AI Search Visibility
AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, GEO, and LLM optimization.
- News
Google flags subdomains that override your AI Overviews setting
Search Console's generative AI control lets a child property set its own value, and only the domain property owner gets the notification that it happened.
- News
Ahrefs traces one in five of its signups to ChatGPT or Claude
Ahrefs' self-reported signup data puts AI second only to Google, while its referral sessions show far less. What to add to onboarding forms and analytics baselines.
- News
Some AI Overview links carry a ?st_source=ai_overview parameter
Screenshots show the parameter on AI Overview and AI Mode links, Search Engine Roundtable could not replicate it, and an anonymous tip blames black hat indexing.
- News
AI Overviews skip thin, stale pages at the same organic rank
A sample of 600 commercial searches compared ignored page-1 results with cited ones at the same organic position. Short, stale pages were the ones passed over.
- News
Google now lists entire team rosters in its AI Overviews
Google's AI Overview now prints a full NFL roster on some team queries, first for the Raiders, not at all for the Giants. Audit list templates on mobile first.
- News
Google now tags Gemini links so referrals leave direct traffic
Gemini's UTM tagging is undocumented, the referrer still drops on mobile, and the resulting GA4 jump reflects attribution catching up, not new visits.
- News
Google now shows AI Overviews for most big brand names
A test of about 100 brand names found AI Overviews on 93 percent, mostly below the brand's own result. DemandSphere says branded AI Overviews tripled in September.
- News
AI Overviews cite page tops, but moving text up may not help
A Reddit study puts two thirds of AI Overview citations in the top 30% of a page. Commenters want a baseline, and one saw AI Mode citations change within 33 hours.
- News
Microsoft's own data puts Bing Chat click rates far below search
Microsoft's click-through figures for three publisher groups appear in the Sept. 17 summary judgment brief, with no sample size, date range, or tie to Copilot.
- News
French sites lost CTR in proportion to their AI Overview exposure
Ahrefs data on 963 French domains shows sites where over 20% of queries triggered an AI Overview lost 23.1% of their CTR in the nine days after launch.
- News
AI visibility swings of 20 points can be noise at 10 runs a prompt
Mike King of iPullRank publishes margins of error by run count, explains why vendors disagree on model mode and prompt phrasing, and lists methodology questions.
- News
ChatGPT's default model cites brand sites far less than Thinking
Writesonic ran 50 prompts through two ChatGPT models. Brand websites got 8% of the default model's citations and 56% of Thinking's, and sources barely overlapped.
- Analysis
Six new studies measured AI traffic conversions, they all disagreed
A peer-reviewed paper says ChatGPT converts below organic. Adobe says 42% better. Shopify says nearly 50% higher. The contradictions are the finding.
- News
AI answers cite retailers' size guides, support and policy pages
Aleyda Solis reviewed Semrush and Similarweb data for 25 US retailers and found AI answers cite size guides, help articles and policies alongside product pages.
- News
AI Overviews and ChatGPT usually criticize different brands
BrightEdge compared negative brand mentions in Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT: Google leans on lawsuits and recalls, ChatGPT on product limits and compatibility.
- Analysis
Wikipedia's bot traffic to overtake its human readers as costs surge
We pulled 82 months of Wikimedia API data. Human pageviews down 36% from peak, bot traffic tripled, lines projected to cross by late 2026. What this means for AI answers.
- News
Adding schema did not raise AI citations in an Ahrefs study
Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD against matched controls and found no citation lift in ChatGPT or AI Mode, plus a small dip in AI Overviews.
- News
Google adds more links to AI answers but shares no click numbers
Google's five link changes to AI Mode and AI Overviews include inline links, desktop hover previews and subscription labels, with no rollout dates or click figures.
- News
Google's AI search splits long questions into smaller searches
Google's Liz Reid says AI Mode gets longer, need-based queries that Google breaks apart; SEJ argues each part's classic ranking decides which pages get cited.
- News
Test chatbots with web search off to see where brand errors start
Jes Scholz's Search Engine Land piece sorts AI brand errors into training, retrieval and generation faults, with tests for each and fixes via sameAs and schema.
- News
A fake Google core update ranked on page one and in AI Overviews
An SEO published an AI-hallucinated core update as a test. Google ranked it, AI Overviews repeated it, and other SEO sites copied it with invented details.
- News
AI search may read only a couple hundred words of your page
Dan Petrovic's breakdown for Sitebulb traces how AI search rewrites a prompt, scores page passages with a cross-encoder and hands the model extracted snippets.
- News
Most AI Overview citations come from pages outside the top 10
Ahrefs checked 863,000 keywords and found 38% of AI Overview citations rank in the top 10, down from 76%, and ties the gap to Google's query fan-out sub-searches.
- News
Pages that rank on Google can still be invisible to AI search
Googlebot runs JavaScript, but many AI crawlers do not, and robots.txt rules or CDN bot filters can block them. The fixes start with rendering and access.
