Wissenswertes

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,

Key Takeaways: Peham reported an increase of referral traffic from ChatGPT - similar to the one I saw: Beginning of May, ChatGPT started adding hyperlinks to brand names in the ai responses [vs. before when] ChatGPT would just display your name/brand/product as a text. Blyskal pointed out: OpenAI referral traffic to monitored brand sites increased by ~1.6x overnight (and held there) Share of logged-out ChatGPT answers containing a clickable brand URL increased by 5x: ~4-5% to

Key Takeaways: At Google I/O Google announced lots of new features and a vision for the Agentic Web and stating "Google Search is AI Search": Gemini 3.5 flash: fast, but relatively expensive Gemini Spark: 24/7 personal agent running in the cloud - Give it a task and it works autonomously in the background, even if your phone and laptop are turned off. You choose to turn it on and it's designed to check with you before taking major actions (first only US and Google AI Ultra Us

Key Takeaways: Screaming Frog released version 24.0 of their crawler tool and they dropped a bomb with lots of incredible features: Local MCP: integrate Screaming Frog crawls into your agentic workflows. Of course there need to be some improvements as you currently cannot control lots of important crawl settings AND cannot create crawl configs using the MCP - still, lots of opportunities analyzing crawl data with Claude Auto-compare + Email notifications: You can now setup ma

Key Takeaways: Wills analyzed citations in ChatGPT of 100k+ prompts including 145 industries and 1.595 personas to draw conclusions on Citation factors: 1. SEO is the foundation. OpenAI is using search data today and building their own index. As that matures, the connection between search authority and LLM visibility deepens. Traditional SEO principles are not obsolete, they're the starting point for LLM visibility too. 2. Persona is the measurement unit. The #1 airline for a

Key Takeaways: Rudzki (Peec AI) analyzed 5 million query fanouts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok (April, 2026) and found: Perplexity commonly just simplifies your query - not much insight for optimization (1.4 fanouts per prompt) ChatGPT commonly adds brands, comparisons, and reviews - crucial for optimization for AI search (2.1 fanouts per prompt) Grok runs a full research brief with year modifiers and site: operators - the richest signal of all if you want to optimize

Key Takeaways: Google introduces new AI Mode features in Chrome (first for desktop devices in Chrome): Opens links within AI Mode directly side by side (left AI Mode, right Website / TikTok / YouTube) Select recent tabs and add them to your search (e.g. hotels oder destinations you like or personal notes from Drive or JIRA or even ChatGPT) Shepard expects disadvantages for publishers and site owners "The user may see your site, but they never leaves Google. Another brick in t

Key Takeaways: Solis analyzed the Google March Core Update 2026 for the US and found: Dictionary, translation, and language-reference sites were among the clearest loser clusters Travel discovery and planning visibility looked more affected: Google seems to have concentrated visibility around a smaller set of stronger, better-known travel destinations and platforms Jobs showed one of the clearest source-type splits: broad job intermediaries down, more direct or specialized de

Key Takeaways: Simmonds analyzed Google SERPs for 8,566 keywords pulled from keyword gap reports, covering every term where Reddit.com and at least one of 13 major B2B SaaS domains both hold a ranking position Reddit outranks every vendor simultaneously on 50–66% of shared keywords in 3 of 4 verticals, covering 957,540 monthly searches where buyers hit Reddit before any vendor. It’s not a reviews story. 77% of Reddit’s winning search volume comes from generic category k

Key Takeaways: Segonzac (RESONEO) published a full technical study on how ChatGPT works and what changed when GPT-5.4 was introduced on 04.03.2026 and GPT-5.3 became the new default: Average domains dropped by -20% - fewer domains share the visibility in ChatGPT answers - which is also supported by Crawl log data from ChatGPT User Agents Query Fan-Out changed and includes site: Parameters to filter highly relevant or authorative sites Single tool web.run evolved into 12 o

Key Takeaways: Indig analyzed over 21.000 ChatGPT citations from different industries in depth to cover how AI cites sources based on content length and which pages/domains are picked etc. His findings / statements: Text with a question mark is 2x more likely to be cited (18.9% vs. 9.4%) 43.2% of sources cited by ChatGPT rank in Google position #1 ChatGPT retrieves about 6x more pages than it cites Top 10 domains take 46% of all citations in a topic, Top 30 at 67% While pages

Key Takeaways: Gabe spotted more and more Google AIO on Breaking News such as: "uber rivian" "gerrit cole returns" Google has lots of News data that could be summrized via AIO - news publisher would have to expect click drops Happens after a post quoting: "Google's Jaffer Zaidi said AI Overviews are purposefully not triggered for hard news queries. SEO consultant Barry Adams of Polemic Digital told the conference that publishers whose search traffic is primarily generated by

Key Takeaways: writesonic analyzed 50 prompts (re: SaaS) in ChatGPT comparing GPT-5.3 Instant (new default) and GPT-5.4-Thinking (new premium) vs. GPT-5.2 Instant and GPT-5.2 Thinking and found: in GPT-5.4 Thinking a total of 53% of citations were from brand websites , compared to GPT-5.3 Instant's 8% a major shift (it cited reddit.com , techradar.com , forbes.com and others instead ) GPT-5.4 Thinking cites totally different sources as GPT-5.3, most of them not from Googl

Key Takeaways: SERanking analyzed Google AI Overviews for 100.000 keywords in the US and found that with Gemini 3 more sources get cited: Average number of sources increased by +31,8% from 11,55 to 15,22 sources, smallest increase in the Insurance sector with +6,1% N umber of unique domains cited increased by + 9.3% from 89.262 to 97.574 However, lots of movements for cited domains: 37.870 domains that were previously cited are no longer cited at all while 46.182 entirely