AI Search

Blueprint-style illustration of a crossed-out robots.txt BLOCK stamp next to a $40M cash stack and an Oreo cookie revealing data inside, on a technical grid.

Mondelez Spent $40M Unblocking the AI Crawlers It Spent Years Blocking

Mondelez originally blocked AI crawlers from indexing its content, then watched Oreo get cited in roughly 10% of AI chatbot cookie answers despite owning the most famous cookie brand on earth. The company has since reversed course, unblocked GPTBot and friends, and committed $40 million to an AI marketing platform

Blueprint-style schematic of a YouTube play button connected to a chat bubble, with timestamped citation markers along a video timeline.

YouTube Built Its Own 'Ask' Search Because Google Stopped Surfacing Videos

Google launched "Ask YouTube" on April 28, 2026, a conversational search test inside YouTube for US Premium subscribers, 18 and over, on desktop, in English. The experiment runs through June 8, 2026 and converts video content into text summaries with cited timestamps and persistent follow-up threads. The implication:

Blueprint-style diagram of a Bing Webmaster Tools AI Citation Share dashboard with grounding query labels next to a faded Google Search Console panel.

Bing Previewed the AI Citation Share Number Google Search Console Still Hides

Microsoft Bing previewed a Citation Share metric for Webmaster Tools at SEO Week New York on April 27, 2026. Citation Share would show what percentage of citations a single site captures inside a given AI grounding query. Google Search Console still bundles AI Mode and AI Overviews into the total

Blueprint chart showing AI tool share climbing from 0.54% to 1.72% of desktop visits while Google search holds 94.3% organic share, per Datos Q1 2026 report

Datos Caught AI Search at 1.72% of Visits While Google Climbed Back to 94.3%

Datos, a Semrush company, published its Q1 2026 State of Search report this week, drawing on clickstream data from millions of desktop users across the US, EU, and UK. AI tools hit 1.72% of desktop visits in the EU and UK, up from 0.98% a year earlier. In

Blueprint-style technical diagram of a Bing Copilot search answer with the cited text dimmed out and only a tiny superscript citation number highlighted as the new click target.

Bing Is Shrinking Copilot's Citation Click Target to a Single Mark

Microsoft Bing is testing Copilot Search results that strip the inline link off the cited answer text and leave only the small superscript citation number clickable. The change shrinks each citation from a full-sentence target to one character. Bing's own AI Performance report, which launched in February, still

Blueprint schematic of a Google AI Mode citation card with the publisher title crossed out and replaced by a first name, magnifying glass over the swapped anchor text

Google's AI Mode Rewrote Publisher Titles Until Lily Ray Called It Out

Google confirmed on April 23, 2026 that AI Mode has been rewriting publisher citation titles into a person's name when the page mentions someone by name. Rajan Patel at Google said "It is a bug. Thanks for pinging, we'll fix" after Lily Ray posted

Magazine rack with Bravo, Cosmopolitan, and Autozeitung covers pixelating into binary code under a looming AI search icon, stark pop-art style

Bauer Killed Most of Its German Websites and Named AI Search the Culprit

Bauer Media Group will close Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland on September 30, 2026, pulling the websites for Bravo, Cosmopolitan, and Autozeitung offline and eliminating roughly 160 digital publishing jobs. The official April 14 announcement names AI search as the cause, citing Ahrefs data showing AI Overview results now correlate with