SEO Madmanby Adam Hafez

Topic

AI search and answer engines - how to get cited

What AI search means

AI search describes search surfaces that answer a query directly with generated text and cite a small set of sources, rather than returning a list of links. Visibility in these surfaces depends on whether a page states an extractable answer, supports it with verifiable citations, and is reachable by the crawlers each system uses.

Reference: en.wikipedia.org

Google opens its SynthID detector to everyone

Google's SynthID Detector is now open to anyone, globally in English. It checks images, video and audio for watermarks, and nothing ties it to rankings.

Oct 7

Merchant Center adds a UCP integration hub for US merchants

Google's Merchant Center is rolling out a UCP integration hub in the US, with checkout buttons for AI Mode and Gemini behind an interest form.

Oct 7

ChatGPT tests green and gray labels on product results

OpenAI is testing labels such as best all-rounder and best for beginners on ChatGPT product results, in green and gray. OpenAI has not commented.

Oct 6

OpenAI will watermark ChatGPT text in the EU

OpenAI adds an invisible watermark to ChatGPT and Codex text in the EU, with an API opt-in worldwide. Edits weaken it, and Google does not use it.

Oct 6

Search Console flags child property AI control overrides

Google's help page now says top-level domain owners see a notice on the Search generative AI control page when a child property overrides the parent.

Oct 6

How Google turns a query into results, per a Barcelona recap

A ROAST recap of Mueller and Illyes in Barcelona: synonym expansion, AI fan-out queries missing from Search Console, and retrieval before ranking.

Oct 2

Shopify auto-enrols stores in new AI shopping channels

Shopify's Agentic setting shares eligible stores' products with AI chat apps by default, and in-chat checkout can bypass your own tracking code.

Oct 2

Google's AI contribution pilot pays about 100 publishers, report says

The Information reports Google pays about 100 publishers in its AI contribution pilot, with payments for several smaller sites under 0.1% of ad revenue.

Oct 1

Google rolls out AI Mode monitoring to everyone worldwide

Google is rolling out AI Mode monitoring to all users globally, after Ultra and Pro subscribers. It watches sites, forums, social posts and Shopping Graph.

Oct 1

ChatGPT adds virtual try-on and Favorites for shopping

OpenAI launched virtual try-on for clothing and accessories and a Favorites library in ChatGPT on mobile and web, announced on October 1, 2026.

Oct 1

Cloudflare moves Monetization Gateway and Pay Per Use into beta

Cloudflare put two AI payment products into beta on 30 September 2026: per-request charges for agents, and monthly payouts to publishers for reported use.

Oct 1

Google says fact-checking AI content is critical before publishing

Google updated its generative AI content guide on 1 October 2026: manually fact-check and review AI output, including titles, alt text and structured data.

Oct 1

Google tests AI Overview citations at the bottom and a loading button

Google is testing AI Overview citation cards below the answer instead of on the right, and a loading state in place of Show more. Neither is confirmed.

Oct 1

Google AI Overviews now show for many large brand queries

Chris Long found AI Overviews on 93% of about 100 large brand queries he tested. Most sit mid-page, and Google and news sites are exceptions.

Oct 1

Google appeals the EU order to share search data with rivals

Google appealed two EU Digital Markets Act decisions on 29 September 2026. Nick Fox says Europe's Search is degraded and spam checks were pulled back.

Oct 1

Publishers with OpenAI deals get 48% more ChatGPT citations

A study joining licensing-deal records to 129.3 million AI citations finds a ChatGPT premium for OpenAI partners, but no matching edge on Google.

Oct 1

Court dismisses Penske's AI Overviews lawsuit against Google

A court dismissed Penske Media's AI Overviews suit because it pleaded no actual agreement with Google. It did not rule on AI Overviews themselves.

Oct 1

Google research makes query fan-out an order of magnitude faster

Google's R4T research cuts query fan-out latency by an order of magnitude, tested on fashion and music benchmarks. Google has not said it runs in Search.

Sep 27

Google's SAFE paper targets AI slop channels, not web pages

Google's three-page SAFE paper describes AI agents that investigate clusters of channels posting AI slop. It never mentions web search or the spam update.

Sep 27

Bing tests calling its Copilot Search tab AI Mode

Bing is testing an AI Mode label on the search tab normally named Copilot Search, a month after testing Google's AI Overviews name for its answer box.

