Wissenswertes

Key Takeaways: Segonzac analyzed a leak of Google Maps Geostore and found: 72 Geostore ranking signals 793 data source providers (along with mechanisms for provenance, priority, trust, and conflation = when several sources disagree) 446 local search intent types 50,998 Mapcore styles + 12,936 label styles = Mapcore decides what to show and what not 10,936 searchable Geostore declarations Google builds a canonical representation of the place that can incorporate data from mult

Key Takeaways: Metehan analyzed SSE (server-sent events) in the ChatGPT UI and found a detailed debug view of ChatGPTs retrieval system: For a single "best AI visibility tools" prompt, ChatGPT ran 5 search rounds, wrote 18 different queries (hidden queries), made 50 engine calls, pulled 228 results, fetched 223 URLs with selected chunks, and cited 16. The page body is not HTML. It is a markdown-like text render. That render is what gets cut into blocks of roughly 170 words an

Key Takeaways: Cyrus surveyed 131 SEO experts on the importance of defined Google Ranking Factors (z > 100): “How much of a positive or negative effect do you believe each of the following factors has on Google’s organic search rankings?“ + “What are the three most important Google ranking factors?“ Three most important Ranking Factors: 1. Relevance - 57.1% Content is relevant if it matches and satisfies the search intent of the user. The content should semantically match wh

Key Takeaways: Google introduces masked links with /goto-Redirect dropping another bomb on Rank Trackers and AI Chat competition It is a trap: While tool providers celebrate easy fixes and workarounds, I believe it is a trap: Now Google can identify more easily which users misuse its search engine = those sessions call all the redirect links from a SERP - before it could only see users or IPs doing lots of searches that could still look natural, now it actually sees who revea

Key Takeaways: On August 6th OpenAI changed the default model for ChatGPT to GPT 5.6 so that free tier users per default get access to GPT 5.6 Luna - eventhough just recently in July they've already changed it from GPT 5 mini to GPT 5.5 Salomon/OnCrawl analyzed logs and found ChatGPT User Bot jumped in hits when the new default GPT 5.6 was released and concluded Live Search is triggered more often for Free tier users Live Search relies on more Query Fanouts and generates more

Key Takeaways: Gabe reported an increase of ChatGPT ads based on a SE Ranking analysis by Deda and Tomko ChatGPT ads appear on 26% of commercial prompts, 61% of prompts regarding Pets 96.37% of brands that got ChatGPT ads displayed are not cited in the answer = only 3.63% of advertisers were also cited as a source in the answer above their ad YMYL: ChatGPT showed substantially more ads for YMYL topics than Google’s AI Mode. Ads appeared on 28.69% of healthcare prompts, compar

Key Takeaways: Kopp analyzed search patents related to search and AI search, adding a new patent on Search System Having Task-Based Machine-Learned Models The patent is a about a search system that breaks broad user queries into ranked subtasks using LLMs + specialized multi-task ML models — then surfaces, ranks and dynamically re-ranks content based on aggregated user interaction scores across the full task session. He outlined the process: Query Classification — is this a g

Key Takeaways: Segonzac analyzed the retrieval system of ChatGPT and gained highly interesting insights: Bright = web search engine but likely just Google Labrador = an in-house index, topped up with press feeds, open scientific repositories and partner platforms (it is not Bing: as titles are too long) The labrador snippet: 200 characters taken from the start of your page body (straight after your H1) and the page's title What to do with this. Your grounding budget in instan

Key Takeaways: Harpreet shows Ahrefs data on AI Overview citations of X.com that are increasing since March 2026 to July 2026 from approx. 250.000 to 900.000 citations As Ray raises concerns about how trustful and truthful X Posts are (and other social media platforms) Andell shows that the same is happening in Google Discover: Acceleration from the beginning of May (~38k), then a climb to ~65k by the end of the month, with the percentage visibility also doubling. After intro

Key Takeaways: Google introduced the first update to the recently introduced Open Knowledge Format (OKF) that adds a Trust Layer called OKF v0.2: new sources field: author, usage_count, last_modified generated: { by, at }: how the current content was produced, and when it last meaningfully changed. verified: [ { by, at } ]: a list of independent confirmations against the sources or the underlying resource; a human sign-off, a nightly finance process, or both. status moves a c

