AI Search

ChatGPT Just Became a Local Search Engine. Nobody Has a Playbook for That Yet.

On March 26, OpenAI added a toggle to ChatGPT. Settings, Data Controls, Location Sharing, off by default. Five days later, local search might have a second major player for the first time in a decade. And almost nobody in local SEO is talking about it. What the Toggle Actually Does

Blueprint-style diagram of AI search traffic flows from Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT to websites with varying stream widths

Gemini vs Perplexity Traffic: Raw Clicks vs. Real Value

Gemini Flipped the Traffic Scoreboard in Four Months In August 2025, Perplexity was sending roughly three times more referral traffic to websites than Google Gemini. By January 2026, Gemini had overtaken it, sending 29% more visitors globally and 41% more in the United States. That reversal happened in about four

Compressed vector grid with magnifying glass scanning hundreds of documents, representing Google search evaluating more pages

Google's TurboQuant Could Let Search Read Hundreds of Pages Per Query Instead of 30

Google published a research paper last week introducing TurboQuant, a compression algorithm that makes vector search dramatically faster and cheaper. The coverage has focused on the technical achievement. The part that matters for anyone doing SEO is what happens when Google can semantically evaluate hundreds of documents per query instead