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The State of Search

What is currently true about AI search, claim by claim. The archive answers what happened; this answers what's the latest — and says plainly which claims the record settles, which it contests, and which rest on a single source.

Last moved August 29, 2026.

Every claim traces to published wire items. Nothing here is asserted that the record has not already reported. A claim that has not moved shows the date it last did.

Why don't AI visibility tools agree with each other?

settled The record agrees. A change here would itself be news.

Because they measure different engines, query sets and windows. Two trackers reporting opposite trends for the same subject are usually both correct, and the disagreement is methodological rather than factual — which is why the fact of disagreement stays stable while every number under it moves.

Verified against the record 2026-08-27 · record last moved August 26, 2026

The clearest worked example the record holds is Reddit in August 2026. BrightEdge reported on August 16 that Reddit's AI citation surge had plateaued at a baseline several times higher than a year earlier, and that Google AI Overviews accounts for roughly 88% of Reddit's AI citation volume. Three days later a tracker reported an 86.4% collapse. Both were right.

Promptwatch's own per-engine breakdown resolved it: ChatGPT Search fell 86.4% (3.83% to 0.52%), while AI Overviews slipped 11.3% and AI Mode 30.5% over the same window. The surface carrying ~88% of the volume barely moved. A decline reported widely as Reddit disappearing from AI search was one engine changing how it assembles background queries.

Engine-to-engine spread inside a single study is wide enough to swamp most between-study comparisons: Writesonic measured "ghost citation" rates from 52% (Perplexity) down to 19% (Microsoft Copilot) across seven engines and roughly 16 million brand appearances. A figure quoted without its engine is not a figure.

The model underneath moves too. Gemini 3.7 Flash rolled out in Google AI Mode on August 16, 2026, which dates any visibility study measured against the version before it.

Still unresolved

  • Nobody has published a head-to-head of the third-party measurers on the same query set. Until someone does, reconciliation is inference.
  • Why ChatGPT's background query assembly changed on August 8. Promptwatch reads the forty-six-fold rise in `site:` operator use as the engine asking named sites directly; OpenAI has not commented.

Evidence

  • That the two headline Reddit measurements were different engines, with per-engine numbers for all three surfaces. on the wire Promptwatch study — vendor-published and called provisional by its author
  • Where Reddit's AI citation volume actually sits (~88% Google AI Overviews), which is what makes the split decisive. on the wire BrightEdge study — vendor-published
  • How wide the engine-to-engine spread is inside one methodology. on the wire Writesonic study — vendor-published
  • That the model under a surface changes, dating studies measured on the prior one. on the wire
  • The standing caveats — citation share is engine-specific, model-sensitive, and methodology-dependent. · source ↗

aeo · research · tools

What can a publisher actually control about AI answers?

moving Actively changing — a rollout, a deadline, or a live fight.

Appearance and training are separate controls and no single lever covers both. Google now offers the only control that removes a site from AI Overviews and AI Mode without touching ordinary Search — it is rolling out to a subset of accounts, and it does not cover training.

Verified against the record 2026-08-27 · record last moved August 27, 2026

Four levers exist and each has a different scope. Choosing wrongly costs more than doing nothing: three of the four take ordinary Search results with them.

The price of the one that does what publishers asked for is stated plainly by Google — opt out and "you won't receive any traffic or impressions from these features" — against AI Overviews appearing on 43% of Google searches in July 2026, up from 15% a year earlier.

A regulator is already pushing on the gap. The UK CMA's Publisher Conduct Requirement, imposed June 3, 2026 and legally binding under the digital markets regime, requires Google to let publishers opt out of training, fine-tuning **and** the grounding behind AI Overviews and AI Mode, with nine months to comply. The Search Console control answers one of those three.

Google's own guidance has not caught up with its own control. "AI features and your website" — the Search Central page telling publishers how to approach inclusion — named `nosnippet` 18 times and the Search generative AI control zero times when checked on August 27, 2026. A publisher following the documentation rather than opening Search Console would not learn the control exists.

