LLM + Search + RAG + Grounding = figures out where the information is actually mentioned, then show the links in the response. In AIO and AI Mode, you see links attached. This is only possible because of grounding - it confirms that the information is actually there.

"In fact, Google records almost every action we take: what we search for, what we click, and how long we spend on a website. We are all a giant Mechanical Turk, telling Google which results are good." "How Google Click Signals Drive SEO Rankings and AI Answers"

💰 From Retrieved to Cited: How Commercial Content Earns Citations in AI Search - excellent research from Oshen Davidson showing how: * Early-Discovery Content Earns a 20% Higher Citation Likelihood When Claims Are Grounded in Data * Pages That Make Shortlisting Options

Holy moly SEOs. It turns out Google has been accidentally inflating impressions in Search Console reports for ALMOST A YEAR:

It's very clear that social teams are going to be instrumental for AI search. This study found that Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn + Facebook were the top most cited domains:

Truspilot.com seems... trusted by Google. :) Massive gains with the December 2025 broad core update. I'm seeing this when analyzing a client's situation btw. They are everywhere when checking important queries for that client...

Using the awesome, updated RESONEO ChatGPT Chrome plugin to look at fan-out queries in ChatGPT - when you choose the better model (5.4), the citations appear to be higher quality/more precise. You can review the model's "thinking" process and how it adjusts its fan-out queries

Ouch. Google really needs to do a better job of promoting small publishers Chartbeat data shows the smallest publishers (1,000–10,000 daily page views) saw the biggest declines over the past 2 years Small publishers are the backbone of the web. We don't need a McGoogle

You can force ChatGPT to search for your site, crawl your pages and show you exactly what it extracts from each page. Copy-paste prompts, and how to combine with our free Chrome extension to see the real fan-out queries and grounding data 🔽 linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…

New post from Addy Osmani (a Google engineer working on Gemini and Cloud). And yep, he has a new version of the acronym AEO -> Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO) I think at some point, Google needs to come out with an official stance on all of this. Because as of now, the various

Google's CEO said the future of search is an "agent manager". Well now a Google Software Engineer just wrote a guide on Agentic Engine Optimization. It covers discoverability, parsability + token efficiency:

The Fan-Out Effect: What Happens Between a Query and a Citation - From a research developed by Kevin_Indig & AirOps analyzing 16,851 queries and +353K pages across ChatGPT's full retrieval pipeline: * Retrieval rank is the #1 signal. A page at position 1 in ChatGPT's

This is an extremely useful breakdown by Gianluca Fiorelli Two sections worth noting for SEOs: “In 72 minutes about the future of Search in April 2026, the CEO of Alphabet did not address: publisher traffic impact from AI Overviews, content-creator economics or attribution

Everyone assumes the SEO team should be 100% responsible for all aspects of GEO, meanwhile they only influence a small portion of how LLMs form their opinion of a brand. That's why GEO is an executive level problem. Not a technical optimization problem.

17 Content Types to Survive Google’s Zero-Click Future - Excellent research by Cyrus SEO We know that Google favors different types of sites now. Winning content tends to be proprietary, unique, and solves problems beyond providing information. Here are 17 content types

All the slides + JC's coverage. Some good nuggets here -> Google Search Central Live Toronto Slides (April 2026) *Crawl vs. Index: “Crawled – Currently not indexed” is rarely a technical rendering issue; it’s usually a quality signal. Google may have tried the content and

Very informative slide via Google's Danny Sullivan explaining the difference between "Commodity" vs "Non-Commodity" content Google prefers the later IMO, lots of evidence this is spot-on, not where Google is going in the future, but where it already is now via JC Chouinard

👀 Google Search Central Live Toronto Slides & Summary by JC Chouinard 👇 * The Indexing & Quality Bar Selective Indexing: AI has lowered the barrier for content creation, forcing Google to raise the bar for what actually gets indexed. * Crawl vs. Index: “Crawled – Currently

The reality of the web is that the content on the left has far more surface area and is thereby easily reflected in training data. It can and will be answered without your content participation. The content on the right represents more of the semantic and knowledge gap that

Esto es lo que recomienda Google para aumentar las probabilidades de que se muestre un deep link de "Más información" dentro del snippet. Google ha actualizado su documentación sobre meta descripciones, añadiendo una sección con 3 claves para aumentar la probabilidad de que