Issue 31, 6 November 2026
What changed in search and AI answers, for marketing teams, in five minutes.
Google added booking buttons to home services results in AI Mode, through partners including Angi, Thumbtack, Housecall and Jobber, with ServiceTitan coming soon. It is US only for now, but shows Google pushing AI Mode straight into transactions rather than just answers. If you sell local services, expect bookings to start skipping your site entirely for users who stay inside AI Mode.
Google is rolling out UCP powered direct checkout in AI Mode and the Gemini app to Canadian shoppers, starting with lululemon, Shoppers Drug Mart, Simons and select Shopify merchants, with simplified Merchant Center integration promised next year. Shoppers pay with Google Pay without leaving the conversation, and retailers stay the seller of record. If you run an ecommerce feed through Merchant Center, this is the direction checkout is heading, worth tracking even before it reaches your market.
Google Ads added California, South Korea and Vietnam to the list of places requiring disclosure of AI generated or edited ad assets, joining the EU, India and New York. In some of these regions the ads themselves will now show a visible AI label overlay. If you run ads with AI generated creative in any of these markets, check your disclosure settings before launch.
Google Search Profiles has started adding LinkedIn automatically alongside YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X, though there is no way to add it manually yet. It is a useful one for professionals and creators whose Search Profile is seen by others. Nothing to action yet since it is automated, but worth checking what your own profile now shows.
Researcher Saul Westbrook found that Meta has quietly indexed over 6 million AI generated pages at facebook.com/fb-answers, each summarising a topic using Facebook posts as sources, and these pages are ranking and gaining traffic in Google since June. SEO commentator Glenn Gabe called it a clear case of scaled content abuse, the same practice Google's spam policies target when smaller sites do it. If a competitor topic is being answered by one of these pages instead of your content, it is worth checking, since Google has not yet said whether this will be treated the same way as other mass AI content.
Responding to a widely cited study showing ChatGPT referrals are under 1% of Google's traffic volume, Dan Taylor ran his own analysis of 108 million sessions and found a similar 0.66% share, but also that ChatGPT visitors convert at roughly five times the rate of typical search visitors. His argument is that counting clicks misses the point, since conversational answers can shape a purchase decision before any link is clicked. For the reader, this means low AI referral traffic in your analytics does not mean AI answers have no influence on what people choose to buy.
Adthena counted roughly 175,100 paid ad placements inside Google AI Overviews and AI Mode across five holiday categories from June to September, with apparel and electronics making up the large majority, while ChatGPT ads leaned more towards research style prompts in beauty, travel and toys. The report, from a vendor selling ad tracking tools, does not cover clicks, spend or conversions. If you advertise in these categories, your existing Search, Shopping or Performance Max campaigns may already be appearing in these AI surfaces without any extra setup.
Alphabet reported its fastest search query growth in five years alongside its slowest search revenue growth of 2026, and Google's chief business officer directly named AI Mode's lower monetisation as a contributing cause. Alphabet shares fell about 13% on the news, the steepest one day drop on record. The analysis is written by someone who runs an AI visibility measurement company, so treat the framing with some caution, but the underlying revenue numbers come from Alphabet itself: AI answers are now showing up as a real, counted effect on Google's business, not just a theory.
See whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can find and cite your brand. Free, results in 30 seconds, no signup.
Glen Allsopp announced Ahrefs' DR4 update, rolling out December 1, which will score subdomains separately from root domains and halve the pool of sites that affect ratings, with a claimed 2.5x stronger correlation to Google rankings. If you track Domain Rating as a KPI, expect your number to move, and check Ahrefs' tools now to see the likely change before it lands.
LabraSEO