Jim Hedger returns from bereavement time as he and cohost Kristine Schachinger learn that Matt Mullenweg has found a way to make the WordPress controversy much worse that it was when it started by banning WPEngine, establishing a loyalty pledge complete with a box to check to swear your WP-Loyalty, running down investors, getting himself and the commercial arm of WordPress sued for Extortion, and very possibly sacrificing small animals on the beach at midnight. Meanwhile SEOs contemplate what a DOJ mandated break-up of Google might look like while at the same time thinking about how to guide clients through questions about AI bots. X changes the way it pays content creators, and Bing has another one of its own Generative Search Experience rolling out. To round things out, Google pulled a manual job on Forbes Advisor over Reputation Abuse. Google is also rolling out newly AI organized search results and clarifying support for robots.txt fields while dropping support for the "noarchive" meta tag directive. More importantly, Google has updated its Web Search Spam Policies to be clearer about Site Reputation Abuse. We sort of learn how Google pays for all this, by seeing nearly 9,000 ad campaigns established every second!