An OpenAI executive’s volume estimate rests on a generous definition of a search, two informal tests suggest AI Mode flight answers send clicks only to Google’s own product, and reporting tools and help pages changed in ways that can alter what teams think they see.
Who Gets The Click: AI Answers Keep Users Close
Two items today ask what a search is and where the click goes once an AI answer replaces the results page.
- OpenAI Puts ChatGPT Search at Roughly One Fifth of Google’s Volume An OpenAI executive, Adam Fry, estimates Google sees about five times ChatGPT’s search-style demand, and he counts every web lookup inside a chat as a search. He did not say which Google figure or time period the comparison uses, so the ratio is directional and measures activity in ChatGPT, not visits sent to publishers.
- AI Mode Flight Answers Linked Only to Google Flights in Two Informal Tests Barry Schwartz and Natzir each found that asking AI Mode about flights returned links to Google Flights and nothing else. Both are informal checks with no published method, so travel publishers and airlines have a gap worth measuring for themselves, not a proven loss.
Read The Dashboard Twice: When The Tool Changes The Story
A reporting oddity and a rewritten help entry both ask site owners to check their own data before drawing conclusions.
- Search Console Clicks Spike on Some Sites, and It May Be a Bug Clicks jumped in the Performance report on some sites while impressions stayed flat, and in one case the API and web interface disagreed. Sources split between a bug and bot traffic, and Google has not commented, so hold the numbers back from client decks for now.
- Google Rewrites Its “Crawled, Not Indexed” Help Text The Search Console entry now calls the status common and not necessarily a problem, and it drops the old line about the URL possibly being indexed later. Quality is still not mentioned, so the documentation leaves open whether thin content is the reason Google skipped a page.
Controls And Switches: What Google Lets You Turn Off
One announcement puts defaults in the hands of school administrators, and one answer from Mueller shows how narrow a robots.txt fix can be.
- Google Defaults Search and Gemini to Off for K-12 Student Accounts Google announced that Search and its Gemini products will stay off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators switch them on, alongside a Guided Learning pilot in Search. Google gave no switch-off date, and the stated rationale is its own account of consulting schools.
- Mueller: Robots.txt Can Hide a Third-Party Popup Script From Googlebot John Mueller said disallowing one legally required age-verification popup script in robots.txt would generally work, provided pages still load properly without it. The advice covers that single third-party script, and he would not block a JavaScript file that handles many jobs.
Today’s Quick Hits
- Performance Max may now hold back brand queries for Search campaigns A Google Ads help page says Performance Max may filter navigational and brand searches, so confirm a funded brand Search campaign is live.
- Google ad tags in server GTM will take full IP addresses in January A notice to advertisers says Ads, DV360, SA360, and CM360 tags in server containers shift on Jan. 11, 2027, while Analytics tags keep redacting.
- Update: SE Ranking finds unrelated Google results match one query word SE Ranking’s 10,000-keyword analysis says unrelated listings that echo a single word cluster at position 9 or lower, so check page 2 before blaming a drop.
- Google Ads asset scheduling now accepts weekday and weekend groups Advertisers can pick day ranges and stack several schedules on one asset, though the report rests on one practitioner’s screenshot.
- Google may be testing a search bar without the AI Mode button One unreplicated sighting from Len Raleigh shows the button missing, and Barry Schwartz could not reproduce it.