Flood The LLMs™.Designed for the answer era > Explore the methodology >

Flood The LLMs™.Designed for the answer era > Explore the methodology >

Flood The LLMs™.Designed for the answer era > Explore the methodology >

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The Current: A Setting You Don't Own Can Deindex You Tomorrow

Cloudflare's September 15 defaults can block Googlebot, 97% of People Also Ask answers are now AI Overviews, and Google rebuilt EU results.

Most weeks your rankings move because Google changed its ranking systems. This week they moved because a security vendor changed a default, an AI layer swallowed a SERP feature, and a regulator redrew a results page. Google ran no core or spam update in those seven days.

Your CDN can block Googlebot, and the deadline is tomorrow

Jin-Hee Lee and Bryan Becker announced on July 1 that Cloudflare sorts crawlers into three jobs: Search, Agent and Training. One line in their post puts a date on your organic traffic: "On September 15, 2026, we'll be setting new defaults for each of these three classifications."

Cloudflare applies the strictest rule that matches a crawler, a mechanic Matt G. Southern walked through at Search Engine Journal in July. Googlebot crawls for Search and for Training, so a single Training block catches the whole bot. Cloudflare wrote: "multi-purpose crawlers such as Googlebot, Applebot, and BingBot will be blocked by customers who have selected to block Training". Site owners can opt out in their Cloudflare security settings before September 15.

The evidence splits in two. Cloudflare's policy is confirmed, in Cloudflare's own words, with a date on it. Practitioner reports that some sites tripped this months early are not. Roger Montti reported at Search Engine Journal on August 4 that a poster in r/TechSEO saw Googlebot and Bingbot take 403s after switching AI Training to Block, that John Mueller asked for a DM, and that nobody had established whether the cause was a bug, a misconfiguration or an early rollout. The owner of Home-Barista.com then opened a Cloudflare community thread describing verified Googlebot requests taking 403s since early July, with Cloudflare's security events naming "Block AI training crawlers" as the reason. No Cloudflare staff answered it.

Nobody has counted the affected sites, and Cloudflare has not acknowledged an early misfire. Treat the September 15 policy as fact and the summer reports as open.

What to do about it

Open your Cloudflare dashboard today and read the bot settings yourself. If someone switched on "block AI training" during last year's scraping panic, that switch now reaches Googlebot. Pull Crawl Stats in Search Console and look for 403s since July, because an early block leaves a trail. IT owns the CDN at most companies, and the hard part of enterprise SEO is getting another team to act, so find the person holding that login and get an answer before tomorrow.

People Also Ask stopped being its own feature

Mark Williams-Cook of AlsoAsked posted a measurement to LinkedIn this week, drawn from a sample of 19.2 million English-language results: "97% of PAA answers in the first week of September are AIOs, up from 86% in August." Saeed Khosravi of Allintitle posted a stronger version: "Allintitle's Also Ask Miner data shows that starting August, 2026 Google People Also Ask Answers Are 100% AI Generated." Barry Schwartz covered both at Search Engine Roundtable on September 9.

Two vendors who sell PAA tracking measured the same thing and disagreed at the top of the range. That gap is the tell. They agree on direction and slope, neither published a full methodology, both sampled English results, and Google has said nothing. A vendor's chart is not an audit.

The consequence holds even at 86%. A box that used to lift a snippet from one page now shows a model's answer assembled from several. Your page still feeds it, and Google decides whether your name survives into the citation panel beside the answer. Khushal Bherwani spotted Google testing a thinner version of that panel on September 8. Brands that optimize to be the answer rather than an entry on a list now have a number behind the argument.

What to do about it

Take your highest-value PAA questions and read the AI answers by hand, checking whether each one describes you, a competitor, or nobody. Keep your own answers short, factual and on crawlable pages, because extraction rewards clean structure over clever prose. Then retire PAA presence as a reported win and replace it with how often AI surfaces name your brand. Search Console's AI performance report hands you impressions and withholds clicks, so pair it with hand checks until Google ships more.

Google rebuilt European search and called the result its worst quality drop

Reuters reporter Foo Yun Chee published Google's own assessment on September 8. Nick Fox, Google's senior vice-president for knowledge and information, said: "These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans ... Users outside the EU will not be impacted by these changes." Google told Reuters the changes mark the largest reduction in quality of service at the world's most popular internet search engine in its 29-year search history. Reuters reports the European Commission fined Google €460 million in July over self-preferencing in shopping, hotels, transport and sports results.

Google documented the mechanics itself. Matt G. Southern at Search Engine Journal reported the EEA rollout the same day, and Google Search Central now carries a page for the aggregator unit, updated September 11, which calls it "a multi-provider feature designed for Vertical Search Services (VSSs), including Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), Comparison Shopping Services, metasearch engines, and directories." Google limits it to EEA countries and to queries about hotels, flights, long distance trains or buses, and products. A companion supplier unit gives hotels and airlines their own placement beside it.

Read Google's framing with your eyes open. Google fought this remedy, lost, and now calls the outcome the biggest quality cut in its history. Google also told Reuters that earlier DMA changes cut free direct booking traffic to European businesses by 30%, a number Google produced and nobody else has audited. No independent party has published click data on the new layout.

What to do about it

Segment your European reporting by country now, before October mixes a layout change with a demand change. If a comparison site sits above you in the EEA, your lever moves to listing quality inside that aggregator rather than your own page. Brands selling only in the US get a preview rather than a problem: Google will insert a comparison layer above suppliers when a regulator forces it to, and the businesses that owned the direct click pay for it.

Also worth knowing

Your Search Console page indexing report has permanent holes in June, and John Mueller told Barry Schwartz that Google will leave them there: "We don't back-fill indexing data."

Google Business Profile insights showed no September data through the eighth of the month, and Schwartz reported the numbers populating again by September 11.

A Google Maps contributor uploaded photos carrying a fake phone number onto business listings so callers would reach a scammer. Naomi Stevens raised it, Sam Sarsten circulated it, and Google pulled the contributor within a day.

Brodie Clark spotted new sections inside Merchant Center's AI performance insights, the report Google runs for English queries in the US, Canada, Australia, India and New Zealand, showing share of voice against competitors.

John Mueller told a site owner on Bluesky that low-value programmatic pages carry a price: "Our systems have possibly lost faith in your site providing good value to users based on the old pages."

Keep your own copies

Three of this week's stories turn on a number that no longer exists. Google will not restore June's indexing data. Google Business Profile dropped eight days and returned them without explaining why. The AI surfaces where shoppers meet your brand offer no history export at all. Your reporting stack has become a rolling window rather than a record, and you will feel that the first time a CFO asks what your visibility looked like a year ago. Snapshot your own numbers every month and keep them somewhere Google does not control. Log what you shipped beside them, because implementation rate belongs in your reporting as much as visibility does.

Flood runs this sweep every week for the brands we work with. If you want yours read against your own data, start a conversation.

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