What changed in AI search this fortnight

Vendor moves

One robots.txt line for training

Google, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a shared AI training token on 30 October, and Anthropic has begun implementing it. It is a robots.txt group headed User-Agent: __usage_ai-training with ordinary Allow and Disallow rules, defined in an IETF AI Preferences working group draft by Anthropic's Kevin Kelley. According to Search Engine Journal's reading of the draft, it defines training as "using content to modify a generative AI model's learned parameters", exempts classification and ranking models, controls no crawling, and is not matched by wildcard user-agent groups.

Each provider reads the token in its own way.

• Google says it will honour the token in 2027 and, where Google-Extended is not named explicitly, "plans to interpret that as if the publisher had disallowed Google-Extended"; at Google that covers both Gemini training and grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI, while Search inclusion and the AI Overviews control are untouched.
• Microsoft honours the token from 1 February 2027 and adds a page-level ai-training preference and a separate ai-grounding preference, both defaulting to allow, with a disallowextended value that keeps content available to Microsoft-operated surfaces including Copilot while excluding third-party grounding products such as Web IQ and the Foundry API.
• Microsoft also stops reading NoArchive and NoCache on 1 March 2027, and from 15 December opens temporary grounding preferences in Bing Webmaster Tools for sites that use those tags on that date, which expire on 30 September 2027.
• OpenAI says it will honour the shared signal in the next few months and keeps its GPTBot policy, with no statement on how a conflict between the token and a GPTBot rule resolves.

Nothing in the token removes content already collected. Access is still a matter of robots.txt crawler tokens, which Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin described in the 21 October Non-Canonical Cabinet episode as an access protocol only: "disallow bluntly means, 'Do not enter the room.'" Think of the crawler token as the front door and the new token as a house rule about what a guest may take home.

Ads move into AI answers

Google is scaling ads into AI Mode while telling investors that AI Mode earns less. On the 28 October third-quarter call Philipp Schindler said "the strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact because of the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode" and that "we're now scaling ads within both AI Overviews and AI Mode to more users and more queries". Search and other revenue was $63.35 billion, up 12% year on year, and Sundar Pichai gave no AI Mode revenue, ad load or CPC figure.

The ad formats followed within days.

• On 28 October Google's Shashi Thakur announced ads in AI Mode for Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore, with Brazil, Mexico and the UK to follow in the fourth quarter, plus multiturn ads in the US that appear on follow-up queries.
• Thakur stated that "click-through rates are already similar between sponsored and organic product list items within AI Mode".
• A test spotted on 29 October splits AI Mode product carousels into "Sponsored" and "All products" headers, which Google confirmed as "part of our ongoing experiments with ads in AI Mode".
• In a single sighting on 30 October, Khushal Bherwani saw Bing showing sponsored results inside its own AI Overviews; Barry Schwartz could not reproduce it.

No EU market beyond the UK has a date for ads in AI Mode in our sources.

OpenAI set ChatGPT ads to be rewritten by default. Its notice to advertisers said creative enhancements, which can include new or updated headlines and descriptions, image resizing, changes to the destination URL and translation into other languages, switch on for new and existing self-serve campaigns on 30 October, and that these ads "can run automatically without requiring you to review or approve each version". Advertisers can opt out in Ads Manager or change the setting afterwards.

Apps for Google's agents

Google opened a platform for apps that act for users inside AI Mode and the Gemini app. The Connected Apps Platform, in preview from 28 October, lets a developer build once through a cloud-hosted MCP server or Android MCP, and over 50 apps are live, including Adobe, Experian, Localiza, Peloton and Calm. Access is a US developer waitlist, Search expansion is due "in the coming weeks", and users add an app to their Search settings before it can act for them.

A week earlier, on 21 October, a Cloudflare post with Commerce.com, formerly BigCommerce, said WebMCP agent tools such as search_products and add_to_cart are now switched on for nearly 100,000 storefronts, by default and with a merchant opt-out. Agents reach those tools only where WebMCP runs today: behind Chrome flags, in Chrome Origin Trials, in some agentic browsers and in Cloudflare's own developer environment.

Smaller changes

The rest of the vendor news was smaller.

