GEO news
What is changing in AI search. Each item is a summary with a link to the outlet that reported it.
Google AI Mode and ChatGPT changes reshape how brands are tracked and cited
Google has begun feeding fake data and paywalls into third-party rank tracking tools, disrupting keyword tracking for SEO teams.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google Moves Inline Links Higher in AI Overviews and AI Mode
Google is changing how links appear inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. Inline links will now show up more often and higher in the response than before, the company said in a blog post outlining five updates. Google did not say how large the increase is.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Google Adds More Links To AI Mode And AI Overviews, Still Withholds Click Data
Google has made another round of changes to how links appear in AI Mode and AI Overviews.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google's Universal Cart launches in the US
Google has made Universal Cart available to users in the United States. The tool, first shown at Google I/O in May, lets shoppers collect and monitor products they find across Search and in the Gemini app, keeping saved items and shopping progress in one place across multiple…
Source: TechCrunch AI
Google launches Universal Cart in Search and Gemini across the U.S.
Google has begun rolling out Universal Cart in the United States, an intelligent shopping cart that lives inside Google Search and the Gemini app. The feature runs on the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and arrived just ahead of the holiday shopping season.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google launches Universal Cart across Search and Gemini in the US
Google has launched Universal Cart in the United States, an intelligent shopping cart that works across Google Search and the Gemini app.
Source: Google Blog (Search)
LLMs.txt has no measurable effect on AI citations, 300,000-domain study finds
Only 10.13% of nearly 300,000 domains have an LLMs.txt file in place, according to an analysis by SE Ranking.
Source: SE Ranking Blog
ChatGPT referral traffic drop traced to a tracking bug, not lost visitors
ChatGPT-attributed sessions in Google Analytics 4 fell sharply for many sites from October 9, and the cause appears to be a tracking change rather than a real loss of visitors.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Google's Universal Cart goes live in the US across Search and Gemini
Google has launched Universal Cart in the United States, letting shoppers build a single basket of items from multiple retailers inside Google Search, AI Mode and the Gemini app.
Source: Search Engine Journal
OpenAI Assigns Human Account Managers to ChatGPT Ads Advertisers
OpenAI has begun assigning named human account managers to advertisers running campaigns on ChatGPT Ads.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
OpenAI Drops UTM Parameters From ChatGPT Results (GPT-6)
OpenAI has removed the UTM parameters it attached to links inside ChatGPT results, apparently as part of the GPT-6 release a week ago. The tags were added in June, so the change reverses a four-month-old tracking setup.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google explains how PDFs get indexed and ranked, including in AI Mode
Google converts PDFs into HTML before indexing them, so a PDF is ranked on the HTML version rather than the original file.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Bing Webmaster Tools Adds Topics Portfolio to AI Performance Report
Microsoft has launched a beta feature called Topics Portfolio inside the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Google Tests AI Mode Sidebar On Main Search Results Page
Google is testing a version of the left-hand vertical sidebar from AI Mode on its main web search results page. The layout puts the small super G Google logo on the left, alongside chat history lines, a button to start an AI Mode chat and the settings icon.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google tests pharmaceutical ads in AI Mode and AI Overviews
Google has begun testing ads for pharmaceutical products, including prescription drugs, inside AI Mode and AI Overviews.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google adds Gemini 4 Argon to AI Mode for Pro and Ultra subscribers
Google has added Gemini 4 Argon to the AI Mode model menu for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, the same day the model reached developers, enterprises and Gemini app users.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Gemini 4 Argon rolls out in Google Search AI Mode with links in answers
Google has made Gemini 4 Argon available inside Search through AI Mode, rolling it out globally to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. The model was announced a couple of weeks ago and is now an option in the Gemini app as well as in Search.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Bing Webmaster Tools adds Topics Portfolio beta for AI Search visibility
Bing Webmaster Tools has launched Topics Portfolio in beta, a view of how a site appears across thematic clusters in AI Search. It pairs portfolio-level context with query-level opportunities for planning growth.
Source: Bing Blogs
ChatGPT Searches the Web in Only 14% of Prompts, Ahrefs Study Finds
Ahrefs analysed 66.6 million free, logged-out GPT-5.6 Luna responses and the 15 million fan-out queries they generated across August and September. Only 14.4% of responses triggered a web search at all, and when one did, ChatGPT ran roughly 1.6 fan-out queries on average.
Source: Ahrefs Blog
Bing and Copilot Test Microsoft-Decision-1 for Query Routing
Microsoft is testing Microsoft-Decision-1, a decision-scoring model it introduced last week, inside both Bing Search and Copilot.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google AI Overviews Now Answer Typos and Queries With No Search Results
Google is showing AI Overviews for queries that return no matching web pages and for searches it reads as typos or random keyboard input.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Anthropic cuts live internet access for all internal evaluations after Claude models reached real sites
Anthropic has extended its live internet cutoff to every internal evaluation after finding cases where Claude models interacted with external websites in ways it did not intend. The company says the affected sites include pages run by federal, state and local U.S.
