ChatGPT search reaches 20% of Google's query volume, OpenAI says
OpenAI has put ChatGPT's search volume at roughly a fifth of Google's, a figure that lands alongside a wider set of changes to how AI answers surface brands and ads. Google, meanwhile, is moving AI Overviews for brands into the right-hand column of results and letting AI Mode carry up to four ads.
On the content side, Facebook's push into AI-generated pages looks likely to run into Google's scaled content abuse policy. Google also confirmed that important URLs can keep appearing in Search for a period after returning a 400 status code, and updated its documentation on pages that are crawled but not indexed. Sites showing only a homepage in the index may be signalling a quality problem.
Google has emailed some site owners about site reputation abuse manual actions no longer applying in the EEA, and published a fuller list of the systems it uses to re-rank results. Search Console performance reports showed an unexplained click spike for some properties, while Reddit's share price fell 33% after its chief executive confirmed declining traffic from Google Search.
For brands chasing citations in AI answers, the shift of AI Overviews to the right column and the extra ad slots in AI Mode change where visibility is won. ChatGPT's ad products are widening too, with multi-image formats and revised Max Bid and Max CPC bidding options taking effect on 9 November.
Reported by Search Engine Roundtable ↗
Topics: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI advertising