Diggity Marketing News Roundup – September 2026
AI continues to drive major changes in online marketing, and it’s behind many of the top industry stories you’ll learn about this month. In the top stories of the month, you’ll learn why some marketers are saying the internet is “banning” Google. Then you’ll find out how YouTube just altered its monetization, and what happens when AI Agents are allowed to run wild on an SEO strategy. After that, you’ll learn about Google’s latest spam update and the impact it had on a popular type of content. You’ll also learn why YouTube no longer counts views in the same way, and what that means for your video marketing efforts. At the end, you’ll find some of the month’s most interesting research. Find out what the latest data says about how much of the internet is written with AI, and where industry citations in LLM answers come from. Let’s jump in! The Internet Bans Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB6BhmoSDvI ThioJoe brings you this look at why the internet is banning Google. Of course, by “banning,” he’s referring to the growing number of publishers who will no longer allow crawler bots. As he mentions in the video, Cloudflare is the most recent company to announce a policy. Cloudflare has announced it will now block all major search engine crawlers used for AI training. These filters will be enabled by default for all Cloudflare customers (close to 25% of sites on the internet). Google uses the same bots for data collection that it does for indexing sites. For now, that means any sites that choose to keep these filtering options will block indexing crawlers by default. This may affect searching and ranking and have other serious consequences for Google’s ability to deliver results. Google isn’t the only company being targeted by the update. The policy also bans Microsoft and Apple crawlers that perform similar functions. Any multi-purpose crawlers from any source will also be blocked. As ThioJoe mentions in the video, all of this is going down on September 15th. If you have any Cloudflare-hosted sites, you should check your settings before and after that deadline to monitor what’s changed. Make sure you check out the video for more analysis on this update and policy. ThioJoe covers what’s really blocked, which companies are already cooperating, how much traffic this is likely to affect, and more. Next, YouTube has made serious changes to its monetization policy. BREAKING: YouTube Just Changed Monetization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVNjAQyxOac Sean Cannell of Think Media brings you this analysis of YouTube’s upcoming major update. In an official post last month, YT outlined three major changes that will arrive on February 1st, 2027, and affect monetization for most types of content. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a quick cheat sheet. Premium Lite Changes This subscription is being expanded to all countries where YouTube Premium is offered. This subscription offers uninterrupted, offline, and background viewing of most content. This should attract additional subscribers who are currently priced out by higher-level tiers. YouTube Shorts Changes YouTube Shorts Changes Creators who have 10 million qualified Shorts views over the last 90 days will now be eligible for ads and subscription revenue sharing. Channels below this threshold remain in YPP and will continue to earn from long-form content. YPP ads and Premium Threshold Changes Entry requirements for ads and Premium revenue are changing. New creators applying for YPP will need 8,000 qualified watch hours in the last 365 days, or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. The entry thresholds for our Fan Funding and shopping products remain unchanged. Sean goes into much greater depth, exploring what these changes are likely to mean for publishers. He covers the top things you should know if you are currently using the platform as a serious income stream. First, in some bad news for new creators, the entry bar for ad and premium revenue has been doubled. They are also adding activity requirements for YPP channels, which may make it harder for struggling channels to maintain an active status. Sean warns you that a contract deadline is approaching and that you should handle it. The new contract covering the changes should already be available for you in the Earn tab of your YouTube Studio dashboard. Check out the full video to learn more about preparing for this update. Next, you’ll find out if Agents are ready to command an SEO strategy. I let a few of them loose, and I’ll break down everything they were able to do on their own. I Let AI Agents Run My SEO. Here’s what happened… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ccnRNTxwqc I bring you this look at what’s possible with agents, featuring a live test where I let them target and address issues on a real client site in the trucking niche. My agents overperformed, delivering nearly $`20,000 in fresh revenue for my client. Once they were in action, they surprised me with their ability to identify problems that weren’t easily detectable from analytics or clicks alone. I learned a lot from this test, and in this video, I take you through some of the most interesting things I found. When you’re done, you’ll know how to build a money-saving agent, how to make an agent behave like an SEO expert, and how to create an agent who can detect traffic leaks. To make this test work, I built several agents, each given specialized goals. To make sure the agents could find issues that the others couldn’t, I anticipated that I would need at least a: I take you through the specific rule sets I set for each of these agents and include all the prompts I use to develop them. Check out the complete video to learn more about how everything came together, including screen-grabs of my agent-building process. Next, you may already be seeing the effects of being hit by Google’s August Spam update. Learn more about what this update did, what it targeted, and how you should react if your content has been penalized. Google’s August Spam Update Just Crushed Scaled Content – SaaS Is Winning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-70To9bGXVQ Edward Sturm brings you this look at the Spam Update that arrived on August 18th, but had been causing disruptions for weeks before then. The update was announced as complete only a few days later, on the 21st. Throughout most of last month, sites in many niches were reporting ranking swings, sudden traffic losses, and unexpected recoveries. Edward goes through all of the chatter and trends to help you understand what really changed with this update. He identifies many signs that the scaled content was targeted directly. He explores evidence that sites publishing 500 to 1,000 pages per day suddenly lose rankings and traffic, and that the pattern of sites rapidly increasing their page count while their organic traffic falls. You’ll also get to learn about some of the recent trends that may have driven these changes. Edward takes you through Mike King’s explanation for why Google may not need to detect AI-generated content directly, and provides examples of how user behavior and site-quality signals can make lazy content easier to detect. The news for sites isn’t all bad. As Edward notes, there appear to be signs that sites previously hit by Google’s spam systems are now recovering. SaaS sites are doing surprisingly well, and seem insulated from the vulnerability so far. Check out the complete video for more analysis on the spam update. Next, YouTube has changed what counts as a view, and you need to know what’s changed. YouTube Just Changed What Counts as a View https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vql2c08Q9o Rob Wilson brings you this look at a small YouTube update that may have big implications for the future. On August 24th, Google quietly began updating YouTube’s view count system. They had announced this in a support post published just a few days earlier. In that post, Google announced: Last year, we updated how we count public views for Shorts to reflect better how viewers watch on YouTube. Now, we’re aligning all other video formats to this same standard for consistency across the platform. Beginning on 8/24/2026, a view will be counted the moment a video begins to play—from the very first frame. This standard will now apply globally across all formats… Rob goes into much more detail about what this means and how it will affect your compensation. First, it’s important to understand that while the public-facing view system now tracks every view, your participation in monetization programs will depend on “engaged views.” Engaged views are a separate counting system that only tracks viewers who stayed on or interacted with your content. Your earnings will continue to be based on ”Engaged Shorts views” and “Engaged Watch Hours.” This was once the same as the public count, but now it is private and can be found in your dashboard. According to Google, this change should not affect creators’ earnings or their eligibility for the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). Check out Read More Read More
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