Live AI search news feed

Recent updates to LLMs:

• GPT-5.5 Instant has improved response style and quality, but no longer supports canvas (GPT-5.5 Thinking won't support canvas anymore either)
• Claude Opus 4.8 is here - improvements across benchmarks, and now a more effective collaborator, especially in its honesty
• Dynamic workflows now available in Claude Code - it's a new feature available in research preview so Claude can run bigger tasks by planning the work and running hundreds of parallel subagents in one session
• Claude.ai and Claude Cowork now have an effort controller. Higher effort = more, deeper thinking. Lower effort = faster answers.
• Perplexity Computer is now available inside Microsoft Office apps

Ahrefs shared an AI Search Benchmark Report (PDF) with findings from 13 individual studies they conducted in Q4 2025 and Q1 2026. Highlights:

• AI Overviews appear for 21% of all keywords, much more often on long, informational queries.
• Single-word queries trigger AIOs 9.5% of the time; queries with 7+ words hit 46.4%.
• AI Mode & AI Overviews agree in substance, but cite different sources: Only 13.7% URL overlap, yet they reach the same conclusion 86% of the time.
• 28% of ChatGPT’s top-cited pages have zero organic keywords. You still have a chance of visibility in ChatGPT even without traditional ranking performance.
• Only 37.9% of cited URLs in AIO rank in the top 10, down from about 76% in Ahrefs’ earlier study.
• Brand mentions don’t reliably earn links: When Ahrefs is mentioned in AI responses, it gets linked only 28% of the time overall.
• YouTube mentions had the strongest correlation with AI brand visibility across ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews.
• AIO citations have near-zero correlation with content length; 53.4% of cited pages were under 1,000 words.
• For top-of-funnel ChatGPT queries, “Best X” blog lists made up 43.8% of source URLs.
• AIO are global & uneven: Indonesia leads with 37.2% AIO coverage (U.S. rate is 20.5%)
• Position #1 results saw a 58% CTR reduction when AIOs were present; position #10 lost 19.4%.
• ChatGPT has about 12% of Google’s search volume, but Google sends 190x more traffic to websites.
• Most AI tools repeated fake brand claims planted online; ChatGPT performed better, Claude avoided hallucinating but missed the official site.
• AIOs are unstable in wording, stable in meaning: They changed between observations 70% of the time, but their core message stayed highly consistent.

Google announced AI performance insights coming to Merchant Center. The new report will include:

• Share of voice - visibility vs similar brands in both AI Search results and Gemini
• Shopping funnel performance - discovery, evaluation, purchase
• Popular product search terms & your SOV for them
• Popular product attributes in search (things like color, style, material)

Will roll out in the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand "in the coming months"

I hate AI slop, so I wrote a list of things that are obvious AI slop (writing) to me. I also built a free tool called FishFry.ai that helps you create a Claude plugin/skill that writes like you. Here’s the AI slop article: https://momenticmarketing.com/blog/avoid-ai-slop

Google announced "Preferred Sources" in AIO & AI Mode - if users add favorite sources under source preferences in Search personalization settings, they will see a 'Preferred' label on those citation links in AI Search results. Time to start adding those "Add us as a preferred source on Google" direct links on your website if you haven't already done so!

The blog has a bunch of examples and there's documentation too.

If you have Google Drive sources in an NotebookLM notebook, they will automatically sync now - super convenient!

YouTube is adding more prominent AI labels and rolling out automatic AI detection:

• *For Long-form Videos:*The label will now appear directly below the video player, above the description.
• *For Shorts:*The label will appear as an overlay on the video itself.

If you think your content was incorrectly labeled as AI-generated you can dispute it.

Wow, there's yet another data logging error in the GSC Discover performance report on May 21 (they had one on May 7/8 this year too). Once again, Google says it's just a data logging error, not an actual decrease in Discover clicks/impressions.

Similar web shared data showing ChatGPT is showing more prominent links in answers since May 7, resulting in 150% more referral visits (comparing the week post 5/7 to the week previous). So if you notice a corresponding bump in ChatGPT referral traffic to your site in the time range, keep in mind it might be partly due to this trend and not necessarily because of something you did.

Reportedly DuckDuckGo is getting more users since Google I/O last week. TechCrunch says DDG app installs in the U.S. are up 18% week over week, and 9to5Mac says DDG installs on iPhone specifically are up 33% WoW.

The appeal seems to be how DDG makes it easy to toggle AI on/off. If this trend sticks it's a good reminder to check how your search results look in there too, if it's a search engine your audience is likely to use.

DDG is still only 1.74% of total U.S. search engine share according to statcounter as of the end of April - will be interesting to see if that goes up when their May data is released.

