Issue 33, 10 November 2026
What changed in search and AI answers, for marketing teams, in five minutes.
Microsoft is showing both standard search ads and shopping ads at the top of Bing's AI Mode (formerly Copilot Search), with sponsored labels so faint Schwartz said he initially missed them. Ads now appear in Bing's follow-up queries too, so the same multiturn ad pattern spreading across Google and Bing.
Google updated its aggregator unit and supplier unit help documentation to say these EEA only features, shown for searches like "hotels near me", now support "things to do" queries. Travel and local businesses serving European users should check whether their listings qualify for these units.
SEO consultant Cyrus Shepard pulled his own site, Zyppy, out of Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode for four weeks using Search Console's exclusion control and compared the before and after, estimating AI features accounted for about 21% of clicks, rising to 23% once he added a lift he attributes to regular listings performing better when the site also appeared in AI answers. He is explicit this is one experiment on one site and should be read as "a directional yardstick" rather than a number to apply elsewhere, but it is a rare attempt to put a hard figure on AI click contribution.
Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah told analysts organic Google referrals fell about 37% year over year last quarter, compared with a 23% fall the year before, and said the company's sites generated roughly 2.7 billion impressions in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, nearly ten times the clicks those same sites got from Search. Shah said the company is "not planning on a search recovery" and expects referrals to keep declining, a warning sign for any publisher watching its own Search Console AI impressions report climb without matching clicks.
Graphite's updated AI usage report puts six AI assistants at 76 billion monthly sessions worldwide in September, up 37% year over year, but no longer compares that figure against search engine usage as it did in March, saying its earlier estimate likely undercounted Google search use inside Google's Android app. The agency sells SEO and AEO services and relies on Similarweb's data, so treat any AI versus search ratio you see cited, including the old 56% figure, as unreliable until someone solves the Android app counting problem.
Barry Schwartz reports tracking tools showing spikes over the past 24 hours, following an October 27th update that lingered for a full week, though he cautions the tools may be "poisoned" by Google's blocking measures and Search Console's own performance report is currently unreliable for many sites. If your traffic moved this week, check the timing against this before changing anything on your site.
See whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can find and cite your brand. Free, results in 30 seconds, no signup.
Ray says she has received more messages from site owners hit by Google manual actions in the past couple of weeks than at any point she can remember, and says others in the SEO community are reporting the same. If you have not reviewed your Search Console manual actions report recently, this is a good week to do it.
Glenn Gabe said he saw no ads in AI Mode with Personal Intelligence turned on, but rerunning the same query with personalisation off showed an ad woven into the response plus the usual ad unit at the bottom, suggesting ad exposure in AI Mode may depend on personalisation settings.
Glenn Gabe said Facebook's "Scaled content abuse", AI generated posts targeting every topic, has grown to 6.4 million URLs and is expanding daily, all fully automated.
LabraSEO