December is shaping up as the first full month of ‘Gemini 3-era’ search, with Google now auto‑routing tougher AI Mode queries to its frontier model and quietly reshaping which entities get surfaced in answers. AI Overviews are testing bigger safety disclaimers, new event layouts, and deeper travel/booking workflows – all of which keep users inside Google’s generative layer longer. At the same time, ChatGPT and Perplexity have leaned hard into visual answers and agentic shopping, turning AI search into an end‑to‑end discovery + checkout funnel. Expect December to be about one thing: can your brand be selected by AI systems, not just ranked in blue links?
This week made one thing loud: the “blue links” era is now an optional layer, not the default.
Google shipped a December 2025 Core Update while pushing AI Mode deeper into Discover and AI Overviews. Publishers are pushing back with lawsuits, crawler blocks, and the rise of “LLMs.txt”. Meanwhile ChatGPT Search keeps levelling up, and commerce is creeping into chat (instant checkout is real). If you’re still measuring success only by rankings and CTR, you’re late. Your content becomes a training signal too. Track entities, citations, and conversions. Win those, and rankings follow.
Google’s December 2025 Core Update started rolling out on Dec 11 at 09:25 PST, and Google says the rollout may take up to three weeks. SEOAnalyst flagged ‘Movember’-style turbulence even before the announcement. Expect the usual core-update pattern: broad re-scoring, not a single “penalty.” My playbook: pause non-essential changes for a few days, annotate Dec 11 in GA4 + GSC, and segment impact by intent + entity (brand vs non-brand, informational vs transactional). If “helpful” pages dropped, audit depth, first-hand evidence, author credibility, and internal linking—then re-test after rollout completes.
AI Mode is no longer a ‘lab toy’. In this “Gemini 3-era” month, Google is stitching it into the core journey: AI Overviews push users into AI Mode via “show more,” and Discover is testing “Summarize,” “Follow up,” and “Dive deeper” actions that open AI Mode-style experiences. Google also says AI Mode will add more in-line source links with brief explanations of why each source matters. Preferred Sources is expanding for English users—subscriptions matter again. For SEOs, the battle shifts from ranking to being cited. Build clean entity pages, original data, and quotable paragraphs.
Generative search is getting a business model. SEOs spotted ad placements and sponsored units inside AI Mode responses, meaning the “answer layer” won’t stay ad-free. Google’s Search leadership has also been publicly signalling that advertising will adapt to conversational AI, not disappear. We’re also seeing deeper travel and booking flows inside the generative layer, keeping users in the chat UI longer. Translation: the real estate above the fold is shrinking again. Action: map where ads appear for your money queries, protect brand demand, and make product + local entities machine-readable (schema, feeds, consistent IDs).
Google Search Console quietly got more useful for AI-era debugging. The Performance report now offers weekly and monthly views (great for smoothing noisy daily swings), and Google is rolling out a branded-query filter. Practical impact: you can separate “brand demand” from “algorithmic visibility” without exporting everything. Do this now: create saved filters for brand vs non-brand, annotate the Dec 11 core update, and watch query groups tied to your main entities. If AI Mode is stealing clicks, impressions still reveal where you’re being shown.
AI Overviews keep compressing the click economy. Recipe publishers are already calling out the “copy-paste” feel of AI summaries and the loss of traffic when answers are served on-SERP. Independent research earlier this year found users are less likely to click links when an AI summary appears, and Google is responding by promising more visible source links inside AI Mode. seoClarity data also shows AIOs getting shorter over time. Net effect for SEOs: design content for extraction. Lead with the answer, cite your sources, and give the model a clear entity to attach the claim to (brand, author, dataset).
AI crawlers are no longer “polite bots.” Cloudflare says it has already blocked 416B AI-bot requests since July 1, which tells you how aggressively models are harvesting the web. In parallel, Google’s documentation now acknowledges LLMs.txt, pushing the conversation from “robots.txt only” to AI-specific crawl guidance. For technical SEOs, this is a new layer of governance: log-file audit your AI bots, decide what’s allowed, and standardize rules across staging and production. If you monetize content, protect it. If you want citations, allow the right bots.
