This week’s news updates highlight how AI-driven search is reshaping the fundamentals of visibility.
Google’s latest discussions shed light on how AI Mode now evaluates and recommends businesses, shifting discovery from simple keyword matching toward multi-step reasoning and contextual understanding.
Meanwhile, Google is retiring certain lesser-used features and structured data types, signaling a continued move toward simplification and standardization in the search results.
New data from SEMrush also shows how brand visibility in AI search behaves very differently from traditional rankings, and Google issued a reminder for sites using cloud-hosted assets to ensure proper Search Console verification.
In a recent interview on the Silicon Valley Girl podcast, Robby Stein, Google’s VP of Product for Search, explained how Google’s new AI Mode changes the way information is discovered, ranked, and recommended. The conversation offered one of the clearest looks yet at how Google is merging large-model reasoning with Google’s Knowledge Graph, Shopping Graph, Maps data, local listings, image search, and real-world business information.
Stein emphasized a central point: search isn’t going away — but the way people search is changing. AI Mode lets users ask multi-sentence, context-heavy queries and complete tasks (not just receive answers), meaning the entry points and decision steps in the search journey are evolving.
1. How AI Mode “Reasons” to Produce Answers
AI Mode doesn’t just return a single set of search results. Instead, it performs what Stein calls “query fan-out”:
This means Google isn’t replacing search — AI Mode is search, expanded.
2. Google’s Knowledge Sources Go Beyond the Web
Unlike standalone chatbots, Google can draw on:
This gives AI Mode context and grounding, helping it recommend places, stores, products, and real-world services — not just text answers.
3. Local Recommendations Now Understand Intent
When a user asks:
“Find a cozy Italian spot for a date night in my neighborhood”
Google evaluates:
This shifts local SEO from “rank for keywords” to match real-world attributes to human goals.
4. Agentic Actions: AI Can Book, Call, and Compare
Stein demonstrated:
This is significant:
Businesses without strong websites can still be selected — if their business profile and contact info are correct.
Local SEO now includes:
Answer your phone. Keep your hours updated. Maintain real-world consistency.
5. Personalization Will Be Opt-In
Google plans to let users allow AI Mode to draw from:
But only if the user chooses it.
Early personalization is already available in Search Labs for:
6. Ads Are Not Going Away — They’re Evolving
Stein confirmed that:
Expect:
7. PR & Reputation Matter More in the AI Era
AI uses the same signals people do when evaluating credibility:
This means:
Digital PR becomes a visibility engine — not just a credibility play.
If your business is talked about, AI can find you.
8. Search Behavior Is Shifting to Longer, Conversational Queries
People are asking:
This is where content strategy must adapt:
| What’s Changing | What to Do |
| Search queries are longer and more natural | Write content around questions, not just keywords |
| AI Mode uses business profile data heavily | Keep Google Business Profile complete & updated |
| Mentions in reputable content influence AI recommendations | Invest in digital PR & earned citations |
| AI can now book/call/compare providers | Ensure pricing, availability, and contact info are accurate |
| Visual + multimodal search is rising fast | Add original images, labeled sections, structured data |
| Ads will still matter — just in new formats | Prepare for conversational and multimodal ad placement |
Stein’s message is clear: search isn’t disappearing — it is expanding into AI-powered reasoning, personalization, and real-world task completion. Businesses that invest in credibility, structure their information clearly, and understand how users actually express needs will be best positioned for discovery. The future of visibility belongs to brands that are both useful to people and legible to AI.
Watch the full interview below:
Google announced its plan to remove various “lesser-used” structured-data types and search page features as part of its push to simplify the results page and improve efficiency.
According to the official blog post on the Google Developers site, starting January 2026 Google will “remove support for the structured data types in Search Console and its API.”
For webmasters, content teams, and SEO professionals, these updates mean that some previously implemented structured data may no longer trigger enhanced displays or reporting in Search Console. That doesn’t necessarily mean rankings will drop—but the visibility features associated with certain markup may disappear, and dashboards relying on them can need adjusting. Google emphasised that while indexing and ranking are not being changed for these types, the user-facing features and their measurement may no longer apply.
Sites that currently use practice-problem or dataset markup should review its purpose: if the markup exists solely for enhanced result display in general search but the feature is being retired, it may be prudent to remove or repurpose it. Also, review analytics and dashboards: if you rely on reports tied to deprecated markup, adjust alerting and measurement systems so you’re not caught off guard once support ends in January 2026.
Google’s move to streamline search features and structured data types reflects the direction of a more efficient and simplified search ecosystem—one that favours high-value, broadly used features over niche enhancements. For SEO practitioners, this is a timely reminder that tech debt (old markup, unused features, legacy dashboards) can become a liability. Staying current with documentation, audit-proofing your markup, and aligning with Google’s stated feature set remains critical for visible and stable performance.
SEMrush recently launched its AI Visibility Index, analyzing brand mention and source-diversity trends across two major AI search models—ChatGPT and Google AI Mode—over the months of August through October 2025. The data digs into how many brands get mentioned by the models, which domains are cited as sources, and how stable visibility is over time.
The study highlights that AI search visibility is not identical to traditional search visibility—brand mentions and source prominence behave differently across models. For marketers:
The SEMrush AI Visibility Index offers a revealing snapshot of how brand visibility is evolving in the AI-driven search era. As models like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode reshape discovery and recommendations, “being visible” means more than ranking well—it means being mentioned responsibly, cited authoritatively, and ready to be recommended. For SEO and digital marketing teams, adapting to this visibility landscape is becoming not optional, but essential.
Read the full report here.
John Mueller site owners on Bluesky to verify any cloud-hosting hostnames (e.g., buckets, CDNs) in Search Console when they host assets like images, videos or static files.
Many websites serve assets from third-party clouds (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage) on hostnames such as bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com or storage.googleapis.com. If these hosts aren’t verified under your Search Console property, Google may not attribute crawl data, indexing issues or Safe Browsing notices to your domain — meaning you could miss alerts or data affecting your visibility.
If you skip this step:
In a world where sites increasingly rely on cloud infrastructure and edge delivery networks, verifying the hosting layer in Search Console is a simple but essential technical-SEO move. By bringing all your resources — web pages, images, videos and static files — under properties you control, you ensure visibility, alerts and reporting remain consolidated. This may not directly boost rankings, but it strengthens your foundation for reliable indexing, clean migration paths and robust monitoring.
As AI-powered search becomes the default experience, the way we think about optimization, visibility, and authority continues to evolve. The theme across all of this week’s updates is clear: clarity, credibility, and structure matter more than ever. Whether it’s how AI Mode interprets intent, how visibility shifts across models, or how technical setup influences indexing — the fundamentals still apply, just in new forms. We’ll continue tracking these changes as they unfold, so you can stay prepared and optimized for the search landscape ahead.
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