When AI tools started taking off, Google faced a serious problem: the risk of its search results being flooded with AI-generated spam. If left unchecked, the world's most-used search engine would lose trust - and with it, revenue. Search drives almost 57% of Alphabet's income, totaling over $198bn annually. And that revenue was at risk. AI spam isn't like old-school SEO spam. It's better written, harder to detect, and convincing enough to fool algorithms.
For most of the last two decades, SEO mostly meant one thing, where you ranked on Google (and occasionally Bing). The customer journey was familiar. Someone searched, scanned a list of links, clicked and explored. Now the journey is increasingly 'ask, get an answer, take action.' And the platforms shaping that journey include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google itself, which is inserting AI summaries, what Google calls AI Overviews, into search results.
Bing is testing a new report within Bing Webmaster Tools named AI Performance. AI Performance shows you how many citations you are getting from Microsoft Copilot and partners. But while it shows you citations (i.e. impressions), it does not show you clicks from those Bing AI experiences. Microsoft did not announce this but this is something Microsoft is testing with a limited number of trusted beta testers.