SEO news: SEO, GEO and AI search

Version 25.0 of Screaming Frog's SEO Spider, released on November 3, 2026, saves its configuration in JSON: through its MCP server, an AI assistant can set up a crawl described in plain language (JavaScript rendering, segments, custom extraction) and flag issues encountered mid-crawl. The software adds custom-built dashboards, issues whose type and priority users can define, automatic throttling when the server returns 429 or 503 errors, and a tab that checks Open Graph and X Card tags. Pages can also be exported to Markdown, and JavaScript rendering now waits by default for network activity to stop, closer to how Google decides a page has finished loading.

Google says it will recognize a shared robots.txt setting, developed by the IETF's AIPREF working group, that lets a site refuse in a single line the use of its content to train models from multiple AI providers. For Google, this opt-out will count as blocking Google-Extended when the latter is not specified, with support targeted for 2027. Microsoft adopted the same syntax the same day and added separate Bing settings for the use of content in AI answers; OpenAI also announced that day that it will honor the signal.

Google is expanding ads in AI Mode to Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore, with Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom planned for the fourth quarter of 2026. In the United States, ads can now appear in follow-up questions within a conversation, still labeled as sponsored. According to Google, queries in AI Mode are on average three times longer than traditional searches.

Microsoft Advertising now offers AI-assisted campaign creation: using a website, marketing documents, brand guidelines and product photos, the tool drafts a business profile and then an editable Performance Max campaign that runs on Bing, Copilot, Outlook and other services. Advertisers also get more Performance Max reporting and exclusions, brand guidelines for AI-generated ads in open pilot, and the conversions API in general availability.

Google is launching the Connected Apps Platform in preview, letting developers plug their service into Google Search and the Gemini app through an MCP server, then submit it for review from a single console. Once the app is live, the business can track its traffic and keeps control of its logo and branding. More than 50 connected apps already exist, and access will open in stages to more developers and countries.

Ahrefs' Site Audit adds an “AI Discoverability” issue category: pages blocked for AI crawlers in robots.txt, pages that are too slow or too heavy, rules that differ from one crawler to another, AI-generated content that is too similar, and pages that require JavaScript execution, which most AI crawlers cannot handle. Usage limits for the API and the MCP server double on every plan, for example from 100,000 to 200,000 units on the Lite plan.

Copies of Rank Math PRO version 3.0.123 downloaded from the official website between 8:02 p.m. on October 15 and 7:12 a.m. on October 16 (UTC) contained malware capable of taking over a site once the plugin was activated. The vendor removed the files and released a clean version, 3.0.124. The free version distributed on WordPress.org is not affected; Rank Math has not disclosed how many sites were hit.

Google announced several changes to its AI answers to send more traffic to websites: more inline links placed higher in the text, and a test of a section at the top of the answer that highlights official sites relevant to a specific task. News article carousels are expanding to more countries and languages, and links to related articles at the end of answers now get thumbnails. According to Google, the number of preferred sources users has grown more than sevenfold since the start of the year.

Google Ads is rolling out worldwide, for Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns, two optional settings: channel prioritization and budget allocation. Advertisers can rank networks (Google Search, Search Partners, Display Network) as high or low priority; priority channels are funded first, and the share of daily budget spent on secondary channels can be capped. Starting in February 2027, the current way Search campaigns run with the Display Network goes away: to keep it, Google recommends setting the Display Network to low priority with 50% of the budget.

The AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools gets a Topics Portfolio tab, in beta. It groups into broad topics the queries for which a site is cited in Bing and Copilot AI answers, and shows for each topic the total volume of citations, the number of cited sites and the level of competition. Queries where the site has room to grow are suggested based on its own activity.

With ChatGPT's new answer format, rolled out overnight from October 8 to 9, most cited links lost the utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter that lets analytics tools recognize these visits, and the browser no longer passed a referrer. These visits were counted as direct traffic until around October 16; the parameter returned on almost all links on October 17, according to Sistrix data. OpenAI has not publicly explained the cause of the problem, which several analysts attribute to a bug.

