Articles
Research, experiments and analysis on AI visibility, generative search, SEO and how artificial intelligence systems understand the web.
Stay ahead of SEO & AI Search.
Follow the topics that matter to you. Get relevant new articles by email every 8 hours.
Create Free Alerts Free to join · Choose your topics · Unsubscribe anytime
Google Is Paying Publishers for “Significant” AI Contributions—but Won’t Reveal Which Content Earned the Money
Google has started paying selected publishers when it decides their content has made a “significant” contribution to an AI-generated answer. The experiment establishes something pu...
Read more →
A Domain Migration Looked Bad in Traditional SEO Tools—and Almost Catastrophic When Trending Google News Queries Were Measured
A UK publisher’s domain migration looked severe in conventional SEO tools. When the same move was measured against the fast-changing queries that drive Google News and Top Stories....
Read more →
Your Page Can Be Cited by AI Without Actually Shaping the Answer—GEO Needs an “Absorption” Metric
A page can appear in an AI answer’s source list without contributing much to what the answer actually says. That distinction sounds obvious, but most GEO measurement still treats t...
Read more →
Google’s New EU Search Layout Gives Comparison Sites More Visibility—While Direct Hotel and Restaurant Listings Lose Features
Google is redesigning some of its most commercially important search results in Europe, giving specialist comparison services more prominent placement while stripping features from...
Read more →
Deep-Search Agents Often Verify Poisoned Evidence—and Still Fail to Recover From It
Deep-search AI agents can recognize that evidence deserves additional checking and still fail to escape a poisoned information environment. A new benchmark finds that verification....
Read more →
A New GEO Defense Cut Manipulation Success From 50% to 6% Without Fine-Tuning the Search Model
A new defense for generative search has reduced the success of malicious GEO manipulation from an average of 50.32% to 6.20% without fine-tuning the language mo...
Read more →
Standard AI Guardrails Barely Stop GEO Poisoning Because Manipulated Content Still Looks Informational
Standard AI safety guardrails can be surprisingly weak against a form of search manipulation that does not look unsafe at all. A new benchmark finds that GEO-optimized misinformati...
Read more →
Your GEO Visibility Score May Describe the Prompts Your Tool Chose—not the AI Search Market Your Customers Actually Use
A GEO visibility score can look like a measurement of the AI search market while actually describing something much narrower: the collection of prompts, weights and scoring rules c...
Read more →
Google Search Console Can Count an AI Citation the User Never Saw—and Still Can’t Tell You Where It Appeared
Google Search Console can record an impression for a source inside an AI Overview even when the user never scrolls far enough to see that source on screen. At the same time, Search...
Read more →
The Famous “15% Wikipedia Traffic Loss” Was Revised Down to 5%—Because the Researchers Changed the Measurement
One of the most striking early estimates of AI Overviews’ effect on publisher traffic has been substantially revised. A University of Washington working paper that initially report...
Read more →
Amazon Fails to Restore Its Block on Perplexity’s Shopping Agent—Strengthening the “AI Is a User Tool” Precedent
Amazon has failed to persuade the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reconsider a closely watched ruling over Perplexity’s AI shopping agent, leaving intact an opinion....
Read more →