Nishat's Weekly Reads 📖 Issue #1 — Week of April 7, 2026
Search, AI, and the internet quietly changing — curated for friends and family.
Hey,
You know how some weeks you just end up deep in rabbit holes? That was this week for me.
I read a lot about search engines, AI, and how the internet is quietly changing — and honestly, some of it was fascinating enough to share. None of this is technical jargon, I promise. Here’s what caught my attention.
Google’s crawler is more interesting than you’d think
Google sent out a rare behind-the-scenes post explaining how Googlebot actually works — how it reads web pages, what it skips, and why crawling is more complicated than just “a robot reads every page.” If you’ve ever wondered how Google finds new content, it’s a good read.
ChatGPT doesn’t actually get its ideas from Google
This one surprised me: when ChatGPT recommends a brand or product, it’s pulling from Bing, not Google. Researchers found that the top result in Bing and the top result in ChatGPT were often the same article. Google barely factors in. If you’re building a brand, you apparently need to care about Bing now. Wild.
Does AI-written content rank on Google?
Short answer from the data: it can, but only when humans are heavily involved in editing it. One study found that every step — ideation, drafting, publishing — needed at least three people reviewing the AI’s work before the content performed well. So “AI does it all” still doesn’t work.
There’s a whole industry of people buying news websites and turning them into casino spam
This was the most unsettling thing I read all week. Press Gazette ran a piece on how legitimate old news sites are getting purchased, then quietly converted into pages full of gambling ads and sponsored junk. The writers’ names stay on old articles. The site’s reputation carries on. Nobody notices until it’s too late. It’s a real problem for anyone who relies on Google for trustworthy information.
LinkedIn thinks articles can fix your engagement
Social Media Today covered LinkedIn pushing creators toward long-form articles as a way to build an audience. The platform is apparently trying to position itself more like a publishing platform. Whether that plays out or not is another story — but if you’ve been thinking about writing on LinkedIn, now might be a good time to try.
One more thing
A post I came across made a point that stuck with me: everyone makes bad videos at the start. The people who are good at it now just made a lot of bad ones first and kept going. True for most things, really.
That’s it for this week. If any of these sparked a thought or you want to chat about something you’ve been reading, hit reply — I’d love to know.
Talk soon, Nishat