Google's AIO promises, Hollywood's IP reckoning, and the NPR host suing over his stolen voice

A cautionary tale of AI-fabricated data, UK PM Keir Starmer's crackdown on social media, and how Cloudflare is changing the way bots read your pages - all in this week's Content Aware.

Published: 15:00, 19 February 2026

Corbidge on... the Inc. credulity machine
BBC tech reporter Thomas Germain built a website claiming he was a champion hot dog eater. The LLMs believed him. Our AI Angler Rob goes fishing for the truth and bemoans that circumventing the normal checks and balances on quality and facts has never been easier, if you are looking to LLMs for answers. The quickest way a cheater can rate their brand No.1 for a thing? Just tell an LLM.
Read

Google's shiny new promises
Calling it a ''huge engineering project'', Google says it's working on more precise controls for opting out of AI Overviews without hurting search rankings. In the meantime, licencing deals with the Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post are stacking up, with "preferred sources" being boosted in Search and subscriptions prioritised in Gemini. Clicks disappearing? Google disagrees - they're just being spread more widely.
Read

Google search trial twist
Just days before the start of the crucial phase which will decide how Google will demonopolise search and be forced to allow rivals to gain traction, a White House reshuffle saw the US anti-trust lead swept from office and new assessors being attached to the case. Are they tech-friendly choices, or good news for media and publishers? One thing you can trust is that Ricky Sutton is investigating.
Read

Hollywood vs. fakes 2.0
ByteDance's new AI video generator Seedance 2.0, currently China-only, is causing serious ructions in Hollywood, with the MPA, SAG-AFTRA, and a chorus of screenwriters condemning it for mass copyright infringement and unauthorised use of actors' likenesses to conjure whatever a text prompt demands. In response to cease-and-desist letters from Paramount and Disney, ByteDance says it respects IP rights and is ''strengthening safeguards.'' Hollywood is not convinced: Netflix and Warner Bros. have since entered the ring.
Read

Discipline, diversification, and serving the community
A new report by FT Strategies and the Knight Foundation makes the case that local news doesn't need to go viral - it needs to be useful. The outlets actually surviving are deeply embedded in civic coverage, backed by audience data and direct reader relationships. No single revenue fix exists here; most are juggling three or four income streams and treating philanthropy as a safety net, not a lifeline. AI has a role, but it's not the one in the spotlight - the smart newsrooms are using it with clear goals and solid data behind it.
Read

Paid ads are munching on your organic traffic
Confused by your organic traffic numbers? AI Overviews isn't the only culprit. SEO consultant Aleyda Solis' SERP analysis across January 2025 and 2026 shows text ads and PLAs are stealing more clicks than ever, dragging organic traffic down by 11-23% in certain verticals - and she has thoughts on what to do about it.
Read

Pause on the doom scroll
Under pressure from his own MPs to ban social media for under-16s, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is alternatively targeting the addictive mechanics rather than the platforms themselves. Infinite scroll, autoplay, the features designed to keep eyes of all ages glued to screens, are in the sights, with a three-month consultation launching in the coming weeks that could lead to an outright ban or targeted restrictions. Such measures are now being considered from Paris to Delhi too. What this means for regular sites and apps featuring such front-end design techniques is uncertain.
Read

Three months of AI fiction
A viral Reddit post making the rounds is a cautionary tale. A company's AI agent is claimed to have spent three months confidently hallucinating data while leadership made real decisions off the back of it. True or not, it no longer seems unlikely.
Read

Blurry voice lines
Perhaps not as headline-grabbing as Scarlett Johansson's run-in with OpenAI, NPR veteran David Greene is suing Google, claiming the tech giant trained NotebookLM's AI podcast host on his voice without permission or pay. Google, as expected, flatly denies it, insisting the voice belongs to a paid professional actor.
Read

Auto-markdown
Cloudflare's new Markdown for Agents automatically converts your HTML pages to markdown, making it easier for AI agents to parse and understand your content. See what the SEO pros are flagging, why it matters, and what it could mean for how your content gets read by bots.
Read

Inside GPT-5's tokenizer
SEO researcher Metehan Yesilyurt has reverse-engineered the tokenizer behind GPT-5, o1, o3 and o4-mini, extracting and analysing 200,000 tokens to draw conclusions about training data composition and what it could mean for AEO/GEO. A long but worthwhile read for the technically minded.
Read