semrush just tested query fan-out optimization to see whether it would increase citations in ai search. why? ai search (google ai mode, chatgpt search, etc.) breaks a user’s query into sub-queries, then compiles the best answers.

chatgpt is citing reddit less, down from 29% to 5% in just three weeks. and according to similarweb daily active users are slipping as well, contributing to the sell-off.

perplexity just launched its search api that means: hundreds of billions of web pages in reach fine-grained retrieval at the snippet level real-time indexing that updates thousands of times per second structured outputs designed for ai apps

“don’t pay for links.” “google will catch you.” “link-building is dead.” we've heard these takes for over a decade. and yet… link building still works. what’s changed is how you do it. ten years ago, you could get away with more for less. today, if it looks natural, it works

turns out, ai doesn’t weigh your links the way google does. @kevinindig just dropped an analysis of 35,000 datapoints on backlinks and ai visibility. here's what he found:

ai overviews are starting to look a lot like… google search. a 16-month study from bright edge found 54.5% of ai overview citations now come from pages that rank organically. that’s up from 32.3% in 2024, a 69% relative increase. but the picture is anything but even:

purpose of bot site crawls: 76.9% for training 16.8 for search 5.3% user action 1% undeclared

google still goated for its crawl-to-refer ratio, currently at 5.61:1 anthropic deplorable with a 25.6K:1 ratio shout out to perplexity, 3.6:1

cloudflare just threw publishers a lifeline… but will google honor it? they’ve launched a new content signals policy for robots.txt that lets sites say: “yes, index me in search.” “no, don’t use me in ai overviews.” “don’t use me to train your models.”

From 15% to 2.5% in two weeks, ChatGPT’s web searches have collapsed. That's right, according to @sistrix.com, anonymous sessions, which previously pulled live web data 15% of the time, dropped to under 2.5% in just two weeks. Why? Nobody’s sure, exactly. Potentially because:

ignore AI search if you want, just don’t be surprised when your best-converting traffic comes from it seer interactive just published some great insights, hot off the press: ai traffic grew 113% in just 3 months perplexity referrals convert at 15.9%, beating organic search’s 9.77%

serpapi releases google fast light api like the recently discontinued &num=100, google fast api allows users to scrape 100 search results in a single request shout to @gaganghotra_ for finding this one serpapi.com/blog/solutio...

reddit + google back at the table rumor: a new ai licensing deal is in the works ugc could soon power even more ai answers $RDDT prices go "brrrr"

and THIS is why google is perfectly positioned to win as THE ai search platform they have so much data, so many legacy users, and so many great serp features all they have to do is bring it all together and the users will come openai can't compete with this

Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, and other major platforms are adopting a new "Really Simple Licensing" (RSL) standard to get compensated for AI content indexing. I'm very deliberately choosing to use the word indexing here instead of scraping, as I feel like this is one of those linguistic PR tactics that-

heads up!

siege media study shows chatgpt's engagement rate of 63.42% is very similar to organic search's 61.64%

Google lawyer says searchers are wanting AI summaries (AI Overviews) over links to publishers but Google will link to publishers for the health of the ecosystem www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-su... hat tip @glenngabe.bsky.social via @theverge.com #google #googleaioverviews #googlesearch #seo

bigco gonna bigco

bot traffic by location: 1. gibraltar 2. turkmenistan 3. ireland 4. iran 5. singapore 6. seychelles 7. finland 8. netherlands 9. isle of man 10. hong kong ... 16. russian federation 17. united states ... 20. china ... 23. israel ... 53. united kingdom ... 56. australia ... 59. canada

Quick update on the num=100 situation. The various search visibility tools are starting to publish information with their response to the num=100 change. And it's not pretty. Both Semrush and Accuranker posted earlier. See screenshots below. www.seroundtable.com/google-searc...

if chatgpt was honest with search marketers: 1. yes, i can write a meta description. yes, it will sound exactly like every other meta description ever written. 2. yes, i can write your seo content. no, i can't make it pass ai detection.

non-native english writers are more likely to have their work flagged as ai-generated text by ai detectors than native english writers

bot vs. human http requests for the past 12 months 70% human, 30% bot

the irony that this study includes the word "delving" in its title 💀 "The findings suggest that at least 30% of text on active web pages originates from AI-generated sources, with the actual proportion likely ap-proaching 40%."

86% of Gen Z use TikTok weekly for search. www.searchengineworld.com/tiktok-says-...

Element: <payment> -> Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, Quora, People, O'Reilly, wikiHow, Ziff Davis, and others adopt the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard that sets terms for AI scraping "The RSL Standard builds upon the robots.txt protocol and websites can now add licensing and royalty terms."

month-over-month growth of google vs. ai search the averages are interesting: google +0.5% chatgpt +18.9% bing +0.6% duckduckgo -4.2% claude +72.9% perplexity +6.3% copilot +1170.6% gemini +0.4% mistral +103.4%

Apple wants in on AI search. Bloomberg reports Apple is building an “answer engine” called World Knowledge Answers, expected in 2026. It's rumoured to be powered by Google’s Gemini.

Google just got hit with a $3.5B fine by EU regulators. Highlights from the ruling: It's G's 4th multibillion-euro fine since 2017 EU threatens to force Google to sell part of AdTech Trump calls it “unfair” and vows U.S. pushback Google calls the decision “wrong” and will appeal

AI crawlers aren’t welcome everywhere. Of the top 10,000 domains, 3,710 disallow them in robots.txt: GPTBot leads with 240 full blocks + 66 partial ClaudeBot: 161 full, 47 partial PerplexityBot: 128 full, 52 partial Even ChatGPT-User, Anthropic, and Amazonbot are on the block list

LLM search was never built to help your site. It was built to replace it. The UX tells the story: Citations are buried in dropdowns, deprioritized, sometimes hidden entirely. OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthroponic don't care for you. They scraped your content and took your traffic.

Judge Mehta speedrunning from ‘illegal monopolist’ to ‘it’s fine actually’

only 0.3% of sites have adopted llms.txt 10K out of 3M scanned by originality(dot)ai the major AI platforms: - chatgpt (openai): no support announced - gemini (google): monitors via robots.txt (google‑extended), not via llms.txt - copilot (microsoft): no native support indicated

chatgpt the ai chatbot 👑

danny changing his tag to the @generativesearchliason

geo influencers: "seo is dead, optimize for generative search" meanwhile anthropic has a 38,100:1 crawl-to-refer ratio, openai a 1,100:1 ratio, and perplexity 194.8:1 ratio google goated with 5.4:1

comparing month over month, googlebot crawl rate up big the last two weeks potentially related to the spam update rollout? the spike flatlined on the 26th just as the rollout started link to the report in the comments

reddit sucks now the community over at r/redditalternatives has built an entire list of great forums link in the comments

hold on to your panties. google's august 2025 spam update has gone live google vaguely say the update will target techniques that go against its spam policies the rollout is set to take up to three weeks to complete the previous spam update was unleashed last year in december

key distinction that needs to be made in this data: does traditional search include ai overviews and ai mode? if it does, nothing changes, and zero-click search remains a persistent problem

the "google killers" using google search results to kill google

shiny object syndrome is undefeated in seo

"Since October 2022, when Musk’s acquisition completed, X’s referrals to newsbrands have fallen by 65%." - Charlotte Tobitt (Press Gazette). 😅

rankings ❌ vibe citations ✅

welcome to the churn economy

when was the last time serps volatility was this quiet? it feels like it's been popping off for months

"We’ve heard your concerns about less diversity in search results… so our solution is even less diversity in search results."