📧 Getting weird emails from Instagram? IG says there wasn’t a data breach.

🛒 Walmart expands AI-powered shopping with Google Gemini.

✂️ Google doesn’t want you to create bite-sized chunks of your content.

📱 Disney+ to add vertical videos to its service later this year.

🔍 YouTube’s new search filters make clearer distinctions between long-form videos and Shorts.

🍺 Beverage brands update Dry January marketing based on changing consumer habits.

Google’s Web Guide, which was quietly launched in beta in July 2025, reframes search as guided research.

It breaks a query into meaningful subtopics and clusters relevant pages under each one, helping users explore topics. It’s powered by a Gemini-based model using query fan-out, meaning one search becomes many related searches stitched together into a structured map of the web.

What’s refreshing is what this signals for publishers and SEOs. Web Guide rewards clarity, focus, and depth. And crucially, it still sends users out to websites.

Here’s why it matters: 

• Fewer zero-click dead ends. Unlike AI Overviews, Web Guide is designed to surface pages, not replace them.
• More room for smaller sites. Strong content answering a specific subtopic can appear alongside big publishers.
• Topical clusters > single keywords. Comprehensive coverage across a theme increases visibility across multiple clusters.
• Intent-first organization. Content that genuinely helps users navigate a topic has a better chance of being featured.

If traditional search ranked content, and AI Overviews summarized it, and AI Mode chatted about it, then Web Guide organizes it. This could mark a subtle but meaningful shift back toward a healthier web ecosystem. Fingers crossed.

Head to Semrush for more.

SurgeFlow is a Chrome browser extension that automates your web tasks using natural language commands.

Describe what you want done in plain English, and it automates repetitive tasks; coordinates across multiple tabs at once; plans, executes, and validates tasks; and speeds up analysis, research, job applications, data collection, etc.

At CES 2026, The LEGO Group teamed up with Sphere Studios, Disney Consumer Products, and Lucasfilm to launch the LEGO Star Wars SMART Play experience on the Las Vegas Sphere’s Exosphere.

For the first time ever, the Sphere was transformed into a giant LEGO Death Star, and guests could sit in a life-size LEGO X-Wing cockpit to reenact the iconic “trench run,” blasting the Death Star live on the world’s largest LED screen.

The experience celebrated the reveal of LEGO’s new tech-enhanced bricks, minifigures, and tags (which launch on March 1) that respond with sound, lights, and reactions.

Reese’s, 1984