Issue 22, 26 October 2026
What changed in search and AI answers, for marketing teams, in five minutes.
After demoing it at I/O in May, Google rolled out Universal Cart to US users last weekend, adding a cart icon and "Add to cart" buttons directly in product listings and Gemini. It uses Google Pay, so shoppers can buy without leaving search; if you sell products, expect more purchases to start and finish on Google's own pages rather than yours.
Google is testing citation cards in AI Overviews that show an AI generated summary of each source rather than its actual on page text, spotted by Brodie Clark and confirmed by Barry Schwartz on some queries. The summary can read differently from what is actually on your page, so the snippet users see before clicking may not match your content at all.
Google is testing a reworked Business Profile performance report with new sections for engagement, reviews, search trends, audience and recommendations, spotted independently by two users. If it rolls out widely, local businesses will get a clearer read on what drives calls and visits from their Business Profile.
Performance Max campaigns have a new "Sourced videos" toggle that uses Google AI to find and add relevant video from your approved channels without manual uploads, and Google says this no longer requires opting in. If you run PMax and already publish video elsewhere, check this setting before it pulls assets you did not intend to use in ads.
Marie Haynes analysed 12 months of GA4 data across 100 sites and 145 million sessions and found ChatGPT sessions equalled just 0.62% of Google organic volume, rising to 0.73% with all LLMs included. ChatGPT visitors converted at 13.8% versus 3.02% for Google organic, a 4.5x higher rate, but Google still drove 96.5% of total conversions, 27 times more than all LLMs combined. For most sites, Google organic remains the channel that matters most by far, even as AI visibility gets attention.
Following Google serving different results to suspected rank tracking bots in October, Ahrefs said it is "cleaning up any past results that may have been affected" without specifying which dates or metrics, while SEOmonitor says it reprocessed affected keywords from Oct 9 to 13. Separately, rank tracker Nozzle found 8.7% of its tracked first pages showed signs of this between September 13 and October 21. If your rank tracking shows odd swings from early to mid October, check with your vendor before trusting the numbers.
Third party tracking tools and SEO chatter both spiked around Saturday October 24, suggesting Google pushed a ranking change Friday into Saturday, on top of unconfirmed updates already reported on October 16, 20 and 21. Google has not confirmed anything, so if your traffic moved that weekend, it is worth comparing timing before assuming a site issue.
John Mueller confirmed on Bluesky that Google Images and Discover do not support the JPEG XL format, and Google's documentation lists only BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG and AVIF as supported. If your site or CMS has started serving JPEG XL for its compression gains, switch back to a supported format or those images will not appear in Image Search or Discover previews.
See whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can find and cite your brand. Free, results in 30 seconds, no signup.
Cyrus Shepard points to the "matchedScore" attribute from Google's API leak, suggesting that a batch of suspicious links paired with one trusted link using similar anchor text can get the whole batch trusted, which he says may explain why large sites get away with spammy link profiles.
LabraSEO