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We have spent a lot of time talking about how brands get mentioned in AI search, but I've been thinking a little more about what happens after that mention.
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Because getting recommended by Chat GPT or showing up in a Google AI overview, that's great.
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But does someone actually click through to the website?
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Can they buy your product directly through an AI assistant?
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And if they do visit your website, can you even track where that traffic came from?
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And that's really the theme of today's episode.
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Google is making some changes to how it displays source links in AI overviews.
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Walmart just launched a new way for AI agents to shop on behalf of customers.
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And we have an update on that chat GPT tracking issue that I talked about last week.
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Hey, I am Cassie Clark.
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I'm an AI Search Visibility Consultant, and this is Found in AI, where we talk about what's happening in AI Search and what all this means for brands trying to get found.
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Today is October 22nd.
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I do have a bit of a cold this morning, so my apologies if I sound rough, but let's get into it.
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On October 15th, Google announced that it's moving source links higher in AI overviews in AI mode and making those links appear more frequently throughout AI generated answers.
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Now, this is interesting because we've been talking about the zero click problem for a bit now.
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Google can pull information from your website, they can summarize it in an AI overview, and then give someone everything they need without that person ever visiting your website.
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And if you're a publisher or brand that's investing in content, that's a pretty big problem.
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So Google's trying to make those source links more visible.
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On the surface, that sounds like a good thing.
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If someone can see the source more easily, maybe they're more likely to click on it.
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But I do have a question about this.
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Are people actually going to click?
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Google has not shared any click-through data showing that these changes are sending more traffic to publishers, and I think that's a pretty important part of this announcement that we really shouldn't overlook.
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We can make all the changes that we want to know how our links are appearing inside of AI answers.
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But until we have the data showing that people are actually using them, we don't know how much of a difference this actually makes.
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Now, the other part of this announcement that I thought was really interesting was preferred sources.
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Google says usage of preferred sources has increased more than seven times since January.
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If you're not familiar with it, preferred sources allows users to select the publishers they want, and they can see those publishers more often in certain Google search experiences.
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From a brand marketing perspective, I think that's interesting.
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We've spent the last year or so trying to figure out how to get AI engines to recognize brands and then retrieve their content and then cite them in the answer.
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But now we're also talking about people actively choosing which sources they trust.
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That kind of changes the conversation just a bit.
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Think about it.
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If someone already knows your brand, trusts your content, and wants to hear what you have to say, they are more likely to seek you out.
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Now I do want to be clear that preferred sources isn't the same thing as choosing which websites appear in every generated answer.
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And Google hasn't given us the actual number of people, you know, using it.
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But I do think this reinforces something that I have been saying across the podcast and everywhere I've been talking about this.
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Brand marketing is becoming an important part of AI search visibility.
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It's not enough to just create good content that an AI engine can retrieve.
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You also need people to recognize your brand and trust the information that you're putting out.
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And, you know, also take the initiative to do something like select you as a preferred source.
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For now, I'd keep my eye on this one and see what happens to organic traffic as Google rolls out these changes.
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And if you're a publisher, I'd also be thinking about how you're building an audience that wants to hear from you specifically.
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Okay, moving on to Walmart.
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And I think this one is a pretty big deal for where AI Commerce is heading.
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On October 21st, so just yesterday, Walmart launched something called Agent Gateway.
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Essentially, it's an MCP server that allows approved AI agents to search Walmart's inventory and complete purchases on behalf of the shopper.
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If you're not familiar with MCP, it stands for Model Context Protocol, and it's a way for AI applications to
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connect with outside tools and systems.
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So in this case, an AI assistant can connect with Walmart's shopping infrastructure, look for products, and help complete a transaction.
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Think about how different that is from how we normally shop online.
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Right now, if you use an AI agent or an AI engine for this, you might ask ChatGPT to recommend a product.
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It'll give you a few options, maybe some links, and then you go to the retailer's website to make the purchase.
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Or if you're like me and you are a Walmart shopper, you just go straight to their website or their app and then spend forever scrolling through results to find what you want to buy.
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But with something like Walmart's Agent Gateway, the process can happen through the AI assistant.
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And next month, Walmart is planning to roll out something called agent profiles.
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This is where shoppers can authorize different AI assistants separately and control what those assistants are allowed to do.
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For example, you could require approval before every purchase, or you could give an assistant a spending limit, or you could give it a repeatable shopping list for your groceries.
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Each authorized assistant would also have its own order history.
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And if we think about AI assisted shopping now as we know it, where an agent or an engine gives a recommendation and then it's on the user to go do the rest compared to what Walmart is doing, there's a really big difference between asking an AI assistant to recommend something and then giving it permission to spend your money.
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But here's the part that really caught my attention.
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While Walmart is building a way for AI agents to access its shopping systems, Amazon has been blocking certain third-party AI shopping agents.
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So we're seeing two very different approaches to authentic commerce.
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Amazon is restricting access, while Walmart is creating a way for approved agents to come in and just complete those transactions.
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I don't think Walmart's approach should be confused with just letting any AI bot access to its website.
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They're building controls around which agents can connect and what those agents can actually do.
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Which brings me back to something I have been talking about recently, which is the difference between AI search visibility and agent readiness.
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Because let's say that you are a retailer, you've invested in GEO, your products are showing up in Chat GPT recommendations, you are getting mentioned when people ask
for the best products in your category.
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That's great.
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But what happens when that same customer asks their AI assistant to go ahead and buy the product?
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Can the assistant actually do that?
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Does it have access to your inventory?
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Does it know whether the product is available?
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Can it complete the transaction?
