Issue 21, 23 October 2026
What changed in search and AI answers, for marketing teams, in five minutes.
Google is rolling out a new unified dashboard called Google Business Home that brings Business Profile, Merchant Center, YouTube and Ads into one place, with content tools, multi location management and personalised advice. If you manage a local or multi location business, ask whoever owns your listings to check for access, since this replaces the scattered management screens Google has used until now.
Google is testing a new layout for local knowledge panels that moves the business name, rating, description and action buttons above the photos, matching current mobile design more closely. Barry Schwartz could not replicate the test himself, but if it rolls out widely it could change how often people click, call or get directions from your local listing.
Google's Gary Illyes said in a new Search Central video that robots.txt, as defined by RFC 9309, only governs which URLs a crawler may request, not what a company does with content afterwards. To block one AI crawler while allowing others, you must name that crawler's exact user agent token in your file, since invented directives are simply ignored by parsers.
Moz and Profound announced a partnership that puts Moz's domain authority, brand authority, keyword and link data directly into Profound's AEO product. If your team already uses Profound to track AI citations, you will now see familiar SEO metrics alongside it, with Moz framing this as filling in the groundwork its own blog admits GEO still needs.
Barry Schwartz rounds up three separate analyses, including Marie Haynes's review of 145 million sessions across 100 sites, which found ChatGPT sent just 0.62% of the volume Google organic did and only 3.5% of total conversions despite converting 4.5 times better per visit. All three studies agree AI assistants send a small fraction of what Google Search drives, so if you are deciding where to spend limited budget this quarter, organic search still deserves the larger share.
Responding to the same three studies, Mike King of iPullRank does not dispute the low traffic numbers but argues they measure the wrong thing, comparing it to judging a Super Bowl advert by click through rate. He points out ChatGPT reaches 1.2 billion people weekly and AI Overviews reach 2.5 billion, so the practical takeaway for your team is to track AI visibility as brand exposure alongside, not instead of, your traffic metrics.
Research by Searchable, using 30,000 prompts across five AI assistants, found ChatGPT cites national newspapers almost as often as local ones even on local queries, and goes to council or government sources for 81.3% of local questions versus just 0.9% to local news. For crime queries specifically, police force websites supplied 57.8% of citations, so local brands and publishers may need direct, well structured pages on their own sites rather than relying on press coverage to appear in AI answers.
Ahrefs says it has seen an increase over the past few weeks in Google showing different search results to suspected SERP data providers, affecting between 5% and 20% of results depending on the provider. Ahrefs says it has filters to detect and reject these abnormal results, so if your rank tracking numbers look erratic right now, this industry wide issue, not your site, may be the cause.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai told podcast host Alex Heath that he sees Search and AI converging into what he calls one box rather than separate products, with a shared agent infrastructure spanning consumer and enterprise use. There is no product change here yet, but it signals the direction Google is building toward, worth watching if you plan content or technical work with a multi year horizon.
See whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can find and cite your brand. Free, results in 30 seconds, no signup.
Pichai told Alex Heath that AI agents will reach websites both through human style browsing and through dedicated protocols such as Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, and expects protocols to scale better but take longer to build. Worth a glance if you sell products and are considering structured feeds for agent based shopping.
Lily Ray found that for an enterprise client, the most cited page in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, with five times more impressions than the homepage, was a detailed, human written About page covering company history. Her recommendation is to invest in comprehensive, accurate About pages rather than building separate LLM specific pages, since she expects AI companies to increasingly discount pages that look built purely to game their systems. Check your own Search Console Gen AI report to see which pages are actually getting cited.
LabraSEO