Sep 26

Algorithm Updates

BERT update (2019): what it changed and what it means now

Google announced BERT on 25 October 2019. It first helped with 1 in 10 US English searches and by 2020 was used in almost every English query.

Sep 26

Algorithm Updates

MUM (2021): what Google's Multitask Unified Model does in Search

Google announced MUM on 18 May 2021 as an AI model, not a ranking update. It is used for specific tasks, not for general ranking in Search.

Sep 26

Google tests AI Overviews in the hotel side panel

Google is testing AI Overviews at the bottom right of hotel results, under the knowledge panel, not at the top of the page. Google has not confirmed it.

Sep 25

Search Console splits web results into text and multimodal

The Performance report now has a Web: Multimodal search type for image-based searches, separate from Web: Text-based, and it has no query data.

Sep 25

YouTube citation share across AI search platforms, BrightEdge

BrightEdge measured YouTube's citation share in Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity and ChatGPT from May 2024 to September 2025. Here are its figures.

Sep 25

Rootly's AI citation rate rose from 3% to 30% in AthenaHQ case

AthenaHQ says Rootly's citation rate across tracked AI prompts rose from 3% to 30%. Here is what it reports, and what a vendor case cannot prove.

Sep 25

Google auto-enables native checkout for Merchant Center stores

Merchants are getting emails saying products are eligible for checkout inside AI Mode and Gemini, with opt-out handled on the platform side.

Sep 24

AI shoppers now convert 54% better than non-AI traffic, Adobe finds

Adobe's May 2026 data shows AI-referred retail visits converting 54% better than non-AI traffic, a reversal from a year earlier.

Sep 24

Does adding JSON-LD schema raise AI citations? Ahrefs test

Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD against matched controls. Here is the method, the citation changes by platform and the limits.

Sep 24

Report: Google AI Overviews now carry far more external links

Peec AI data says AI Overviews with external links rose from close to 0% to over 25%. Search Engine Roundtable shares it with doubt.

Sep 23

Google AI Mode adoption and zero-click rate, Semrush 2025

Semrush clickstream data on Google AI Mode's first two months: usage grew about 4x to just over 1% of sessions, and 92-94% ended without an external click.

Sep 23

Which SERP features sit next to AI Overviews, per Semrush

Semrush's refreshed study: Related searches (95.32%) and People Also Ask (90.03%) almost always appear beside an AI Overview, and ads now reach 25%.

Sep 23

Google tests AI Overview links that lead into AI Mode, not a webpage

Google is testing anchor links inside AI Overviews that look like normal web links but open a follow-up question in AI Mode instead of a website.

Sep 22

Shopping Graph grew from 45 to 60 billion listings in 19 months

Google's own disclosures put the Shopping Graph at 45 billion listings in October 2024, 50 billion in January 2026, and past 60 billion by May 2026.

Sep 22

Google Web Guide's classic search button doesn't work

A reported bug in Google Web Guide keeps the classic search button from exiting the feature. It reloads Web Guide instead of returning to normal search.

Sep 20

Which AI crawlers do news sites block most? CCBot tops 75%

A robots.txt scan of 100 top UK and US news sites finds CCBot blocked by 75%, the most of any AI bot. Google-Extended is the least-blocked training bot.

Sep 20

Google appears to be blocking scrapers and rank trackers harder

Since around September 13, 2026, rank-tracking and tracking tools report Google blocking more of their scraping, Nozzle citing an 80 percent data drop.

Sep 19

OpenAI tests Sponsored Agents as a new ChatGPT ad format

OpenAI is testing Sponsored Agents: labeled conversations with a business agent that users start after clicking a ChatGPT ad, with select US advertisers.

Sep 18

Google tests an AI Mode button in the results page search bar

Google is testing an AI Mode button in the search bar on results pages, not only the home page. The button is inconsistent and regular search still works.

Sep 18

AI Overview trigger rate by query type: comparison queries hit 95%

Seer Interactive tracked 49,358 queries and found comparison searches trigger an AI Overview 95.4% of the time, versus 27.3% for single words.

Sep 18

AI training now drives 52% of crawler requests, Cloudflare says

Cloudflare reports AI training made up 52% of identified crawler requests in June 2026, up from 22% in Spring 2025, with search crawling shrinking.