Where it differs

noindex settled
Removes the page from Search altogether. The bluntest lever, and the only one with no partial mode.
nosnippet / data-nosnippet / max-snippet settled
Limit what Search displays — and take the ordinary result snippet with them.
Google-Extended settled
Governs training and grounding for Gemini rather than appearance in Search's own AI features. A robots.txt token with no reporting attached to it.
Search generative AI control (Search Console) moving
Removes a site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's generative features in one to two days. Google says it "isn't used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search." Rolling out to a subset of site owners; does not cover training. on the wire

What changed

  • 2026-08-27 Previously: No control separated AI Overviews from ordinary Search: leaving one meant accepting damage somewhere else. Search Console's Search generative AI control was documented, closing the gap for appearance but not for training. Establishing this fact also unblocked the crawler-compliance story, which had stalled on exactly it. on the wire

Still unresolved

  • Whether opting out costs Top Stories placement. Google places Top Stories carousels inside AI Overviews on roughly 15.5% of US and 17.5% of UK news searches, per NewzDash's John Shehata, who called the link high-confidence; Google has not addressed it.
  • Whether the control satisfies the CMA order. It covers appearance; the order covers training, fine-tuning and grounding, with nine months to comply from June 3, 2026.
  • Whether the control reaches every account, and when. Google says "a subset of website owners" and has published no schedule.

Evidence

  • What the control does, what it does not cover, and the caveat Google's ring-fence language leaves open. on the wire rolling out to a subset of site owners
  • The Top Stories exposure a news publisher takes on by opting out. on the wire
  • The binding regulatory requirement the control partially answers, and its clock. on the wire

google-search · aeo · law-money

Does llms.txt do anything?

thin One measurement or one source, without corroboration.

For Google, no — its documentation says outright that no AI text file is needed to appear in its AI features. For every other major engine there is no published answer either way, and the one large-scale measurement found 97% of llms.txt files were never read by an AI crawler.

Verified against the record 2026-08-18 · record last moved August 18, 2026

The evidence is one vendor study and one vendor's documentation. That is thin for a tactic this widely recommended, and the thinness is the finding: nobody has published a reason to make the file, and only one company has published a reason not to.

Ahrefs, across roughly 15 million data points, found 97% of sites' llms.txt files were never read by an AI crawler, and that adding schema markup produced no measurable lift in AI citations across 1,885 pages over 30 days. The same research found 88.46% of AI citations still traced to pages in the general search index — the tactic that works is the old one.

The spec itself is still moving. Jeremy Howard published a version 2 update on August 10, 2026, its first revision since the format launched in 2024, adding `rel="alternate" type="text/markdown"` and `rel="describedby"` link relations so agents can find a page's Markdown version.

Where it differs

Google settled
Says it is unnecessary: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features." on the wire
OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Microsoft thin
No published statement on whether their systems read the file. Never asked on the record.

Still unresolved

  • Whether any engine other than Google reads llms.txt. Four operators have never said, which is half a story sitting unfinished.
  • Whether the v2 link relations change crawler behavior. The spec revision is three weeks old and no measurement post-dates it.

Evidence

  • The only large-scale measurement of whether the files are read at all. on the wire Ahrefs study — vendor-published
  • Google's own position, stated in its documentation rather than inferred. on the wire
  • That the spec is under active revision, so measurements have a shelf life. on the wire

aeo · tools · llmeo

Are AI answers costing me traffic?

contested Credible sources disagree, and the disagreement is unresolved.

It depends on what you publish, and part of the disagreement is instrumentation. Commerce reports AI referrals as growth; news and nonprofit publishers report steep declines; Google's own figure arrives without methodology. Before any of it is compared, 22.4% of AI Overview traffic is misattributed away from Organic Search.

Verified against the record 2026-08-29 · record last moved August 19, 2026

The disagreement is real and it sorts by what a site sells. Shopify told its Q2 earnings call that AI-driven traffic and orders tripled year over year, with half of AI-referred sessions landing directly on product pages — 2.5 times the rate of traditional search. Over the same period Blood Cancer UK's leukaemia information page lost 53% of its page views. Both are first-party reports from parties with no incentive to overstate against their own interest.