Outside Google, the “answer engine” race is turning into distribution + legal warfare. OpenAI shipped a Search upgrade in ChatGPT, and its Instacart partnership now supports instant checkout inside ChatGPT—AI answers that convert. Perplexity grabbed attention with Cristiano Ronaldo as an investor/partner, while lawsuits from The New York Times (and now the Chicago Tribune) escalate publisher pushback. On the policy side, a U.S. judge is forcing Google’s default-search deals to be shorter, reshaping where discovery starts. For SEOs: feeds, citations, and licensing strategy are now part of SEO.
Barry Schwartz
His daily coverage this week is the fastest signal for what Google is actually testing. He reported the Dec 2025 Core Update rollout timing and highlighted how Google is pulling AI Mode into more surfaces (Discover actions, AI Overviews “show more”). The takeaway: don’t treat AI Mode as a sidebar feature. Treat it like a new SERP format with its own ranking and citation logic. If you’re auditing drops, his timeline helps you separate algorithm movement vs UI movement.
Brodie Clark
He’s been tracking the messy reality of AI Mode layouts—where ads, carousels, and “assistant” UI elements appear. This week’s screenshots and notes are a reminder that generative answers are not just text blocks; they’re a new page template. His practical angle: capture SERP-state changes like you would track featured snippets. Build a prompt set for your key entities and monitor how the answer, citations, and paid units shift week to week.
Sharon McClintic
She’s pushing the crawl-governance conversation forward—LLMs.txt, robots controls, and what to do when AI bots ignore polite rules. Her key point: don’t wait for a perfect standard. Start with server logs, identify AI user agents and IPs, and decide your stance per directory (news, evergreen guides, tools, paywalled). The next wave of technical SEO isn’t only Core Web Vitals. It’s about who can read you, quote you, and monetize you.
Ryan Siddle
He’s doing what more SEOs should—treating AI companies like crawlers you must observe, not brands you must trust. His log-based research flagged fresh OpenAI-related crawl infrastructure (new IP blocks and traffic patterns), suggesting search-style indexing is scaling fast. Why it matters: when answer engines crawl more, your technical hygiene matters more too—canonical consistency, 200/404 correctness, and duplication controls. If you can’t see the bot, you can’t manage the bot.
Vahan Petrosyan
His experiments focus on entry points—where AI Mode is being triggered and which query classes get routed into generative answers. This week’s big insight: the funnel is changing. It’s not “query → 10 links.” It’s “query → AI summary → follow-up conversation.” That means your content strategy needs conversation coverage: definitions, comparisons, and edge-cases around your main entities. If your page only answers one narrow keyword, AI Mode will rewrite you into irrelevance.
Aleyda Solis
She’s consistently advocating an SEO + product mindset, and this week’s discussions land the same punch: optimize for being selected, not just being ranked. Her angle is practical—use structured data, strengthen internal entity relationships, and make expertise visible (authors, credentials, references). In an AI-first SERP, weak attribution kills trust. If your brand isn’t an entity Google can confidently identify, AI systems will cite someone else—then your rankings won’t save you.
Core Update aftershocks: the December 2025 Core Update can run for up to three weeks, so expect volatility through late December. Don’t chase daily swings—analyze intent clusters after the dust settles.
AI Mode becomes the default path: watch for more “show more” and Discover entry points, plus richer inline citations and Preferred Sources expansion. Being cited (and trusted) will matter as much as ranking.
Content control gets political: more publishers will block crawlers and push for licensing. Audit AI-bot traffic, implement clear crawl rules, and decide where you want your content to be quotable vs protected.
Chat-to-checkout accelerates: with instant checkout flows entering ChatGPT and deeper booking workflows inside Google’s generative layer, feeds + schema + entity IDs will decide who gets the conversion.
Things in SEO that you must know (this week)
Google spent this week turning AI Mode from a side tab into the main doorway of Search – from Discover, from the homepage search bar, and from inside AI Overviews themselves. Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Pro are now powering AI Mode in ~120 countries, while Google quietly added LLMs.txt to its official docs and the industry shipped a verified AI-crawler list. Off-Google, Perplexity grabbed Cristiano Ronaldo as an investor in the same week The New York Times sued it for copyright infringement. Add a fresh antitrust ruling forcing Google to re-bid default search deals yearly, plus Cloudflare blocking 416B AI bot requests, and you get the real story: distribution and crawl control are now as strategic as rankings.
