Issue five. Every two weeks I read what changed across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the models behind them, then turn it into what it means for brands that want to show up when a customer asks an AI for a recommendation. The last two issues covered a visibility score that will not hold still and a leadership change at the company that builds AI Overviews. This fortnight the theme is control: who decides whether your page gets fetched, which model is doing the citing this week, and where the links inside an answer actually point. On several fronts, less of that sits with you than you might have assumed.
OpenAI's own crawler documentation now says robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User, the bot that fetches a page live the moment someone asks ChatGPT about it. TollBit's H1 2026 State of the Bots report, a vendor study picked up by Search Engine Journal on August 14, measured about 15 percent of identified AI page-fetchers pulling disallowed URLs on European sites, and found ChatGPT-User specifically reaching disallowed pages on nearly half the sites that had listed it by name. OAI-SearchBot, the crawler that decides whether you show up in an answer, still respects the file. ChatGPT-User, the one that fetches your page when a customer is already asking about you, treats the file as a preference.
Google put a new model behind AI Mode one day after announcing it. Gemini 3.7 Flash launched August 13 and was live inside AI Mode for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in English by August 14, with a full rollout expected over the following weeks. Marie Haynes's framing is worth keeping close: a model swap behind a search surface behaves like a ranking update for which sources get cited. If you run any kind of visibility tracking, mark August 13 as a line on the chart, because a shift in citations this fortnight could be the model talking, not your content.
Google's AI Overviews started generating their own images this fortnight, built on the Nano Banana model. These images carry no attribution and no outbound click. The space they occupy is space that used to hold a publisher's own photography, usually with a link attached. That link is gone in the cases where Google decided to draw the picture itself.
OpenAI confirmed what last fortnight's rollout implied. Ads are running inside ChatGPT for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go tiers, labeled and visually separated from the answer, and the test now reaches the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea in addition to the US. OpenAI says ads do not shape the answer itself and stay outside the conversation an advertiser can see. Paid placement is sitting in the same window as your earned citations in more markets than it was two weeks ago.
Anthropic is now watermarking Claude-generated text everywhere, a change made to meet the EU AI Act. The pattern is invisible on the page, and only Anthropic can verify it, with a detection API planned. Anthropic's own note on the limits: light editing of Claude's output probably leaves the watermark readable, a full rewrite probably removes it. If Claude drafts anything that reaches a client's site under your byline, that is a policy question worth deciding before the detection tool exists.
Google's fortnight opened with a personnel change and closed with a model swap, and both affect how AI Overviews decide what to cite. On August 5, Demis Hassabis stepped back from running Google DeepMind day to day to become Chair, Koray Kavukcuoglu moved up to SVP, and Jeff Dean left after 27 years at the company to start a new venture called Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat. Alphabet stock dropped about 5 percent on the news. A week later, Gemini 3.7 Flash launched on August 13 at an introductory price of $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output through the end of 2026, and was serving AI Mode answers for subscribers within a day. The Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly users the same week, which Google calls its fastest-growing product ever. Separately, Google filed an amended complaint against SerpApi on August 10, three weeks after a judge dismissed its original case, this time arguing that partners such as Reddit directed Google to prevent third parties from extracting licensed content. If that theory holds, it touches every provider that scrapes search results for a living, including the ones GEO tools depend on for scan data.
OpenAI spent the fortnight turning announcements into live product. Ads in ChatGPT are confirmed for the Free and Go tiers and now run in the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea alongside the US, on top of the oCPC conversion campaigns and product carousels that started running for brands like L.L.Bean, VistaPrint, and Walmart two weeks ago. Automatic Advanced Matching, which ties ad conversions back to a pixel automatically, became the default for existing web pixels on August 17. On the model side, OpenAI previewed Ultrafast mode on August 13: GPT-5.6 Sol served on Cerebras hardware at up to 750 output tokens per second, as much as 14 times the Standard tier, in limited preview with no public price yet. OpenAI also brought on Dali Rajic as Chief Revenue Officer and, two weeks prior, improved GPT-5.6 Sol's accuracy, widened free access to GPT-5.6 Luna, and turned on long-context Fast mode for prompts over 272,000 tokens.