The Bot Analytics dashboard in MS Clarity got an update:

• New metrics & high-level insights

◦ AI bot requests (total number of requests from AI crawlers and automated systems)

◦ AI bot traffic share (% of total site request volume)

◦ Pages crawled (% of total pages accessed by bots)

◦ Total requests overview for unified activity tracking

• Request status visibility

◦ Breakdown of bot requests by status: successful, redirected, and unsuccessful

◦ Trendlines added to request status and key metric cards

◦ Click-to-filter from request status for deeper analysis

• Expanded exploration & filtering

◦ Domain-level and path-level filtering across all bot analytics views

◦ Click-to-filter support for path requests and request status

◦ Improved interactivity across dashboard tables and metric cards

• Content type & table improvements

◦ New Content Type card aggregating request distribution by content type

◦ Removal of content type from Path Requests table for cleaner structure

◦ Refactored Path Requests view with improved aggregation and consistency

• Expanded CDN support

◦ New integrations for Akamai and Azure Front Door (AFD)

◦ Integrations for non-enterprise Cloudflare plans, including free, pro, and business.

Google is now showing how many times a photo or video was viewed in your Google Business Profile. This is helpful because you can see which ones are the most popular (assuming you have a bunch that were uploaded around the same time) and then lean into what people are gravitating towards.

Bing launched a new version of Bing Image Search, describing it as an AI-guided experience that organizes image results to reduce overwhelm and make it easier to find what you want.

• Use the "New Version" toggle in Bing Image Search to try it out
• Instead of a wall of thumbnails you get grouped & labeled sections with short descriptions

Seems pretty helpful to me!

People are sharing instances of not being able to Google basic words like "disregard", "delete," and "ignore" because they're being misinterpreted by AI as commands. I just got this glitchy result so apparently it's not all fixed yet.

Cloudflare made a tool that checks if a website is AI agent-friendly. It gives a detailed breakdown and you can customize the scan too.

Ahrefs added some new features to the GSC Insights reports:

• GSC Insights > Overview: keyword filter now available
• GSC Insights > Keywords: 2 new filter options

◦ Rank Tracker status (filter for currently being tracked or not)

◦ Word count (select min/max number of words)

• GSC Insights > Pages: new column with traffic value

Microsoft published a new article with helpful, specific recommendations around agentic commerce.

Key takeaways below, the big underlying one is "complete, structured, consistent product data":

• *AI agents are becoming the new gatekeepers.* AI tools increasingly decide which brands make the shortlist in the first place, for shoppers researching a purchase decision.
• *Machine trust is foundational.* Brands need to prioritize accurate, structured, up-to-date product data so AI systems can find, understand, and confidently recommend their products.
• *Product data is paramount.* Sparse, inconsistent, or outdated product feeds hurt conversion & may hide brands from consideration in AI-supported buying journeys entirely.
• *Reviews with specifics are gold.* AI systems can synthesize review sentiment, so detailed reviews about real use cases are more valuable than five-star ratings with minimal context.
• *Fulfillment reliability is becoming a trust signal.* As agents move closer to making purchases on behalf of shoppers, shipping accuracy, availability, and delivery performance matter more: "Your logistics will become your trust score."
• *Brand agents could help brands keep customer relationships.* AI-powered brand representatives are a way for shoppers to interact with brands directly through conversational experiences. In the bigger picture, customer agents (from the customer's AI assistant) will interact with brand agents on websites. Build your own brand agents now or let a third-party platform own them.
• *Conversational checkout could collapse the funnel.* Agentic commerce may let shoppers move from need → recommendation → selection → purchase in one AI chat.
• *Prioritize agent readiness now.* Brands should enrich product content, improve schema, sync pricing and inventory, strengthen reviews, and maintain clean feeds in Microsoft Merchant Center and Google Merchant Center.
• *Winners will have unified, real-time, machine-readable product data.* Everything else (AI visibility, brand agents, conversational checkout, measurement) depends on that foundation.

Google's making sure they have our attention all week! Here's another core update, less than 2 months after the last one: https://momenticmarketing.com/google-updates/may-2026-core-update

Google published a report on how people are using AI Mode.

Helpful to know:

• The keyword & query data spans May 2025 - April 2026
• Comes from a random sample of searches
• Trends data measures interest as a share of AI Mode searches only (not total volume based on all the Google searches), and the AI Mode trends data in this report isn't found in Google Trends

Key insights:

• Image searches are growing and more than 17% of U.S. searches use voice or image
• Average AI Mode search is 3x longer than a traditional Search query
• AI Mode queries related to planning are growing fastest
• Brainstorming queries are also growing faster than average

This blog has the summary and links to a 27-page PDF of the actual report.

• Slide 8 has the top 10 topics people search in AI Mode.
• Slide 10 has the top things people ask beginning with "where to..." or "where should I..."
• Slide 15 has the top shopping topics
• Slide 17 has the top retail attributes people look for when shopping in AI Mode (they're not at all surprising, you could probably come up with these in a minute just by thinking about it)

It's a design-heavy PDF that's fast to skim & has a lot more!

Ahrefs made a couple updates:

• New crawled pages report under Site Explorer. Shows all the pages the Ahrefs bot crawled. Use on your own site to ID crawl issues or on competitor sites to see new pages they published (sort by 'first seen')
• Now you can export organic keywords & positions data WITH YOUR FILTER SETTING APPLIED.

Lily Ray asked JMu about this on Bluesky and he provided some helpful official context:

OpenAI is on board with the SynthID watermarking initiative Google announced yesterday.

Google published new Lighthouse documentation: experimental agentic browsing scoring

• Evaluates how well your site is built for machine integration
• Because agentic web standards are still forming, it's meant to provide actionable signals more than a definitive ranking score
• Audit results can fluctuate due to timing of tool registration & agentic request response

The stuff it checks for actually makes sense, even to a non-developer like me:

• All interactive elements have programmatic names
• Roles & parent/child relationships are valid
• Content is not hidden
• Visual stability is critical so keep an eye on CLS
• Checks for llms.txt at domain root (even tho Google's latest blog says llms.txt is a myth, this is about agent-centric accessibility, not optimizing for AI search visibility)

It offers 3 pieces of advice:

• Use WebMCP API to make your site's logic & forms clear to AI agents
• Prioritize semantic HTML & proper ARIA labeling: "these are the machine-eye view of your page"
• Optimize for stability by reducing layout shifts so agents can interact with your UI

But wait, there's more! Of course Google announced updates to Shopping as well:

• Universal Cart - an intelligent shopping cart you can use across merchants & services. Now you can participate in capitalism right from Google Search, in a Gemini chat, in your Gmail, or on YouTube.
• Add a product & the smart cart gets to work hunting for deals & price drops, can also alert you when an OOS item comes back in stock
• Uses "intelligent reasoning" to anticipate your needs & solve problems. Example: you're building a custom PC and some of the parts you add to your cart aren't compatible. The cart will tell you and suggest alternatives.
• Check out with Google Pay or transfer your items to the merchant's site to buy.
• Rolling out in Search & Gemini app this summer, then YouTube & Gmail later.
• UCP expanding to Canada, Australia, and U.K., and to YouTube in the U.S.
• Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) lets agents make payments on your behalf.

Google I/O 2026 took place today so we have a lot of announcements to get our heads around:

• Conversational AI is coming to more Google products:
• Ask YouTube (testing now, rolling out in the U.S. this summer)
• Voice-powered Google Docs Live: verbally brain dump & Gemini turns your mess into organized text and does what you ask it to (list things, draft things, reformat things). Rolling out for subscribers this summer. Voice capabilities coming to Gmail & Keep too.
• Gemini Omni - new model that includes generative media models. "capable of generating samples in any output modality from any input". Rolling out only to developers & enterprise customers via API.
• SynthID watermark detector in Gemini app so users can verify AI-generated content.
• Content Credentials verification shows you if the origin was AI or a camera, and if it was edited using AI tools.
• Both SynthID detector & Content Credentials will be in Google Search & Chrome.
• Gemini 3.5 Flash is new. Faster & better. Available now. Gemini 3.5 Pro coming out next month.
• Antigravity - a new agent-first development platform for developers, including a standalone desktop app.
• Gemini Spark - a personal AI agent in Gemini app. Initially just integrates with Google tools, and eventually with third-party tools via MCP. Coming to Gmail, Google Chat, and Chrome too.
• Daily Brief - Gemini app agent that summarizes things for you and makes a "morning digest" to boost your productivity.
• Android Halo is a new UI space (for Android users obvs) where you can check task progress & live updates of all your agents.
• Information agents in Search work in the background 24/7 to find what you need - rolling out this summer to AI Pro & Ultra subscribers.
• Generative UI capabilities in Google Search will build custom experiences for individual questions, like dynamic layouts & interactive visuals. Coming this summer to everyone, for free.
• Use Antigravity in Search to build your own custom experiences (in the coming months, only for subscribers at first).
• Intelligent eyewear coming this fall. Includes audio glasses that offer "spoken help in your ear" and display glasses that show you information. Audio is making its debut first, "later this fall." Sounds super helpful for accessibility!

This "hub article" links to a bunch of individual articles that dig deeper into specific products and features. And of course SEO industry publishers are already breaking this all down - we'll have plenty to digest for a while!