Key Takeaways: Must watch: Petrovic outlined in a webinar from Edge of Search how AI Search Optimization works, what to focus on and why (AI) SEO experts have all the right tools to optimize a brands performance He compares monitoring model perceptions via prompts with human psychology and stresses how new tactics on top of traditional SEO can move the needle to incease citations, mentions and recommendations Why AI SEO? "When AI Search or Agents become personal assistants t

Key Takeaways: Segonzac clarified how websites can end up in the training data of a llm model, specifically that being crawled does not mean you are successfully finding your way into the training data. Layers of AI Chat Answers Training Data of the LLM model takes place in multiple steps: Crawling Extraction Deduplication Filtering Tokenization/Data mix/etc. Training Retrieval e.g. via Web Searches: Potential crawling hit Training Data Myths: “If an AI crawler hits my page,

Key Takeaways: Pelham (Otterly) ran an Reddit Engagement Experiment: 9x more AI citations for the active community vs. the dormant one 6.9x more total citations than the median external subreddit 4x more Google keywords ranked 18x more monthly search volume covered Metehan (PeecAI) reported how Reddit is eating non-English AI visibility: We analyzed 64.77 million Reddit citations across 20 countries and 4 LLMs. In Sweden and Norway, over 70% of Reddit citations on Google AI O

Key Takeaways: Similarweb carried out a study on User Behavior in the US: Methodology: We tracked thousands of real user journeys across three industries: Finance, Travel, and Beauty - focusing on users who asked ChatGPT for an industry-relevant question and received a specific brand in the answer. We then followed those users for the seven days after the AI conversation, tracking whether they visited the website of the recommended brand or a direct competitor. To isolate gen

Key Takeaways: SparkToro and Similarweb analyzed user data from the US from 01/26 to 04/26: Only 32% of searches result in a click, 29% in further searches and 39% of search sessions immediately end 66.6% of clicks in search to go organic search results, 27.3% to Google or rather Alphabet-owned features, 6.0% to paid ads While in 2016 55.0% of searches resulted in a click, in 2026 only 32.0% do - a drop of -41.8% Compared to 2024: Further searches grew by +7.3%, while clicks

Key Takeaways: Google introduces Search Profiles: We're launching Search profiles, a new way for publishers and creators to shape their presence on Search. Search profiles are a dedicated, shareable space to highlight content across social media, video and news platforms, and help audiences find accurate and up-to-date information about sources on Search. People can easily follow a source from their new Search profile, so they’re more likely to see content from that source on

Key Takeaways: AI Mode introduced Ads and users can now also set preferred sources Schwartz: Google AI Overviews & AI Mode gain preferred sources, plus new perspectives carousel and highly cited labels Sources: https://x.com/brodieseo/status/2058799216500289982 https://brodieclark.com/notes/#may-2026 https://x.com/glenngabe/status/2059682951684567066 https://x.com/glenngabe/status/2059604843879133333 https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-ai-mode-gain-preferred-sour

Key Takeaways: Rudzki (Peec AI) analyzed their data of Google AI Overviews and found that the appearance of AIOs is increasing (n=500k) Google AI Overview appearance differs across markets: US: 91.4% UK: 91.7% Australia: 86.5% Poland: 82.9% Germany: 75.6% France: 0% (not served by AI Overviews or AI mode) across funnel-stage: For decision-stage (bottom-of-funnel) prompts, AI Overviews appeared 88.5% of the time - higher than the 87% average. Google classifies queries into eig

Key Takeaways: Profound introduced its new partnership with Noble to offer automated Guest Posts and Brand Mentions based on cited sources for a given prompt set in LLM chats Now, you can build an Agent that: Knows the prompts that matter most to your brand Finds the third-party sources AI platforms are citing for those prompts Filters to the citations where your brand is not mentioned And exports those citation domains directly to your Noble workspace Then, Noble reaches out

Key Takeaways: Google published a report regarding AI Mode usage based on Google Trends keyword data The average AI Mode query is 3x the length of a traditional Search query. Keyword research now needs to be complemented with prompt, task, constraint and scenario research. Follow-up queries in AI Mode have increased by more than 40% on average per month in the U.S. Aleyda states: Brand visibility can't be analyzed only at the first prompt anymore: a brand might be mentioned,