The door the ruling left open

On Monday we quoted six words from Judge Amit Mehta's ruling on Google's AI Overviews. Since then the full 41-page opinion has been read and reported in detail, and it is narrower than its best line. It closes one road for publishers and does not touch another.

The rest of the week so far is about measurement. The spam update made a third pass. ChatGPT started telling shoppers which product is "best". Search Console learned to filter by several countries at once. And rank trackers explained why their data keeps getting harder to collect.

What the ruling actually decided

The memorandum opinion was signed on 30 September, a day earlier than most reports dated it, and it covers two cases, not one. Chegg, the education company, had sued on the same grounds as Penske Media, and both suits were dismissed together.

Every federal claim was dismissed in full. That includes reciprocal dealing under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, monopoly maintenance, tying, and attempted monopolisation. The judge's reasoning is the one quoted on Monday: there was never an agreement in which Google promised traffic in exchange for content, so there was no bargain to break.

The second sentence matters as much as the first. The court did not find that the traffic loss was imaginary. It found that losing traffic to a search engine's design is not, by itself, an antitrust injury.

What the court did not decide is the question many publishers care about most. Both companies had also claimed unjust enrichment under California law: that Google profits from their content without paying for it. Once the federal claims were gone, the judge declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over those state claims. He did not rule on whether they are right. A claim dismissed that way can, in principle, be brought again in a state court.

The opinion also says that "a final, appealable order accompanies this Memorandum Opinion". So the antitrust question can go to the Court of Appeals. As of 7 October we found no statement from Penske or Chegg on whether they will appeal or refile.

The spam update's third pass

The September 2026 spam update began on 24 September and Google said it would take about two weeks. Search Engine Roundtable now counts three phases. The first ran on 25–27 September, the second on 30 September, and a third on 4–6 October, seen by Semrush, Mozcast, SISTRIX, Similarweb and ten other trackers. News sites, Discover and Google News took the hardest swings again. One news publisher on a webmaster forum reported earnings "currently down 80%".

On 7 October the Search Status Dashboard still showed the update with a start date and no end date.

ChatGPT starts saying which product is best

On 6 October Brodie Clark spotted ChatGPT testing new labels on the products it recommends. One product gets a green "best all-rounder" label. Others get grey labels for narrower wins, such as "best for beginners" or "best cushioning". OpenAI has not announced the test.

These are organic results, not ads. That makes the label a ranking. Until now an AI shopping answer listed several products, and the question for a brand was whether it made the list. With labels, the answer also says which of the listed products wins, and for what. A brand can keep its citation share and still lose the green label to a competitor.

Monday's digest covered the other OpenAI news of the week: visual ads beside generated images, to be tested in the US later this month.

Search Console: several countries at once

On 6 October Google Search Central announced on LinkedIn that the Performance report filters now accept more than one country, and more than one device. Before, the only way to see two countries together was a comparison, and a comparison is still limited to two items.

The same week Google added one line to the help page for the Search generative AI control, the Search Console setting that takes a site out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative features in Discover without changing its ordinary rankings. It concerns sites with several properties.

In practice this means one section of a site can be opted out of AI answers while the rest stays in, and the owner of the main property is now told when that happens.

Why rank tracking keeps getting harder

On 5 October Roger Montti of Search Engine Journal set out why Google keeps making its results harder to scrape. Cloudflare reports that "daily requests from AI agents on our network grew by more than 1,700%" over the past year. Many of those agents query search engines too. To Google they look much like a rank tracker, and AI answers cost more to serve than a list of links. Montti also names a third motive: stopping competitors from rebuilding Google's ranking from its own results.

This is the same pressure behind the SISTRIX incident we noted on Monday, open since 27 August, about reduced data collection from Google. Any tool that reads Google from the outside, ours included, now has to say how much of what it shows was actually observed. That is why AI Volatility reports the number of answers behind every reading.

"Couldn't fetch" may mean "not needed"

On 6 October John Mueller and Martin Splitt explained the Search Console sitemap error that worries site owners most. A sitemap can be valid, public and listed in robots.txt, and still show "couldn't fetch". Sometimes the server is busy. Sometimes Google simply decides it does not need the file.

Read next to the spam update, that is a quality signal, not a technical fault. How much Google wants to crawl a site depends on how much it values what it already found there. Splitt agreed that the message is misleading. Google has not changed it.

Also on 6 October

• Search profiles for creators and publishers, launched in the US in June, opened in India and Canada, with Brazil next. A profile needs at least 10,000 followers on YouTube, Instagram, X or TikTok. Google says it does not affect rankings, but followers may see more of that creator in Discover.
• Google expanded its helpful-content guidance on deceptive authorship, which Monday's digest covered: fabricated author profiles are now named as deception in the documentation site owners read.

Sources

Every claim above is dated and linked. Where a number comes from a measurement rather than an announcement, whoever measured it is named.

• Penske AI Overviews lawsuit dismissed because 'no formal bargain' struck with Google — Press Gazette, 1 October 2026
• Judge dismisses Chegg's and Penske's AI Overviews cases: an expectation is not an agreement — The Decoder, 4 October 2026
• Google Search Status Dashboard — Google, read 7 October 2026
• Final Phase Of Google September 2026 Spam Update Rollout Oct 4-6? — Search Engine Roundtable, 6 October 2026
• OpenAI Tests New Product Labels On ChatGPT Results — Search Engine Roundtable, on Brodie Clark's report, 6 October 2026
• Google Search Console Lets You Filter By Multiple Countries — Search Engine Journal, 6 October 2026
• Google Search Generative AI Control Page Adds Top-Level Domain Details — Search Engine Roundtable, 6 October 2026
• Search generative AI control — Google Search Console Help
• Google Is Fighting SERP Tracking. AI Agents May Make It Worse — Search Engine Journal, 5 October 2026
• Google Explains The "Couldn't Fetch" Sitemap Errors — Search Engine Journal, 6 October 2026
• Google Opens Search Profiles In India & Canada, Brazil Next — Search Engine Journal, 6 October 2026
• Google Warns Against Deceptive Authorship Information Within Content — Search Engine Roundtable, 6 October 2026