Welcome to edition #6 of Wired For Visibility, our fortnightly wrap of what's happening across SEO, GEO, AEO and AI visibility, and what it all means for brands.

Let's get into it.

Your ad copy. Now written by AI using everyone else's opinions.

Google's been quietly adding AI-generated review summaries to Search ads, and Australia is officially on the list.

Essentially, Google's AI pulls together reviews about your business from across the web, then writes a short summary that can appear alongside your Search ads.

The catch? It's not pulling from your carefully crafted brand messaging. It's using what other people are saying about you. And while the summaries are positive-only, you can't edit or approve them.

There's also no dedicated reporting showing when they appear, which reviews they're pulling from, or whether they're actually improving performance.

The feature is available across English-language Search campaigns in Australia, the US, UK and India, excluding sensitive categories like pharmaceuticals. There's nothing to activate, and Google decides when to show one.

So you're paying for the ad, AI's writing part of it, and the internet's supplying the material.

Source: Search Engine Land

Our take: This is a pretty significant shift in how brands need to think about paid media, earned media and reputation management.

We've always known that what other people say about your brand matters. Obviously. But now those opinions can directly influence the messaging appearing in your paid ads, without you having much say in it.

It also reinforces something we've been banging on about for a while. SEO, GEO, earned media and paid media aren't separate conversations anymore. They're increasingly influencing one another.

Reddit's had enough of AI eating its traffic.

Reddit is planning to test a logged-in-only experience in selected markets outside the US, meaning people may soon need an account to access conversations that have traditionally been available to everyone.

The reason? AI search is increasingly using content from platforms like Reddit to answer questions, without necessarily sending people back to the original source.

Which is a bit of a problem when your business relies on people actually visiting your platform.

Reddit has spent years building one of the internet's biggest collections of real human conversations. Those discussions are incredibly valuable to AI platforms looking for authentic opinions, product recommendations and reviews.

But if people can get the answer directly from AI, why would they visit Reddit?

There's also an interesting commercial dynamic here. Reddit reportedly has a multimillion-dollar licensing agreement with Google, giving it access to Reddit content for AI development.

So Reddit's content is valuable enough for AI companies to pay for, but those same AI experiences could be reducing the traffic Reddit earns from search.

Not exactly an ideal arrangement.

Source: Engadget

Our take: Reddit has become an important part of the AI visibility conversation, particularly for consumer brands.

Real customer experiences, recommendations and discussions can influence how AI platforms understand and recommend products. And Reddit is full of them.

If more of that content moves behind login requirements, it could change what AI platforms can access and which sources they rely on.

Our recco? Keep investing in genuine community engagement, but don't rely too heavily on any one platform for AI visibility.

Customer reviews, earned media, relevant publishers and third-party recommendations all help build the broader online reputation that AI platforms draw from.

And keep monitoring which sources are being cited when AI recommends your brand. Those sources could change as platforms become more protective of their content.

AI's stealing your clicks. Or is it?

SEO expert Cyrus Shepard recently ran an experiment to understand how much traffic Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode actually generate.

Using Google Search Console controls, he removed a website from Google's AI features and compared performance before and after.

Before opting out, around 8% of the site's Search impressions came from AI features. The estimated click-through rate from those appearances was just 0.9%.

That's roughly nine clicks for every thousand AI impressions.

Pretty underwhelming.

But after removing the site from AI results, regular organic clicks dropped too.

Shepard's theory is that appearing in an AI answer can increase the likelihood of someone clicking your traditional organic listing further down the page.

He's calling it the Search SERP Halo Effect.

It's worth keeping in mind that this was a single website experiment, and Shepard hasn't published the full traffic volumes or testing period. So it's an interesting finding rather than definitive proof.

Sources: Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Land

Our take: We've been encouraging brands to look beyond AI referral traffic for a while, and this is another reason why.

If your brand appears in an AI answer, the value doesn't necessarily end with someone clicking through from that answer.

It could influence trust, consideration and even the performance of your existing organic listings.

Which makes measuring AI visibility purely through referral traffic a pretty limited approach.

Our recco? Look at AI citations, brand mentions, organic performance and referral traffic together.

And before anyone decides AI visibility isn't worth the effort because the click numbers look small, remember that influencing a purchase decision and generating a website visit aren't always the same thing.

AI's showing up for 88% of buying searches.

Semrush has been tracking 400 commercial keywords in the US, and the results show just how quickly AI Overviews are becoming part of the buying journey.

In September 2025, AI Overviews appeared for 45.75% of those searches.

By August 2026, that figure had climbed to 88%.

The growth is particularly noticeable across searches where consumers are comparing products, researching brands and deciding what to buy.

Across the tracked keywords:

• 96.12% of "best X for Y" searches triggered an AI Overview.

• Over 86% of "brand vs brand" searches triggered one.

• Over 82% of "brand alternatives" searches triggered one.

Review-related searches also saw significant growth, with AI Overview appearances increasing from around 30% to nearly 90%.

The study covered 400 US desktop keywords across banking, ecommerce and software, so these figures aren't representative of every commercial search.

