Ghosts in the manuscripts, content that earns its place, and Reddit rolls out the welcome rug

From search to chat windows, a hard pass on AI from Wikipedia, following your audience habits, and Snap under investigation - all in this week's Content Aware.

Published: 15:05, 02 April 2026

Corbidge comments on… the need for genius in SEO
As the world's dominant arbiter of traffic to websites continues to shift the goalposts and rewrite the "rules" on what constitutes good content worthy of good search results. and AI options sedate traffic yet more, the rationale for SEO seems in some quarters to be under attack. If there are no rules, why spend money trying to work them out?
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Publishing & Media

Publishing's latest AI headache
Red faces at Hachette after a published novel, Mia Ballard's Shy Girl, was pulled and pulped after it was indicated to be up to 78% AI-generated. Around the same time, the New York Times cut ties with freelance book reviewer Alex Preston after he admitted using AI to help draft a review, no-one spotting prior to publication that the NYT piece was riddled with plagiaristic hints and no credits for the "inspirations". AI writing detection tools aren't that reliable or inclined to agree with each other, and while Ballard denies any involvement by her of AI in the text and blames an editor who may have used it, Preston said this was a first time overreliance on AI to help in drafting, and he had not used it in six previous novels he'd authored. Two incidents, one common issue: AI detection tools are flaky, AI is learning quickly how to evade them, and if you're determined or unconcerned AI work can slip through. Publishers know it, and the industry is working out what, if anything, can be done about it.
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The Daily Star's gold rush
While Google Discover hasn't been kind to UK giant Reach, portfolio title the Daily Star quietly built MSN into one of its biggest revenue earners and source of views. The secret? A full-time role dedicated entirely to the platform, navigating its AI-driven filters, tailoring content to its format, and surmising what the MSN audience actually wants. The generous ad revenue from MSN it now outperforms Meta for the title, with some stories hitting nearly a million page views. The article covers the winding road to learning what MSN wants.
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Amendment 1, EO 0
A US federal judge has permanently blocked President Trump's executive order to cut all federal funding to NPR and PBS, ruling it unconstitutional and in contravention to the First Amendment right to free speech. Judge Moss has found the order amounted to viewpoint discrimination to punish the broadcasters for coverage the president didn't like. Does this reinvigorate media plurality and public broadcasting? Hard to say as the practical impact is a bit complicated: the administration had already shut down The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funnelled congressional funding to both networks, and the ruling itself will almost certainly be appealed.
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Reddit opens the Pro door 
Reddit has now opened up its Pro publishing tools to all publishers, after a period in Beta. It claims early testers saw median post views up by 46%, and profile views and comments nearly double. Reddit claims over 55 billion views of publisher-related conversations in 2025, so the audience isn't lacking. Does this mean all your content gets poured into the Reddit AI? No. The on-Reddit chat and conversations will be, but you get a tools suite which includes RSS auto-posting, AI-powered community targeting, and analytics that show where your content is spreading across the platform, which seems like a fair trade to us for a free service.
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2MB and done
Google's Gary Illyes has published a detailed breakdown of how exactly Googlebot works, and there are a few things worth knowing. Googlebot fetches up to 2MB per URL, HTTP headers included, and when a page hits that threshold the crawler will just stop and send whatever it has to Google's indexing systems which in turn considers the file complete. Anything past 2MB is ignored. For most sites this will not be an issue, however sites with heavy inline CSS, JavaScript, or embedded data, could be losing content due to the cutoff. The fix? Move heavy CSS and JavaScript to external files, and make sure the important metatags, canonicals, and structured data aren't buried at the bottom.
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The data and developer dependency solved
Editorial teams working with the kind of data which often surrounds or validates the content they are writing typically find it a massive pain to deal with to get it on the site or app. Getting live sports data, financial data and prices, or product spec and catalogues alongside content can become more time-consuming and complex than writing the stories themselves. Getting external data into a CMS often means a developer ticket, a wait, and flat numbers unable to educate publishing logic. Glide CMS Third-Party Widgets fix that by allowing editors to connect and view external data sources within the CMS itself, and using the data realtime to assist publishing logic. Editors can browse, search and embed live data directly into their articles without code or developer dependency. It means a sports writer can drop live match stats directly into the CMS, or that a commercial team can place ad units more productively. Data streams that might well have taken weeks to integrate into a bespoke system can be connected directly on the spot. If your editorial team is still copy-pasting data into stories, ask us how Glide CMS can help.
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A busy March for Google
Hot on the heels of a spam update, Google is rolling out its first broad update of 2026 this week and next. The description is the usual word salad of the aim to better surface relevant, satisfying content across all types of sites and regions. If your rankings shift over the next couple of days, this is likely the culprit, and if you've been hit, take a peek at Google's core update guidance.
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Big Tech

