The week in GEO: 9 to 15 October 2026
Twenty-two stories in our news feed this week. These are the ones that change how a GEO agency works, with what each means in practice.
ChatGPT visits now look like direct traffic
OpenAI has stopped adding utm_source=chatgpt.com to links in ChatGPT, apparently with the GPT-6 release. With no tag and no referrer, analytics tools count the visit as direct. On about 500 pages where ChatGPT sent at least 5% of visits, ChatGPT traffic fell by roughly 31,000 a day while direct traffic rose by 26,000 a day (our summary).
A separate Ahrefs study of 66.6 million ChatGPT responses found it searched the web for only 14.4% of them. When it did, three quarters of its single-site searches went to brand sites, and the word "official" appeared in 13.1% of its English searches in September (our summary).
What it means for agencies
Any client report that counts ChatGPT referrals will show a drop from early October that is not real. Say so before the client notices, and move reporting to prompt tracking and to direct traffic on the pages ChatGPT used to send visitors to. The Ahrefs figures also argue for work on clients' own sites: when ChatGPT does search, it often goes looking for the official page.
Google puts more links in AI answers
Google says inline links will appear more often and higher in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It is testing a block of official sites at the top of some answers, adding thumbnails to links at the end, and says use of Preferred Sources has grown more than sevenfold this year. It still gives site owners no click data from AI answers (summary, more detail).
Gemini 4 Argon is now in AI Mode for Pro and Ultra subscribers, and its answers carry links, unlike the earlier Flash release (summary). Google is also testing the AI Mode sidebar on its main results page (summary).
AI Overviews now appear on most searches for big brands' own names. Ahrefs found them on 63 of 100 global brand names by 30 September, up from 5 on 1 July, with most of the rise in September (summary). Overviews also now answer typos and searches with no matching pages (summary).
What it means for agencies
For many clients, the first thing a buyer sees when searching the company's own name is now an AI answer. Checking what that answer says, and which pages it links to, belongs in every audit. The official-sites test rewards a clear, authoritative page for each thing a client wants to be known for.
Bing shows where competitors are cited instead
Bing Webmaster Tools has added Topics Portfolio, in beta, to its AI Performance report. It groups the searches where a site is cited in Copilot and Bing's AI answers into topics, with Topic Size, Sites Cited and Queries for each, and lists Opportunity Queries where other sites are cited and the client is not (summary). Bing says the figures are approximate.
What it means for agencies
This is free, first-party data on the gap between a client and its competitors in one AI engine. Connect clients' Bing Webmaster Tools accounts if they are not already, and use the Opportunity Queries as a starting list for content work.
llms.txt makes no measurable difference
SE Ranking looked at nearly 300,000 domains. Only 10.13% have an llms.txt file, and a model predicting how often a domain is cited by AI assistants became more accurate when llms.txt was taken out (summary).
What it means for agencies
Adding an llms.txt file is cheap and does no harm, but on this evidence it should not be sold to clients as something that wins citations. Agencies that list it as a deliverable should say what it does and what it does not.
Ads move into AI answers
Google is testing pharmaceutical ads, including for prescription drugs, inside AI Mode and AI Overviews in the US, labelled Sponsored (summary). OpenAI has started giving ChatGPT Ads advertisers named account managers and fortnightly check-ins (summary).
What it means for agencies
Paid placements now sit beside the organic citations agencies are paid to earn. Clients will ask whether to buy them. It helps to show, prompt by prompt, where a client is already cited and where a paid slot would add anything.
Google's Universal Cart goes live
Universal Cart is live in the US across Search and the Gemini app. It holds products from different retailers in one cart, tracks price drops and stock, applies promo codes and checks out through Google Pay or the retailer's site. It runs on the Shopping Graph's more than 60 billion product listings, and Nike, Sephora, Target, Walmart and many Shopify merchants are in at launch (summary).
What it means for agencies
For ecommerce clients, product data is now part of being recommended. Accurate feeds, prices and stock in Merchant Center decide whether a product can be added to the cart from an AI answer at all.
Anthropic bans fake corroboration
From 12 November, Anthropic's usage policy bars using Claude to seed the sources AI systems draw on with content that hides who made it, such as networks of sites posing as independent sources that back each other up. Fake personas, outlets and reviews are covered too, and so is selling any of it as a service (summary).
What it means for agencies
A tactic some GEO work has relied on now breaches the terms of one of the main AI tools. Earned mentions on genuinely independent sites carry no such risk.
Also this week
Google explained that PDFs are converted to HTML before indexing and can appear in AI Mode and AI Overviews like any page, though images inside them are poorly understood (summary). Subscription content from publishers can now appear in AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini (summary).
All the week's stories are on the news page. To compare GEO agencies, see the directory.