But they do give us a pretty good indication of where things are heading.

Sources: Semrush, Search Engine Land

Our take: For consumer brands, this is arguably one of the most important developments in AI search.

AI is increasingly appearing at the exact moment someone is deciding which product or brand to choose.

And being ranked highly in traditional search results doesn't automatically mean your brand will be recommended in the AI answer.

The sources AI references, and what those sources say about you, matter.

Our recco? Start with your ten most valuable commercial search queries. Look at the AI answers, which brands are being recommended and which websites are being cited.

If your competitors are consistently appearing and you're nowhere to be seen, you've got some work to do.

That might mean better product content, useful comparison pages, stronger third-party reviews or earned media coverage on the publications AI already references.

The goal isn't simply to rank for the search. It's to make sure your brand is part of the answer.

You can tell AI to keep its hands off your content. Sort of.

Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic have agreed to support a common instruction that allows website owners to restrict how their content is used for AI training.

Until now, blocking AI training generally meant managing different instructions for different AI crawlers.

The proposed approach introduces a shared instruction through robots.txt, the file that tells automated crawlers what they can and can't access on your website.

There are two important distinctions here.

AI training involves using website content to develop AI models.

AI grounding involves retrieving content to help generate answers to specific questions. This is where brands can earn citations, recommendations and potential referral traffic.

Ideally, brands should be able to make separate decisions about each.

Microsoft's approach distinguishes between the two, but Google's implementation is more complicated. Blocking training can also affect visibility in Gemini unless Google-Extended is configured separately.

The changes aren't fully operational yet, with Google targeting early 2027 and Microsoft planning to begin in February 2027.

Sources: Bing Blogs, Search Engine Roundtable

Our take: For most consumer brands, being discoverable by AI is a good thing.

If you're a publisher or a business selling proprietary content, there may be legitimate commercial reasons to restrict AI training.

But if you're a retailer, telco, restaurant group or another consumer-facing brand, your website content is generally there to help people discover, understand and choose your products.

And increasingly, AI is part of that discovery process.

Our recco? Before making changes to your robots.txt file, understand exactly what you're blocking and which AI platforms might be affected.

It's also worth checking any automated AI crawler settings through platforms like Cloudflare.

The last thing you want is to spend months improving your AI visibility, only to discover you've accidentally told the bots to bugger off.

More searches. Less money. Google's got a bit of a problem.

Despite all the talk about AI replacing traditional search, people aren't necessarily searching less.

They're searching differently.

According to Google, AI Mode queries are around three times longer than traditional searches, with approximately one in five involving voice, images or documents rather than typed text.

Google is also processing more than 50 billion visual searches every month.

So there's certainly no shortage of search activity.

But Google's reported Search revenue growth has slowed from 19% to 12%, raising questions about how search behaviour is changing and what that means commercially.

Google's response includes expanding advertising opportunities within AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Ads are being introduced to more queries and markets, including follow-up questions within AI experiences.

And while Google has announced further international expansion, it's not yet clear whether Australia is included in the next wave.

Sources: Google, Search Engine Journal

Our take: Search isn't disappearing. It's evolving into something much more conversational, visual and personalised.

Instead of searching for a few keywords, consumers are increasingly asking detailed questions, comparing options and expecting recommendations tailored to their needs.

For brands, that means content needs to do more than target individual keywords. It needs to answer the questions consumers are actually asking.

And with advertising becoming more integrated into AI search experiences, the relationship between paid search, SEO and GEO is only going to get closer.

Our recco? Make sure your paid media and organic search teams are working from the same understanding of how consumers are searching, what questions they're asking and where your brand is appearing.

Because treating paid search, SEO and GEO as separate disciplines is starting to make less and less sense.

A few more bits from the SEO and AI visibility world

Google might be bringing back 100-result search requests.

Google may restore the ability for tools to retrieve 100 search results in a single request. Its removal has contributed to slower and less consistent ranking data, so a return could help improve the reliability of SEO reporting.

Google's cracking down on user-generated spam.

Google updated its guidance on 26 October, encouraging websites that host forums, profiles, comments and other user-generated content to be more proactive about preventing spam from being indexed.

If your website allows users to publish content, it's worth reviewing what's appearing in Search Console.

Discord conversations could soon be appearing in Google Search.

From mid-December, messages in public channels within some of Discord's largest public servers may become searchable through Google.

Private channels and direct messages aren't included, and the change applies to new messages rather than historical conversations.

For brands with active communities on Discord, that's another potential source of organic and AI visibility worth keeping an eye on.

Sources: Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Journal

Google's using customer opinions in paid ads, Reddit's rethinking who gets access to its content, and AI is becoming an increasingly influential part of how consumers discover and compare brands.

If there's one thing connecting all of this, it's that brands have less direct control over how they're represented in search.

What customers say, what publishers write, which sources AI trusts and how platforms choose to present that information are all becoming part of the visibility equation.

Which is why SEO, GEO, AEO, paid media and earned media need to work together.

We'll be back in a fortnight with more news and insights worth discussing.

Until then, stay visible.