Google adds more links to its AI answers
Google says the number of people picking Preferred Sources has grown 7x since January, and it is now pushing more clickable links into AI answers. It still will not show you how many clicks those answers send.
Read the whole week in one goRank trackers are mostly fixed, but not fully
Why your traffic moved
Rankings jumped around today with no update confirmed
Barry Schwartz reported ranking movement, volatility and a spike in chatter today, which may be an unconfirmed Google update. Google has not announced anything. Unconfirmed movement like this often settles on its own.
Who this affects: Everyone with a website that gets traffic from Google.
- Do nothing yet, unconfirmed swings usually settle within days.
- Check Search Console positions again later this week.
Getting into AI answers
Google is putting more links inside its AI answers
Google is adding more links inside AI Overviews (the AI written answer at the top of results) and AI Mode, and placing some of them higher in the answer.
Google continues to refuse to show us click data in Search Console
Who this affects: Anyone whose pages get shown or cited in Google's AI answers.
- Our take: track AI referral visits in analytics over coming weeks.
- Change nothing on your site for this.
ChatGPT visits are showing in your analytics again
ChatGPT links carry their tracking tags again, so ChatGPT visits should stop being counted as direct traffic. Glenn Gabe says he now sees utm parameters (the bits of a link that tell your analytics where a visitor came from) on every link, in the answer, the main sources and the "More" sources.
If you check GA4, you will see a big drop in ChatGPT visits based on this change.
Who this affects: Anyone who watches where their visitors come from in analytics.
- Ignore last week's drop in ChatGPT visits, it was fake.
- Compare this week's ChatGPT referrals against two weeks ago.