SEO, GEO & AI News: October 19th – November 1st, 2026

Why it matters: AI Overviews make rank tracking harder, and trackers are already shaken by the poisoned SERPs Google serves them. But do positions still matter in a search world powered by AI? I do believe the 10 blue links will disappear, but generating every SERP from scratch would be too costly for Google given billions of searches a week; I expect precomputed conversational results instead, so some tracking may remain.

Why it matters: Publishing on Substack, LinkedIn Articles or X Articles has become a popular parasite SEO strategy to SERP snippets, and AI now makes it possible at scale. I think that's what Google is after here: less noise in its results, and fewer resources spent crawling and indexing pages nobody needed.

Why it matters: I agree with Marie that Google remains unavoidable, but traffic isn't the whole story. As Mike King replied, AI search works as a brand channel, and GA4 undercounts it anyway: tracking breaks, and people who ask an LLM often finish on Google with a branded search, which counts as organic.

Why it matters: Google Posts are an underused local SEO lever: they add keywords to a Business Profile, prove it's active and open a direct line with customers. At Decathlon, publishing one post a week on every store's profile became one of my most effective local routines.

Why it matters: Even though it only covers work use, this data shows what people actually ask ChatGPT and how that changes over time. If you do prompt tracking, use these categories to build your prompt corpus, rather than tracking informational queries alone.

Why it matters: For e-commerce, this form is a free brief: it lists the questions shoppers care about, market by market. I would check three things: can your category filters handle those options, are the answers written on product pages rather than implied by a photo, and does your feed carry them as structured attributes, with current prices and size variants?

Why it matters: Claude switching its index is the AI equivalent of a Google core update: it reshuffles who gets cited. It's too early for specific tactics. For now, I'd track both modes side by side (adding (extended mode) to the prompt forces it) to see which sources each one cites, then go back to the classic GEO playbook.

Why it matters: Looking under the hood of an AI search engine is always instructive. I would ignore the authority score, a DeepSeek-specific PageRank, but undated pages being dropped is a quick fix worth making. The robots.txt finding doesn't surprise me: the CDN or firewall remains the reliable way to block AI.

Why it matters: If this pilot expands, a CDN becomes a GEO lever: sites behind Cloudflare could be discovered and refreshed faster by ChatGPT, especially deep, poorly linked pages. That said, being indexed doesn't guarantee a citation, but a page OpenAI has never seen can't be cited anyway.

Why it matters: More traffic from LLMs is good news. GPT-6 itself may drive it, or the way ChatGPT now displays links, which strongly affects click rates. These gains tend to swing from one model to the next, so I hope this one lasts.

Why it matters: Serving AI a different, enriched version of your content is tempting, and it works for now. Experience tells me it won't last: AI platforms will start penalizing it, as Google did. On my site, Exa's crawler fetches each page twice in a row, first requesting Markdown, then HTML; comparing the two is already technically possible.

Why it matters: Agentic commerce is still small, but it's growing fast, especially with Muse. I'm following it closely: I expect it to reach several percent of orders within months, and at 2% or 3% of an ecommerce site's sales, it will justify real investment. Meanwhile, 61% of shoppers already research with AI, another metric that proves GEO matters.

Why it matters: I agree with Sundar: to win the personal agent market, tech giants can't wait for sites to ship MCP servers or other protocols. Agents will keep using the web as it is and sites that optimize for personal agents will likely see fewer failed tasks and more conversions.

Why it matters: Another sign that tech giants are taking the agentic web seriously. An MCP server connected to this platform lets Google's agents interact directly with your service. It's not mass market yet: few companies have access, though developers can apply, and users only find these apps in AI Mode, in the US and in English. But to me, this looks like the future.