Google is actively removing friction between classic results, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. This week, mobile tests rolled out where tapping “Show more” in an AI Overview opens a conversational thread in AI Mode, turning the overview into a shallow entry point rather than the destination. In the Google app, Discover stories and any article you open now expose AI Mode options (summarise, ask a follow-up, dive deeper). On desktop, uploading a file or image from the Google.com search bar drops you straight into AI Mode instead of classic search or Images.
Impact for SEOs: treat AI Mode as the default journey for exploratory and research queries. Track how often your key topics trigger AI Mode from Discover, images, and Overviews – not just from typed queries.
On December 2, Google expanded Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro inside AI Mode to roughly 120 countries and territories (English), but only for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Gemini 3 is already being auto-routed for “harder” AI Mode questions, increasing query fan‑out and richer layouts, as documented in November and summarized in SEOAnalyst’s December brief. At the same time, Google’s Year in Search 2025 shows Gemini (and Gemini Nano Banana) as the most searched AI tool in India, with Grok, Deepseek, and Perplexity all ranking ahead of ChatGPT in buzz.
Impact for SEOs: in markets like India, AI discovery = Gemini discovery. Your entity, schema, and topical depth need to be “Gemini-ready” across web, app, and Android surfaces, not just organic blue links.
Ads inside Google AI Mode are now widely documented, with sponsored tiles appearing beneath Gemini-generated answers – a pattern initially spotted by SEOs and confirmed by Google as part of its long-term monetisation tests. OpenAI’s November rollouts turned ChatGPT into a visual commerce engine: more inline images for products and places, and a shopping research flow that produces personalised buyer guides with outbound links. Perplexity has already leaned in with an AI personal shopper and integrated checkout via partners like PayPal. On the Microsoft side, Copilot in Edge is tying AI answers into price comparisons and deal discovery for holiday shopping.
Impact for SEOs: product discovery is sliding into closed AI funnels. Winning means (a) clean, rich product schema; (b) pricing, reviews, and availability that LLMs can parse; and (c) partnerships with marketplaces and feeds that show inside these assistants – not just in organic PLAs.
Barry Schwartz’s December 2025 Google Webmaster Report and independent analyses confirm that the unconfirmed “Movember” turbulence (Nov 7–12 and Thanksgiving week) is still shaping December traffic. LeadAdvisors’ November update pegs AI Overviews at ~30% query coverage, with organic CTR down ~61% and paid CTR down ~68% on affected SERPs, especially in publishing, reviews, and comparison content. At the same time, Search Console finally feels “AI-era”: branded/non‑branded filters, custom annotations, and Query Groups give SEOs a way to segment AI-impact vs brand demand vs classic discovery, as SEOAnalyst highlights.
Impact for SEOs: stop reporting “overall organic CTR”. Split by:
Your dashboards must reflect AI reality, or you’ll misread performance.
Perplexity had a whiplash week. On the upside, it announced Cristiano Ronaldo as an investor and global partner, launching a Perplexity x CR7 interactive hub with career archives and exclusive content. The move positions Perplexity as a mass-market brand, not just a nerdy answer engine. On the downside, The New York Times filed a fresh lawsuit accusing Perplexity of copying and displaying millions of articles – including paywalled stories – and even hallucinating content falsely attributed to the Times’ brand and trademarks.
Impact for SEOs & publishers: Perplexity is both a new distribution channel and a legal risk vector. Track how your brand appears there, audit for hallucinated attributions, and make sure your licensing stance (or legal team) keeps pace.
Cloudflare revealed it has blocked 416 billion AI bot requests since July 1, 2025, and called out Google for merging its search and AI crawlers in a way that forces publishers to accept AI training if they want organic visibility. At the same time, Search Engine Journal shipped a verified AI crawler list (GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude* bots, Gemini-Deep-Research, Bingbot as AI, Applebot-Extended, etc.) with IP validation and robots/allow examples. OpenAI’s crawl infrastructure also ramped up ahead of the holiday season, with Merj’s Ryan Siddle spotting new IP blocks and Search Engine Roundtable confirming the expansion.
The twist: on December 3, Google quietly added LLMs.txt to its official Search developer docs after previously downplaying the standard – effectively legitimising AI-specific crawl controls.
