This week in searchOctober 9, 2026

An AI Overview is the AI-written summary Google places above the regular results. Ahrefs analysed 232.8 million US desktop results from July through September and found AI Overviews on 83 percent of searches for brand names by the end of September, up from 61 percent in July and 13 percent in November 2025.

The sources behind those summaries are mostly pages the brand does not control. Across the 100 largest global brands, Wikipedia was cited in 72 percent of the AI Overviews with visible sources, YouTube in 39 percent and LinkedIn in 23 percent. Ahrefs recommends searching your own brand signed out and keeping those three profiles accurate. Semrush’s second analysis the same week shows the same rise.

A spam update is a change to the systems Google uses to catch pages that break its spam policies. The September update finished rolling out on October 8, two weeks after it started, where the three before it each took under three days. Google called it a normal update that applies in every country and language, and it has not said what the update targets. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable tracked three waves of ranking movement, and some SEOs told him it behaved more like a core update.

One caution on the data. Search Engine Journal reported that Google was returning truncated results to automated queries from September 26, so some drops in rank-tracking tools were artifacts of the tools. Search Console is the reliable comparison. In the same period, consultant Marie Haynes and others reported a rise in manual actions, the penalties Google applies by hand, mostly for thin and scaled content.

OpenAI released GPT-6 to every ChatGPT tier this week, including free accounts. The headline feature is Intelligent UI, which lets an answer include buttons, forms, charts, maps and working calculators inside the chat. By OpenAI’s own evaluations, the new model starts answering web-backed questions 44 percent sooner and makes better decisions about when to search.

Paid tiers received the update on October 7 and free accounts on October 8. OpenAI says ChatGPT now reaches more than 1.2 billion people a week.

Google updated its guidance on AI-generated content on October 1. It now says all AI-generated content must be fact-checked and reviewed before publishing, and that the review covers title tags, meta descriptions, structured data and alt text, because a language model predicts a likely sequence of words and can state things that are false.

Search Engine Journal found a second change a day later. Google now lists AI-generated headshots, made-up names and false credentials as deception and a signal of low quality. Drafting with AI remains allowed, provided a person reviews the result and the byline names an actual person.

Gary Illyes of Google’s Search team presented a slide at Search Central Live in Barcelona on October 2 with internal figures for how long 23 Search processes take. Google did not publish it, so the figures come from a recap by John Campbell of the agency ROAST that Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable both reported.

Google discovers a new URL in about 20 hours and recrawls a known one about every 30 days. A robots.txt change registers in about a day, a new title in one to two days, a change to a page’s canonical URL in one to three weeks, and a site move in one to three months. Recovery from a core update takes three to six months. Several rows carried a worst case of never, with quality given as the reason, and Illyes called the numbers a reference point and nothing more.

On Google’s Search Off the Record podcast, Search Advocate John Mueller said AI crawlers have no equivalent of Search Console for submitting a sitemap, so they look for the default. His advice is to keep the file at sitemap.xml and to maintain an RSS feed, since feeds are linked from every page’s head. He has seen AI crawlers request his own sitemap in his server logs.

Asked about llms.txt, the proposed file that lists a site’s content for language models, he said “the hope is bigger than the reality” and that Google does nothing with it today. On sitemaps that remain at “Couldn’t fetch” in Search Console, he said crawl demand often reflects how Google rates the quality of the site.

Ahrefs asked new signups how they heard about the company, and 21.7 percent named ChatGPT or Claude, behind only Google at 42.5 percent. Its analytics recorded a fraction of that as AI referrals, because most AI influence arrives as a direct visit or a brand search with no referrer attached.

The article sets out seven signals that can be measured, from AI referral traffic and a how-did-you-hear-about-us field to branded search demand and web mentions. It also cites a 75,000-brand study, run by Ahrefs, in which YouTube and web mentions correlated with AI mentions at about 0.7 on a scale where 1 is a perfect match, while backlinks and domain ratings scored below 0.33.

Preferred sources is the Google feature that lets readers choose which sites they want to see more of in Top Stories, the news block in search results, and Google says the choice also feeds AI Overviews and AI Mode. This week Search Console began emailing site owners a count of how many people have selected their site, with data as of October 5. The number exists only in the email for now.

The email recommends adding Google’s embed code for a one-click select button and links to a survey about which metrics owners would want. Google has not published any measurement of how much a selection changes visibility.