One widely-cited framing does not survive the record. Zero-click searches hit a record high in June 2026 — 40% of U.S. searches sent a click to the open web — but the same report put Google AI Mode at 0.13% of U.S. search-related visits, usage it described as plateaued or dipping. A surface used by roughly one in a thousand visits cannot be the cause of a decline that broad, whatever else is.

Measurement sits underneath all of it. A nine-month GA4 study of 51,200 clicks found an average 22.4% of AI Overview traffic recorded as Direct rather than Organic Search, and Similarweb found 58.8% of ChatGPT referral traffic lands on publisher homepages even though 65% of cited URLs point two or three folders deep. A citation and the session it produces are not measured in the same place, which is why two honest parties can count the same channel and disagree. See the measurement-disagreement claim.

Where it differs

Google (the engine) thin
Says AI features in Search send "billions of clicks" to websites weekly. No methodology accompanied the claim, and it has published no supporting data. on the wire
Commerce settled
Growth. Shopify reported AI-driven traffic and orders tripled year over year in Q2, half of AI-referred sessions landing on product pages — 2.5x traditional search — and framed AI as a complement rather than a substitute. on the wire
News publishers settled
Decline, and not enough leverage to act on it. Google search fell to 21% of People Inc.'s traffic from 25% the prior quarter, with core sessions down 22% year over year and Google search traffic specifically down 40% — and the publisher still declined to block, saying that would "turn off search". on the wire
Nonprofit and health information settled
The sharpest declines in the record. Blood Cancer UK's leukaemia page lost 53% of page views year over year, with 17-45% declines across its other blood cancer pages. Save the Children logged a 303% rise in AI Overview appearances while both clicks and impressions fell. on the wire
The instrument settled
Understates the channel before anyone compares it. An average 22.4% of AI Overview traffic was recorded as Direct rather than Organic Search across a nine-month, 51,200-click study — worst at 29.3% in May 2026. on the wire

What changed

  • 2026-07-23 Alphabet reported Q2 Search revenue of $63.27 billion, up 17% year over year — the first deceleration after four quarters of accelerating growth. The money says the business has not broken, only slowed. on the wire
  • 2026-08-03 Previously: The zero-click rise was widely attributed to AI answer surfaces. The same report that recorded the zero-click record put AI Mode at 0.13% of U.S. search-related visits and plateauing, which separates the two trends rather than linking them. on the wire

Still unresolved

  • Google holds the only complete dataset and has published no methodology behind "billions of clicks". Until it does, the engine's own position is the least checkable one in the record.
  • Whether the sector split is causal or compositional. Nobody has published a study that holds content type constant and varies only AI-surface exposure.
  • What share of the zero-click record predates AI answers entirely. The decline is broader and older than AI Mode's 0.13% usage can explain, and no one has decomposed it.
  • Whether misattribution is worsening. The 22.4% average spans nine months with a 16.8-29.3% range and no trend line published.

Evidence

  • The engine's own claim, and that it arrived without data. on the wire vendor statement, no methodology published
  • That AI referrals read as growth in commerce, first-party. on the wire vendor-published, earnings call
  • That the instrument understates the channel before comparison. on the wire
  • That AI search is layering on top of traditional search rather than replacing it, and that the cited URL and the landing page differ. on the wire
  • That crawl volume and referral value are now separately measurable, and diverge sharply. on the wire

seo · google-search · research

What on-page work actually moves AI citation?

settled The record agrees. A change here would itself be news.

The levers that measure are the ones that were already SEO — being in the search index, ranking well, being reachable in plain HTML, and keeping pages current. The AI-specific file formats measure near zero.

Verified against the record 2026-08-29 · record last moved August 24, 2026

The single largest number in the record points back at classic search: 88.46% of AI citations traced to pages already in the general search index, and 76% of the passages Google reused 100 or more times came from pages already ranking first organically. Google's own position is the same — John Mueller said there is "nothing really special you need to do for generative AI responses in search".

That is not the same as saying nothing is specific to AI. Three levers measure, and all three are mechanical rather than semantic: whether a crawler can reach the page at all, how recently it changed, and whether the passage is shaped to be lifted. The AI crawlers are stricter than Googlebot on the first — GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Bingbot found none of a site's JavaScript-injected internal links across 41 days, and recovered 250 pages within 48 hours of the links being converted to HTML.

