Press review

Press review 11.11.2026: the November update, a company profile in chat and ads inside the conversation

Google has started its November core update, which may take two weeks, and ChatGPT cites pages that are on average 458 days fresher than Google's organic results. On ChatGPT Ads, the number of advertisers grew 21-fold while average spend fell by 85 percent.

Bartosz Bielawski

Bartosz Bielawski

· 9 min read
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Press review 11.11.2026: the November update, a company profile in chat and ads inside the conversation

Google has started the November core update - don't touch your content until the rollout ends

Signal: 2 independent sources this week, 3 in 30 days; tracked since 2024-05-10.

Google began rolling out its November core update on 10 November. It may take up to two weeks and applies to all languages and markets.

This is the third core update this year, and the previous one finished on 2 June. Google has published no new guidance and no list of recovery actions.

Measuring the impact will be tricky. If the rollout takes the full two weeks, the week after it ends falls on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so any comparison with a normal week will be distorted.

What to do: save the week before 10 November as your baseline, compare against it only after the rollout finishes, and note seasonality separately.

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ChatGPT cites fresher content than Google and rarely anything from the top 10

Signal: 3 independent sources this week, 8 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-07-08.

ChatGPT searches the live web for most questions, and the pages it cites are on average 458 days fresher than Google's organic results. Only about 8 percent of its citations point to pages ranking in Google's or Bing's top 10.

In the Ahrefs study, structured data made no measurable difference to how often pages were cited. Brand matters: 83 percent of answers to questions about a company cited the company's own website, usually as the first source.

Results also depend on whether your robots.txt lets in three OpenAI crawlers. OAI-SearchBot handles visibility in search, GPTBot handles training, and ChatGPT-User handles the visit after someone pastes a link.

What to do: check your robots.txt for OAI-SearchBot and publish official information on your own site - prices, specifications, policies - because that is what gets cited.

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In local AI recommendations, the winner is whoever has 4.3 stars on Maps and Yelp

More than half of US consumers ask AI tools for local recommendations at least once a month. A year earlier, that figure was 9 percent.

Average brand visibility in AI answers has climbed to 36.1 percent, roughly matching classic local results. Recommended businesses average about 4.3 stars, while those left out sit near 4.0.

The most cited sources are Google Maps and Yelp, with company websites in third place, especially individual location pages. You can offset a weaker rating with review volume, and volume carries the most weight in Gemini.

What to do: fix your Maps and Yelp listings for every location, keep your rating at 4.3 or above, and add location pages with opening hours and what you offer locally.

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Yahoo adds its own AI answers - another place where you can be cited

Yahoo has taken its Scout assistant out of beta and built a new search experience called Pivot Search on top of it. You can switch between classic results and an AI answer in the same window.

Scout has answered more than 3 billion questions since January. It has also landed in Firefox, where you can select it in the browser's AI sidebar.

Yahoo stresses that every answer includes prominent links to sources and frames this as a fairer deal for publishers than answers that keep people from clicking through.

What to do: add Yahoo to the surfaces where you track citations and referral traffic, and check that your content is easy for Scout to read.

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AI Mode ads expand beyond the US, but you still can't see their results separately

Signal: 2 independent sources this week, 2 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-11-10.

Google has expanded ads in AI Mode to more than 10 English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India and Singapore. Brazil, Mexico and the UK are promised for the fourth quarter.

In the US, ads now also appear on follow-up questions. An ad can show up under the second or third answer in the same conversation, with no new setting in your campaign.

Reporting still doesn't break them out: impressions, clicks and costs land in standard campaign reports, and search terms only approximate what people meant. As a result, a campaign can improve overall while AI Mode underperforms.

What to do: tell clients that AI Mode cannot be isolated in reporting, and treat changes over time as correlation, not proof of impact.

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In PMax, control over landing pages comes from switching Final URL expansion off

New signal: one source so far.

Google has refreshed the page feeds interface in Performance Max. The new copy is split into guidance on when to use feeds and what to keep in mind.

The key relationship hasn't changed: with Final URL expansion on, Google can use any URL it knows from your site, including those in the feed. Only switching that option off limits ads to URLs from page feeds.

Feeds are attached at the campaign level, and custom labels let you group URLs for individual asset groups. The change is mostly educational, as the underlying features remain the same.

What to do: review your feeds, remove outdated URLs and make a deliberate decision about whether a given campaign needs reach or control.

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Google Ads is introducing an "Ads with pay-per-lead goals terms" setting. Activating it requires accepting additional conditions.

They cover business verification, communication with leads, and responsibility for service quality and customer disputes. Google also gets broad permission to use the business information and branding you submit.

Calls and messages generated by ads may be recorded or monitored. The setting appearing in your account does not mean the account qualifies for pay-per-lead billing.

What to do: before accepting, check that your team is ready for call monitoring and that you have a process for disputing lead quality, because responsibility stays with you.

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Search has moved to the end of the purchase journey - Google is shifting weight to YouTube

Signal: 2 independent sources this week, 2 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-07-21.

Google's messaging has clearly shifted toward YouTube, creators and brand building - an area Meta used to own.

The data explains why: 68 percent of US Google searches end without a click, and product discovery has scattered across AI and social media. Search revenue keeps growing anyway, so Google isn't losing money on this.

