Trend Radar Week 38/2026: Google strengthens publisher profiles

Google expands Search Profiles for publishers

On September 16, Google announced three improvements to Search Profiles for publishers. Publishers should be able to present content, subscription options and audience relationships more visibly in Search. The feature is aimed at media companies, but the direction matters more broadly: Google is giving more weight to source, brand and direct relationships, not only individual results.

What does this mean for you? Do not treat your website as a loose collection of pages. Users and search engines should quickly understand who you are, what you offer and why your company is trustworthy. Keep your About page, contact details, team information, local signals and brand information consistent. Also review titles and meta descriptions on key pages: even with more source context, snippets still need to be clear and clickable.

Cloudflare separates search and AI training more clearly

heise reported on September 18 about new Cloudflare rules for multi-purpose crawlers. The idea: website owners should be able to block certain AI crawlers without necessarily damaging normal search visibility. This addresses a real problem: many site owners want search visibility, but do not want every form of AI training or scraping.

What does this mean for you? For a small business website, blocking everything is rarely the right move. Visibility in Google, Bing and local search still matters. Still, you should know which bots create heavy traffic and whether your hosting shows unusual patterns. If your content or images matter commercially, review logs, robots.txt and security rules. Do not copy random blocking rules blindly; they can affect SEO, previews, monitoring or accessibility tools.

The Hugging Face hack highlights AI agent risk

Also on September 18, heise analysed the Hugging Face hack and the role of AI agents as a security risk. The specific platform may feel distant for many small businesses, but the lesson is close: AI agents that can run code, fetch data, use tools or automate workflows can scale mistakes and attacks faster than a normal chatbot.

What does this mean for you? Do not give AI automation admin access, customer databases or payment workflows just because a tool technically supports it. Start with limited tasks: drafts, internal checklists, non-sensitive research and summaries. Anything that sends emails, deletes files, changes shop data or processes customer data needs approvals, logs and a human final step. Enable 2FA, separate test and production accounts, and keep backups.

A majority of German companies now use AI

Several media outlets reported on September 14, citing current industry figures, that a majority of companies in Germany now use AI. For SMEs, the exact percentage is less important than the normalisation effect: AI is moving into office work, marketing, support, accounting and website maintenance.

What does this mean for you? If competitors use AI, that does not automatically mean better quality, but it can change speed. Small businesses should define three safe use cases: draft website and social media text, summarise internal information, and generate ideas for customer communication. Set boundaries: no passwords, no confidential customer data, no unchecked legal or medical copy, and no automatically published content.

In brief

• Google published more Search examples around profiles and personal use. For SMEs, clear structure beats SEO tricks.
• Privacy and compliance around Microsoft 365 remain active topics in specialist media. Check processing agreements, roles and storage locations.
• The AI crawler debate is becoming more technical. Document bot rules instead of clicking them once in a hosting panel.