The tactics named after the category are the ones that do not measure. An analysis spanning roughly 15 million data points found 97% of llms.txt files were never read by an AI crawler, and adding schema markup produced no measurable citation lift across 1,885 pages over 30 days. See the llms-txt-effect claim, which holds that question's own open threads.

Where it differs

Search-index presence settled
The dominant lever. 88.46% of AI citations trace to pages in the general search index; 76% of passages reused 100+ times already ranked #1 organically. on the wire
Crawlability in plain HTML settled
Decisive, and stricter than Googlebot. Over 41 days GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Bingbot reached none of a 2,400-page site's JavaScript-linked pages; Googlebot reached 2% against GoogleOther's 48%. on the wire
Recency settled
Measures, and varies by engine. Of 47,097 citations, 75% of cited pages had been updated within a year and 88% within two — Gemini 78%, ChatGPT 73%, Perplexity 65%. Last-modified date tracked citation better than original publish date (72% vs 42%). on the wire
Passage shape settled
Observable in what gets reused. Across 15.7 million AI Mode citations, 80.9% of passages were cited once, while roughly 2,300 were reused 61+ times and skew short (117-word median), answer-first and self-contained. on the wire
AI-specific files (llms.txt, schema) thin
No measurable effect. 97% of llms.txt files were never read by an AI crawler, and schema markup produced no citation lift across 1,885 pages over 30 days. on the wire

What changed

  • 2026-08-18 Schema markup moved from an assumed AI-citation lever to a measured null: no lift across 1,885 pages over 30 days, in the same analysis that found 97% of llms.txt files unread. on the wire
  • 2026-08-24 Google stated the position directly — "there’s nothing really special you need to do for generative AI responses in search" — framing AI Overviews and AI Mode as drawing on the standard search index. on the wire

Still unresolved

  • Whether entity phrasing is a content lever. Google's own paper found models fail to recall 26-34% of facts they encoded and tied part of the gap to subject/object order, but the researchers stop short of calling it something a publisher can act on.
  • Whether the recency effect is causal or compositional. Actively maintained pages may simply be better pages; no study holds quality constant and varies only update date.
  • Whether passage shape can be induced. Pillarbase's finding is observational across published pages — nobody has run the experiment of rewriting a passage to the observed shape and measuring citation change.
  • Whether serving a stripped machine-readable page to agents helps or is penalized. BrightEdge shipped Agent Edge on that premise on 2026-08-26; Perplexity blocked Time's agent-facing markdown pages on 2026-08-11. The record contains a product and a punishment and no measurement.

Evidence

  • That index presence dominates, and that the two named AI-specific tactics measure near zero. on the wire vendor-published (Ahrefs), ~15 million data points
  • That AI crawlers are stricter than Googlebot on JavaScript-rendered links. on the wire single-site experiment, 2,400 pages over 41 days
  • That recency tracks citation likelihood, and by how much per engine. on the wire vendor-published (Seer Interactive), four brands
  • What shape a repeatedly-reused passage has. on the wire
  • Google's own stated position that no separate optimization target exists. on the wire spokesperson statement on social, not documentation
  • That the entity-order finding is a model-recall result its own authors do not extend to publisher practice. on the wire

aeo · geo · seo · research

Can I buy my way into AI answers?

moving Actively changing — a rollout, a deadline, or a live fight.

You can buy a slot, but not a citation — they are separate games. Ads run on about a quarter of ChatGPT's commercial prompts and nearly one in three commercial AI Mode queries, and only 3.63% of the advertisers whose ads ran were also cited as a source in the answer above them. The ad stack is scaling faster than the reporting under it.

Verified against the record 2026-08-29 · record last moved August 24, 2026

The paid layer arrived quickly and is still moving. ChatGPT Ads launched in the US on February 9, 2026, reached nine markets by August 17 — its first Spanish- and Portuguese-language ones — and roughly 40 countries two days later when 31 European markets went live at once. OpenAI's enterprise CMO put ad revenue growth above 25% since the start of August. Ads remain limited to Free and Go plans.