• On 21 October Google rewrote its page on controlling what you share with Search, which now lists seven methods, among them the robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, X-Robots-Tag and the Search generative AI control for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• On 26 October Google's user-generated spam guide gained a section telling tools that let users publish shared pages, generated content or web apps to apply noindex or a robots.txt block by default to pages made for direct sharing, collaboration or utility.
• OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra on 26 October at $1 input and $5 output per million tokens, replacing GPT-5.6 Terra in ChatGPT Work, Codex and the API, with no change announced to the consumer ChatGPT default.
• Google launched Gemini 4 Carbon on 28 October to cyber defenders in the Fairwind programme first; it is not in the Gemini app, AI Mode or the public API.
• DebugBear, whose real-user-monitoring script many SEO teams embed, had its DNS hijacked at the registrar on 29 October, so the script served malicious JavaScript.

How LLMs read the web

What AI search sends

Three traffic studies landed in the same week, and all three found that AI search sends little measurable traffic. Marie Haynes's 21 October post draws on 12 months of GA4 data across 100 sites and more than 145 million sessions. Google organic still produced 96.5% of conversions on those sites, 27 times all LLMs combined, and she dates the end of ChatGPT's growth to the GPT-5 launch in August 2025.

SEO Works counted 2,825,594 organic sessions against 72,095 AI-referred sessions across 95 sites, in a benchmark that is agency-sourced. On the 63 sites with enough data, AI converted at 1.18 times organic overall, 1.51 times for B2C and 0.62 times for B2B product businesses, the first split in our sources suggesting the conversion premium is a consumer effect.

Kevin Indig's study is the one to read before anyone claims influence they cannot measure. Across 12 mostly B2B sites, total direct traffic rose 140.9% while engaged direct fell 1.0%, which he reads as bots. A 0.72 correlation between AI share of voice and direct traffic at a three-week lag was matched or beaten by deliberately misaligned periods.

Mike King and Rand Fishkin accepted the data and drew a brand conclusion from it. King's 22 October reply, "The numbers are right. The category is wrong.", argues AI answers are a brand channel to be measured by share of voice, mention frequency, citation position and sentiment, with branded search and direct traffic read quarterly. Fishkin, according to Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land, agreed with Haynes's numbers, noted ChatGPT sends less than DuckDuckGo and called AI a digital billboard.

What an AI Overview is worth

Cyrus Shepard's one-site test found that leaving Google's AI features cost ordinary organic clicks. He used the Search generative AI opt-out on one site and reported on 28 October that AI impressions were about 8% of its total, and that regular organic clicks fell while the site was excluded and recovered when it returned. Search Engine Roundtable reports his estimated click-through rate of about 0.9% on the AI impressions, which is derived: he solved for the AI share from the site's clicks and impressions with and without the known AI impressions, on one property, with seasonality unaccounted for.

Shepard calls the study "super limited" with a "small sample size", and names the effect a "Search SERP Halo Effect". AI Overviews kept appearing during the test; only the site's inclusion changed. Our reading is that an AI citation is a low-click placement whose main effect is on the brand, and in this one test, leaving AI Overviews did not hand the clicks back to the blue link.

The backdrop is coverage. Barry Schwartz's 26 October tally puts AI Overviews on over 80% of Google searches by Semrush's Sensor, up from about 50% in June 2025 and 15% a year earlier, while seoClarity's Mark Traphagen reports 62% overall and 55 to 84% by industry. Both are vendor figures.

Brand searches by market

SE Ranking's brand study is the first in our sources with a German leg. SE Ranking tracked 1,000 brand keywords per market across 17 industries on 12 to 14 October, with three daily checks, and found AI Overviews on 82.5% of US brand searches and 40.4% of German ones. The study is vendor-sourced.

For German brand AI Overviews, SE Ranking's German-language write-up of 16 October reports:

• The brand's own site is cited in 86.4% of cases, according to SE Ranking.
• The homepage makes up 41.2% of sources, according to SE Ranking.
• Brand-managed channels, including Google Business Profile and app stores, make up 50.9% of citations, according to SE Ranking.
• 77% of German brand AI Overviews cite at least one brand page outside the organic top 10, according to SE Ranking.

