A daily digest of what changed in SEO, Google Ads and AI, with links to the sources.
Three in four homepages lost organic clicks year over year, and on more than half of sites the homepage no longer collects the most AI impressions. Meanwhile, Adthena counted 175,000 paid placements in Google's AI answers, and ChatGPT Ads already has more than 100,000 advertisers.
On average, a visit from a ChatGPT ad brings in considerably less revenue than one from a Google ad. Reddit is testing ads in its search, and a single robots.txt rule may soon cover every AI company.
Brands vanish from AI answers even when the page is cited: in Google AI Mode that happens in almost half of cases. One in a hundred users clicks AI traffic, but it converts almost twice as well.
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.
Google Ads finally lets you decide which channel gets the budget first. ChatGPT searches the web for only one in seven answers, and when it does, it goes for first-hand sources.
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.
Google has started paying publishers for content that genuinely shapes AI answers, but won't say how it judges that. The same week, another study showed that AI Overviews take roughly one in four clicks from heavily exposed sites.
Ad strength in Google Ads says nothing about results: in a large study, campaigns rated “poor” did better than those rated “excellent”. On top of that, the ChatGPT ads panel does not yet let you exclude keywords.
AI Overview now leads straight into a conversation with AI, and just over 1% of people click the source links. In the same week, OpenAI and Anthropic showed models that carry out tasks on a computer by themselves.
