GEO news
What is changing in AI search. Each item is a summary with a link to the outlet that reported it.
ChatGPT ad clicks earn $0.89 per visit against $2.45 from paid search, working paper finds
A visit from a ChatGPT ad generated $0.89 in revenue for U.S. traffic, compared with $2.45 from a paid Google search ad, according to a working paper by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze dated October 2026 and still under review.
Source: Search Engine Journal
BrightEdge finds big travel brands lead AI answers, with gaps in inspiration queries
New BrightEdge research into travel queries shows established brands taking most of the visibility in both Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT, but the leader changes with the travel sector being asked about.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Opting out of Google AI Overviews cut organic clicks too, small study finds
A small case study by Cyrus Shepard has put an estimated click-through rate of roughly 0.9% on impressions inside Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google Gemini Stopped Attaching UTM Parameters To Cited URLs
Google has stopped appending UTM parameters to the links Gemini cites in its answers. The tags, which carried utm_source=gemini, appeared in early September and then disappeared around 28 September, according to tracking by Natzir that was shared on X.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Being known is not being recommended: a five-time CEO's AI search test exposes the measurement gap
Tony Uphoff asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews the questions his prospective clients ask, then counted how often the engines named the two businesses he launched in February.
Source: Search Engine Journal
New asset: AI Search Visibility Pitch Deck
A new pitch deck aimed at helping marketers make the budget case for AI search visibility has been published, intended for use before attribution and measurement catch up with spending on generative engine optimisation.
Source: Growth Memo
ChatGPT Ads switches on automatic creative changes by default
OpenAI is turning on creative enhancements by default for new and existing ChatGPT Ads campaigns from Friday, October 30.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Half of AI citations vanish by the next day, but most come back
Roughly 37,500 citations across five AI tools were tracked daily for 20 days to find out what happens to the sources that drop out of AI answers.
Source: Ahrefs Blog
OpenAI data: one in five consumer ChatGPT messages now seek information
Information seeking reached 20.7% of messages on consumer ChatGPT plans in August, edging past writing at 20.6% for the first time in OpenAI's Signals series, which begins in July 2024. Writing regained the lead in September at 21.4% against 20.2%.
Source: Search Engine Journal
STAT's Tom Capper: track brand mentions, not citations, in AI answers
Brands measuring their presence in AI answers should treat mentions and recommendations as the outcome, with cited URLs as supporting evidence rather than the headline metric, according to Tom Capper, Director of Search Product Strategy at STAT.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Brands ChatGPT rarely names without search stay rare even when cited pages mention them
Brands that ChatGPT seldom names when answering without search results tend to stay seldom named when it does search, even when those brands appear on many of the pages it cites.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Winning AI search visibility does not guarantee B2B sales, analysis finds
Ranking well in Google, ChatGPT or Perplexity does not by itself win B2B buyers. Buyers who arrive from an AI answer still have to understand an offering, check its claims and decide to act, and a website that makes that work hard loses them before sales ever hears from them.
Source: MarTech
ChatGPT sends 0.62% of the traffic Google organic does, 100-site study finds
ChatGPT traffic is a rounding error next to Google organic, according to an analysis of 12 months of GA4 data across 100 websites and more than 145 million sessions.
Source: Search Engine Journal
ChatGPT sends less than 1% of Google's traffic
ChatGPT referral traffic amounts to just 0.62% of the sessions Google organic search sends to websites, according to an analysis by Marie Haynes covering 100 sites, 12 months of GA4 data and more than 145 million sessions.
Source: MarTech
