Articles
Research, experiments and analysis on AI visibility, generative search, SEO and how artificial intelligence systems understand the web.
92% of Bloggers Use AI—but Only 14% Say Their Content Delivers Strong Results
AI has become nearly universal in blogging, but content marketers have rarely felt less confident about the results they are getting. In Orbit Media’s latest annual survey, 92.4% o...
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Google Has Shut Down Entertainment Review Profiles—and Users Have One Month to Save Their Data
Google has switched off the user profiles that once allowed people to manage reviews of entertainment content such as movies and television shows directly through Google Search. Th...
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Google Is Turning Sports SERPs Into an AI-Powered Live Game Feed
For years, a sports query on Google has been one of the clearest examples of an answer-first search result: type in a matchup and the SERP immediately surfaces the score, schedule....
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Google AI Mode Can Now Access Your Live Fantasy Roster—and Recommend Who to Start
Google is turning AI Mode into something more personal than a general-purpose sports assistant. Fantasy football players in the United States can now connect their Yahoo Fantasy or...
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ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity Cited AI-Generated Sources in About 16% of Cases
AI search engines are designed to make web research easier by synthesizing information and attaching citations, but a new audit raises a more complicated question: what happens whe...
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Google Search and AI Overviews Shared Only 18% of Their Sources in an 11,500-Query Study
Ranking in Google Search and being cited by Google’s generative search features may be far less closely connected than many publishers assume. A large empirical study of 11,500 que...
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Researchers Found 72 Google Maps Signals—but 25 Are Deprecated and None Reveal Their Weight
Reverse engineering of Google Maps has exposed one of the most detailed public views yet of the vocabulary behind Google's local-search infrastructure: 72 named ranking signals ins...
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Google Says Europe’s New DMA Search Results Are Its Biggest Quality Downgrade Ever
Google Search in Europe is beginning to look materially different from Search elsewhere in the world, and Google says the latest regulatory redesign is the most damaging change to....
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AI Search Blocks 99.78% of Traditional SEO Spam—but LLM-Specific Manipulation Doubled the Success Rate
AI search systems appear remarkably resistant to many of the black-hat SEO techniques that have polluted conventional search for years. A new security study accepted at The ACM Web...
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Google Researchers Are Testing an LLM That Generates the Search Ranking Itself
Most modern search ranking systems are built around a compromise. One model retrieves a manageable set of candidate documents quickly, while a more computationally expensive model....
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ChatGPT Ads CPCs Range From $3 to $22—and Advertisers Still Can’t See Why
Six months into ChatGPT Ads, marketers finally have enough public campaign data to see that advertising inside an AI conversation can produce real traffic, leads and sales. What th...
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