My Book: The Machine Layer - get it now! The search industry is entering a transition that many people still treat as a footnote. The systems consumers rely on is changing, and the way information is gathered, summarized, and delivered is changing with them. Yet the public messaging around what…

For the last two years, the fundamental unit of generative AI development has been the "completion." You send a text prompt to a model, it sends text back, and the transaction ends. If you want to continue the conversation, you have to send the entire history back to the model again. This…

How does LLM retrieval differ from traditional search? LLM-driven retrieval evaluates content by semantic meaning rather than term matching, and selects sources based on information gain rather than link authority. Where traditional search engines match queries against documents using lexical…

Google’s AI Mode generates responses that are 4x longer than AI Overviews (on average). When we first noticed this, the natural assumption was that AI Mode simply expands on the same information, taking AI Overview’s concise answer and adding more detail from the same sources. But after analyzing…

Note: Highlighted bits of this article indicate the parts used to ground Gemini with article title as prompt. Our prior analysis showed that Google doesn’t use your full page content when grounding its Gemini-powered AI systems. Now we have substantially more data to share, specifically around how…

16 requests from 12 unique IP addresses - why is Grok attacking your website? What actually happens when you paste a URL into a chatbot? Jérôme Segura at DataDome investigated how xAI Grok fetches a url: - Distributed "Swarm" Architecture: A single user prompt triggered 16 requests from 12 unique…

Picture this. You are sitting post Thanksgiving surrounded by friends and family. The conversation drifts towards AI, because at some point it will. When it does, try a quick exercise: ask everyone at the table to choose a side. On one side, you are the consumer. You use ChatGPT to plan holiday…

I analyzed 250M AI responses. Here is the uncomfortable truth about AI Search right now. After processing more than 250,000,000 AI answers across eight major answer engines, the patterns are no longer interesting. They are definitive. A few of them completely rewrite how marketers should think about…

Introduction to Agents | Kaggle

Watch this Whiteboard Friday, as Tom Capper explores the #=100 parameter and why its depreciation was so impactful. The #=100 search parameter was recently deprecated. This seemingly small change in a Google search URL parameter is having a massive impact on the SEO industry. In this Whiteboard…

We all love finding the perfect holiday gift, but shopping can often become a chore. Endless scrolling, tracking prices and jumping between tabs — it can feel like work. Our latest advancements in AI and agentic technology can help: Today we’re introducing a major AI shopping update across Google,…

Paul Fruitful 5 min read· Nov 9, 2025 -- Press enter or click to view image in full size There’s been a new breakthrough in continual learning for large language models (LLMs). In this writeup I'll try to break down this breakthrough and research in the most simple way possible. Before diving into…

Check this out, this “fun” story from ~10 years ago. I’m staring at a client’s analytics. An SEO miracle. Everything we shipped this year has hit, dashboards glowing green for months on end. Then one week goes red, very red. YOY drops in site traffic and conversions. The homepage ends up being the…

Validate your product feed against OpenAI's Product Feed Specification Key Differences from Google Shopping Feeds AI Reasoning vs. Keyword Matching OpenAI's feed enables ChatGPT to understand and reason about products, not just match keywords. Rich descriptions and semantic relationships matter more…

We have seen a clear decline in LLM referral traffic over recent months, especially from ChatGPT, and this trend lines up with the release of GPT-5. Many senior marketers are asking why GPT-5 seems to send fewer clicks to websites than GPT-4.5. The answer is simple. GPT-5 gives people more complete…

🚨 ChatGPT Visibility Report Leak 🚨 Last week, I reviewed an OpenAI partner-facing report, the kind of dataset typically made available to a small group of publishers. And what’s inside feels like a déjà vu for anyone who lived through Google’s Position Zero era. And the numbers… are brutal. For a…

Duane Offers Consulting Doc Brown’s DeLorean didn’t just travel through time, it created different timelines. Same car, different realities. In Back to the Future, when Marty’s actions in the past threatened his existence, his photograph began to flicker between realities depending on choices made…

ChatGPT Referrals to E-Commerce Websites: How Do LLMs Compare Against Traditional Channels? 68 Pages Posted: 18 Oct 2025 Last revised: 19 Dec 2025 Maximilian Kaiser University of Hamburg Christian Schulze Frankfurt School of Finance & Management Date Written: October 08, 2025 Abstract We investigate…