Google is making it increasingly hard to collect its results pages automatically: redirects through /goto URLs, shorter result lists and, since September 2026, results that differ from the real ones for some queries. SISTRIX explained on October 7 that the whole industry is receiving these divergent results and that it now publishes only data verified several times, which slows updates for some keywords; it considers the top 10 still reliable. According to Search Engine Roundtable, other rank trackers also report IP blocks and more captchas. Google has not commented on the divergent results, but a spokesperson confirmed to Search Engine Roundtable in late August the rollout of /goto URLs, described as an anti-abuse measure.

Yoast SEO AI+ for Shopify combines the Yoast SEO app for Shopify with AI Brand Insights, which shows how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity describe a brand, on top of structured data and technical SEO for product pages. The plan costs $45 a month or $450 a year, with a 14-day free trial.

Ahrefs' Site Explorer offers an “adaptive” organic traffic estimation mode that applies a specific click-through rate to fifteen types of search result features, including AI Overviews, recalibrated every month on real data; it will become the default mode after testing. The Top Pages report shows the number of AI answers each page appears in, and Brand Radar doubles its prompt database, from about 14 million to 30 million.

Yoast SEO is expanding its “Abilities,” the functions it registers with the WordPress Abilities API: an AI assistant connected to the site through MCP or an automated workflow can now read every SEO field on a page (title, meta description, robots directives, schema type, canonical URL, social previews) and change them. Since April, it could only view the SEO and readability scores.

On September 24, 2026, Google launched its third spam update since June, applying worldwide and to all languages. Longer than the previous ones, it rolled out over two weeks and was completed on October 8.

Google is adding a “multimodal” search type to Search Console performance reports, including the generative AI features report. It groups searches started from an image: Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, images uploaded to Google Search and Chrome's “Search image” feature. The rollout has been global since September 24, 2026.

Google is making AI performance insights available in Merchant Center in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the United States: they compare the share of voice of a brand and its products with that of other brands in AI Mode and AI Overviews. Google also recommends enriching product feeds with conversational attributes; in a test with lululemon, these were picked up in half of the relevant AI Mode recommendations.

Peec AI, a tool that tracks brand presence in AI answers, now connects to Google Analytics to measure what visitors arriving from an AI assistant do: comparison by assistant, landing page, country and device, and the share of visits that lead to an engaged session. A page-level view combines AI crawler activity, citations and traffic, and perception analysis flags objections and false claims about the brand.

Version 10 of Sitebulb, a technical site audit tool, launches Sitebulb MCP, available in both the desktop and cloud versions. It lets users query crawl data from an assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT, for example to list a site's issues or prepare a report, following an early access period.

Dashboards are coming to Google Analytics to bring key metrics together in a single report, with drag-and-drop chart building and new visualization types. Google had announced them for Google Ads on August 10. On September 21, Google Analytics also added filters that accept only data from authorized domain names, to keep out spam.

To comply with the Digital Markets Act, Google has been changing its search results in the European Economic Area since September 8, 2026, notably for hotel, flight and restaurant queries. A vertical search service (comparison site) appears at the top of the page, followed by two others, then a carousel of businesses without certain features such as real-time prices, according to Reuters. Google, which calls it the biggest drop in quality in its history, is publishing documentation on regional differences for comparison sites, direct suppliers and publishers. Users outside Europe are not affected.

Meta now appears among the AI channels in Shopify's Agentic Storefronts, alongside the other conversational assistants. Merchants' products are shared with Meta by default through the Shopify Catalog; catalog access and direct checkout are managed in the settings, which also show this channel's performance.

On September 2, 2026, federal judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia rejected the US Department of Justice's request to force Google to divest its AdX ad exchange, after ruling in 2025 that Google had monopolized open-web advertising technology. Instead, she ordered behavioral remedies: interoperability and data sharing, non-discrimination, and limits on Google's buy-side bidding. A monitor and a technical committee will oversee their implementation, with details to be set in the final judgment.

