AI Search, Claude Workflows & Google Crawl Limits | HighDegree* Marketing – Issue 29

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Google’s agentic search shift, Claude records your workflows on video, Clarity tracks AI citations, crawl budgets punish bulk content, and SEO rewards builders.

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Hi Marketers,

Welcome to the new issue of HighDegree*: Cutting Through the Noise in SEO & Digital Marketing

Google’s Q2 earnings call was less about revenue and more about direction. The company is spending billions to build infrastructure for agentic search, and the gap between its ad revenue and cloud revenue says the rest. Anthropic’s Claude can now learn your workflows by watching you work. Microsoft built a free AI citation tracker that paid tools charge for. On the SEO side, bulk AI content is still collapsing under crawl budget pressure. And Nick LeRoy had a clear-eyed take on why years of experience won’t get you the SEO job anymore.

Let’s jump in.

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➞ Digital Marketing This Week

• Google’s Earnings Call Reveals the Real Future of AI Search
• Claude Can Now Watch Your Screen and Learn Your Workflows
• Microsoft Clarity’s Free Tool Tracks How AI Answers Use Your Content
• Why Google’s Crawl Budget Is Quietly Killing Scaled AI Content
• The SEO Job Interview Mistake That Costs You the Offer

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➞ Subscribe

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➞ Google’s Earnings Call Reveals the Real Future of AI Search

Google’s Q2 2026 posted its first negative cash flow since the IPO, which sounds bad until you see where the money went. Google spent $6 billion on physical infrastructure this quarter, 60% on servers, 40% on data centers. Revenue is still up 24% year-over-year.

SEO consultant Marie Haynes went through the call and pulled out what site owners should actually care about. Sundar Pichai used the word “agentic” repeatedly. Search is shifting from returning links to completing tasks. Google has already announced direct app connections inside the search interface: an agent that finds a recipe, pulls the ingredients, and places the Instacart order without the user leaving.

Two numbers from Haynes worth keeping: Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is now the model routing AI Overviews queries, and Google’s Adsense revenue fell 1% year-over-year while Cloud revenue jumped 87%. That’s not a revenue story. It’s a business model story.

Read the full report from mariehaynes.com ➞

While Google reshapes how traffic flows at the platform level, Anthropic is reshaping how individual workers get their own tasks done.

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➞ Claude Can Now Watch Your Screen and Learn Your Workflows

Anthropic added “Record a Skill” to Claude Cowork. You screen-record yourself doing a task, narrate what you’re doing and why, and Claude turns it into a skill it can run on its own later.

The obvious use case is anything you do on a schedule. Compile a weekly report from three data sources? Record yourself doing it once, talk through your logic, and Claude builds a reusable skill from that session. Next time, you trigger it instead of starting over.

It’s live now for Pro, Max, and Team subscribers through the desktop app. One Pro user on Reddit said it resets roughly every five hours, though Anthropic hasn’t confirmed the cadence officially. OpenAI’s Codex has had a similar feature since June (called Record and Replay), but that one is Mac-only and locked out of the EEA, Switzerland, and the UK. The Claude version works across platforms.

Read the full report from searchenginejournal.com ➞

Teaching AI your own workflows is one problem. Knowing whether AI is using your published content is another, and Microsoft just made the second one measurable for free.

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➞ Microsoft Clarity Now Tracks How AI Answers Use Your Content

Microsoft Clarity launched Topic Insights on July 9, a free tool that shows site owners not just whether their content shows up in AI answers, but how much of each answer it actually drives. It groups AI citation queries by topic and layers in competitor data, so you can see exactly where rivals are getting cited and where you’re not.

The distinction Clarity draws between appearing and contributing matters. A passing mention is not the same as being the source an AI answer was built on.

The numbers from NP Digital’s May 2026 survey of 500 marketers put the content gap in context: original research earns AI citations 82% of the time, the highest of eleven content types tested. Generic blog posts: 25%. Product pages: 14%. Microsoft’s own data puts AI citation traffic at 3x the conversion rate of other channels. The tool is free, lives in Clarity’s AI Visibility dashboard, and is in beta.

Read the full report from clarity.microsoft.com ➞

Tracking AI citation performance is one problem. Avoiding the indexing collapse that bulk AI content causes is a different one, and it’s hitting more sites than people realize.

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➞ Why Google’s Crawl Budget Is Quietly Killing Scaled AI Content

When AI made bulk content production cheap, a lot of teams ran the same play: spin up thousands of pages, rank for everything, collect traffic. SEJ contributor Dan Taylor explains why that keeps failing, and Google’s stance on AI content is not the reason.

