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“It feels almost like all control is being taken away,” Shelby Blackley, a manager of newsroom SEO at The Athletic and a cofounder of WTF Is SEO? , an industry newsletter, told me. She was referring to an unsettling trend: Google has been taking an increasingly heavy hand in reshaping how content appears on its platform. Blackley and Jessie Willms started WTF Is SEO? in 2021, with the aim of helping journalists better understand a concept already well known in the marketing world. Lately, they have been paying close attention to the shifts in Google’s strategy—and how news organizations are starting to notice the changes.

Google’s most recent move was experimenting with rewriting headlines for search results using LLMs, as was reported by The Verge in late March.…