It's official: Snapchat has an EU problem
The EU Commission has launched a formal investigation into Snapchat under the Digital Services Act, with a preliminary assessment that is a tough read. The investigation claims Snapchat is letting under-13s onto the platform, exposes them to age-restricted products, and uses dark patterns in its design to keep them there. Snapchat isn't the first platform to receive such preliminary findings, as the EU makes it clear it intends to use the DSA's child protection provisions to the fullest. Off the back of the US social media court rulings, nets are tightening.
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Your audience moved, time to follow
INMA just published a new report, which posits that the shift from conventional search to conversational AI interfaces is fundamentally changing the way audiences find and consume their news, and publishers shouldn't ignore it or fight against it, and instead roll with it. The report identified three emerging AI-first user journeys - text, audio, and agentic - and outlines that publishers need coordinated experiences across all three to stay relevant. The priorities are structured, modular content systems and first-party relationships, with a pushback on traffic as the primary success metric.
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AI & Copyright

Publishers, authors, and scientists unite
A copyright lawsuit against Anthropic filed by Concord Music Group back in 2023 is attracting more interest, especially from the News/Media Alliance, the Authors Guild, and scientific publishers, all claiming copyright infringement on a massive scale. It shines a positive light on the likes of OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon where they have done actual deals, which Anthropic has yet to similarly do. While the music case is the vehicle, the issue spreads across news, books, scientific publishing, and any content business with touchpoints against AI companies, so a verdict or settlement is keenly anticipated.
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Less muck, more brass
SEO sage Harry Clarkson-Bennett gives a blunt but useful take on what's happening to evergreen content. As AI Overviews erode clicks and answer engines give alternatives to further reading, people are becoming tetchy at 2,000-word articles telling them what time something starts, and publishers who churned out SEO content for search will get the short end of the stick. He doesn't say to abandon it completely, but focus on making it work harder and earn its place by driving conversions, registrations, follows, saves, anything that would move someone further into your ecosystem. Content which doesn't do that needs a better reason to exist.
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Write your own encyclopaedia
Following the German-language version, English-language Wikipedia has updated guidelines to ban articles fully or substantially written by AI. The ban isn't absolute, with AI-assisted translations, error detection, and light editing still finding a place. Wikipedia acknowledges an AI detection issue after some writers who just sound like language models being rejected for sounding too much like the LMs which quite likely ripped them off in the first place. The update follows a rule change from 2025 which allowed admins to delete obviously AI-generated content without a week-long discussion period. Wikipedia is trying to get ahead of the problem, rather than fixing things in the aftermath.
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Using it, hating it
Two new surveys show how Americans actually feel when it comes to using AI. A Quinnipiac University poll shows that although most people say they are using it regularly for research, writing, and work, more than three-quarters say they don't trust it. Meanwhile a separate Fathom survey indicated that while nearly two-thirds use AI weekly, stronger oversight is wanted but not at the cost of regulatory bumps like ceding of US control over international regulations or accepting higher costs. It's a tough needle to thread. It's interesting that in this space people trust independent experts far more than the tech companies, which tells you something about how the last few years of AI have gone.
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