There is some concern and speculation on the internet that Microsoft Bing is feeding in content behind paywall and using such content to provide answers in Bing Chat. I asked Bing Chat if it can give answers based on content behind paywalls and it said no, it cannot.

But I am not sure if this answer is 100% true:

Here is one thread about Bing Chat referencing and citing content behind a paywall to provide an answer for Bing Chat:

It’s a tricky minefield. If proven that these generative AIs are trained on proprietary and/or paywalled content, it opens the door to, shall we say, interesting litigation.

— Barry Adams 📰 (@badams) March 19, 2023

Now, is this possible? Well, there can be answers on why Bing was able to access this content:

(1) Maybe the content was open for a period of time where it was not behind a paywall and Bing indexed it?

(2) Maybe the content provider is giving this paywalled content to Bingbot without a paywall. There are approved ways to give paywalled content to search engines, like the old first click free and flexible sampling solutions.

So technically, the content might now be behind a paywall for users but not for search engines.

So technically, Bingbot doesn’t see the paywall but users might.

That is a possible technical explanation.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google Business Profiles lets you see what business listings offer service-wise, they’ve been doing this for a while now, and now they seem to impact your local rankings. But what is new and scary is that Google is making up pricing for your services that are almost always incorrect and sometimes dangerous for that businesses.

Carrie Hill and Sukhjit S Matharu spotted this and posted a couple of examples, one from a client and one from some random business. In both cases, the pricing Google listed are incorrect. She said her client is not offering these services for free, despite what Google says. And her client’s competitors are not offering bed bug inspection for only $1 and $100.

Here is what Sukhjit S Matharu shared on Twitter, saying “when looking into a client’s services in their GBP, we noticed that some of the predefined services had a “free” label which we nor the client added.”

Here is what Carrie Hill shared on Twitter saying “Here’s another where pricing is arbitrarily added in – not from the client… certainly not correct!”

Joy Hawkins, a local SEO, also confirmed this is new.

I wonder if this is easy for the business to fix by going into their Google Business Profiles and editing their services. But I suspect most of these businesses have no clue Google added these prices to their services and it might lead to some bad reviews if a customer is charged or quoted more than what is listed in Google Search.

This reminds me when Google Local Service Ads estimated pricing, which upset many businesses.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google has updated the Googlebot help document on crawling to clarify that the 15MB fetch size limit applies to each fetch of the individual subresources referenced in the HTML as well, such as JavaScript and CSS files.

Google initially added information about this 15MB limit several months ago, which caused a lot of concern in the SEO industry, so make sure to read that story.

The help document now reads:

Googlebot can crawl the first 15MB of an HTML file or supported text-based file. Each resource referenced in the HTML such as CSS and JavaScript is fetched separately, and each fetch is bound by the same file size limit. After the first 15MB of the file, Googlebot stops crawling and only considers the first 15MB of the file for indexing. The file size limit is applied on the uncompressed data. Other Google crawlers, for example Googlebot Video and Googlebot Image, may have different limits.

It previously read:

Googlebot can crawl the first 15MB of an HTML file or supported text-based file. Any resources referenced in the HTML such as images, videos, CSS, and JavaScript are fetched separately. After the first 15MB of the file, Googlebot stops crawling and only considers the first 15MB of the file for indexing. The file size limit is applied on the uncompressed data. Other Google crawlers may have different limits.

Gary added on LinkedIn, “PSA from my inbox: The 15MB resource fetch threshold applies on the JavaScript resources, too, so if your JavaScript files are larger than that, your site might have a bad time in Google Search. See googlebot.com for information about the fetch features and limitations. Yes, there are JavaScript resources out there that are larger than 15MB. No, it’s not a good idea to have JavaScript files that are that large.”

Here are some comments on early feedback from the SEO community on this:

Are you running into 15mb Don size? That’s quite a bit.

— johnmu is not a chatbot yet 🐀 (@JohnMu) March 19, 2023

The 15mb is just about fetching, it’s totally separate from the indexing side.

— johnmu is not a chatbot yet 🐀 (@JohnMu) March 19, 2023

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.