LabraSEO

Ads in AI Mode expand 🤖, UGC spam crackdown 🧹, Bitly's link data 🔗

Issue 25, 29 October 2026

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

Headlines & Launches

Google expands ads in AI Mode to more countries, adds multiturn ads (3 minute read)

Google is rolling out ads in AI Mode to Australia, Canada, India and seven other countries now, with Brazil, Mexico and the UK to follow in Q4, and US users will start seeing ads appear in AI Mode follow up questions. Google claims click-through rates are already similar between sponsored and organic product listings in AI Mode. If you run paid search, AI Mode is becoming a real ad surface, not just an experiment, so budget and creative plans should start treating it that way.

Google widens its spam guidelines to cover UGC sharing platforms (5 minute read)

Google added language to its spam policies naming hosting tools and platforms that let users publish shared pages or generated content as sites that can face manual action, alongside new advice for those platforms on preventing abuse. If your team uses link building or content tactics built on user generated or shared page platforms, treat this as a warning that Google may act against the hosts themselves, which could pull your content down with them.

Google opens a Connected Apps Platform for Search and Gemini (4 minute read)

Google launched a preview letting developers build apps that plug into Search and Gemini through a cloud hosted or Android MCP server, registered and tested via a new console. Being listed does not guarantee visibility, since searchers must add the app to their personalised Search settings, but it is a new, developer led route into Google's AI surfaces worth scoping if your product has an app or API.

Restaurants can now switch off ordering providers directly in Google Business Profiles (3 minute read)

Google added per provider controls to the Business Profile dashboard, with separate pickup and delivery switches, so restaurants can turn off Uber Eats, DoorDash or similar without waiting up to five business days for the provider to process a removal request. If you manage a restaurant's local listing, you can now drop providers that cut into margin or compete with your own ordering flow instantly, right from the dashboard.

Deep Dives & Analysis

Pages cited by AI more often opened with a direct answer (5 minute read)

An analysis of 193,507 AI answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews found cited pages opened with a direct answer 23% of the time versus 14% for pages the AI saw but did not cite, and 20% versus 5% against Google's top 10 pages the AI never pulled up. The author, whose agency sells SEO and GEO services using the same data, is clear this shows association rather than proof of cause, but it is still a signal to put your answer in the first lines, not buried under a lead-in.

GA4 missed two thirds of one retailer's holiday orders last year (9 minute read)

An agency audit of eight UK ecommerce sites found GA4 undercounted store reported orders badly at three of them, including one where GA4 showed revenue down 68% over Christmas week while actual orders were down only 13%, often traced to cookie banners silently failing or bot traffic flooding sessions. With peak season approaching, check your GA4 order counts against your actual sales platform now, since a broken tracker can make a healthy season look like a crisis in your dashboards.

Hreflang routes searchers, it does not make a page rank (8 minute read)

Bill Hunt revisits a known quirk, confirmed by Google's Gary Illyes, where Google can serve the correct country version of a page in search results even when only one page in an hreflang cluster is actually indexed, because discovery, indexing and serving are separate steps. For international sites, the practical point is that hreflang alone will not make a thin, duplicate market page rank or get cited in AI answers, so each country page still needs its own reason to matter.

A link shortener's own survey says the case against short links is only half right (10 minute read)

Bitly's survey of over 1,500 Americans found that generic shorteners hiding a brand name bother 23% of consumers, well below safety concerns (57%), clickbait feel (52%) and vague link descriptions (44%) as reasons people hesitate to click. The study comes from a link management vendor with an obvious interest in the result, but the underlying point for marketing teams is that trust signals like branded domains and clear link descriptions likely matter more for click-through than the shortener debate itself.

Tactics & Tools

Ahrefs adds an AI Discoverability check to Site Audit (3 minute read)

Ahrefs' Site Audit now flags whether AI crawlers like ChatGPT and Claude can actually reach, read and cite your pages, covering robots.txt blocks, slow or heavy pages, inconsistent bot policies and JavaScript rendering issues most AI bots cannot handle. If you have not checked whether your site technically allows AI crawlers in, this is a fast way to find out before assuming poor AI visibility is a content problem.

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.

Quick Links

Bing tests a scan to call QR code on phone buttons (2 minute read)

Bing is testing a QR code that appears when you click the phone icon in local pack results, mirroring a feature Google added back in 2023. Worth knowing if you track how local searchers reach your phone number.

Google adds a Fan POV button that opens AI Mode (3 minute read)

For queries like 'world series', Google now shows a button letting users pick a team's point of view before being taken into an AI Mode answer tailored to that fandom. It is a small sign Google is testing more personalised entry points into AI Mode from standard search results.