Anthropic published the mechanics of its Claude watermark. It works by changing which of several equally good words Claude picks at each step, using a cryptographic key only Anthropic holds, so output quality does not change and no one outside Anthropic can currently check for it. It applies globally, is sparse on factual or exact-output passages like code, and cannot tell the difference between Claude writing something from scratch and Claude editing a human draft closely. A detection API is planned, with no date given.
Perplexity shipped a Search SDK with official Python and TypeScript clients and Vercel AI SDK support, aimed at developers who want an agent to fan out searches, filter results, and rank them in code. Cloudflare had a dense two weeks: Kitesurf, a browser built on Workers for agents to drive; a WebMCP developer preview that makes any site usable by a browser agent behind a single toggle; a new AI Search product; and detection inside Gateway for MCP traffic that was not supposed to be there. Cloudflare also repeated the number that more than half of requests on its network now come from machines rather than people. Mistral announced European inference infrastructure and open models under a data-sovereignty framing, following its release of Shieldstral, a small open-weights safety classifier, the week before.
The robots.txt carve-out is the item with the most direct consequence for anyone who manages a site. OpenAI's documentation separates OAI-SearchBot, which determines whether you appear in ChatGPT search results, from ChatGPT-User, which fetches a page live the moment a person asks about it, and argues that because the second one is triggered by a specific user request, robots.txt does not necessarily apply. TollBit's measurements back that up with numbers: ChatGPT-User, Bytespider, and Youbot each reached disallowed pages on close to half the European sites that had explicitly disallowed them. The choice this leaves a site owner is not comfortable. Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT search with certainty. Blocking ChatGPT-User in robots.txt buys only a chance that it listens. Real enforcement now lives at the network layer, in a firewall or a service like Cloudflare's bot products, not in a text file.
llms.txt shipped a v2 spec in the middle of a debate the last two radar reports already settled. The new version recommends a markdown alternate for every page, at a URL like page.html.md, discoverable through a rel='alternate' type='text/markdown' link, and it points to adoption by name: Chrome Lighthouse checks for the file, and OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all publish one for their own developer docs. None of that changes the visibility question. Google's position is unchanged: the file has no effect on Search, AI Overviews, or AI Mode. A widely shared cats.txt test from two weeks ago found the same thing by making a file up and watching nothing happen. The honest read is that llms.txt is turning into a convention for making documentation readable to agents, and it remains a non-factor for citation.
Treat the Gemini 3.7 Flash swap as a measurement event rather than a feature. Glenn Gabe's early comparison found little difference in how the new model reads intent against the model it replaced, which is one practitioner's first look and not a clearance. The window to watch is the next two weeks, especially once the model reaches free-tier AI Mode rather than only Pro and Ultra subscribers.
Barry Schwartz documented the AI-generated images inside AI Overviews directly, a feature Google announced in July on the back of its Nano Banana model and is now shipping into live answers. The image fills a slot that a publisher's photo, and the link that comes with it, used to fill. There is no byline on the generated version and nowhere for a reader to click through to the source.
One older item is still worth carrying forward. Glenn Gabe's phantom-index case, a site deindexed from Bing and Google that is still cited heavily inside ChatGPT, suggests ChatGPT's retrieval corpus can drift from the classic search index it is supposed to track. It is a single practitioner report, not a pattern yet, but it is the kind of gap that would explain a client asking why they show up in ChatGPT and nowhere in Google.