Following discussions with the European Commission, Google is changing how it enforces its site reputation abuse policy, which targets third-party content published on a reputable site to benefit from its rankings. Since August 30, 2026, a manual action taken under this policy no longer affects searches made in the European Economic Area, but still applies elsewhere. In the EEA, the section concerned can be gradually separated from the rest of the site to be ranked independently. Eligible sites will also be able to use mediation after a reconsideration request.

Version 3.0.120 of Rank Math PRO, an SEO plugin for WordPress, replaces the Content AI chat with a new AI agent described as more capable. The same version fixes slow sitemap generation on large WooCommerce stores.

Google is offering publishers an interactive button to place on their pages: one click adds the site to the reader's preferred sources on Google, then brings them back to where they were. Preferred sources show up more in Top Stories, AI Overviews and AI Mode; more than 600,000 different sources have already been chosen, according to Google. The same day, Google announced that users will be able to tune their Discover feed by describing their interests in their own words.

Google Ads announced for September an A/B test that compares different budgets and return-on-investment targets across several Search campaigns at once. Tests of AI Max, its automation option for Search campaigns, now work with brand and location restrictions turned on. The Performance Planner shows the likely effect of a bid or budget change on existing campaigns and applies it in one click.

WordPress 7.1, named “Mary Lou,” lets users adjust a block's appearance by screen size from the site editor, without custom CSS. The admin bar stays visible in every editor, a new media editor brings together cropping, rotating, flipping and metadata editing, and review notes now support rich text and mentions. Two new blocks, Playlist and Tabs, make their debut.

On August 18, 2026, Google launched a new spam update, the second in two months, applying to all languages and countries. The rollout was completed on August 21, after just under three days.

Similarweb is adding an AI Ads channel to its Ad Intelligence module that catalogs ads shown in ChatGPT and in Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews: actual creatives, landing pages and advertisers, filterable by domain, platform, period and country. The company says the data comes from real user conversations and is displayed alongside its search, display and social ad data.

Google is adding to the top of the Google Analytics home page an automatic summary of key changes since the last visit, with email or phone notifications, as well as custom insight cards in Google Ads. Dashboards built from a simple written prompt are coming to Google Ads, ahead of Google Analytics. Ask Advisor, the AI assistant in these tools, also compares campaigns against anonymized averages from similar businesses. Several of these features are in beta, for accounts set to English.

Sistrix's AI Check adds three brand analyses available without setting up a project first: the sentiment of answers (praise and criticism) by platform and topic, the strengths and weaknesses attributed to the brand compared with its competitors, and the situations in which it is recommended. According to the company's quarterly review, these analyses cover six AI systems, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews. In the same quarter, the Prompt Research module became available through the API and the MCP server.

Google is adding a rule to its review snippet documentation, covering the stars that can appear under a search result: fake reviews and reviews obtained in exchange for an incentive that is not disclosed must not be marked up with structured data. Google says the change is about transparency in user reviews.

On July 23, 2026, the European Commission adopted two decisions finding that Google is not complying with the Digital Markets Act. The first, carrying a fine of 460 million euros, penalizes Google Search for favoring its own services (shopping, hotels, transportation, sports) over comparable third-party services. The second, of 430 million euros, targets restrictions that prevent developers from steering Google Play users toward cheaper offers. Google must end these practices.

Starting July 22, 2026, Google is rolling out in France AI Overviews, which summarize an answer above the results, and AI Mode, a conversational search experience built on a Gemini model. France was one of the last major markets without these features, launched in the United States in May 2024 for AI Overviews and in 2025 for AI Mode, because of a dispute over neighboring rights for the press. The Search Console setting that lets a site opt out of these features, limited to some UK sites at launch, has been open to all sites, including French ones, since August 31, 2026. According to an SE Ranking study of 100,000 keywords, AI Overviews appeared from launch on 52.6% of the searches analyzed.