Sep 18

Where desktop Google searches end: Datos Q4 2025 data

Datos and SparkToro's Q4 2025 clickstream shows 24.5% of US desktop Google searches ended with no click in December, versus 25.1% a year earlier.

Sep 18

llms.txt fetch counts: what AI crawlers requested on 83 sites

EZY Research's 12-week server-log panel shows OpenAI and Anthropic crawlers fetching llms.txt in single digits while pulling robots.txt thousands of times.

Sep 18

What correlates with AI brand mentions? Ahrefs' 75,000-brand study

Ahrefs correlated 12 metrics with brand mentions in ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews: web mentions beat backlinks, and it warns of no causation.

Sep 18

How you chunk a page changes whether AI retrieves it at all

A 36-method academic benchmark found paragraph-based chunking nearly doubles retrieval accuracy over naive fixed-size splitting across six domains.

Sep 18

Do AI assistants cite fresher content than Google? Ahrefs data

Ahrefs compared the age of 16.975 million URLs cited by AI assistants against organic Google results. Here is the method, the numbers and the limits.

Sep 18

Logging bug undercounted impressions in Search Console's AI report

A logging error cut reported impressions in Search Console's Generative AI report from August 13, 2026, Google says, with no real drop in visibility.

Sep 16

How much AI Overview citations overlap with the top 10

BrightEdge's tracking: only 17% of AI Overview citations also rank in the organic top 10, a figure flat for months, with wide swings by industry.

Sep 16

AI referral traffic to publishers doubled in a year, Similarweb finds

Similarweb measured 770.7 million monthly AI referral visits worldwide, up 117.4% year over year, led by marketplaces and news.

Sep 16

A randomized field experiment on AI Overviews and organic clicks

A randomized Chrome-extension experiment hid AI Overviews for 1,065 searchers. This piece analyzes Agarwal and Sen's SSRN study of the CTR impact.

Sep 16

llms.txt and robots.txt have two separate, unrelated standards tracks

A W3C tracking issue on llms.txt and an unrelated IETF working group on robots.txt-adjacent AI signals are getting blended into one false headline.

Sep 10

Who blocks AI crawlers: 60 robots.txt files, read in full

We read the robots.txt of 60 publishers and SEO vendors. News sites block AI crawlers almost universally. The SEO industry does not.

Sep 10

llms.txt is a vendor standard, not a publisher one

Only 14 of 60 major sites serve an llms.txt. Half of them sell SEO or hosting software. One is a news publisher. The file has an audience problem.

Sep 10

Bing reports how often AI answers cite your pages

AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools counts citations in Copilot and AI answers, names the cited URLs, and shows the queries behind them.

Sep 9

Search Console now reports impressions from Google's AI features

Google added a generative AI performance report to Search Console, showing how often your pages surfaced inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover.

Sep 9

AEO checker: AI answer readiness score for articles

AEO checker that scores an article's opening answer, headings, ids, lists, citations, schema and date for AI answers. Free, runs in your browser.

Sep 9

robots.txt and llms.txt generator for AI crawlers

robots.txt and llms.txt generator for AI crawlers: allow or block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and 11 more by purpose. Free, runs in your browser.

Sep 9

Google opens AI Mode ads to exact and phrase match keywords

Google confirmed on 4 September 2026 that exact and phrase match keywords can serve text ads in AI Mode, once reserved for AI Max and Performance Max.

Sep 7

Why four 2026 'ChatGPT market share' numbers do not agree

StatCounter, Similarweb, Sensor Tower and OpenAI itself all published a 2026 ChatGPT usage figure. None of the four is measuring the same thing.

Sep 7

Does llms.txt do anything? Three studies say mostly no

97% of published llms.txt files get zero requests. A 10-site traffic test found no effect in 8 cases. The one positive figure has its own confound.

Sep 3

Google confirms AI Overviews now auto-expand on some queries

Google confirmed on 28 August 2026 that AI Overviews can dynamically expand into a full, detailed answer for some queries, dropping the Show more control.

Aug 31

AI citation patterns shift sharply by search intent, Wix data shows

Wix Studio's AI Search Lab found articles win informational queries 2.7x more, and listicles and product pages win commercial and transactional ones.

Aug 24

How five llms.txt trackers reported five different adoption rates

Five independent trackers measured llms.txt adoption since late 2025 and reported 7.4% to 28%, because none counted the same thing.

Aug 23

Three named companies with real, checkable traffic declines

Chegg, Business Insider and HubSpot all show real, checkable declines. A widely repeated CNN figure does not survive a source check.

Aug 21

Google adds a custom button for preferred sources in Search

Google's docs now explain how to add an interactive button that lets readers pick your site as a preferred source. Here is what the documentation says.

Aug 20

IETF's AI Preferences group is still drafting, not shipping

The IETF's AI Preferences group is standardizing AI training and search signals that extend robots.txt. Still an Internet-Draft, not a shipped standard.

Aug 18

Gemini 3.7 Flash reaches AI Mode, a day after its release

Google added Gemini 3.7 Flash to AI Mode's model picker on 14 August 2026, limited to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, one day after the model shipped.

Aug 14

French publishers file complaint over Google AI Mode

French press alliance APIG asked the competition authority on 11 August 2026 to enforce 2022 commitments after Google launched AI Mode in France.

Aug 11

ChatGPT Ads adds oCPC bidding and a product carousel

OpenAI added beta conversion bidding, dynamic URL macros and a multi-product carousel to ChatGPT Ads, reported on August 7, 2026.

Aug 10

Ahrefs: AI Overviews cut position-1 CTR by 58%

Ahrefs analyzed 300,000 keywords via Google Search Console and found AI Overviews now cut position-1 desktop CTR by 58%, up from 34.5% in April 2025.

Aug 6

Zero-click Google searches hit 68% in the US

SparkToro and Similarweb's June 2026 report puts US Google zero-click search at 68.01%, up from 60.45% in 2024.

Aug 4

AI citation hallucination rates: what three real studies found

GPTZero, the Tow Center and a Cureus study each measured AI citation hallucination differently, and none of their numbers agree with each other.

Jul 30

What academic research actually says about AI citation factors

Three 2026 studies measured what predicts citation by AI search engines. Position and relevance win; most citations skip brand domains entirely.

Jul 25

AI Overview traffic decline: seven claims, four hold up

Studies put the AI Overview traffic hit from 24% to 80%. We traced seven quoted figures to source; four hold up, and they measure different things.

Jul 14

AI citation rate by content format: what checks out

Six precise stats on AI citation rates by content format circulate online. Two trace to real studies, one to a paper. Three fail verification.

Jul 13

How three CTR trackers reported three different position-1 rates

Three trackers measured 2026 organic CTR by position and reported position 1 anywhere from 27.6% to 39.8%, because none used the same method.

Jul 11

How often AI Overviews actually appear, January 2025 to April 2026

Semrush's own tracking: 6.49% of keywords in January 2025, a July peak near 24.61%, then 15.69% in November - the real trend, not a snapshot.

Jul 6

Bot traffic passes human traffic on Cloudflare's network

Cloudflare's CEO says automated requests for HTML pages now outnumber human ones, ahead of his own 2027 forecast.

Jul 1

AI crawler block rate: how often a 403 actually stops the bot

Cloudflare network data: 7.9% of AI crawler requests got a 403 in H1 2026, and crawler 4xx rates tripled in a year, unlike robots.txt rule counts.

Jul 1

What Google has actually said about Google Lens search volume

Google's own dated numbers: 12 billion Lens searches a month in June 2023, nearly 20 billion by October 2024 - and why the 22%/26% claims don't check out.

Jun 30

Search Console configures Performance reports from a prompt

AI-powered configuration turns a natural-language request into Search Console filters, comparisons and metric choices, no manual setup required.

Jun 28

What Google and Bing actually say about schema and AI

Schema.org's own numbers, Google's AI documentation and Bing's public statements, separated from unverified SEO claims.

Jun 14

Merchant Center adds AI Performance Insights for share of voice

A new Merchant Center report benchmarks brand visibility on AI Mode and AI Overviews, plus shopping funnel and attribute-gap data.

May 20

AI Overview citations are decoupling from search rank

Ahrefs data shows top-10 pages went from 76% to 38% of AI Overview citations in eight months. Ranking well no longer guarantees a citation.

May 6

Penske Media v. Google: the antitrust timeline so far

Penske Media sued Google over AI Overviews in 2025. The dated record: the complaint, Google's dismissal motion, Penske's opposition, and an EU complaint.

Feb 12

AI Mode passed 200 countries and territories, and entered the EU

Google added more than 35 languages and 40 countries to AI Mode, reaching EU markets including Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland.

Oct 9