Wissenswertes

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

Key Takeaways: Ray analyzed websites (US) that were hit by an unconfirmed Google Update in January and found: Dropping in Google SEO also negatively impacted their LLM Visibility The data shows a broad decline in both SEO traffic & AI search citations: every subfolder in the study (11 of 11) experienced a drop in both Google organic traffic and total AI search citations , with a significant average citation decline of -22.5% . Google’s AI Mode (-23.8%) and ChatGPT (-27.8%)

Key Takeaways: Michalik created 3 listicles for a made up matcha tea that got listed in most major AI chats Claude and AIO cited the fake Matcha quite frequently ChatGPT and AI Mode also cited the fake product from time to time Gemini did the best job in not mentioning the fake product Now all chats caught up, still, way to easy to game in the short run A while ago Fishkin reported that only in <1% of the runs of the same prompt the KI chat returns the same list of recommen

Key Takeaways: Solis analyzed Similarweb data of Google SERPs for the 4 verticals headphones, jeans, online games and greeting cards/ecards in the US from November 2025 to January 2026 compared to the previous year CTR for Google Organic Results dropped by -10% to -23% (absolute, e.g. from 73% to 50% of SERP clicks going to Organic Results) AIO take a major part of the clicks, from 12% to 33% of the SERP clicks Ads CTR doubled (Text Ads as well as PLA) reaching 19% to 36%

Key Takeaways: Google and Microsoft promote WebMCP as a new W3C standard for browsers and agents to interact with websites easily and reliably Volpini: Schema.org gave us the nouns, WebMCP will give us the verbs While WebMCP is the frontend technology to describe options of interactivity, ACP and UCP enable agentic features on the server-side Google explains: WebMCP proposes two new APIs that allow browser agents to take action on behalf of the user: Declarative API : Perfo

Key Takeaways: Landwehr analyzed AI Search responses for pnewind(.)com - a former wind energy company website that has been misused by Casino Affiliates using Google cloaking and access blocking His findings suggest: OpenAI is scraping Google Grok is somehow using Google Claude is using Brave Search Perplexity might use Brave Search (but states that it uses its own index) Konitzny points out that Grok is using Brave for image search - based on the code run in Chrome. Ray con

Key Takeaways: Segonzac analyzed the behavior of AI Search Agents on how they view websites The Good  - Static HTML is visible to everyone (your safest bet)  - <noscript> fallbacks work for ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini The Surprising  - Only 3 crawlers execute JavaScript​ : Bing Copilot, Grok & DeepSeek  - Bing Copilot is the ONLY one that can read iframes and Shadow DOM  - Some crawlers identify themselves honestly (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini), others operate in full stealth mode (

Key Takeaways: SEMrush analyzed 217,000 prompts across Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and ChatGPT Search: SearchGPT references Reddit most often . 12.6% of its answers contain Reddit links, though these links appear later in responses (avg. position 7). Perplexity gives Reddit higher prominence. Only 3.5% of Perplexity answers include Reddit, but those links appear much earlier (avg. position 3). Google AI Mode uses Reddit moderately. Reddit appears in 9% of responses, usua

Key Takeaways: Metehan analyzed Common Crawl (CC) data and found a correlation to citation frequency in LLM Chats such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and others: Most major LLMs were trained on CC data (64% of models studied, 80%+ of GPT-3 tokens) CC prioritizes high-authority domains in its crawling via Harmonic Centrality These same domains tend to be cited most frequently by LLMs Feel free to use his tool to analyze Common Crawl authority scores for your domain or industry:...

Key Takeaways: Google started testing Personal Intelligence in the US: With Personal Intelligence Google provides personalized results and responses - using personal data from various apps such as Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube and Google Search " When enabled, Gemini accesses your data to answer your specific requests and to do things for you. And because this data already lives at Google securely, you don't have to send sensitive data elsewhere to start personalizing your e

Key Takeaways: On January 11th Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol : UCP will soon power a new checkout feature on eligible Google product listings in AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, allowing shoppers to check out from eligible U.S. retailers right as they’re researching on Google UCP is built to work across verticals and is compatible with existing industry protocols like Agent2Agent ( A2A ), Agent Payments Protocol ( AP2 ) and Model Context Protocol ( M

Key Takeaways: Google officially carried out the December 2025 Core Update from 11th to 29th of December - while especially one week later volatility spiked Solis found movements across multiple verticals such as Publications, eCommerce, SaaS : This is yet another iteration to reward specialization, expertise and showcase more commercially oriented content from brands or specialized retailers , rather than generic ecommerce platforms or publications.  Gabe: The December 20

Key Takeaways: Google sued SerpApi for scraping search results and selling the data over copyright and the fact SerpApi’s answer to SearchGuard is to mask the hundreds of millions of automated queries it is sending to Google each day to make them appear as if they are coming from human users SerpApi is used by ChatGPT, Perplexity and other LLM chats for grounding there results as well as by Search Analytics Tools, Apple, Meta aso, After removing the num=100 parameter in Se

Key Takeaways: Dan Petrovic analyzed 7,060 queries via Google's Vertex AI Search that likely powers Gemini Chunk size: The total words retrieved for grounding is surprisingly stable throughout queries at a median of 2.000 words (within 1.500 to 3.000 words) This budget is devided among sources based on their relevance ranking: First position with 28% to 5th position with 13% share. 77% of pages get 200-600 words selected. The typical page gets ~377 words. Longer, more exte

Key Takeaways: Anderson analyzed the Google Leak & DOJ testimony: A deep dive mapping Google's Search Essentials and Helpful Content questions to leaked Content Warehouse attributes like Q*, siteAuthority, contentEffort, and predictedDefaultNsr. From Navboost to contentEffort he provides a clear understanding of how Google is or likely is working ICYMI: Back in 2024 the Website Boosting article from Mario Fischer visually outlined it pretty well Example I: EEAT decoded E-E-A-

Key Takeaways: Based on SEMrush data Long found that major social media channels like X, linkedIn, Threads gained visibility in Google Search since mid of October Inline with this development, Google added a new social feature in the Google Search Console that is controversely discussed - as the data it provides is of low quality and full of anomalies especially with the introduction of AI Overviews and the push of AI Mode Clark shared first insights that he was surprised a

Key Takeaways: Metehan discovered in Google's Discovery Engine 7 ranking signals that likely power AI Mode (Vertex AI search) Base Ranking → core algorithm output Gecko Score → embedding similarity Jetstream → cross-attention model (handles negation better than embeddings) BM25 → yes, keyword matching still matters PCTR → 3-tier engagement system Freshness → time-sensitive query adjustment Boost/Bury → manual business rules His key takeaways: Ancestor headings travel WITH

Key Takeaways: A study by Seer Interactive found massive CTR drops from Google comparing September 2025 vs. June 2024 Paid CTR without AIO dropped by -32% Paid CTR with AIO dropped by -68% Organic/SEO CTR without AIO dropped by -41% Organic/SEO CTR with AIO dropped by -61% Google proclaims that AIO is a successful feature for users and Google is sending more traffic to the web - data throughout different industries cannot support those claims Green raises important points: