Saturday, October 24, 2026
10 stories · 2 topics · 8 outlets
Agent-to-Agent Marketing
2Answer Engines
8ChatGPT sends less than 1% of Google’s traffic
ChatGPT sent 0.62% as many sessions as Google organic search across 100 websites in Marie Haynes' analysis of 12 months of GA4 data covering more than 145 million sessions; adding referrals from other AI assistants raised the figure to 0.73%. Among the 55 sites tracking conversions, 13.8% of ChatGPT visitors converted against 3.02% of Google organic visitors, but Google still drove 27 times as many conversions as all the AI tools together. Haynes, who has called GEO a distraction, also found that ChatGPT referral growth stalled across the sites.
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode: more visible links, still no click data
Google said on Oct. 15 that it is showing more links in AI Mode and AI Overviews, placing them higher in the answers and highlighting one or two for some queries, according to Abondance's account of the announcement. The piece also reports, citing Le Figaro, that Chartbeat data put the fall in news sites' Google traffic at 40% between July 2025 and July 2026. Google still does not report clicks from its AI answers, the article says, which leaves publishers and SEOs unable to measure what the new link formats deliver.
Google AI Overview Citation Cards With AI-Generated Summary Snippets
Google appears to be testing or rolling out AI-written summaries inside the citation cards that sit beside AI Overviews in Google Search, Search Engine Roundtable reports. The cards, shown at the right or bottom of an AI Overview, can now carry an AI summary instead of a plain description.
Inside ChatGPT’s Ad Auction: How Relevance, Bids, And Memory Decide Placement
OpenAI's account of the ChatGPT Ads system describes a custom large language model orchestrator that reads multi-turn conversations, nominates ads for the auction and drops placements that miss the deadline for the response, according to Search Engine Journal's write-up. The piece sets out how relevance, bids and what the conversation remembers interact when an ad is chosen and where it appears.
AI Overviews: with traffic falling, brand becomes a search lever
French media sites lost 22.9% of visits in a year as Google's AI Overviews spread, according to the article, which reports that Google's preferred sources feature turns brand recognition into a search lever of its own. The piece argues that being picked as a preferred source depends on users already knowing the brand, which changes how publishers and brands plan search work.
Getting Indexed No Longer Means Getting Visited
Duane Forrester argues that being indexed no longer buys a visit, because in the answer layer it only makes a page eligible to be cited. Search Engine Journal published the piece.
AI search strategy: 4 layers of brand visibility
Semrush sets out an AI search strategy in four layers, starting with a diagnosis of whether AI systems can reach a site and whether they describe the brand correctly. The post says rewriting content will not help if those first problems are left in place.
GEO: what I learned measuring our citations in ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity
An agency writer put the questions its prospects type into Google to several AI assistants in late September, then measured how ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity answered them. The post sets out what the test showed about the agency's own citations in the three assistants.