Marie Haynes and Barry Schwartz both covered the Gemini 3.7 Flash rollout, with Haynes making the ranking-update framing explicit. Glenn Gabe posted his early AI Mode comparison and kept the phantom-index case in circulation. Aravind Srinivas's posts about the new Search SDK were the loudest items from the authority list this fortnight, at 507 and 293 likes. Aleyda Solis published a Crawling Mondays episode on preparing content for AI search, continuing a run that included her llms.txt debunk two weeks ago (62 likes, 9 reposts) and a piece on selling AI search work to a skeptical budget holder. Lily Ray argued that SEO and AI search are tied together closely enough that most GEO tactics are ordinary SEO with a new name, and that the ones worth paying for should be measured before they get scaled up. Cyrus Shepard's claim that a small set of SEO strategies accounts for around 90 percent of AI visibility is worth the same treatment: a strong claim from a credible voice, still short of a published study.
CiteVantage's video on Perplexity drew traction with three numbers from an audit of 181 e-commerce brands: 87 percent were never mentioned when Perplexity answered questions about their own category, roughly 44 percent of citations came from the first 30 percent of a page, and Reddit made up close to 46.7 percent of Perplexity's top citations. All three are single-source, from a small channel, and unverified against any published methodology. File them as a direction worth checking against your own category, not as a number to put in a client deck. SE Ranking's video on using Reddit for AI visibility is vendor-produced and carries the same caveat.
Reddit's search leg was the noisiest since the collector went live, with most threads off-topic and several repeated spam posts, but a handful held real signal. r/WebAfterAI rounded up five open-source AEO and GEO repositories, with a claim inside that one tool, GetCito, is an uncredited fork of another, Elmo. A r/GEO_optimization thread on hand-building an AI-friendly JSON version of every page drew the right pushback: a second, hand-maintained version of your content becomes a second source of truth that can drift from the page, and JSON-LD in the page head already does the job in a format crawlers already read. A r/TechSEO practitioner mechanically checked 18 well-known SEO sites for heading structure and found half fail a basic hierarchy check, on sites that presumably know better. And a r/SaaS post-mortem traced a failed llms.txt and crawler-file setup to the real cause: the domain was three days old. That last one is a useful line to keep in your pocket for any client who expects a text file to substitute for the authority a site has not built yet.
Split your crawler rules by bot, not by vendor. Check your robots.txt and any CDN or WAF rules for OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User separately. If a client genuinely needs to keep an AI system out, robots.txt alone will not do it for ChatGPT-User; that has to happen at the firewall. If the goal is visibility, confirm neither bot is blocked by accident, because a blanket block-all-AI-crawlers rule written a year ago may be quietly cutting off the one bot that determines whether you show up at all.
Put a line on your scan history at August 13. If you track AI visibility over time, a model swap behind AI Mode can move your numbers on its own. Run a scan now, and run one again once Gemini 3.7 Flash reaches free-tier AI Mode, so any change in citations gets attributed to the model rather than mistaken for something your content team did or didn't do.
Look at what's sitting where your image used to be. Pull a few AI Overview results in your category and check whether the visual is your product photography with a link, or a generated image with neither. That is not something a markup change fixes, but it is worth knowing before a client asks why the AI Overview for their flagship product shows an image that isn't theirs.
If you operate in the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, or South Korea, check what a Free or Go-tier ChatGPT user sees on your category prompts. Sponsored units are now live in those markets alongside the US, and the same rule from two weeks ago still applies: report earned citations and paid placement as two separate lines, not one blended visibility number.
Decide your Claude-drafting disclosure policy before the detection API exists, not after. The watermark cannot tell original generation from heavy editing of a human draft, which means it will produce false signals in both directions once it goes live. Knowing where your team stands on that question now costs nothing. Explaining it after a client finds out on their own costs a lot more.
llms.txt stays cheap and stays low priority. The v2 spec adds real structure for sites built mostly of documentation, and it is worth adopting there specifically. It still is not a citation lever for a marketing site or a product catalog, and no engine has said otherwise. Spend the real budget on rendering, structured data, and the kind of third-party mentions that actually show up in the sources column of an AI answer.
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