Online stores, product feeds and shopping in search.
More and more people ask AI before they buy: they compare products and look for weak spots in offers. Yet the same people dislike the flood of AI-generated content and double-check recommendations elsewhere anyway.
AI answers take clicks away from classic results, and only about one user in a hundred clicks a link inside the summary itself. That small stream of visitors, however, converts noticeably better than the rest.
ChatGPT traffic in GA4 has dropped by half on some sites, but it didn't disappear - it now shows up as direct traffic. In the US, Google is launching a single cart for shopping across multiple stores.
The September spam update ran for almost two weeks, longer than any earlier one this year. Some of the ranking swings during that period, though, were a tracking error rather than a change in Google.
Google has updated its guidelines: AI content, including titles and descriptions, must be checked by a person before it goes live. On searches for a brand name, the AI answer increasingly sits above the brand's own website.
A field experiment confirmed that AI Mode and AI Overviews take clicks away from websites. At the same time, more than half of AI citations come from pages outside the top ten results.
