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.
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.
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. OpenAI will be testing ads in ChatGPT very soon. Google's Gemini 3 Pro now powers some AI Overviews. Surprise, surprise, Google is appealing the search monopoly ruling. Google warns that using free subdomian hosts is not a good idea. Google also said that comment link spam won't help or hurt your site.
At its core, an SEO audit is a step-by-step review of your website's technical health, content quality, and search visibility. An SEO audit identifies technical, on-page, content, and link issues on a website. It helps SEO teams identify, prioritize, and fix the issues that block traffic, rankings, and, importantly, conversions. Businesses and SEO teams should create audits to identify opportunities that advance business goals and growth.