For the US, SE Ranking's and Aleyda Solis's posts report that about three in five cited brand pages sit outside the organic top 10, and that 61% of citations come from platforms brands manage or take part in. A ranking report on its own will miss many of the pages an AI Overview cites for your name.

Semrush's 21 October study of 400 fixed commercial keywords in banking, software and ecommerce, US desktop, found AI Overviews on 45.75% of them in September 2025 and 88% in August 2026, 97.08% weighted by volume. By query type, "best X for Y" queries led at 96.12%, and reviews queries reached 89.04%, up from 30.14%. The study is vendor-sourced and contains no click data.

Who writes the link text

The words under a cited link may no longer be the page's own. On 23 October Brodie Clark spotted AI Overview citation cards carrying AI-generated summary snippets in place of page excerpts, so the text under a cited page's link is written by Google for each query. Google has not commented.

On 29 October Clark saw citation cards disappear from desktop AI Overviews; Barry Schwartz could not reproduce it and notes the card "does load in later". The same day Gagan Ghotra spotted query refinement bubbles on AI Overviews that open AI Mode with the bubble text as the prompt.

Two measurement problems

Gemini's UTM tags are gone again, and the iOS app passes nothing. Natzir's graph, carried by Search Engine Roundtable on 30 October and independently confirmed by Xyborg, shows utm_source=gemini appearing on cited links in early September, surging for three weeks and vanishing on 28 September. Desktop Gemini still passes a gemini.google.com referrer, while the iOS app opens links in a WebView that sends none, so those visits land in Direct and the only trace is a GeminiiOS user agent in server logs.

Rank data from late September needs a note. DataForSEO, a SERP data provider, wrote on 23 October that poisoned pages, where "fewer than half of the websites that usually appear for its keyword appear anywhere on the page", made up roughly 20 to 30% of its scraped results since 26 September, and that two retries plus validation still leave 2 to 3% poisoned. It advises customers to annotate every report from 20 September onward and treat single-day drops as unconfirmed, and Semrush confirmed on 27 October that it has seen the issue since late summer. Both are vendor-sourced, and Google has said nothing.

The GEO paper correction

The paper behind most GEO advice was built on invented evidence, and its own code says so. Aggarwal and colleagues (KDD 2024) report that Quotation Addition raised position-adjusted word count by 42.6%, Statistics Addition by 32.8% and Cite Sources by 27.7%, in a GPT-3.5 generative engine simulated over Google's top five results. The prompts in the authors' public repository tell the model to "Add positive, compelling statistics (even if hypothetical)", to "Add more quotes in the source, even though fake and artificial", and for citations, "You may invent these sources but ensure they sound plausible and do not mislead the reader".

Shaun Anderson's 23 October audit on Hobo Web made the charge, and the repository and the paper's own tables confirm it. In our reading, the paper shows that a summariser model rewards text carrying the surface features of evidence, and it never tested whether true statistics or quotations improve citation on production engines.

An earlier run of our own radar called the charge unsupported by anything published. That was wrong on the substance, since the prompts had been public since 2023, and the correction is on our record.

Community signal

Practitioners on X

Lily Ray pointed out that Search Console still neither labels nor filters AI Overview or AI Mode impressions. Her post drew 150 likes. It credited seoClarity for an 80% coverage figure that is Semrush's; seoClarity's own number is 62%, with a 55 to 84% range by industry.

Cyrus Shepard read the week's surface tests as a motive. His 1 November post says Google is "trying to disguise AI Overviews after realizing people weren't clicking on ads". The missing "AI Overview" label that Glenn Gabe spotted on desktop film and TV queries on 20 October was restored by 22 October, the citation card case is a single sighting with Google silent, and the motive is Shepard's inference.

Marie Haynes, whose 21 October post called GEO a distraction, turned to agents on 1 November. She wrote that "Agentic Search is a whole new ball game" and asked "What are you building that people can use via MCP?". She told Search Engine Roundtable that "in this new era, it's functionality that matters."

Aleyda Solis published a framework on 28 October for prioritising third-party citations, with a worksheet and a Claude Skill that applies its criteria, including citation influence and brand association.