The bulk editor in Yoast SEO for WordPress now shows focus keyphrases next to titles and meta descriptions, with filters for missing content, status or content type, and a separate view for pages, posts and products. With Yoast SEO Premium, AI suggests titles and descriptions for the selected content, to be approved one by one; the WooCommerce SEO and Yoast SEO AI+ plans extend these suggestions to product and category pages.

Google is adding a section to the “My Ad Center” panel that shows, worldwide, whether an ad running on Google Search, YouTube or Discover was created or edited with generative AI. The disclosure is added automatically when the advertiser uses Google's AI tools; for creatives produced elsewhere, a new control lets advertisers declare it. Depending on local regulations, a label may also appear on the ad itself.

Google is creating a new property type in Search Console, the platform property, to track how content published on Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube performs in Google Search and Discover. Reports show clicks, impressions, queries and the posts that bring in the most traffic, with data export. Announced on July 7, 2026, these properties have been open to everyone worldwide since July 29, along with an analysis guide.

Cloudflare now classifies AI crawlers into three uses: search (indexing to answer later), agents acting on behalf of a user, and model training. All its customers, including those on the free plan, can allow or block each use separately. Starting September 15, 2026, new domains block training and agents by default on pages that display ads, while search remains allowed. Cloudflare, which says it handles more than 20% of websites, is also launching a research program to pay publishers based on the actual use of their content in answers.

Google Search now sends clicks directly to AMP pages hosted by the publisher, instead of serving them from the Google AMP Cache in its viewer. Publishers no longer need to update that cache or set up signed exchanges. Google says the ranking of AMP pages does not change in Search or in Discover.

On June 24, 2026, Google launched its June spam update, which applies worldwide and to all languages. The rollout was completed on June 26, in just over two days. These updates strengthen automated detection of practices that violate Google Search's spam policies.

Microsoft is adding four features, in preview worldwide, to the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools: Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare. Queries that lead to a site being cited in answers from Copilot, Bing and partner services are classified by intent (informational, commercial, local, etc.) and grouped by topic. Citation Share shows how a site compares with the other cited sources, and Compare tracks its change over time.

Google has expanded its optimization guide for generative AI features in Search, published in May: an llms.txt file is not needed for Google Search and neither improves nor harms a site's visibility or rankings. Google says files intended for AI, such as Markdown versions of pages, are not used by its search engine, but they can be kept for other services that do use them.

Google Analytics is adding a “Source Group” dimension that merges variants of the same source (for example “fb” and “facebook”) under a single name, and also groups AI sources such as ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Perplexity. The dimension is also calculated on historical data. The same day, Google Analytics added filters that exclude events based on the hostname sending them.

A Google Analytics property can now be linked to one or more Google Business Profile listings from the admin settings. A dedicated report collection is then added to the menu, with seven profile metrics: interactions, calls, bookings, direction requests, website clicks, messages and menu views. The data covers a rolling six-month window.

Google is adding a page to its documentation on third-party SEO tools, providers and advice, and updating its page on hiring an SEO. It encourages users to check any recommendation against its official guidelines and mentions services that promise better results in AI answers, sold as “AEO” or “GEO” tools. Google reiterates that it does not evaluate or endorse any third-party service, that these tools have no access to its ranking data, and recommends Search Console as the reference source.

Google is introducing Search profiles, a dedicated page for each publisher or creator that brings together their latest articles, videos and social posts. Users can follow it, which makes this content more visible in Discover. The profile can be reached from the knowledge panel, from Discover or through a direct URL. At launch, only accounts with a large following on a major social or video platform can claim one; the threshold was lowered to 10,000 followers on September 16, still in the United States only.

Google is adding a Search Console setting that lets a site exclude its links and content from generative AI features in Search: AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI Overviews in Discover. An excluded site no longer receives impressions or traffic from these features, and Google says this choice is not a ranking signal for traditional results. New reports show impressions in these features by page, country and device, without click data. Launched for some sites in the United Kingdom, the setting and reports have been open to all sites worldwide since August 31, 2026.