Impact for SEOs/tech leads:
A US federal judge just ordered Google to limit all default search and AI app contracts to one year, following a 2024 ruling that it illegally monopolised search and search ads. That means Google’s multi‑year deals with Apple, Samsung and others become annual re‑bids – exactly as AI search competitors like OpenAI (Atlas browser), Perplexity’s Comet, Edge with Copilot, and Opera’s Aria are pushing AI-first browsing experiences.
Impact for SEOs: distribution is no longer a given. Over the next cycles, default positions on mobile and OEM browsers may rotate between AI-first experiences, not just between classic search engines. You need a GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) strategy that spans Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot – and any browser that embeds them.
Barry Schwartz
Barry spent the week documenting how Google is turning AI Mode into a natural part of the SERP: Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Pro rolling out to 120 countries, AI Mode entry points from Overviews, Discover and the search bar, and LLMs.txt suddenly appearing in official docs. His take: there’s no single “core update” to wait for anymore. Instead, SEOs face constant micro‑updates across layouts, models, crawling, and measurement – and the only way to keep up is daily SERP observation plus structured annotations in your own data.
Brodie Clark
Brodie has become the unofficial AI Mode ads historian. His latest experiments show sponsored tiles anchoring the bottom of Gemini answers, visually separated from but tightly coupled to the AI summary. He’s contrasted these placements with earlier AI Overview ad tests and warns that, even if organic link cards still sit above the AI block for now, the path is clear: AI surfaces will be monetised like any other ad inventory. For SEOs, his message is simple – SERP feature tracking must include AI Mode layouts and ad formats, not just ranking positions.
Sharon McClintic
In Lumar’s November SEO & AI Search roundup (widely referenced in December), Sharon argues that we’ve crossed a line from “rank tracking” to AI visibility tracking. She ties together Gemini 3’s auto‑routing in AI Mode, Perplexity’s Comet expansion, new Search Console branded filters, and AI Overview CTR studies into one theme: the battle is no longer for position 1, but for inclusion and citation inside AI answers across engines. Her practical advice: map where your brand appears in AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, then close the gaps like you would lost SERP features.
Ryan Siddle
From Merj, Ryan surfaced a quieter but critical story: OpenAI has been scaling up its crawling infrastructure in the last 1–2 months, adding many new IP blocks that show up in server logs as ChatGPT- or GPTBot-related traffic. His guidance is deeply technical: identify OpenAI’s official ranges, update WAF and bot detection so you can distinguish them from generic scrapers, and monitor how often these bots hit key template types. SEOAnalyst.in extends that takeaway – AI visibility starts in your logs, not in Search Console.
Vahan Petrosyan
Vahan’s December 5 Search Engine Journal piece delivers the most practical resource of the week: a verified AI crawler user‑agent list based on SEJ’s own server logs, cross‑checked against official IP lists where available. He breaks out GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude’s bots, Gemini-Deep-Research, Bingbot as AI, Applebot-Extended and more, along with robots.txt patterns and sample UA strings. His core point: controlling AI crawlers is now part of SEO, not just sysadmin work. You need policies for training, search, and real‑time browsing agents separately, or you’ll either overload infrastructure or vanish from AI results.
Aleyda Solis
Aleyda’s earlier work on AI Mode metrics in Search Console is resurfacing hard this month via SEOFOMO as SEOs scramble to understand Gemini traffic. She emphasises that AI Mode clicks, impressions and positions are trackable – but only if you explicitly separate them and overlay annotations for AI experiments and algorithm shifts. In her playbook, SEOs should: 1) add AI Mode as its own KPI line, 2) segment by brand vs non‑brand, and 3) combine GSC with log‑level AI crawler data and third‑party rank/feature tracking. The goal: a multi-surface visibility report, not a single “organic” number.
Expect auto‑routing to extend deeper into AI Overviews and even more entry points from Maps, Lens and Discover. Entity‑rich, task‑complete pages will increasingly outperform thin, single‑intent posts in AI surfaces.
AI Mode ads are the prototype, not the end state. Watch for new formats in AI Overviews and, potentially, similar monetisation inside Bing Copilot and Perplexity’s shopping flows. Paid + organic strategies will need AI-specific budgets and testing.
With Cloudflare’s stance, SEJ’s crawler list, and LLMs.txt in Google docs, expect more sites to adopt AI‑specific robots files and contractual licensing. This will widen the gap between brands that manage AI access deliberately and those whose content is silently harvested.