Google is adding measurement to match: brand lift, view-through conversion optimisation and Meridian, its own marketing mix model. Video action campaigns have been folded into Demand Gen, which makes creative the biggest lever you control.

What to do: plan video as a complement to search, measure success at the brand level and run a holdout in part of the market before you move budget.

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When organic traffic falls, calculate the replacement budget in revenue, not sessions

Signal: 2 independent sources this week, 3 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-04-14.

Companies that relied on organic traffic for leads report fewer enquiries over the past few months and are moving budget to paid. Many of them changed neither their product nor their rankings.

When an AI Overview appears, organic clicks drop while paid clicks stay relatively stable. People rarely click an ad instead of an organic result - mostly they don't click at all.

The catch is that some of the lost traffic never made money. Split it into three buckets: pages that converted directly, pages that fed the funnel, and pages that never sold anything.

What to do: calculate what organic actually delivered in leads and revenue, and base the replacement budget on that number.

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AI and tools

You can now claim your company profile in ChatGPT and see how often you are cited

Signal: 3 independent sources this week, 8 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-07-08.

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Business Hub in beta. Companies can use it to confirm that they own their presence in ChatGPT.

After verification, by text message to a business number or through a DNS record, you see mentions, clicks to your site and "discovery topics" - the themes of conversations in which your site is cited.

Eligible organisations can also build and publish a Business Agent that answers questions and presents their offering. The click data is something Google and Microsoft do not provide in their AI reporting.

What to do: verify your most important clients as early as possible and report ChatGPT mentions as a separate channel.

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ChatGPT Ads has 21 times more advertisers, but average spend has collapsed

New signal: one source so far.

The number of active ChatGPT Ads advertisers grew 21-fold between April and August. Total spending stayed flat, so average spend per advertiser fell by about 85 percent.

The market is dominated by companies selling work software: they account for 69 percent of spending among the top hundred advertisers. Consumer and retail brands make up about 7.6 percent.

One in three advertisers who tried ChatGPT Ads was no longer running campaigns in August. Some of them simply lacked the tools to measure whether the campaigns worked at all.

What to do: before spending, set up a pixel, server-side conversions and UTMs, because without them ChatGPT traffic shows up in analytics as direct.

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In ChatGPT, an ad appears while your image is being generated

OpenAI is rolling out visual ads that appear while ChatGPT creates an image. The ad is labelled and disappears once the image is finished.

The format is being tested on the Free and Go plans, for now with a group of US advertisers. It is meant to stay separate from the generated image and not affect answers.

Contextual matching can be weak: users have reported real estate ads during conversations about something else entirely. The open question is the click-through rate on an ad that lives for only a few seconds.

What to do: prepare creative that works as visual inspiration, and measure impressions, branded traffic and conversions separately within the same time window.

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Google gave coding agents a list of rules - and they made fewer accessibility mistakes

Google has released version 1.0 of Modern Web Guidance, a free skill set for AI coding agents built on current browser features. It installs with a single command in the project directory.

In tests, guided runs passed 88 percent of automated checks, compared with 56 percent without guidance. In one test, results improved further when the skill was named explicitly in the prompt.

The new part is an audit of existing code: the agent points out safe upgrades in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Guided runs were slower, though, and used more tokens.

What to do: add the guidance to repositories where you work with an agent, but don't use it as a substitute for accessibility testing or field data.

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Gemini 4 Carbon went straight into AI Mode - but only on the most expensive plan

New signal: one source so far.

Google released Gemini 4 Carbon on launch day, including in Search. Google AI Ultra subscribers can select "4 Carbon" from the model list in AI Mode.

Google describes it as the company's strongest model, with better intent understanding and better instruction following over the course of a conversation. It is also available in Antigravity and the Gemini app.

Older models usually trickle down to free users, so the quality of AI Mode answers now depends on your plan.

What to do: if you have access, compare citations and source linking between models, because they translate directly into AI visibility.

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Business and sales

Not every customer who leaves is a product failure - sometimes their market collapsed

Structural churn means losing customers because of their own instability, regardless of how good your service is. Two out of three companies fail within 10 years, and some of them picked the wrong customers rather than the wrong product.

Shopify, often praised for retention, loses about 40 percent of its customers a year. The example of an agency charging 299 dollars a month shows that a low price limits churn only when it is set for the customer's worst month.

The second lesson is about valuation: a service business with software economics gets software multiples, but a label alone changes nothing. What counts is revenue retention and incremental margin.

What to do: work out what share of your churn comes from customer structure, and check whether new customers follow the same steps as those who stay the longest.

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Meta has paused its new business terms - but hasn't withdrawn them

On 5 November, Meta paused new terms that would have let it index the websites of businesses using Facebook and Instagram. They were due to take effect on 20 November.

Earlier, a court in Oslo temporarily blocked the terms at the request of Norwegian media groups, and the UK competition authority opened a formal investigation. Meta hasn't said what will come back or when.

It fits a longer pattern: reduced page reach, news removed in Canada, and shops that link to a business's own website being hidden from view.

What to do: calculate what share of your leads depends on Meta's ecosystem and plan diversification before the terms return.

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