Issue 5, 1 October 2026
What changed in search and AI answers, for marketing teams, in five minutes.
Chris Long tested about 100 big brands and found AI Overviews showing for 93% of branded searches, including Reddit, Salesforce, Amazon and Adobe, usually appearing mid page rather than at the top. If your own brand name now triggers an AI Overview, check where it sits on the page, since a mid page summary is less of a threat to your top organic listing than one placed above it.
Reddit says RSS has become "a common surface for large scale scraping and automated abuse" and will end RSS support on November 13, with its public API following in March 2027, while its paid AI licensing deals keep growing. If your team pulls Reddit threads for research or monitoring via RSS, that feed disappears soon, though content still reaches AI answers through Reddit's own licensing arrangements.
The Information reports that around 100 publishers in Google's AI contribution pilot, which pays for content used in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini, are receiving about one tenth of one percent of their advertising revenue, with one publisher on a reported $1 million deal earning less than $1,000 over several months. If you are weighing whether AI licensing could offset falling search clicks, this pilot suggests the payouts are currently too small to matter.
Microsoft Bing is testing overlay labels like "great for," "effective" and "lightweight" on product grid listings, spotted by Khushal Bherwani on X. If you sell products through Bing Shopping, well structured product attributes may help you earn these labels once the test widens.
Greg Jarboe reports that Wikipedia is the most cited domain in ChatGPT and ranks highly in Claude and Google AI Mode, while podcast transcripts and Reddit threads increasingly surface in AI Overviews, work that typically sits with PR teams rather than SEO. If your company has no Wikipedia presence or podcast guest strategy, align your PR and SEO teams, since these channels are shaping AI citations more than traditional on page SEO.
Ahrefs' survey of 301 marketers found 93% using AI in content creation and 69% publishing more AI content than last year, with Claude the most used tool at 83.2%, while the share of marketers checking AI output with AI itself doubled to 28.6%. If your team is scaling AI content production, building in an AI assisted review step is becoming standard practice, not optional.
OpenAI told advertisers it has added bulk creation for product feed campaigns from a spreadsheet, a product review status view, and expanded conversion reporting through its Insights API, alongside launching ChatGPT Ads in Southeast Asia and Taiwan. If you run or are considering product ads in ChatGPT, the bulk upload and review status tools make it easier to manage a larger catalogue and diagnose rejected products.
See whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can find and cite your brand. Free, results in 30 seconds, no signup.
Google confirmed a Google Analytics loading issue on the evening of September 29, restored it for some users within minutes, and resolved it fully about an hour later. If your dashboards showed a data gap or access error around that time, it was a platform wide issue rather than anything on your end.
Lily Ray's updated tracking of around 100 queries found Google's AI Overviews citing 38% fewer self-promotional "best of" listicles since June, and leaving the brand behind them out of the recommendation 83% of the time, up from 69%. If your content team runs "best X tools" style listicles naming your own product, Google's AI Overviews increasingly favour the listicle while recommending your competitors instead of you.
Marie Haynes says several sites she monitors are seeing big improvements during the still rolling out September spam update, which she guesses means competitors' spammy pages have been demoted. Worth checking your own rankings against competitors now, though she plans fuller analysis once the update finishes.
Lily Ray says Google "keeps questioning AI Overview click studies" without releasing data of its own, calling it "frankly absurd" to keep denying that AI Overviews reduce click through rates. Until Google publishes its own numbers, independent click decline studies remain the only evidence either side can point to.
Lily Ray shows that an unconfirmed January 2026 update, which hit scaled content and listicles, caused a sharp drop for a well known brand's entire domain that still has not recovered. If a similar update hit your traffic early this year, do not assume recovery is guaranteed within months.