Google Feeds Rival SEO Tools False Results as Agentic Search War Escalates

Google deliberately served misleading search results to rival SEO tracking tools, according to five SEO service providers. Semrush, Ahrefs, DemandSphere, SEOmonitor and others say Google has begun crafting false response pages to throw off their tracking, Search Engine Land reports.

In one documented case, a baby stroller search in Brazil returned dental supplies. The Portuguese word "carrinhos" can mean "strollers" or carts used in dental offices, but the ambiguity was not accidental, the tools argue. Google Search understood the stroller intent. It fed its rivals an irrelevant result anyway.

Why would Google pollute its own results?

The mechanism matters here. Agentic search tools and LLMs (large language models, the systems behind chatbots) scrape web pages to build their answers. That scraping threatens two things at once: first-party data ownership and the direct reader relationship.

Some content owners now restrict public access while licensing directly to LLM providers. Reddit is one prominent example. But the Google case introduces a sharper problem. A core data source can act as a fierce competitor in agentic search and marketing analytics, and it can poison responses when an agentic rival scrapes a page.

The question for publishers follows directly: allow agents to peruse content freely, or block scrapers as potential usurpers of the customer relationship? No consensus has formed.

Who runs ads at the new Paramount?

Skydance CEO David Ellison has named his combined company's advertising team. Former Paramount CRO Jay Askinasi will lead it, according to Mike Shields in his Next in Media newsletter.

One of the team's most pressing decisions concerns Skydance's ad tech stack. Rumors say Skydance is considering dropping FreeWheel as its ad server, though Shields does not cite a source for the speculation.

The stakes for FreeWheel are high. Comcast owns the ad server today, but FreeWheel will move to NBCU when Comcast spins it off next year. Losing Skydance's business would be a major blow to the fledgling spin-off. Skydance also likely does not want its ad data living inside a server owned by a network rival, Shields notes.

Speculation also holds that Skydance plans to unify Paramount+ and Pluto TV into a single ad tech stack, while having no interest in building its own technology. Google is a plausible winner of the business, Shields writes, because it previously ran ads for CBS All Access, the precursor to Paramount+. Skydance may hesitate to share data with Google. That reservation could disappear if Skydance converts its existing YouTube TV carriage deals into exclusive ad products.

Where did the car commercials go?

Automotive ad spending has not vanished. It moved closer to home.

Less than 10% of US ad spend will go toward automotive ads this year, a first, according to ad intelligence platform Guideline. Local campaigns took 40% of US linear TV automotive ad spend from January through August, up from 20% over the same period in 2023.

Financial pressure drives part of the shift. Gina Reduto, EVP of strategy, advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, cited "financial pressures stemming from tariffs, interest rates and the rising cost of gasoline" in comments to The Wall Street Journal. All marketers are "being tasked with demonstrating the value of every dollar that they spend," Reduto said.

Brands are also leaving linear TV for streaming's targeting control. For American Honda, streaming is "where we know the eyeballs are," said Megan Amic, the automaker's head of digital marketing and strategy in North America.

Also this week

• L Catterton announced a strategic investment in Glance, an AI shopping agent created by InMobi.
• Salesforce customers brace for new fees to use Claude within its product suite, The Information reports.
• Anthropic's ad bill is soaring, Digiday reports, though it remains a pittance next to its other costs.
• Google has not confirmed anything, but Search Engine Roundtable reports signs of a Search ranking update.

People moves

Purpose Worldwide promoted Hollis Guerra to partner and expanded its leadership board. Liquid I.V. hired former Poppi CMO Jenny Danzi to lead its marketing, Adweek reports. Donna Sharp became general manager of Life360 Ads, Campaign US reports.

If Google confirms the poisoned-results practice, expect scraper-versus-platform escalation to become the defining data story of the agentic search era.