3 New Studies Suggest AI Visibility & Search Not Worth Investing In

There are three new studies out over the past week that suggest that spending time, money and resources on AI visibility and AI search may not be worth it. In short, the studies all show that AI Search or AI services send a tiny fraction of traffic (and conversions) when compared to Google Search.

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Google Ads Sponsored Products Expand To Include Product Attributes

Google Ads is testing showing Sponsored Products results that dynamically expand to show product attributes at the bottom of the ad units in a gray background color.

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Google Pauses Ads For Russian Advertisers & Serving Ads To Russians

Back in 2022, Google paused showing ads to users in Russia. That still seems to be active, but Google just posted a new message in the Google Ads and Merchant Center help documentation that it has "also paused ads on Google properties and networks globally for advertisers based in Russia."

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Google On robots.txt Rules For AI Crawlers, Emojis, International URLs & More

Gary Illyes and Chery Prommawin released their second video in the Non-Canonical Cabinet series; this one is named What can you actually put in a robots.txt? Here they discuss what is, and is not, supported by robots.txt files. And while Google may support features or directives, other search engines or AI crawlers might not.

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Google Updated Its URL Structure Best Practices For Hyphens In URLs

Google has made a minor change to its URL structure best practices for Google Search help document. Specifically, the "Use hyphens to separate words" section. The overall meaning of the section really did not change but Google did update it, so I wanted to point out the update.

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OpenAI Auto Enabling Creative Enhancements In ChatGPT Ads

OpenAI sent out emails to advertisers, including me, telling me they have automatically enabled creative enhancements for my ChatGPT Ads. The email says this is starting on October 30, 2026 and I can opt out of creative enhancements or change your settings at any time in Ads Manager.

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Bing Tests Not Showing Sitelinks

Microsoft seems to be testing not showing sitelinks under the main Bing search result snippets. I am honestly not sure if this is new but I was able to replicate Bing showing sitelinks for the first search result snippet in one browser and for the same query, it not showing the sitelinks.

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Google Search Tests Removing Horizontal Rule Line Under Tabs

Google is testing removing the HR, thematic line break or horizontal rule line, that is found under the search tabs under the search box in the search results page.

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Google Ads Now In AI Mode With Personal Intelligence

Google confirmed it will now show ads in AI Mode results with Personal Intelligence enabled. Back in March, Google said AI Mode with Personal Intelligence turned on would be ad-free, but that is now changing.

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Google AI Mode Citations With Preferred Source Preferences

Google is testing letting users view and modify their preferred sources list directly from within the AI Mode citations sidebar. There is a new button named "Source preferences" and when you click on it, it opens up your preferred sources list where you can add or remove preferred sources.

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Google Ads To No Longer Show Featured Professionals, Headshots Are Optional

Google Ads posted a message to Local Service Ads advertisers saying that featured professionals will no longer show on your ads, and headshots will be optional and won't impact ad serving.

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Google Updated Indexing API Quota Details & More

Google has updated the indexing API documentation; this includes three different pages within the documentation. I think the big takeaway is that Google removed the old approval process and initial testing explanation, the sitemap recommendation, and, most importantly, the default quota details.

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Google Dataset Search Currently Not Returning Search Results

For the past several hours, Google Dataset Search has not been able to return any search results or matches. Google Dataset Search returns a response that says "Your search - [keyword phrase here] - did not match any datasets."

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Bing Tests Related Searches Based On Your Browsing

Bing is testing showing "Related searches based on your browsing" similar to how Google is/was showing this a few months ago. In Bing's test, this is below the Microsoft Ads in the search results.

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OpenAI Drops UTM Parameters From ChatGPT Results (GPT-6)

OpenAI seems to have removed or replaced the UTM parameters it placed on links within the ChatGPT results. This makes it harder to know if a click came from ChatGPT versus some other platform. This seems to have started with the release of GPT''6, which was a week ago.

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Google Search On PDFs: Conversion, Links, HTML, Ranking, Limits, Crawling...

Google's Martin Splitt and John Mueller just posted a Search Off the Record podcast on the topic of PDFs, it is named PDFs in Search: Indexing, AI & Pitfalls. It goes over how PDFs are converted for crawling and indexing, how Google processes links, images, what are the file limits and do they rank in search and AI search.

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Gemini 4 Argon In Google Search Via AI Mode

Google announced Gemini 4 Argon a couple of weeks ago and today announced that it is now an option in Google Search via AI Mode for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers globally.

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Google Ads Data Strength Best Practices Updated

Google has revamped its Data Strength Best Practices help document with much greater emphasis on sending more first-party data and identifiers, using Data Manager correctly, adopting AI-powered campaigns, and supporting its recommendations with performance statistics. It is a big update to the document.

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The Industry Mourns The Loss Of Nick Wilsdon - Loved By Industry

I am sad to report that Nick Wilsdon has passed away yesterday, October 11, 2026. Nick Wilsdon has been in the SEO industry for over two decades and was a close friend to many in the search marketing industry.

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Google: Poor Image Quality Won't Stop Products From Showing In Search Or Ads

Google has updated its Google Merchant Center low image quality help document to now say that poor image quality will not stop those products from showing in Google Search or Google Ads.

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Google Search Console Performance Report Extremely Delayed

The search performance reports in Google Search Console is now over 64 hours delayed, which is incredibly unusual for this report. Generally, we see this report updated within a few hours but over the past few days, post-spam update, the report has been lagging.

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Bing Tests Removing Favicons From Search Result Snippets

Microsoft Bing is testing dropping favicons from Bing search result snippets. This makes the search results page look much less graphical.

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Google Ads Self-Services Conversion Lift Measurement

Google Ads now lets advertisers set up Conversion Lift measurement themselves. Google updated its help documentation to say that you no longer need a Google Ads representative to set up Conversion Lift measurement; you just need at least 1,000 observed conversions and a $5,000 budget.

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Google September 2026 Spam Update Has Finished Rolling Out

The Google September 2026 spam update is now done rolling out. It started on Thursday, September 28, 2026 at around 12:00 pm ET and completed on October 8, 2026 at 4:37 am ET. This was different from the previous few spam updates in that this one took two weeks to roll out whereas the others took only two days to roll out.

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Google Search Crawl Rate Doc Adds Retry-After HTTP & More

Google has just pushed some updates to the reduce the Google crawl rate documentation. Most of the changes are just organizational to the content on the page but under the "Urgently reduce crawler traffic (for emergencies)" section, Google added new information on how to use Retry-After HTTP header.

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