What happened in SEO & AI search news this month?
Each month, Lumar’s in-house tech SEO experts hand-pick some of the SEO industry’s top news stories from across the web to keep you up-to-date on all things SEO and website optimization.
For our October 2026 SEO & GEO/AEO news roundup, the top headlines include:
- Google announced updates to AI Mode and AI Overviews designed to drive more traffic to websites — including more prominent links, image thumbnails, expanded news carousels and tests highlighting official sites.
- Google’s September 2026 spam update completed its rollout on October 8th — but significant ranking volatility continued throughout the month, alongside confirmation that Google is using AI to identify low-quality content.
- New data shows AI Overviews now appear on over 80% of tracked branded queries and 88% of commercial searches — highlighting the growing presence of AI-generated answers across branded and commercial search results.
- New research reveals AI referral traffic remains significantly below Google organic search — with ChatGPT generating just 0.62% as many sessions as Google, while Google drove approximately 27 times more conversions than all tested LLMs combined.
- Google launched Universal Cart in the US across AI Mode and Gemini — allowing shoppers to save products from multiple retailers in one cart, with price-drop alerts, promotional codes and integrated shopping features.
Dive into the details behind the SEO and GEO/AEO headlines this month below…
Google to add more links to AI Mode and AI Overviews
Google has announced changes designed to send more people from AI Mode and AI Overviews to the wider web. This includes placing links higher in responses more often and expanding news carousels to more locations and languages. Related article links now carry image thumbnails, while Google is also testing a section at the top of some answers that surfaces official sites.
Despite these major changes, GSC still shows no click data for AI features. Google has pledged to add metrics over time, but for now, site owners will still need to dig into analytics and log data to judge any benefits from these updates.
(Source: News from Google Blog)
The September spam update ends, but rankings don’t settle
Google released the September 2026 spam update on 24 September, alongside the usual predicted timeframe of two weeks. The Search Status Dashboard marked it complete on 8 October; however, John Mueller warned it would likely take longer than some recent updates.
High SERP volatility has continued long after the rollout completed. Search Engine Roundtable tracked unconfirmed ranking swings on 16 October, 20–21 October and again on 23–24 October, when many tracking tools spiked, and forum posters reported sharp drops and Google Discover problems.
What’s more, Google said at Search Central Live in Barcelona that the spam team is now using AI to help catch more low-quality content. Many believe the two trends are related, with AI now
(Source: Google Search Status Dashboard)
AI Overviews now cover most branded and commercial searches
AI Overviews appeared on more than 80% of tracked branded queries by late September, up from about 26% at the start of the month, according to data from DemandSphere.
A Semrush study also found a similar pattern for commercial searches, with AI Overviews appearing for 88% in August 2026, up from 45.75% last year.
“Best X for Y” searches were the most likely to contain AI Overviews, while ecommerce sites saw the biggest rise at an industry level. Neither study measured clicks or tracked changes in CTR. Brands should check what AI Overviews say about their own name and “best”, “review” and “vs” searches, alongside keeping watch on click-through rates for those queries in Search Console.
(Source: Search Engine Land,Search Engine Land)
AI referral traffic still falls well below Google levels
New analysis from Marie Haynes shows that AI assistants still send far less traffic to the world’s biggest sites than Google. Haynes analysed 12 months of GA4 data from 100 sites (more than 145 million sessions) and found ChatGPT sent 0.62% as many sessions as Google organic search. ChatGPT visitors converted slightly better on average, but Google still drove about 27 times as many conversions as all the tested LLMs combined. AI visibility still shapes what people learn about a brand, but for now, site owners should size AI referral work against their own analytics.
(Source: Search Engine Land)
Rank trackers struggle as Google appears to ‘poison’ scraped results
Third-party rank tracking has been returning incomplete or incorrect Google data since September, according to reports. Nozzle’s Derek Perkins first described widespread IP blocking of residential proxy networks, more CAPTCHAs and even bad data injected into results served to suspected scrapers. Nozzle reported that 8% of the SERPs it collected were affected. Meanwhile, many large third-party rank trackers published their own notes on the suspected data issues.
Until this settles, treat sudden rank-tracker movements from mid-September onward with caution, and cross-check them against Search Console before reporting them.
(Source: Search Engine Roundtable)
Google’s Universal Cart goes live in the US
Five months after previewing it at I/O, Google has officially launched Universal Cart in the US across Google Search (AI Mode) and the Gemini app. Shoppers can save items from different retailers in one cart that carries over between Search and Gemini.
The cart sends price-drop and back-in-stock alerts based on Google’s Shopping Graph, suggests payment methods by card perks, and surfaces relevant promo codes. For US retailers, accurate Merchant Center feeds and UCP readiness now affect whether products can be bought directly from Google’s results during peak season.
(Source: News from Google Blog)
GPT-6 arrives in ChatGPT, briefly breaking AI referral tracking
OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 in ChatGPT earlier this month, starting with paid plans and reaching Free and Go users the next day. OpenAI says GPT-6 makes better decisions about when to look something up, potentially speeding up results on queries that require live-fetch. It also introduces Intelligent UI, which adds charts, buttons, forms and interactive tools to answers.
After the launch, Adobe’s Cedric Huesler found ChatGPT links were arriving without the utm_source=chatgpt.com tag, so analytics logged them as direct traffic. This has since been confirmed as a bug, so site owners should check the dates when investigating any dip in ChatGPT referrals.
(Source: OpenAI)
More than 400 publications are taking part in Google’s News AI pilot
More than 400 publications are now taking part in Google’s News AI pilot, which pays for content used in experimental Google News features. New partners include Axios, CNN, the Financial Times and Forbes. A separate AI contribution pilot pays some publishers via Search Console when their content contributes significantly to AI answers.
For most publishers, AI licensing isn’t yet a meaningful revenue line, so organic and referral traffic remain the numbers to protect. However, it’ll be interesting to see if and how AI licensing rolls out to smaller publishers over the coming months.
(Source: News from Google Blog)
Search Console now reports on visual search traffic
Google has added a ‘multimodal’ search type filter to Search Console. It covers traffic from Google Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads to Google Search and Chrome’s ‘Search this image’ option. It appears in both the Search results performance report and the Generative AI features report, and only shows if a site gets this kind of traffic.
(Source: Google Search Central Blog)