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Because those are entirely different questions from whether your brand is just being recommended.
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I think this is something that more businesses are going to have to start thinking about.
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We are so focused right now on getting brands into AI-generated answers, and understandably so, but AI agents are starting to do more than just answer those questions.
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And if that continues, the way brands make their products and services accessible to these systems is going to matter just as much as whether they're being recommended in the first place.
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However, if you listen to the Agentic Commerce episode with AJ Gergic, he predicted that Agentic Commerce would increase this holiday shopping season.
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I think we are starting to see that.
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But I don't think we're at a point where every business needs to run out and build an MCP server tomorrow.
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But I do think it is something to start paying attention to how these systems interact with your business.
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Okay, last update to give you, and this one is actually pretty funny because I talked about it on last week's episode.
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If you listen to that news update, you'll remember that I mentioned chat GPT referral traffic was suddenly disappearing from analytics.
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Well, within just a few hours of that episode going live, OpenAI rolled out a fix.
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So apparently all I needed to do was just complain about it on the podcast.
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I'm kidding, obviously, but the timing was pretty funny.
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Anyway, here's what happened.
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After the GPT-6 rollout on October 7th, ChatGPT stopped adding the UTM parameter to outbound links.
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And at the same time, referral information was also missing.
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So between October 8th and October 15th, traffic that would normally have been attributed to ChatGPT was showing up as direct traffic instead.
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Now if you were looking at your analytics during that week, you might have noticed that Chat GPT traffic suddenly dropped, and maybe direct traffic increased around the same time.
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But without
knowing about this bug, you might have just assumed that something had changed with your visibility.
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Adobe looked at traffic across roughly 500 pages and found that ChatGPT attributed visits had dropped by about 31,000 per day.
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Direct traffic on those same pages increased by approximately 26,000 visits per day.
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That's a pretty significant change.
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And while those numbers don't match exactly, they give us a pretty good indication of what was happening.
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OpenAI confirmed that it was a bug and the fix started rolling out on October 15th.
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So the UTM parameter is back.
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But as always, there's a catch.
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The referral information is reportedly still missing on most Chat GPT clicks, which means if you are relying on referral data alone to measure traffic from Chat GPT, you could still be missing some of those visits.
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So what does this mean for marketers?
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First, I'd go back into GA4 and look at what happened between October 8th and October 15th.
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If you saw a drop in Chat GPT traffic during that period, make a note of the bug in your reporting.
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And if you saw an increase in direct traffic around the same time, I think that's also worth looking into.
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Now I am not saying that every direct visit during that week came from ChatGPT.
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We just don't have the data to make that assumption.
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But we do know that a tracking issue was causing some of those visits to be misattributed.
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And I think this is a really good reminder of why we need to be careful about how we were measuring AI search performance.
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Imagine you are reporting to your results for a client or your brand.
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Maybe you've been tracking referral traffic from ChatGPT and now suddenly that number drops by 30 or 40%.
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If you don't know this is a bug, you just might assume that the strategy isn't working anymore.
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Which means maybe you start making changes to your content.
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Maybe you start questioning whether ChatGPT is still recommending your brand.
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When the problem in reality just might be that it has absolutely nothing to do with your visibility.
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It's just a tracking issue.
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That's why I don't really love relying on a single metric to determine whether an AI search visibility strategy is working.
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We also need to look at whether the brands are being mentioned, whether they are being
cited, and how often they are appearing in relevant recommendations.
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And even then, we have to remember that these platforms are changing constantly.
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Sometimes those changes affect how brands show up, sometimes they affect how users interact with the results, and sometimes apparently they just break our analytics for a week.
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So if you are looking over your October performance, keep that October 8th through October 15th window in mind, and make sure you are looking at the chat GPT UTM parameter rather than depending entirely on referral information.
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Okay, that's it.
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Let's close this one out.
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I think the interesting thing about all three updates this week is that we are starting to see more attention on what happens after a brand gets mentioned in AI search.
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Google is trying to make it easier for people to click through to the sources behind AI-generated answers.
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Walmart is building infrastructure that allows AI agents to actually buy products.
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And ChatGPT's tracking issue is reminding us that even when people do click through, we might not be measuring that traffic correctly.
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And I think that's where this GEO conversation needs to go next.
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We need to understand what people are actually doing after they see those recommendations.
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Because at the end of the day, we are not investing in AI Search visibility just to see our brand name appear in a chat GPT or an AI-generated answer.
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We want that visibility to lead to something.
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And I think these three stories are a pretty good reminder that there's a lot more to AI Search than just getting cited.
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That's all I've got for this week's news episode.
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If you want to keep up with what's happening in AI Search, make sure you're subscribed to Found in AI.
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And if you'd like more of my thoughts on what all this means for your content and marketing strategy and all the new research that's coming out, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter, the visibility report.
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The link is in the show notes.
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And one final quick reminder before I let you go.
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I am hosting a free live training on November 5th at 1 p.m.
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Eastern Time.
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It's called How to Build an AI Search Visibility Strategy.
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If you've been trying to figure out where to start with DEO, how to measure whether your brand is actually showing up in AI Search and what you should be prioritizing, this training is for you.
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And again, it is a free one.
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We're going to talk about how to establish a baseline, how to identify gaps in your AI visibility, and then figure out what makes sense to work on first.
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I'll leave time for questions too, so if you have them, break them.
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It's all completely free.
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You can register at Cassie Clark Marketing.com/slash AI Search Training.
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I'll also put the link in the show notes.
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Okay, now really, that's it for this update.
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Thanks for listening to Found and AI.
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I will see you on the next one.
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Until then, stay visible.