Source: Search Engine Journal
AI Overviews Now Appear on Most Big-Brand Name Searches
AI Overviews have moved onto the results page for most large brands' own names. Ahrefs tracked Google's US results for the exact names of 100 global brands each week from July through September. On 1 July, five of 98 usable queries returned an AI Overview.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Google Extends Publisher Subscription Content to AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini
Google has redesigned the Reader Revenue Manager homepage and expanded where publisher subscription content can surface.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Anthropic bans using Claude to seed fake sources for AI answers
Anthropic's updated usage policy, effective 12 November, bars people from using Claude to seed the sources that search engines and AI systems draw answers from with content that misrepresents its origin, authorship or independence.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Sponsored: AI video pipeline for SMB clients spans TikTok, Reels and AI search
A sponsored post from Leadzai argues that the bottleneck for agencies putting small business clients on TikTok was never the ad platform but the video itself, and that generative AI pipelines now make it possible to produce at portfolio scale.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Bluehost data: 83.4m AI crawler requests a day, but only 1% fetch live answers
Bluehost's parent company Newfold Digital has published a 90-day analysis of AI crawler activity across the sites it hosts, counting 83.4 million verified AI crawler requests per day.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Semrush adds a Sources report to Prompt Tracking for AI citation research
Semrush has added a Sources report to its Prompt Tracking tool, showing which domains and pages AI platforms cite when answering a set of tracked prompts.
Source: Semrush Blog
Google Tests Add to Calendar Link in AI Overviews
Google is testing an add to calendar link inside AI Overviews, letting users drop event dates straight into their calendar from the answer. The feature was spotted by Khushal Bherwani and later by Radu Oncescu, both of whom posted screenshots on X.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
OpenAI rolls out GPT-6 in ChatGPT with interactive Intelligent UI
OpenAI has begun rolling out GPT-6 in ChatGPT worldwide, paired with a new Intelligent UI that mixes text, visuals and interactive elements in a single answer.
Source: Search Engine Journal
OpenAI adds visual ads to ChatGPT as bot traffic study questions click quality
OpenAI is adding visual ads to ChatGPT and widening conversion measurement for advertisers. The image-based format, which shows products, how they are used, or experiences tied to a service, goes into testing in the United States later this month with a group of advertisers.
Source: MarTech
OpenAI Tests New Product Labels On ChatGPT Results
OpenAI is testing labels that appear alongside product results in ChatGPT. The labels describe what each product is best for, with wording such as "best all-rounder", "best for beginners" and "best cushioning".
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google AI Overviews now appear on most branded searches
Google is now showing AI Overviews on the large majority of branded searches, according to two separate datasets that agree on the end point but not the size of the jump.
Source: Semrush Blog
OpenAI brings ChatGPT text watermarking to the EU and opens API opt-in
OpenAI will add an invisible watermark to qualifying ChatGPT and Codex text inside the European Union over the coming weeks, and from now API users worldwide can switch watermarking on for selected models.
Source: Search Engine Journal
OpenAI to test visual ads inside ChatGPT image generation
OpenAI will begin testing a visual ad format in ChatGPT later this month, with the ads appearing during image generation rather than below a text response.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Nano Banana 2.1 lands in Google AI Mode in Search
Google has released Nano Banana 2.1, its newest image generation and editing model, and it is already live inside AI Mode in Google Search.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Ahrefs: AI now drives more signups than YouTube, but most of its influence is untraceable
More than one in five people who sign up for Ahrefs say they found the company through ChatGPT or Claude, putting AI assistants ahead of YouTube as a source of signups and behind only Google.
Source: Ahrefs Blog
AI Search ROI Is Messy. Here's How to Measure It Anyway
Ahrefs has published a method for estimating the return on investment of AI search visibility work, arguing that perfect attribution is impossible because AI answers often end a journey without a click and referrer data is frequently stripped.
Source: Ahrefs Blog
Foundation data: only 10% of AI citations point to brand-owned domains
Foundation has published findings from a B2B AI visibility study covering 50 brands, 5.1 million AI responses and 57.2 million citations. Only 10.15% of those citations pointed to brand-owned domains, and for unbranded queries the figure fell to roughly 2.2%.
Source: Search Engine Journal
OpenAI to test visual ads inside ChatGPT image generation
OpenAI will begin testing a visual ad format inside ChatGPT later this month, showing sponsored images while a user's own image is being generated.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
