Welcome to this week’s Pulse: Updates affect how links appear in AI search results, what types of sites gained or lost visibility in the March core update, and how Google’s Preferred Sources feature works in new markets.
This is what matters to you and your work.
Google Adds More Links and Link Context to AI Search
Google announced five updates to how links appear in AI previews and AI mode.
Highlights: The updates add more inline links, more links at the end of some AI responses, public forum discussion previews, and desktop hover previews.
Why it matters
Inline links placed next to the text they support could change the calculation of clicks for cited pages in the AI results. Until now, most AI Overview quotes were grouped at the bottom of the answer, where they competed with each other and were easy to ignore. Placing them closer to the relevant phrase gives each link more context.
Public discussion previews add a new surface for content on Reddit, forums, and similar platforms. If your brand or product is discussed on these platforms, this content can now appear alongside AI-generated responses with your name attached.
Read our full coverage: Google Adds More Links and Link Context to AI Search
Core Update Data Shows Aggregators Losing Ground
An analysis by Amsive found that aggregators and user-generated content platforms lost search visibility in the United States after Google’s recent core update, while proprietary brand sites and government domains gained visibility. Lily Ray, VP of SEO and AI Research at Amsive, examined over 2,000 domains using data from the SISTRIX Visibility Index.
Highlights: YouTube lost 567 SISTRIX viewability points, the largest drop for a single domain in the dataset, and about 30% larger than Wikipedia’s drop in December. Reddit lost 64 points, Instagram 48, and X 46. In travel, OTAs such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Expedia declined, while hotel chains gained. Ray notes that some losers, including Reddit and Indeed, bounced back shortly after the deployment window closed.
Why it matters
Compare these category breakdowns to your vertical. If you’re in travel, healthcare, finance, or work, Amsive shows which sites won or lost. This helps distinguish whether the update affected your vertical as a whole or your site specifically.
The YouTube figure grabs the headlines, but is back to pre-March levels, making it a correction rather than a new low. The trend across verticals is more telling. Domains that own the product or service tend to win, while aggregators or discussion platforms tend to lose.
Amsive interprets Google as favoring “the company that owns the thing” rather than “the platform to discuss it.” This matches the data, but that’s Amsive’s view, not Google’s.
What SEO Professionals Say
Lily Ray, VP of SEO and AI Search at Amsive, wrote on LinkedIn:
“This was a strange baseline update, but I think the key takeaways are consistent with the broader trends we’re seeing in Google Search: a desire to elevate companies that sell the product/service, not companies that ‘write about them.’
Read our full coverage: Google’s March core update moved visibility away from aggregators
Google’s Favorite Sources feature expands to all languages
Google has updated its Search Central documentation to indicate that the Preferred Sources feature is now available in all languages supported by Google Search.
Highlights: Favorite Sources lets users choose which publishers they want to see more often in Top Stories and Google Discover. It is available in all languages supported by Google Search and has added translated downloadable button elements for publishers. The feature works as a user-controlled signal alongside Google’s ranking systems.
Why it matters
You can use your site’s Favorite Sources button to influence how your site appears in Discover. This expansion is particularly important for non-English speaking markets, as the feature was previously only available in English, limiting multilingual publishers.
Read our full coverage: Google Preferred Sources is Now a Global SEO Signal
Mueller says Vibe Coding won’t manage your SEO for you
John Mueller and Martin Splitt, members of the Google Search Relations team, discussed mood coding websites in a recent episode of Unofficial research. Both found that AI coding tools could produce working sites quickly, but good SEO still required specific technical direction.
Highlights: Mueller said vague prompts like “add SEO” lead to vague results. He compared vibe coding to working with a developer who doesn’t specialize in research. The sites he built produced reasonable HTML that wouldn’t stand out for its flavor code. Mueller named Claude Code and Gemini CLI as his current tools.
Why it matters
Mueller’s experience suggests that these tools handle HTML structure and layout quite well, but they don’t make informed choices about canonicals, sitemaps, or crawling without specific instructions.
Mueller has previously reported similar deficiencies in mood-coded sites. He reviewed a vibe-coded Bento grid generator on Reddit and found crawling issues, outdated meta tags, and content stored in JavaScript files that search engines couldn’t access.
Read our full coverage: Google’s Mueller: Vibe Coding will not manage your SEO for you
Ask Jeeves has disappeared after nearly 30 years of searching
Ask.com, the search engine launched under the name Ask Jeeves, has shut down. Parent company IAC has ended its research activities as part of a broader refocusing.
Highlights: Ask Jeeves was founded in 1996 with a natural language question format and a cartoon butler mascot. IAC acquired the company in 2005, dropped the Jeeves brand, and in 2010 shut down the web crawler and outsourced primary research. The farewell message on Ask.com ended: “The spirit of Jeeves lives on. »
Why it matters
Ask Jeeves was the first search engine built on the principle that users should be able to enter complete questions rather than keywords. This idea didn’t save the company, but it describes what Google is currently building with AI Mode and AI Previews. The search engine that pioneered conversational search closed its doors the same year that conversational search became the direction of the industry.
The closure marks the end of one of the last recognizable consumer search brands of the pre-Google era.
Read our full coverage: Ask Jeeves has disappeared after nearly 30 years of searching
Theme of the week: The identity of the source matters more
Every story this week comes back to the identity of the source.
Google adds labels, previews and signals to links. Amsive’s analysis shows that visibility is evolving towards brands that own products or services. Preferred Sources allows users to tell Google which publishers they trust.
If your site is the original source, this week’s signals all point in the same direction. Google creates more paths to you. If your site summarizes what others produce, the math becomes more difficult.
Best stories of the week:
Featured image: PeopleImages/Shutterstock; Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
