Articles
Research, experiments and analysis on AI visibility, generative search, SEO and how artificial intelligence systems understand the web.
131 SEOs Still Rank Backlinks Second—but Put Search Intent and Original Evidence First
SEO has changed dramatically in the age of AI Overviews, algorithm leaks, antitrust testimony and generative search, but a new survey suggests practitioners have not abandoned the....
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Google Says the Traditional Position 1–10 Model No Longer Maps Cleanly to Modern Search
For decades, one of SEO’s most intuitive questions was also one of its simplest: does a page rank first, third or tenth? Google’s John Mueller now says that familiar model is incre...
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Bing Webmaster Tools Now Tracks AI Citation Share, Intent and Topic Visibility—While Google Search Console Still Doesn’t
Microsoft is turning Bing Webmaster Tools into something search marketers have been asking for since generative answers began absorbing more of the discovery journey: a first-party...
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Product Pages Captured 24% of B2B AI Citations—Nearly Six Times More Than Reddit, YouTube and Forums
B2B marketers trying to earn citations from AI assistants may be looking in the wrong place if they focus primarily on Reddit threads, YouTube videos and community discussions. In....
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A Randomized Google Search Experiment Found AI Mode Cut External CTR by 18.8 Points—and Reduced User Trust
Google’s AI Mode did more than reduce clicks to the open web in a randomized field experiment. It also reduced how often people searched, pushed more users toward rival search engi...
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The AI Crawl-to-Referral Metric Publishers Use to Block Bots May Be Missing Most Native-App Traffic
Publishers deciding whether to allow or block AI crawlers increasingly rely on a deceptively simple metric: how many pages a bot fetches for every visitor its platform sends back.....
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Google Business Profile Brings Back Post-Level View Counts After Three Years
Google is giving local businesses a visibility metric they have been missing for more than three years. Post-level view counts are returning to Google Business Profile, allowing ow...
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Amazon DSP Is Becoming a New Gateway Into ChatGPT Ads
Amazon is becoming a new buying route into ChatGPT’s emerging advertising business. A pilot between Amazon Ads and OpenAI allows selected U.S. advertisers to extend campaigns from....
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55% of Top AI Citations Didn’t Rank in the Traditional Top 10
Ranking on page one still matters in AI search, but it is no longer the whole visibility story. A new Rankability analysis found that 55.2% of the pages appearing among the first 1...
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AI Search Surfaces Fewer Long-Tail Sources—and Concentrates Visibility on a Smaller Web
AI search may make finding an answer faster, but it can also make the web behind that answer smaller. A large-scale MIT-led study comparing generative and traditional search found....
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ChatGPT Retrieved 63% of Expert-Selected Clinical Studies—Gemini Found Just 17%
Ask three leading AI assistants the same evidence-based medical question and the studies they retrieve can differ dramatically. A new preprint comparing ChatGPT GPT-5.5, Claude Son...
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