The one‑year cap on default search and AI contracts turns distribution into an annual auction. Emerging AI-first browsers and assistants will bid harder for default slots, making GEO across Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, DuckDuckGo AI and You.com a survival skill, not a nice‑to‑have.
After launching Gemini 3 on November 18, Google flipped the next switch on November 26: automatic model routing in AI Mode now sends “your toughest questions” straight to Gemini 3 Pro. Previously, only Pro/Ultra users who picked the “Thinking” option could force Gemini 3. Now, Google decides per query. For SEOs, this means complex, multi‑step queries are more likely to trigger:
Deeper query fan‑out (more background searches),
Richer generative layouts (tables, tools, simulations),
And potentially new pages being pulled in that never ranked top‑10 before.
Treat AI Mode as a parallel discovery system: optimize entities, schema, and depth so your content is “Gemini‑ready,” not just “rank‑ready.”
The inevitable happened: ads are now showing inside AI Mode answers. Greg Sterling and Brodie Clark spotted sponsored cards at the bottom of Gemini‑powered AI responses, with Google confirming these are part of ongoing ad tests first announced in May. The current pattern:
Organic link cards appear around / above the AI answer,
Sponsored tiles sit at the bottom of the AI block, labeled as ads.
Right now, organic visibility isn’t being displaced at the top of AI Mode – but this is clearly the monetization blueprint. Expect Google to iterate on positioning, formats, and targeting. SEOs need to watch how often their commercial SERPs now show AI Mode plus ads, not just classic ads + ten blue links.
Google is testing a much larger “Double‑check important information” notice at the bottom of some AI Overviews, telling users to verify critical info and offering a “Learn more” link. This seems to trigger more often on YMYL queries (finance, health, etc.). It reframes AI Overviews as a starting point, not final authority.
At the same time, AI Overviews are experimenting with a new direct event display, replacing the traditional event module with AI‑driven event cards – currently buggy, but live for some users. For local/event SEOs, that means structured event data and strong entity connections matter twice: to rank in Events and to be selected for AI Overviews’ event layouts.
Late November saw another burst of ranking chaos, with a “Thanksgiving update” reported around November 24–26 on top of the broader “Movember” volatility earlier in the month. Multiple roundups describe:
No official core update, but big swings across many verticals,
Ongoing crackdowns on site reputation abuse and low‑quality third‑party content,
AI Overviews appearing in roughly 30% of queries in some datasets.
Combined with Q3 data showing AI Overviews can reduce organic CTR by ~61% and paid CTR by ~68% on affected queries, we’re clearly in a world where ranking volatility + zero‑click behavior are now normal conditions, not anomalies.
While rankings wobble, Search Console finally got more “AI‑era” instrumentation:
Branded Queries Filter (announced Nov 20; rolling out now) automatically splits branded vs non‑branded traffic in Performance reports using Google’s own AI classification.
Custom Annotations in performance charts let you log site changes, algorithm updates, migrations, and even your AI experiments inside GSC instead of in spreadsheets.
Query Groups in Search Console Insights use AI to cluster similar queries by topic and show trending up/down query families.
Action item: set a December baseline. Annotate all AI‑related tests (new schema, FAQ pruning, IA changes) and start reporting non‑brand vs brand SEO impact as separate storylines.
OpenAI’s November releases turned ChatGPT into an even stronger “answer + search” surface:
Nov 21 – More images in answers: ChatGPT now injects inline web images for people, places, and products, with clickable sources, when visuals add clarity.
Nov 24 – Shopping research: a new interactive flow where ChatGPT deeply researches products, asks clarifying questions, and returns personalized buyer guides with links to buy. This is live on web and mobile for Free, Go, Plus, and Pro users with generous holiday limits.
This turns ChatGPT into a visual, commerce‑aware answer engine, not just a chatbox. For SEOs, it increases the importance of structured product data, high‑quality images, and brand coverage across the open web that ChatGPT crawls and cites.
Perplexity spent late November turning itself into an AI‑first shopping and browsing environment:
It launched an AI personal shopper that lets users search conversationally for products (“best winter jacket if I live in San Francisco and take a ferry to work”) and get personalized cards with specs and reviews.
Purchases can be completed via PayPal Instant Buy inside Perplexity, with a holiday promo offering 50% back (up to $50) for early US users who pay with PayPal.
