LabraSEO

UTM tags vanish from ChatGPT 🔗, Google poisons rank tracker data 🧪, AI Mode sidebar spreads 🤖

Issue 15, 15 October 2026

What changed in search and AI answers, for marketing teams, in five minutes.

Headlines & Launches

ChatGPT stops tagging outbound links, muddying attribution (3 minute read)

OpenAI appears to have dropped UTM parameters from ChatGPT's outbound links around the GPT-6 release, so clicks that used to show as ChatGPT referrals now often land in analytics as direct traffic. Adobe's Cedric Huesler found ChatGPT referrals down roughly 31,000 visits a day on tracked pages while direct traffic rose about 26,000 a day on the same pages. If your AI referral numbers suddenly dropped this month, check your direct traffic instead, the visitors may not have left, just the tag did.

Google tests an AI Mode sidebar on regular search results (3 minute read)

Google appears to be testing the AI Mode left sidebar, with chat history and a way to start an AI chat, on its normal web search results page, not just inside AI Mode itself. Barry Schwartz could not reproduce it himself, so this looks like a limited test for now. If it rolls out widely it pushes AI Mode closer to being the default way people search, which means more of your prospects' queries may get answered without a click to your site.

Bing groups AI citation queries into topics and shows gaps (4 minute read)

Bing Webmaster Tools added a beta Topics Portfolio view inside its AI Performance report, grouping the queries where your site is cited in AI answers into broader topics and listing queries where competitors are cited but you are not. It only appears once Bing has enough data on your site, so smaller sites may not see it yet. This is a direct worklist for AI visibility gaps, worth checking if you have any presence on Bing or Copilot.

Google explains how little URLs matter for ranking (4 minute read)

In a new Google video, Gary Illyes said keywords in a URL or domain are an "incredibly small signal" for rankings, confirmed hyphens over underscores, and said Google can detect spam patterns in URLs. There is nothing new to act on here, but it is useful confirmation if anyone on your team still wants to stuff keywords into URL slugs.

Deep Dives & Analysis

Analysis claims Google is feeding rank trackers false data (4 minute read)

Rank tracking firm Nozzle says Google has been serving non standard, misleading search results pages to scrapers and rank trackers since September 20, reaching as much as 25% of results on some days and settling between 5 and 11% since October 1, with no indication on the page that it is wrong. Nozzle calls this poisoning rather than blocking, and suggests it targets AI companies that scrape Google to ground their answers as well as rank trackers caught in the same net. If this holds up, it means your rank tracking dashboards may already be showing volatility that never happened, so treat sudden ranking swings with some caution until this is independently confirmed.

Google confirms it converts PDFs to HTML before ranking them (6 minute read)

Google's Martin Splitt explained that Search never ranks the PDF itself, it runs PDFs through a converter that produces an HTML version, and that HTML is what gets indexed, with images inside PDFs possibly not indexed at all. For teams that publish whitepapers, spec sheets or reports as PDFs, this means the same basics apply as any web page, clear text and headings matter, and relying on images inside a PDF to carry key information is risky for both Google Search and AI Mode.

Most Shopify stores can be browsed by AI agents but not bought from (15 minute read)

Bill Hunt tested 122 top Shopify storefronts and found the agent readiness is mostly automatic: 76 of 86 product pages load the same Shopify provided WebMCP script, and 83 of 89 agents.md files are near identical copies of Shopify's template, with only five written by the merchant. He found agents can build a checkout on these stores but routinely cannot answer basic questions about delivery or cancellation, because the platform switched on the plumbing without merchants adding the actual content agents need. If you sell on Shopify, having the default setup is not the same as being ready for AI shopping agents, check whether your own delivery and returns information is actually answerable by an agent.

Tactics & Tools

Google Ads adds priority tiers across channels and budgets (6 minute read)

Google Ads is rolling out channel prioritization and budget allocation controls globally across Search, Shopping, Performance Max and soon Demand Gen, letting advertisers mark channels High or Low priority so Google's bidding fully funds the high priority tier first. Teams running Performance Max alongside Search should check these new controls, since Low priority channels can now have a capped percentage of daily budget set against them.

RankZero's free AI SEO audit (Sponsor)

See whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can find and cite your brand. Free, results in 30 seconds, no signup.

Google Ads formalises its prediction market ad policy (3 minute read)

Google folded its prediction market advertising rules into the main Google Ads policy document, requiring advertisers to hold local licences and meet location specific criteria. Only relevant if you run ads for event contract or prediction market products, but worth a check before your next campaign if you do.

Quick Links

DEJAN launches an AI SEO workspace (1 minute read)

DEJAN's new AI SEO Suite lets teams track AI visibility across Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, test page edits against an AI ranker before publishing, and compare Search Console clicks against AI citations in one dashboard.

From X and LinkedIn

Glen Allsopp: moves its AI search traffic benchmarks to Ahrefs (1 minute read)

Glen Allsopp's data on traffic to roughly 115,000 sites comparing ChatGPT against Google has a new home as "Ahrefs Benchmarks," now including bot analytics and AI citation breakdowns by industry. Useful as a free, large scale reference if you want to see how AI referral traffic compares with Google in your sector.