Google doesn’t crawl everything on every site. It allocates crawl resources based on quality signals. Flood a domain with thin, repetitive pages and Google reads that as a quality problem and pulls back crawling across the whole site. Pages don’t just fail to rank. They don’t get indexed. One batch of low-quality pages burns the crawl budget, indexing resources drop, and the whole pipeline stalls.

Taylor’s point is that AI content is not the disqualifier. Missing human judgment is. Skip topic selection, accuracy checks, internal linking, and whether a page actually answers what someone needs, and the volume itself becomes the liability. The sites seeing traffic drops and manual penalties treated content as a numbers game without editorial strategy behind it.

Read the full report from searchenginejournal.com ➞

Bad content strategy has consequences on the technical side. On the career side, Nick LeRoy has thoughts on what separates the SEOs who get hired to fix these messes from the ones still sending résumés.

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➞ How to Stop Being the Forgettable Candidate in an SEO Interview

Nick LeRoy runs SEOJobs.com and gets a steady stream of DMs from people asking how to land their next role. He always asks the same follow-up: what makes you different from the other 300 applicants? The most common answer is years of experience. That answer goes nowhere.

His case is simple. SEO competency gets you the interview. By the fifth or sixth candidate, everyone can talk through crawl budgets, canonical tags, and internal linking. At that point hiring managers aren’t testing knowledge anymore. They’re trying to remember which candidate they’d actually recall the next morning.

LeRoy’s answer is work you built when nobody asked for it. A small SEO tool, a testing site, a newsletter, a GitHub project, volunteer organic search help for a nonprofit. The project doesn’t need to be profitable or even successful. What it shows is curiosity and follow-through, the two things that don’t show up in a bullet point. In a market with more qualified candidates than open roles, competency is the entry requirement. Being memorable is the job.

Read the full report from seoforlunch.com ➞

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➞ From Google

Everything from Google search this week —

→ Google’s Liz Reid Discusses Persistent Autonomous Search (searchenginejournal.com)

→ Google AI Mode Ads Rarely Match the Sources It Cites (searchenginejournal.com)

→ Google: We Send Billions of Clicks to Websites Weekly Through AI Search (seroundtable.com)

→ Introducing Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber (blog.google)

→ “Are You A Bot” Screens Can Get Your Pages Dropped By Google (searchenginejournal.com)

→ Google Downplays Search Console “Error” Reports, Says Many Aren’t Real Problems (searchenginejournal.com)

→ Google Explains When To Use Search Console’s Validate Fix (searchenginejournal.com)

→ Google Updates Its Crawl Budget Doc: Every Site Starts on Conservative Crawl (seroundtable.com)

→ Google Warns Not to Place AI Labels on Corners of Images (seroundtable.com)

→ Google Explains SEO Connection of Site Quality to Non-Indexed Pages (searchenginejournal.com)

→ Google: Significant Differences With A/B Tests Can Show in Search Results (seroundtable.com)

→ Google: You’re Better Off Without Lastmod Dates When They Are Incorrect (seroundtable.com)

→ Google Search Ranking Volatility This Weekend – Around July 18th & 19th (seroundtable.com)

→ Local Services Ads Come to Google Ads via Performance Max (searchengineland.com)

→ Google Confirms Local Inventory Ads Will Be Enabled by Default (searchengineland.com)

→ Google Ads Simplifies GA4 Setup With Bulk Account Linking (searchengineland.com)

→ Google Ads Adds Missed Growth Estimates to the Recommendations Tab (searchengineland.com)

→ Google Tag Manager Adds Guided Setup for Google Ads Purchase Tracking (searchengineland.com)

→ Google Expands Brand Lift Studies With Enhanced Measurement Option (searchengineland.com)

→ BrightEdge Research: Google AI Cites Facebook in 19.5 Million Answers as Social Platforms Become AI Discovery Sources (globenewswire.com)

→ Google AI Mode Now Lets You Link and Interact With Select Apps (techcrunch.com)

→ Google is Renaming NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook (theverge.com)

→ Top Stories Roll Out in Google AI Overviews (searchengineland.com)

→ It’s Official: EU Will Force Google to Share Search Data and Open Up AI on Android (arstechnica.com)

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➞ AI + Social

Find out what’s happening in the social media and artificial intelligence world —

→ ChatGPT Showing Two Ads in Footer of Results (seroundtable.com) – OpenAI is now testing two ad placements in ChatGPT’s response footer, marking a clear move toward an ad-supported model.

