you can see here the example Barry's put here is where you would usually see, you know if you hover over a link you can see the bottom left preview the little parameter down the bottom left there of your browser it actually adds a google.com slash goto and then a query string url and then a bunch of stuff leading to that url so this in theory is preventing people from scraping search results possibly tied to the recent legal issues that google have had with SERP API, SERP API, and how they, there we go, Barry Mentos here, it's likely to make it more difficult for SERP API who Google sued and is struggling to beat in court from scraping search results.

24:41AI companies and other tools scrape search results as well, obviously, and I know that there have been statements from SEMrush, there's statements from Ahrefs, this is not affecting tracking data before you start worrying if this is still news to you. This is an interesting thing, I think, because it does kind of change how Google is presenting URLs. But thankfully, it doesn't seem to have a big impact on tracking or the data that we're getting as SEOs. I think that was the big worry is that it can suddenly, you know, when they change the parameters of how many results you get on the page, they did the num100 change.

25:21I don't know if you remember that from a little while ago. They changed a parameter of how many search results appear per page and that completely screwed a bunch of the tracking tools, rank tracking and things like that like Ahrefs, Systrix, SEMrush, SE ranking, all those kind of guys. Thankfully that didn't happen when they rolled out these go-to pass-through redirect URLs but it is clearly Google trying to just keep a hold and try to protect themselves a little bit more from this kind of third-party scraping tools and things like that. So to recap, that is all of the news, headline news from August of 2026.

26:00We had EU requirements for labeling AI generated content. We had the Microsoft Clarity branded and non-branded new filters, clawed watermarking its content, new visualizations and interactive elements in AI mode, and Google adding that go-to redirecting pass-through URL as well. Five bits of news, I think the biggest headline pieces of news from August 2026. Hopefully these little podcasts are very helpful to give you a quick little summary of what's been happening recently over the last few weeks in search. And yeah, if you're not already subscribed, like I said, go to coreupdates.com, check out our newsletter.

26:44Mark and I write the news every single week and you get it delivered to your inbox. We keep it streamlined as possible. We keep it usually fewer than 10 pieces of news, like I said, plus Mark's tips, plus the podcast and a few extra giveaways and other bits and pieces as well. So go and subscribe to Core Updates at coreupdates.com. In the meantime, I mentioned a little while ago I'm building up to season five launching in October. I'm very excited. we're going to have a big kind of relaunch and rebrand heading towards AI search focused episodes for the foreseeable future. Basically, starting in October, we'll be discussing everything from how to track AI search visibility, what things to pay attention to, how it affects things like technical SEO and crawlability, how it affects the kind of content you should be making, what kind of strategies, how has it changed, what still works from traditional SEO now into AEO, GEO, whatever you're calling it.

27:47It's going to be an ongoing series. Season five is going to be focused on AI search. And I've already recorded a couple of episodes with some fantastic guests, some returning faces, some brand new faces, all of them very smart, very interesting people who We have a lot to say about AI Search. So stay tuned for that launching in October. Throughout September, I'm still building up hype to Search Norwich. Excel, if you haven't already got your tickets, is in less than three weeks. If you're listening to this on Monday when it comes out, it's on the 24th of September. If you are local, if you're in Norwich or Norfolk or East Anglia and you have already got tickets and you're listening to this or watching this, come along.

28:28Hit a link in the show notes. That'll get you a nice little discount with SWC podcast as the little discount code there. And yeah, come and join us for a full day of SEO and AI search insights and a bunch of brilliant speakers. I'll be there hosting and emceeing. The whole Canada team will be there. Help you make sure you get all your food and your drinks. Make sure you're in the right place. The theatre is right here in Norwich. The first time we're ever doing something like this. and it's going to be at the Matter Market Theatre on the 24th of September, 2026. Come and check us out. I'll put links for everything I've mentioned, all the news stories, newsletters and everything else in the show notes.

29:09Thank you very much for watching. Thank you very much for listening and I'll see you next week.