Fake Photos on Your Google Listing, a New Way to Check What AI Says About You, and the Traffic Panic That Wasn’t Real

Here’s what happened this week in SEO, AEO, GEO, and social, and what it means if you run a local service business in the US.

Your Google Listing

Scammers are hijacking Google Business Profile photos to steal your customers’ calls. Using Google’s Maps contributor program, they upload AI-generated photos with a fake phone number baked directly into the image, so anyone who calls the number they see reaches the scammer instead of the real business (Search Engine Roundtable). It’s already hit dozens, if not hundreds, of listings, and reporting the photo to Google hasn’t reliably fixed it yet.

Key takeaway: check your own listing’s photos this week. If you spot one with a phone number printed on it that isn’t yours, report it and let your regular customers know directly.

Search & AI Visibility

Google finally handed small businesses a mirror. A new Google Business Profile feature called Collected Info shows you exactly what Google’s AI systems have pulled together about your business, straight inside your own dashboard (Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz). That information used to live entirely inside Google, out of reach for the business it was actually about. Now you can see it, confirm it’s accurate, and know exactly what a customer hears before they ever call.

Prompt of the Week: Once you have pulled up your own Collected Info report, here’s a prompt to make sense of it: “Here is the information Google’s AI has compiled about my business: [paste the details from Collected Info]. Compare this against what’s actually true: [list your real hours, services, and service area] flag every mismatch, and tell me which ones are most likely to cause a customer to call the wrong number, show up at the wrong time, or think I don’t offer a service I actually do.” Paste your own facts in place of the brackets, and it does the comparison work for you instead of you checking it line by line.

A widely shared claim that AI overviews are destroying law firm website traffic doesn’t hold up against real client data. A year-long review of actual analytics found the doom framing overstated the damage, and the piece recommends checking your own Search Console generative-AI reporting, live since June, instead of assuming the worst from an industry-wide average (LawFuel).

Key takeaway: before you take a scary industry statistic at face value, check your own Search Console data first.

New LinkedIn research found 90% of B2B marketers believe their company’s future growth depends on reaching Gen Z and Millennial decision-makers, and 42% say content from real people-employees, creators, and industry experts-works better than brand campaigns at reaching them. 73% now say credibility matters more than visibility, and over half of CMOs plan to spend more on AI search optimization next year (Demand Gen Report).

YouTube is rolling out an AI feature called Ask YouTube that answers a viewer’s questions about a video using its frames, audio, and transcript, and it’s expanding a tool called Get Feedback that reviews a Shorts video before you publish it (Search Engine Journal). If you post a video for your business, that feedback tool is worth using before you hit publish.

Google Analytics now lets you build a custom dashboard that pulls your key metrics into one view instead of digging through several standard reports (Search Engine Land).

Ads & Platforms

OpenAI cut off ChatGPT ads for products that compete with its own tools. Adobe lost the ability to promote its Firefly image generator without warning (PYMNTS). OpenAI is aiming for $100 billion in ad revenue by 2030.

Amazon Ads and OpenAI opened a pilot letting select advertisers extend their existing Amazon campaigns into ChatGPT, with Delta Vacations as the first company testing it. The same week, the IAB raised its 2026 US ad spend forecast to 12.3% growth, up from 9.5% in January (The Agile Brand Guide).

Microsoft Advertising officially published its rule requiring disclosure of AI-generated ad content and preservation of provenance data (PPC News Feed). If you or your agency run Bing Ads with AI-made creative, this is active now.

Grindr will pay roughly £26 million to about 12,000 UK users after sharing their HIV status and location data with ad partners (PPC Land). A reminder that ad-tech data sharing is drawing regulatory scrutiny well beyond big tech companies.

Also This Week

Anthropic published a blueprint for AI agents that can shop and buy on a customer’s behalf, though trust, pricing, and accountability questions remain before it can scale (MarTech).

IBM research cited by the Content Marketing Institute puts a dollar figure on strong thought leadership, as much as $107 million in enterprise value, according to the report (Content Marketing Institute).

Cloudflare launched a self-updating bot detection system called Adaptive Intelligence, aimed at sites getting hit by AI scraper traffic (MarketingProfs).

Google gave small businesses a new scam to watch for and a new way to check what its AI says about them. A widely shared claim about AI killing website traffic didn’t hold up against real data. And three separate stories this week point to the same thing: ChatGPT is becoming a real advertising channel.