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Week 45/2026: a shared AI opt-out, ad strength that doesn't convert and bookings in AI Mode

AI Overviews now fill 61.4% of results and are pushing featured snippets out, while AI Mode ads are moving into more countries. The week's biggest paradox: a higher ad strength score buys more impressions and a pricier conversion.

Bartosz Bielawski

Bartosz Bielawski

· 5 min read
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Week 45/2026: a shared AI opt-out, ad strength that doesn't convert and bookings in AI Mode

The week in three sentences

This week was about tidying up the rules: the biggest AI providers agreed to honour a single shared training entry, and Google showed that AI answers now take up most of the search results. Advertisers got a dose of realism - a better creative score does not mean a cheaper conversion, and traffic from chat tools is tiny but it buys. The most interesting changes are happening where nobody was looking until recently: in AI Mode bookings and in ads inside follow-up questions.

Blocking AI training will take one entry, not a list of bots

Signal: 3 independent sources this week, 3 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-11-04.

Google, Microsoft and OpenAI said they will honour one shared robots.txt entry for AI training. Instead of a separate token for every provider, a single declaration will be enough.

For you, that means less work in the file and fewer mistakes. The effects go further than they seem: if you do not list the Google-Extended token separately, Google will treat the shared opt-out as blocking it. That token also covers grounding, meaning your content being passed to Gemini as a source for its answers.

What to do about it: before you roll out the shared entry, check whether Google-Extended is already defined in your robots.txt, because that determines what Google actually blocks.

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

AI Overviews appear in 61.4% of results, up from 5.9% two years ago (DataForSEO). The AI answer block has become the default view rather than an add-on.

Over the same period, the share of featured snippets - the highlighted answers under the ads - fell from 8.96% to 0.44%. Queries are getting longer too, because people ask in full sentences instead of two words.

What to do about it: put the answer in the first two sentences of a paragraph and name the topic in plain words. That is how much AI Overviews show without a click - the rest stays invisible.

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A higher ad strength score wins more impressions but costs more per conversion

Signal: 3 independent sources this week, 8 in 30 days; tracked since 2025-10-01.

Google keeps leaning more heavily towards creatives with a higher ad strength score. In 2026, the better-rated ad won more impressions in 63% of ad groups where two ads competed (Adalysis).

The results are weaker. The higher score translated into a better CTR in only 52.5% of groups and a better conversion rate in 45%. On top of that, higher-rated ads have an 11.8% higher cost per conversion on average.

What to do about it: treat ad strength as a delivery signal, not a performance signal. Judge creatives by CPA and conversions, not by the score in the interface.

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ChatGPT sends a trickle of traffic, but that traffic buys

Signal: 3 independent sources this week, 12 in 30 days; tracked since 2025-12-27.

In October, ChatGPT accounted for 0.36% of traffic across the sites tracked in the Ahrefs panel, while Google accounted for 24.74%. The gap in volume is enormous.

That small stream is valuable, though. In a year-long GA4 study, visits from ChatGPT converted at 13.8%, while visits from Google organic converted at 3.02%.

What to do about it: set up ChatGPT visits as a separate channel in GA4. Without that, they get lost among referrals and you never see what they are worth.

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AI Mode ads are coming to more countries, whether you opt in or not

Signal: 4 independent sources this week, 8 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-08-05.

Google is expanding AI Mode ads to 10 more countries, including Canada and Australia. On top of that, ads inside follow-up questions, known as multi-turn ads, launched in the US on 28 October.

AI Mode has no separate campaigns or reporting. Your Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns take part automatically, so you pay for those placements even if you never asked for them.

What to do about it: flag the campaigns with the biggest share of those placements, because in the search terms report they blend in with the rest of Search and cannot be split out.

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On desktop the top result keeps losing clicks, while on mobile it gains them

Signal: 2 independent sources this week, 2 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-09-27.

Over the past year, the CTR of the first desktop result fell by 10.4 percentage points and the second by 12.2 (DataForSEO). On a computer, page one leads to a click less and less often.

On mobile, the drop is much smaller, and in the second quarter mobile CTR even grew. Positions 1-2 gained 6.59 percentage points there, while desktop lost 5.27.

What to do about it: report CTR for desktop and mobile separately. A blended number hides the fact that you only have a problem on one of them.

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AI Mode can already book customers for you, but only through partners

Signal: 3 independent sources this week, 3 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-11-05.

In the US, AI Mode shows direct booking links for home services. They run through Angi, Thumbtack, Housecall Pro and Jobber, with ServiceTitan expected to join soon.

For a service business, this is a new route to customers, but you cannot use it without a partner integration. Jobber requires a paid plan, a full address and a Google Business Profile at the same location.

What to do about it: check whether your booking system is on that list. If it is not, add AI Mode bookings to the questions you ask your vendor.

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ChatGPT has gone from a curiosity to a channel you cannot skip

Signal: 2 independent sources this week, 3 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-10-14.

ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users. The most recent 200 million arrived in about 60 days, which is faster growth than most of the channels you work with today.

Search-style queries there already run at roughly one fifth of Google's volume, according to Adam Fry of OpenAI. The chat is no longer a side note, even if it still sends only a fraction of the traffic.

What to do about it: check what ChatGPT says about your brand and your category. It is the cheapest way to test whether you are part of that conversation at all.

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