Platform changes worth knowing about, published on working days when there is something that matters. Every story is checked against at least one primary or official source, and tells you what we don’t know yet.
AI citations
Microsoft will let publishers set AI training and AI grounding preferences separately. Sites relying on NoArchive or NoCache must act by March 1, 2027, to keep their restrictions.
Google's Connected Apps Platform preview lets developers submit apps for Search and the Gemini app, with traffic, latency and error tracking. Access is phased, and Google has not said how connected apps are surfaced.
Google says it is scaling ads in AI Mode to 10 more countries, including Australia, and launching multiturn ads on follow-up questions in the US. It says sponsored and organic click-through rates are similar but gives no figures.
A Google video and a documentation update on Oct. 21 separate controlling crawling from controlling use in AI Overviews and AI Mode. A standardized robots.txt rule for AI-use preferences is still only an IETF draft.
A Google Ads help page says AI-generated review summaries in Search ads are positive only, cannot be edited by advertisers, and appear when Google predicts they will improve ad performance.
In a University of Toronto preprint, common generative engine optimization (GEO) page tactics showed no statistically significant association with citations once pages were compared within the same website. In a replay through OpenAI's API, what the model's own searches retrieved explained far more.
A beta tab in Bing Webmaster Tools groups the AI grounding queries a site appears for into topics and lists queries where other sites are cited instead. Microsoft says to treat the figures as directional signals, not precise counts.
Cloudflare and OpenAI say signals from about 1% of Cloudflare's network helped OpenAI index hundreds of millions of new pages for ChatGPT search. Their Oct. 15 post gives no figures for citations, traffic or crawl load.
Google says inline links will sit higher in AI responses and is testing a section for official websites. It gave no figures on link placement or clicks, so site owners have little to test the claim against.