Figures we left out

Two figures circulating on X could not be traced to any study, so we left them out. One post claims sites with clear author credentials and expert sources are cited 1.8 times more often by ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, and another credits a table of contents with "1.7x more" citations. We could not find a source for either, which is reason enough to keep them out of your decks.

An older Ahrefs study resurfaced through a Kasra Dash video, and its highest correlation is for mentions. Ahrefs's vendor-sourced 75,000-brand study from 26 May 2025 found Spearman correlations with AI Overview brand mentions of 0.664 for branded web mentions against 0.218 for backlinks, and 26% of brands were mentioned in no AI Overview at all. The video is also an advertisement for his course.

Reddit, unverified

Reddit blocked our thread fetches in both weeks, so these two come from our collector's capture alone and are unverified.

• An r/DigitalMarketing thread asking whether LLM citations translate to traffic drew the answer "citations without clicks is the norm", with a suggestion to add a free-text "how did you hear about us" field and read it beside the AI referral segment for a quarter.
• An r/TechSEO post reports PerplexityBot fetching 23 URLs over two months and then 70 new ones in 26 seconds, which reads to us like an on-demand burst triggered by a query or a sitemap read.

What it means for your brand

Reporting what AI sends

Put AI referral share and conversion rate in your monthly report, next to share of voice. Take AI referral sessions as a share of Google organic and their conversion rate from GA4, and compare them with this fortnight's studies: 0.6 to 0.7% of organic, converting at roughly 1.2 to 4.5 times the organic rate, less for B2B. Then report visibility as a brand channel, measured by share of voice, mention frequency, citation position and sentiment on the prompts your buyers use.

Do not promise a direct-traffic lift from AI visibility that nobody has measured. Kevin Indig's placebo test is the reason: the correlation that looked like AI visibility feeding direct visits dissolved. If a proposal or a vendor deck claims that lift, ask how it was measured.

Take the "up to 40%" GEO figure out of any deck that still carries it. It came from a simulated engine scoring text that the prompts allowed to be invented. Keep stating real statistics, quoting real people and citing real sources, because Google's guidelines treat verifiable sourcing as a quality and trust requirement, while its citation effect on real engines is unproven.

Settings someone should own

Leave your site in Google's AI features, and treat a citation there as a brand placement. Cyrus Shepard's one-site test, reported by Search Engine Roundtable, found that opting out cost ordinary organic clicks, with an estimated click-through rate on AI impressions of about 0.9%. It is a small test, and the first measurement of that control's cost in our sources.

Check what your robots.txt and page headers say about AI training and grounding before the 2027 dates arrive. Look for Google-Extended, GPTBot, NoArchive and NoCache, and write down who set each one and why. If you want Gemini, Copilot and ChatGPT to describe your brand accurately, our default advice is to allow training and grounding and keep measuring the answers; the new token suits publishers whose content is the product.

Two details catch older setups. By Google's stated plan, writing the token without naming Google-Extended explicitly reads as a Google-Extended disallow, which at Google also covers grounding in Gemini Apps, and Bing stops reading NoArchive and NoCache on 1 March 2027.

If you run self-serve ChatGPT Ads, open Ads Manager and check the creative enhancements setting. OpenAI's notice set rewritten headlines, descriptions, destination URLs and translations to switch on by default on 30 October, and the setting can be changed afterwards. For copy with legal disclaimers or market-specific prices, that is a decision someone should make on purpose.

Markets and measurement

Search your brand in each market you sell in, and record what the AI Overview cites. SE Ranking's split, 82.5% of US brand searches against 40.4% in Germany, means a baseline from one market will not hold for another. Record presence, which of your pages are cited, whether they rank in the top 10, and which third-party sources sit beside them.

Annotate Gemini traffic from 28 September, and check your tag manager for DebugBear. A drop in Gemini-tagged visits from that date reflects the tags disappearing, and iOS app visits arrive as Direct; mark rank reports from 20 September too, as DataForSEO advises. For DebugBear, Search Engine Journal advises removing the script from templates, plugins and tag managers, resetting admin sessions and auditing for unauthorised changes.