This webinar presented the Wikidata Embedding Project, a vector database that transforms Wikidata’s structured data into vectors for use in generative AI. Philippe introduced how the database works, explained how it can be used for multilingual semantic search, and demonstrated practical…

Share Written by Danny Goodwin Table of Contents Even when AI Overviews don’t appear, users are simply clicking less everywhere, with Google CTRs hitting new lows across search. Organic click-through rates (CTR) for informational queries featuring Google AI Overviews fell 61% since mid-2024, while…

I’m tracking the shift in organic search vs AI traffic and mentions across the top sites of 5 key verticals in the US (Retail, Newspapers, Travel, Finance & Real Estate) to better understand AI traffic impact and shift over time vs organic search, the evolution and correlation (or not) in AI…

Back to Blog A deep dive into ChatGPT’s hidden semantic layer. By analyzing its SSE streams, we uncover how OpenAI’s web client structures entities, moderates outputs, and connects to a product graph that mirrors Google Shopping feeds. By Andrea Volpini November 3, 2025 — 8 min read entities in this…

Consultation Opportunities With Duane Before you get started, it’s important to heed this warning: there is math ahead! If doing math and learning equations makes your head swim, or makes you want to sit down and eat a whole cake, prepare yourself (or grab a cake). But if you like math, if you enjoy…

Here are the slides for my BrightonSEO presentation. Thank you for everyone who came to my talk. And a special thank you to EVERYONE who sent me encouraging messages before and after the talk. I wrote and scheduled this on the way home from BSEO last night. I'm not at BrightonSEO on Friday (today).…

Building with the Agentic Commerce Protocol is open to all. Instant Checkout in ChatGPT is currently available to approved partners. To apply to participate in Instant Checkout, fill out this form here. Overview The Product Feed Specification defines how merchants share structured product data with…

A series talking to C-suite executives about the strategies guiding their bottom lines. More from the series → The Economist is sketching out its roadmap for a post-search world – one where AI assistants may become the first stop for information. The publisher is investing in formats that are more…

Find me at UnboundAnswers.com For over two decades, SEO teams have built dashboards around a shared set of familiar metrics: clicks, rankings, impressions, bounce rate, link volume, etc. These KPIs powered strategies, reports, and… promotions. But what happens when the interface between your…

There's a growing conversation in the SEO industry about declining clicks, and AI Overviews are at the center of it. Many brands and SEOs have reported a rapid decline in organic traffic for informational queries, causing content teams to ask an uncomfortable question: Should we stop creating…

What actually happens inside a large language model when someone asks a question? And what does this mean for visibility and linking in AI search? This article analyzes a leaked system prompt from Claude 4. It provides detailed insight into how the model decides when to search, which tools it uses,…

3rd June, 2025 Imagine this: you don’t Google hotels in Lisbon. You don’t browse reviews or comparison sites. You just say, “Book me somewhere quiet, near vegan food, not too Instagrammy.” And it’s done. No tabs. No research. No decisions. That’s not a hypothetical – it’s where we’re headed. We’re…

There’s been increasing discussion around chunking and embeddings in the context of AI search—especially with Google AI Mode. Dan Petrovic 's recent analysis on semantic matching adds valuable perspective. To advance that discussion, I've released a new update (3rd one) to the WordLift AI Mode…

Patrick Stox Patrick Stox is a Product Advisor, Technical SEO, & Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs. He was the lead author for the SEO chapter of the 2021 Web Almanac and a reviewer for the 2022 SEO chapter. He also co-wrote the SEO Book For Beginners by Ahrefs and was the Technical Review Editor for The…

Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more … Speaker Deck Features Speaker Deck PRO Sign in Sign up for free From Search Rankings to Answer Synthesis - How ... Dawn Anderson June 13, 2025 From Search Rankings to Answer Synthesis - How to Weather The AI Storm Dawn…

Product Manager, Google Cloud Databases Product Manager, Vertex AI Our most intelligent model is now available on Vertex AI At Google Cloud Next 25, we announced incredible ways for enterprises to build multi-agent ecosystems with Vertex AI and Google Cloud Databases – including better ways for…

Curious how Google's AI Mode really works, or what powers AI Overviews? This deep dive into the Google Antitrust trial documents reveals: Google's "Blueprint" Revealed: For the first time, a detailed (though redacted) "Combined Search Infrastructure" diagram (PXR0315) shows Google's end-to-end…