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Universal Cart Launches In Google Search
Google has launched its Universal Cart today in Google Search and Gemini within the United States. This is powered by the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and it was launched right before the big holiday shopping season.
What can you actually put in a URL 🐔?
Can you put a chicken emoji 🐔in your domain name? What about your URL path? What about non-English characters? Welcome to the premiere of The Non-Canonical Cabinet—a series where Google Search Developer Advocates Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin dig through the vault to answer the weirdest, most hyper-specific edge cases of SEO. These are questions that don't belong on a standard FAQ page but are still useful for Search and generative AI features. In this episode, they tackle the technical boundaries of domain names and URL paths, explain Punycode vs. percent encoding, and unpack why just because technology allows you to be weird doesn't mean you should. In this episode: 🌐 Who decides what goes in a domain name 🈶 Internationalized domain names and Punycode (xn--what?) 🐔🔥 Can emojis go in a domain? 📈 Do keywords in a URL help with ranking? 🔣 Emojis and non-English characters in the URL path, and percent-encoding ➖ Hyphens vs. underscores TL;DR: Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Keep URLs simple, readable and built for humans. Chapters: 00:00 – Welcome to The Non-Canonical Cabinet 01:33 – Can you put anything in a domain or URL path? 02:05 – Domain: understanding ICANN & RFC standards 03:46 – What is allowed in the domain name? ASCII, Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), and Punycode 05:18 – Emoji in a domain name? 06:01 – Do keywords in a URL help with ranking? 07:02 – URL Paths: UTF-8, special characters, and "chicken gear" 08:28 – Encoding in a domain vs URL path 09:06 – Why emoji URLs might not be a good idea 10:45 – Hyphens vs. Underscores in URL paths 11:34 – Recap 📚 Learn more: URL structure best practices: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/url-structure 🗄️ Got a weird question you want us to pull from the cabinet? Don't let your edge-case questions gather dust! Leave it in the comments below! 🤖 Next episode: we try to put chicken in a robots.txt file. Like. Subscribe. Keep it Canonical. #GoogleSearchCent


Gemini 4 Argon rolling out in Google AI Mode & Gemini
Google announced it is now rolling out Gemini 4 Argon to the public and that includes in Search within AI Mode and Gemini. Google wrote, “Gemini 4 Argon is now globally available today for developers and enterprises via the API in AI Studio and Gemini platform, for Google AI Ultra subscribers in Google Antigravity, and Google AI Ultra and Pro subscribers in the Gemini app and
Video: Google Spam Update Done, Penalties Rise, Factcheck AI, Content Quality, Fake Authors, Ads & So Much More
was a super busy week, so there is a lot more content in this recap compared to most. We start off with the Google September 2026 spam update completing, it had its third and final phase earlier in the week. Google may be issuing more manual action search penalties
How To Scale AI Video Ads For Small Business Clients: One Storyline For TikTok, Reels & AI Search
Explore how to scale AI video ads with a single storyline for TikTok, Reels, and AI search to maximize impact.

Video: Google Spam Update Impact, Google Not Paying Much For Your Content, Google Feels Sad & Terrible and more
This week, we covered the first impact felt by the Google September 2026 spam update. And then on Wednesday and Thursday we had the second impact of this spam update. Remember the AI contribution report

OpenAI Takes On Meta’s Muse With Dots, an Always-On AI Agent
The agents run on their own cloud computers and can connect to more than 4,000 apps.
Amazon Ads taps Yelp to turn product purchases into local service leads
Amazon Ads is turning high-intent shopping signals into local service leads, connecting shoppers with Yelp professionals.
Google Rolls Out Monitoring Capabilities In AI Mode To All
Google is now rolling out monitoring capabilities in AI Mode in Google Search globally for everyone. When Google first announced this feature, it was only available for Ultra and Pro paid subscribers, but now it is available to all Google users.
Video: Google September 2026 Spam Update Is Here, Goodbye Discover Traffic, Multimodal Search Reporting & CrUX Ad Metrics In Page Experience
This week, Google announced yet another spam update, the fourth of the year, the September 2026 Google spam update. Prior to that, we reported on more Google Search ranking volatility. Google Search Console released multimodal search filters
Fanout Vectors
An analysis and reproduction of Google’s query fanout research, demonstrating how vector-based diffusion models could replace text fanouts for faster search.

How To Build Local Pages AI Systems Can Find And Trust
Whitespark’s Darren Shaw and Duda’s Russ Jeffery on why local AI visibility starts with crawler access, accurate data, and pages an LLM can read.
How To Build Local Pages AI Systems Can Find And Trust
Whitespark’s Darren Shaw and Duda’s Russ Jeffery on why local AI visibility starts with crawler access, accurate data, and pages an LLM can read.
Video: Unusual Google Search Ranking Volatility, Ad Tech Monopoly Remedies, AI Contribution Publisher Payouts & More
This week we covered the first week or so of Google’s unusual ranking volatility only to see things spike up in a big way this week as well - something is up. Google’s remedies are out for its ad tech monopoly ruling. Google has an AI contribution pilot for paying publishers
Google’s Approach to Recursive Self-Improvement
Dream-RSI optimizes AI agent search strategies offline by replaying past discovery trees as exact simulators, reducing execution costs across discovery tasks.
Google expands agentic commerce tools ahead of the holiday shopping rush
Google’s agentic commerce updates give advertisers new ways to boost AI visibility, engage shoppers and turn discovery into sales.
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