Paid presence and cited presence are close to unrelated, which is the finding that matters for anyone treating ads as an AEO shortcut. Across more than 50,000 commercial prompts in 20 niches, 3.63% of advertisers running an ad were also cited as a source in the answer above it, and 14.35% of the ads shown were unrelated to the surrounding conversation. The same separation shows on Google: an analysis of AI Mode text ads found advertisers rarely among the answer's cited sources.

Two coverage figures circulate and they are not in conflict — they use different denominators. SE Ranking found ads on 25.94% of commercial prompts; Adthena, measuring all US queries rather than commercial ones, found 4.47% at an average of 1.06 ad items per response, against a 3.53-item average on Google's AI surfaces. Read the first as ad load on the queries advertisers want and the second as ad load across everything.

Reporting lags the levers throughout. Campaign-level platform targeting shipped in August into an Insights view that still groups results as Mobile and Desktop, so a web-only campaign reports entirely as Mobile. View-through conversions appear as their own column but are excluded from CPA, bidding and billing. Automated bidding became the default for new ad groups carrying no guarantee against a CPA, CPC or ROAS target. Third-party tooling is currently the only cross-platform view of what is actually running.

Where it differs

ChatGPT — ad load settled
25.94% of more than 50,000 commercial prompts across 20 niches carried an ad; across all US queries the figure is 4.47%, averaging 1.06 ad items per response. on the wire
Google AI Mode — ad load settled
Ads on nearly one in three commercial-keyword queries, and an average of 3.53 ad items per response across Google's AI surfaces — a heavier load than ChatGPT's. on the wire
Overlap with citation settled
Near zero. 3.63% of advertisers whose ads ran were also cited as a source in the answer above them, and 14.35% of ads shown were unrelated to the conversation around them. on the wire
Category concentration settled
Retail and fashion drew 39% of observed US ad placements on 24% of query volume. Logistics and home-and-garden carried the highest ad frequency, at 12.41% and 11.99%. on the wire
Measurement thin
Behind the controls it is meant to measure. Platform targeting reports only Mobile/Desktop; view-through conversions are excluded from CPA, bidding and billing; automated bidding is the default with no performance guarantee. on the wire

What changed

  • 2026-08-19 Previously: ChatGPT Ads ran in nine markets, all English-language until August 17. 31 European markets went live at once, bringing the pilot to roughly 40 countries about six months after the February 9 US launch. on the wire
  • 2026-08-21 Automated bidding became the preselected default for new ad groups. The strategy carries no guarantee against a CPA, CPC or ROAS target, which moves spend risk onto advertisers who do not actively opt into a manual bid ceiling. on the wire

Still unresolved

  • Whether buying an ad affects the odds of being cited at all, in either direction. The 3.63% overlap is a snapshot of co-occurrence, not a test — nobody has run the same queries with and without a live campaign.
  • What ChatGPT ads cost. OpenAI publishes no benchmarks, and making an unguaranteed automated strategy the default puts spend risk on advertisers who have none.
  • Whether the Agent campaign type ships. OpenAI has been testing a format that opens a Business Agent conversation instead of sending a click to the advertiser's site, built from a profile it generates by scraping that site — a different unit from an ad entirely.
  • Whether Google's AI Mode ad load holds. The 3.53-item average is one measurement window and Google has published nothing of its own.

Evidence

  • Ad load on commercial prompts, the share of ads unrelated to the conversation, and the overlap between advertising and being cited. on the wire vendor-published (SE Ranking), 50,000+ prompts across 20 niches
  • Ad load across all US queries, items per response, and category concentration. on the wire vendor-published (Adthena), ~850,000 US and UK queries, March-May 2026
  • That advertisers are rarely among the cited sources on Google's AI Mode. on the wire
  • The pace and shape of geographic rollout, and OpenAI's own revenue-growth figure. on the wire vendor statement for the revenue figure
  • That the reporting layer lags the targeting controls it is meant to measure. on the wire
  • That a third-party view of live creatives and landing pages now exists across ChatGPT and Google's AI surfaces. on the wire vendor-published (Similarweb)

engines · tools · aeo · google-search

The Numbers · Best practices · Glossary · The record