→ ChatGPT Topic Ownership Is Rare, and SEO Alone Doesn’t Explain It (searchengineland.com) – New research shows that ranking well in Google does not reliably translate to being cited by ChatGPT, suggesting the two systems use different authority signals.

→ Music Streamer Deezer Says More Than 50% of Daily Uploads Are AI-Generated (techcrunch.com) – Deezer reports that over half of the tracks uploaded to its platform each day are now AI-generated, raising questions about content volume, curation, and rights.

→ YouTube Clarifies Policies Around AI Slop and Upsetting Videos (techcrunch.com) – YouTube updated its guidance to address mass-produced low-quality AI content and videos designed to disturb, giving creators clearer lines on what stays up.

→ Meta Business Agents Are Here. Marketers Should Pay Attention (searchengineland.com) – Meta’s new business agents can answer customer questions, manage leads, and handle basic transactions directly inside Messenger and Instagram.

→ How TikTok Shop Is Changing Innovation for Food and Beverage Brands (socialmediatoday.com) – Food and beverage brands are using TikTok Shop to test new products in real time, using viral content as both a marketing and market research tool.

→ TikTok Report Explores Creative AI Optimization for Brands (socialmediatoday.com) – TikTok’s latest report details how brands can use AI to tailor creative assets for different audience segments directly within the platform.

→ Reddit Says Brands Need to Connect With Communities (socialmediatoday.com) – Reddit released new guidance urging brands to participate authentically in subreddit communities rather than treating the platform as a standard ad channel.

→ Grok Build Is Now Open Source (x.ai) – xAI open-sourced Grok Build, the coding assistant layer of Grok, making it available for developers to run, modify, and extend.

→ X Adds Grok-Powered Insights to Ads Manager (socialmediatoday.com) – X is integrating Grok into its Ads Manager to surface audience and performance insights, giving advertisers an AI-assisted layer on top of campaign data.

→ X Updates Its Engagement Bait Detection (socialmediatoday.com) – X rolled out updates to its systems for detecting posts designed to artificially inflate engagement, targeting low-quality reply-farming behavior.

→ Claude Can Now Use Your 1Password Credentials for You (theverge.com) – Anthropic and 1Password integrated so Claude can securely log in to web services on your behalf during agentic tasks, without exposing your credentials.

→ Pinterest Advises Brands to Update Their Catalogs (socialmediatoday.com) – Pinterest is pushing brands to keep product catalogs fresh, citing that up-to-date listings see meaningfully better visibility in shopping and search results.

→ YouTube Refreshes Studio and Updates Video Guidance (socialmediatoday.com) – YouTube updated Studio’s interface and released new creator guidance on best practices for video performance, discoverability, and audience retention.

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➞ Worth Reading

These are the articles that will help you refine your marketing knowledge —

→ Google AI Mode’s Shift to Citing Itself (tryprofound.com)

→ AI Mode Now Shows Ads on Nearly 1 in 3 Commercial Queries (seranking.com)

→ How to Read the Indexing Report (youtube.com)

→ The Free Tools SEO Strategy: How to Rank With Calculators, Converters, and Generators (ahrefs.com)

→ 4 Types of Content Decay and How to Fix Each One (searchengineland.com)

→ What It Takes for SaaS Brands to Win in AI Search: 5 Data-Backed Findings and Actions (aleydasolis.com)

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➞ What This All Means for Your Strategy

The gap between teams moving deliberately and teams running on old assumptions is getting wider.

Google is building infrastructure for a search that completes tasks, not one that returns links. Your site needs to be useful to an agent, not just crawlable by a bot. Claude can learn recurring workflows by watching you do them once, which changes what “working with AI” actually looks like day to day. Microsoft built a free tool that shows exactly which topics your content is driving AI citations for, and which ones competitors are winning.

Bulk AI content without editorial judgment is still collapsing under crawl budget pressure, and Google has been saying why for months. And in SEO hiring, the candidates getting offers aren’t the ones with the most experience. They’re the ones with something concrete attached to their name besides a job history.

The through-line: do the work that requires a human behind it. That’s what gets cited, indexed, and hired.

Until next week, Nishat from HighDegree* Marketing

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P.S. Have a question about implementing these strategies? Hit reply – we read every email and often feature reader questions in future issues.

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