Issue 25, 12 November 2026
What changed in search and AI answers, for marketing teams, in five minutes.
Google began the November 2026 core update, timed to finish before Thanksgiving and Black Friday. If your rankings move over the next couple of weeks, check the timing against this before changing anything on your site.
Google is showing the full AI Overview straight away on definition searches, instead of hiding it behind a "Show more" click, a change first spotted by Glenn Gabe. If your pages target definition style queries, expect more of that search page to be taken over by the AI answer and less room for your listing.
Bing launched a Chrome and Edge extension, plus a "-ai" search operator, so users can switch off AI generated answers and see traditional results instead. Some of your visitors may now be choosing classic search over AI summaries, which keeps your normal listing relevant alongside AI visibility work.
A court again ruled against Google's DMCA based lawsuit over SerpApi's scraping of search results, though the judge did not say SerpApi's scraping is lawful, and Google has until 30 November to amend its complaint. The case does not change how your site is treated, but it is one to watch if you rely on rank tracking tools built on scraped data.
Ahrefs counted 5.5 million US ChatGPT answers and found Walmart named in 95,605 of them, nearly double second placed Target, with stores taking six of the top 10 spots and carmakers filling 15 of the top 100. If you compete with these categories, this shows how concentrated ChatGPT's brand recommendations already are, and how much ground smaller brands have to make up to get mentioned at all.
A Google research paper analysed 2.1 million Nano Banana conversations without viewing the images themselves, sorting usage into five groups including brand and marketing, and product visualisation and ecommerce. If you sell physical products, this signals Google sees image generation as a growing ecommerce and marketing tool, which may feed into how it surfaces visual shopping content over time.
Google's John Mueller said again, this time on Bluesky, that a large share of pages stuck at "Crawled/Discovered, Currently Not Indexed" usually means Google's quality systems are not convinced by your site, and that simply shrinking the site does not fix this. If you see this status across many pages, focus on improving trust and quality signals rather than trimming pages for crawl budget.
See whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can find and cite your brand. Free, results in 30 seconds, no signup.
Google's Gary Illyes and Chery Prommawin explained that migrating to a CDN can make Googlebot ramp up crawl speed, and since every first time request still has to hit your origin server, this can overload it if you are not ready. Before any CDN migration, warn your hosting or dev team about this crawl spike so launch day does not take your site down.
Glenn Gabe says Google is "poisoning the SERPs for AI scrapers and now SEO tools," and after running roughly 1,000 sites he is seeing large differences between Ahrefs and Semrush visibility numbers for the same sites. Treat third party rank trackers with caution during this update and lean on Google Search Console as the more reliable source while the rollout continues.
Lily Ray reports that ChatGPT's new Business Hub counts a "mention" only when the response links to your website, not when it just names your brand. Early data she saw showed 8 clicks from 26 such mentions, a 30.8% click rate, suggesting linked mentions in ChatGPT answers can send meaningfully qualified traffic.
Aleyda Solis says OpenAI's new Businesses in ChatGPT feature turned out to be a basic business profile and merchant centre with an agent builder rather than a proper search console, adding "they get more insights from us, than us from them." Worth watching if you were hoping for real ChatGPT visibility data, since this version gives OpenAI more than it gives you.
LabraSEO