The Comet AI browser is now on Android, bringing its agentic, task‑based browsing and multi‑tab AI research workflows to mobile.
SEO implication: product discovery is drifting into closed AI funnels where citations + commerce integrations matter more than ten blue links. Treat Perplexity as a channel to monitor, not a curiosity.
Barry Schwartz
Barry spent the last week chronicling how Google’s AI search stack is shifting in real time: Gemini 3’s auto‑routing in AI Mode, new “double‑check important information” flags in AI Overviews, bugs in event displays, OpenAI’s ramp‑up of crawling IPs, and the unconfirmed Thanksgiving ranking update. His take is clear: SEOs are now dealing with “always‑on” micro‑updates across rankings, SERP layouts, and AI behavior – with very little official communication.
Brodie Clark
Brodie was one of the first to trigger and document ads inside AI Mode, sharing screenshots that show sponsored tiles at the bottom of Gemini’s answer block. He contrasted the new layout with earlier AI Overview ad tests and highlighted that, for now, organic link cards still sit above the ads. For practitioners, his message is blunt: AI Mode isn’t just a UX experiment anymore; it’s entering the paid search strategy deck and will demand new SERP feature tracking.
Sharon McClintic
In Lumar’s November 2025 SEO & AI Search roundup, Sharon framed the month as a pivot point from “rank tracking” to “AI visibility tracking.” She connects Gemini 3’s launch, Comet’s Android expansion, new GSC branded filters, and fresh CTR studies into one narrative: AI layers are changing how and where clicks happen, not just which position you hold. Her advice leans entity‑first: map your brand’s presence across AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity instead of obsessing over one SERP.
Duane Martinez
Duane’s November 21 analysis of Google Search Ranking Updates argues that 2025 marks the real shift from classic SEO to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). He documents the “Movember” volatility, estimates AI Overviews now show on ~30% of queries, and highlights enforcement against site‑reputation abuse and affiliate‑heavy pages. His playbook: lean into authority, structured data, and genuinely helpful content that’s easy for AI systems to cite, not just easy for algorithms to rank.
Ryan Siddle
Ryan, from Merj, surfaced a quieter but important story: OpenAI is scaling up its crawling infrastructure for the holiday season, adding many new IP blocks for its bots. His takeaway for technical SEOs: update WAF rules and bot‑detection logic so you can distinguish OpenAI from generic scrapers, and watch how often AI crawlers hit key templates. It’s a reminder that AI visibility starts in your logs — not just in Google Search Console.
Vijay Chauhan
Event SEO specialist Vijay Chauhan spotted Google’s test of direct event displays inside AI Overviews, where AI now renders event entities in the overview itself instead of handing them off to the classic Events module. He notes that the layout is currently buggy, but significance is clear: AI Overviews are becoming a self‑contained canvas for local discovery. For event and venue sites, Vijay’s experiments suggest doubling down on clean event schema, unique images, and strong entity links to city and venue nodes.
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin was among the first to catch the new “Double‑check important information” notice in AI Overviews and share proof. His screenshots highlight how much more prominent this warning is than the older, subtle disclaimers. The subtext for SEOs: Google is visibly distancing itself from AI mistakes, especially on YMYL topics. That likely increases the bar for which sources are eligible for AI citations – expect more weight on expertise signals, consensus across sources, and clear disclaimers in your own content.
Expect automatic Gemini 3 routing to expand beyond AI Mode and deeper into AI Overviews, especially for complex or multi‑step queries. This should increase the importance of entity‑rich pages that answer entire tasks, not single keywords.
With ads already live in AI Mode tests and Google openly experimenting with placements, December will likely bring broader exposure and more formats. Watch for new ad cards in AI Overviews and start modeling how much your commercial traffic shifts into AI+ads blends.
The branded queries filter, custom annotations, and Query Groups together give you a new reporting stack. Use December to: separate brand vs non‑brand SEO, annotate every AI‑related change, and measure topic‑level volatility instead of relying on single keywords.
ChatGPT’s shopping research and Perplexity’s PayPal‑powered personal shopper show that AI platforms want to own the full shopping funnel. At the same time, OpenAI is scaling up crawling, meaning more of your content will feed non‑Google ecosystems. In December, prioritize: robust structured data, canonical clarity, and AI‑specific crawl controls (robots/llms files, WAF rules).
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