SEO, GEO & AI News: October 5th – October 18th, 2026

Why it matters: I agree with Lily: auditing your content before the axe falls is the safer bet. Since AI went mainstream, many tactics have spread that can be considered spam and degrade the user experience. Many of them directly target AI answers: Anthropic has already updated its usage policy accordingly, and I believe OpenAI and the other major LLM providers will eventually roll out their own spam updates too.

Why it matters: I believe backlinks are a thing of the past. Today, AI also looks at signals from social media and forum discussions, and at their sentiment, positive or negative. A social listening tool like Brand24 lets you track those discussions and their sentiment. Building a brand is the real challenge. That said, backlinks can still help build authority early on, so you might as well do them right. As for listicles, I stopped believing in that tactic back in March, as I shared in a previous edition.

Why it matters: If Google keeps closing access to its results, AI assistants can no longer count on scraping them to ground their answers. My hypothesis is that AI companies will invest more in their own search indexes, or turn to providers like Exa, which lets AI systems search its index through an API. For GEO, visibility would then depend less on Google's rankings alone and more on being well represented in each of these indexes.

Why it matters: Experienced SEOs had a rough idea of how long Google takes to process a website or reflect changes in the SERP. We now have reference ranges shared by Google itself, which I can use in reports and impact estimates to show that results take time, depending on the type of change made to the website.

Why it matters: If you haven't done it yet, add the preferred source button: it's a quick win that can influence what your readers and customers see in Google, AI Overviews and AI Mode. My own blog isn't eligible yet: it's still too new for Google to offer it as a preferred source.

Why it matters: The accuracy of brand claims is a key signal, one we track with Adobe Brand Visibility. Understanding how search engines and LLMs build their answers is essential to trace an error back to its source and fix it. In ecommerce, optimizing your product feed and making sure it matches your site's information is critical.

Why it matters: Placing key links in the footer, on a dedicated sitemap page or in a navigational category is a common way to help crawlers discover a site's pages and strengthen their link equity. I believe it can also help personal AI agents navigate a website. It's also a reminder that a clean sitemap still matters.

Why it matters: This benchmark changed my priorities: the readable layer (a JSON index, llms.txt, markdown pages) did most of the work, while WebMCP stayed marginal for personal agents. For now, I'd treat WebMCP as a pilot and invest first in accessibility and agent-readable files, which already pay off today.

Why it matters: Tracking AI agents is already a nightmare, and from a single site you can't tell whether a drop is yours or everyone's. That's why analyses across thousands of sites, like Cedric's, are so valuable: his first findings spotted the drop within days, and his follow-up confirmed the bug with OpenAI.

Why it matters: This echoes what I argued on the panel about AI in SEO: AI systems crave what they don't already know, such as statistics, first-hand experience and original research. Bringing concrete, sourced evidence is one of the best ways to get cited. The experiment also shows the flip side: without verification, even fake data gets cited, which is why publishing real, sourced numbers matters.

Why it matters: This is a ready-to-use playbook for ecommerce teams. Shoppers increasingly turn to AI to search, compare and choose products, so giving these systems the information they need (accurate product data, clear comparisons, accessible pages) is now essential to stay present in this new buying journey. And with personal AI agents going mainstream, the purchase itself will increasingly happen on the AI side too.

Why it matters: With personal AI agents going mainstream, I believe more and more transactions will happen inside an AI interface rather than on the brand's website. UCP is Google's answer to that shift, and because it builds on the long-established Merchant Center infrastructure, adoption could be fast.

Why it matters: Understanding where an LLM finds its information is critical to ensuring that information is accurate. It's one of the key concerns of Adobe Brand Visibility customers: making sure LLMs give the right information. Imagine an LLM picking up wrong information from your site's forum and repeating it in its answers. Lily's advice is spot on: make sure your documentation, forums and help content are clean and up to date.

Why it matters: Many site owners rightly complain that AI Overviews don't send enough traffic to websites. These changes go in the right direction, even if it remains to be seen how many more clicks they will actually bring.

Why it matters: Just as Lily Ray predicted for Google, rules against manipulating AI answers are now coming from model providers too. It's the same movie as in SEO: the rule comes first, enforcement follows. Tactics built on fake independence have an expiration date.

Why it matters: I built this tool to test whether personal AI agents actually use WebMCP. The code was the easy part: the clean data index behind it and the tracking of every agent call are what made the test possible. Start with a pilot before adopting it at scale.

Why it matters: Considering search intent is essential before creating any content. This technique helps you identify which type of content is needed to meet it.

Why it matters: Search Console's URL Inspection is one of my go-to diagnostic tools: its screenshot and rendered HTML show what Google actually sees. At Decathlon, that's how I caught a release that was telling Google every product was out of stock when they were all available. Its limit was showing only one or two screens of the page; this extension removes it and makes this kind of audit far more reliable. Thanks, Natzir!

Why it matters: Seeing the queries ChatGPT actually runs remains one of the most useful GEO diagnostics: it shows whether your site appears in the results it read, which sources shape its answer and which content gaps to fill. When GPT-5.6 hid them, I rebuilt the tool rather than lose that view.