The percentage of ad spend going to made-for-advertising (MFA) sites increased for the first time since 2023, rising from 0.6% in Q4 2025 to 1.1% in Q1 2026, according to the Association of National A…
AI engines use brand information in two distinct ways: usage (ingesting content without citation) and citation (directly referencing the brand as a source). A Pew Research study found users click link…
A new analysis reveals that declining traffic metrics for AI-generated content may be misleading, as Google's AI Overviews and zero-click searches reduce click-through rates without necessarily dimini…
Three independent 2026 datasets confirm the 'dead internet' theory: automated traffic now accounts for 53% of all web traffic, AI-written articles surpassed human-written ones in November 2024, and un…
SEO Score API has released an official Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI tools like Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf direct access to nine SEO tools, including audit, …
Stackra launches a website grader for small businesses that fuses Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics into a single prioritized fix list. The tool provides a Growth Readi…
Desktop click-through rates on Google increased across 22 industries in Q1 2026, while mobile CTR declined at the top position, according to Advanced Web Ranking data. The desktop gains, especially fo…
A new study reveals that 45% of consumers now use AI assistants to find local services, yet ChatGPT recommends only 1.2% of all local business locations. This shift is causing a dramatic decline in cl…
The SEO industry must shift from rank-tracking-style AI prompt measurement to volatility and average response tracking, as traditional methods fail due to AI model updates and personalization. ChatGPT…
Microsoft rolled out AI Citation Share and other features in Bing Webmaster Tools, while new data from Google and Ahrefs cast doubt on the effectiveness of llms.txt for AI search visibility. Google, M…
OpenAI upgraded free ChatGPT users to GPT-5.5 Instant, claiming it now performs comparably to its frontier Thinking models on health questions, based on internal evaluations. The company reported a 71…
Google AI Overviews cited self-promotional listicles from B2B software brands but recommended competitors in 69% of cases, according to an analysis by Lily Ray. The study found that brands' own pages …
Ahrefs published a guide defining AI agents as software that pursues goals and completes tasks on a user's behalf, distinguishing them from LLMs and chatbots. The article explains the agent loop—Perce…
Google's AI Overviews now appear in about one in five searches, reducing organic click-through rates to 8% when present. A new optimization strategy focuses on earning citations within these AI summar…
Google's AI Overviews and other generative AI tools are absorbing top-of-funnel B2B search traffic, causing a 67% drop in organic click-through rates for brands not cited in AI-generated summaries, wh…
Google Senior Search Analyst John Mueller said on the Search Off the Record podcast that llms.txt files cannot be used by large language models to differentiate which websites to surface, calling them…
Ahrefs analyzed 137,000 domains and found that 28% published a llms.txt file, but 97% of those files received zero requests in May 2026. Of roughly 38,000 valid files, only about 1,100 received any tr…
Ahrefs analyzed logs from 137,000 domains and found 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests, with only 1,100 domains seeing any traffic. AI retrieval bots from ChatGPT and Perplexity accounted fo…
Apify released a Content Gap Analyzer Actor that automates content gap analysis by scraping top-ranking Google pages, crawling their content, and using an LLM to identify missing insights. The tool ai…
A developer built the Google AI Overview Citation Tracker, a tool that renders real Google SERPs in a browser to extract citation data from AI Overview carousels — the only programmatic method availab…