Brandon LazovicBrandon Lazovic writes about how AI is changing the way people find and buy products, and what merchants actually control as agents and answer engines take over.https://brandonlazovic.dev/Conversational Analytics in BigQuery just went generally available, and GA is a support milestone, not an accuracy guaranteehttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/conversational-analytics-verify/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/conversational-analytics-verify/General availability means Google supports Conversational Analytics in BigQuery. It says nothing about whether the SQL it generates is correct.Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe eligible-not-distributed gap: why Merchant Center approval doesn't guarantee Shopping traffichttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/merchant-center-eligible-not-distributed/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/merchant-center-eligible-not-distributed/Merchant Center approval confirms a feed passed checks. Whether Google actually shows the product depends on feed data quality and per-country attributes.Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTChatGPT's source selection lives in an editable prompt OpenAI can rewrite overnighthttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/chatgpt-source-selection-policy/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/chatgpt-source-selection-policy/ChatGPT's source selection runs on an editable server-side policy that OpenAI can rewrite at will, and the underlying fields already changed twice in July 2026.Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTGoogle's billions-of-clicks claim: why it can't be checked against your own site datahttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-ai-clicks-open-web/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-ai-clicks-open-web/Google says AI Search sends billions of clicks weekly and calls the number stable, but Cloudflare and Wikipedia both report reproducible traffic declines.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTAnnotated Page Content: the structured tree Chrome hands Gemini instead of your HTMLhttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/annotated-page-content-gemini/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/annotated-page-content-gemini/Chrome builds a structured, typed node tree from a page's render tree and hands that to Gemini when a tab is shared, per Dejan AI's teardown.Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDoes AI prefer Reddit? Why the answer depends on which AI you askhttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/does-ai-prefer-reddit/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/does-ai-prefer-reddit/OpenAI rejects 99.4% of the Reddit pages it retrieves, Anthropic cites zero, and only Google keeps Reddit near its baseline citation rate.Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTShopify's hreflang toggle relocates the risk instead of fixing ithttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/shopify-hreflang-toggle-gap/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/shopify-hreflang-toggle-gap/Shopify's new toggle turns off auto-generated hreflang tags, but it can't verify your replacement is correct or see CDN-level conflicts.Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTCore Web Vitals thresholds are a floor, not a targethttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/core-web-vitals-floor-not-bar/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/core-web-vitals-floor-not-bar/Google set Core Web Vitals thresholds by what the median site could hit, not by what maximizes conversion. Some sites plateau well before 'good.'Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTHow Brave Search finds pages, and why chasing every engine is a traphttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/brave-search-discovery/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/brave-search-discovery/Brave has no Search Console, no sitemap ingestion, and no IndexNow. It rides on Googlebot-crawlability, and Claude's web search runs on Brave's index, not Bing's.Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTWhy AI writing keeps saying 'it's not X, it's Y'https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/llm-negative-parallelism-tic/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/llm-negative-parallelism-tic/RLHF mode collapse, markdown training data, and reward bias each explain part of AI's 'not X, but Y' tic. None explains all of it, and the evidence disagrees.Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTYour 'are you a bot' screen can deindex your real page, and you'll never see it happenhttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-challenge-screen-deindexing/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-challenge-screen-deindexing/Google's John Mueller confirmed bot-challenge screens served to Googlebot with a 200 status get indexed, and dedup can hand your canonical to a stranger's copy.Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTGoogle's 'nearest trusted seed' ranking patent expires this year. The leak shows the idea did not.https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-nearest-seed-patent/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-nearest-seed-patent/A 2006 Google patent ranks pages by distance from a few trusted seed sites. It expires in 2026, but the leak shows the idea survived as PageRank-NearestSeeds.Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe EU AI Act just made "AI-generated" a required, machine-readable label. Here is who has to use it.https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/eu-ai-act-article-50-disclosure/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/eu-ai-act-article-50-disclosure/The EU AI Act's Article 50 makes AI-content disclosure enforceable on August 2, 2026. Here is what gets marked, who has to disclose, and what it means for search.Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTContent API for Shopping sunsets August 18: check your store nowhttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/content-api-sunset-merchant-api/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/content-api-sunset-merchant-api/Google sunsets the Content API for Shopping on August 18, 2026. Here is how to check in five minutes whether your store's ads and free listings are at risk.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTWhat RAG Actually Does (and When You Shouldn't Use It)https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/what-rag-actually-does/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/what-rag-actually-does/RAG lets an AI look answers up instead of guessing from training. Here is how it works, what you can build with it, and when a simpler tool wins.Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTGoogle added category and sale-duration properties to merchant-listing schema. That's a convergence tax, not an upgrade.https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-merchant-listing-category-sale-duration/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-merchant-listing-category-sale-duration/Google added category and sale-duration properties to merchant listing structured data. For most merchants it adds reconciliation work, not a ranking advantage.Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTGoogle's new AI-slop defense is a video-platform paper, not a Search reveal, and that's the useful parthttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-scts-video-not-search/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-scts-video-not-search/Google's S-CTS paper targets coordinated AI-slop channels on video platforms, not Search rankings. The real lesson is coordinated footprints, not your pages.Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTOpenAI killed Atlas. The pattern is the story, not the browser.https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/openai-atlas-consolidation/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/openai-atlas-consolidation/OpenAI retired the Atlas browser under nine months after launch. The pattern is deliberate consolidation into ChatGPT, not a company that lost its direction.Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTAnthropic found a mental workspace inside Claude, the J-space. The useful part isn't consciousness; you can read it.https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/claude-j-space-workspace/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/claude-j-space-workspace/Anthropic's global-workspace paper found the J-space, the internal patterns Claude reasons with. The real win is reading what a model thinks but does not say.Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTGoogle's TabFM brings zero-shot prediction to BigQuery, but the benchmark that sells it is a chart in a blog posthttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/tabfm-bigquery-honest-read/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/tabfm-bigquery-honest-read/Google's TabFM promises tabular machine learning from one SQL command. The launch benchmark is a self-reported chart, and its real limits decide where it helps.Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTAnthropic's Economic Index is a demand signal, not a jobs report, and the unit of demand is now the artifacthttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/ai-usage-is-a-demand-signal/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/ai-usage-is-a-demand-signal/Anthropic's June 2026 Economic Index shows the unit of demand shifting from keyword to artifact. Read as a demand signal, it maps which intents AI is absorbing.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTSonnet 5 brings near-Opus agents at a fraction of the Opus price, and that is a deadline for machine-readable commercehttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/sonnet-5-agent-cost-curve/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/sonnet-5-agent-cost-curve/Claude Sonnet 5 matches or comes within two points of Opus 4.8 on most agentic benchmarks, at a fraction of the price. For commerce, the story is the cost curve.Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTShopify's catalog landgrab: build vs. syndicate for agentic commercehttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/shopify-catalog-landgrab/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/shopify-catalog-landgrab/Shopify Catalog is positioned as the agentic product-data substrate, and a new Agentic plan lets non-Shopify merchants sync in and sell across AI channels.Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTWhen agents get desperatehttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/when-agents-get-desperate/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/when-agents-get-desperate/An interpretability finding for checkout reliability: a model stays composed on the surface while an internal 'desperate' pattern drives corner-cutting.Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTGoogle's patent for AI-generated landing pages built from your feedhttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-ai-landing-pages-patent/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-ai-landing-pages-patent/A Google patent describes scoring landing pages and substituting AI-generated alternatives built from the retailer's own product data.Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTProduction agents read the accessibility tree firsthttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/agents-read-accessibility-first/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/agents-read-accessibility-first/OpenAI Atlas, Playwright MCP, and Perplexity Comet read the accessibility tree before pixels. For e-commerce, clean semantic HTML and schema matter more.Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoft tokens: how single embeddings change item representationhttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-soft-tokens/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-soft-tokens/Google is testing 'soft tokens', single embeddings that replace multi-token item descriptions, for cheaper representation with cold-start implications.Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTGoogle's crawler split: why SSR vs. CSR decides Merchant Center compliancehttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-crawler-rendering-split/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/google-crawler-rendering-split/The Shopping crawler does not render JavaScript; it validates price and availability. SSR vs. CSR is the real determinant of Merchant Center compliance.Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTOpenAI's feed pivot: two pipelines for ChatGPT product visibilityhttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/openai-acp-feed-pivot/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/openai-acp-feed-pivot/Native in-chat checkout retreated to apps while ACP expanded to organic, feed-driven discovery. Feed hygiene is the single lever for ChatGPT product visibility.Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTConversational ads converge: the model writes the copy from your feedhttps://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/conversational-ads-convergence/https://brandonlazovic.dev/articles/conversational-ads-convergence/Amazon, Google, and OpenAI are converging on one mechanic: AI generates ad copy at query time from the merchant's product feed, not advertiser-written creative.Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT