AI Search, Users, and News: A trove of data from LM Arena offers a glimpse into user search behavior. A few sources garnered the majority of impressions. (Nick Diakopoulos, Generative AI in the Newsroom)

Google steady but social and direct referrals are down: Chartbeat data shows traffic trends to 565 US and UK publishers since 2019 (Charlotte Tobitt, PressGazette)

“There’s no getting around the decline in traffic”: Another apocalyptic roundup on what’s happening with search. (Klaudia Jaźwińska, Columbia Journalism Review)

AI Mode has over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S. and India, says Google. (Abner Li, 9to5Google)

Surprising no one, new report from The Pew Research Center says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks. (Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica)

You shall not pass… unless you pay: Cloudflare has launched a private beta enabling customers to allow, charge, or block bot-access to their content. For it to work, bot operators such as OpenAI or Google would have to use a new protocol named Web Bot Auth and be willing to pay.

Google AI Mode Live In US: Tests Deep Search, Live Search, Personalization, Custom Charts, Shopping & Agentic. And no, Search Console data will not include breakdowns for AI Mode and AI Overviews. (Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable)

Another fun one: Cloudflare CEO warns of AI-driven “existential threat” to publishers as search traffic dwindles amid bot-fueled content skimming. (Christine Wang, Axios)

The rise of retrieval bots raises questions about data ownership, monetization, and the future of the open web. (Nitasha Tiku, Washington Post)

Google’s AI Mode could deal a devastating blow to the web’s business model. (Thomas Germain, BBC)

Metrics mutate: SEO rankings and clicks out, “embedding relevance” and “chunk retrieval” in as GenAI rewrites the rules of engagement. (Duane Forrester Decodes)

Google tests NotebookLM’s chatty AI podcast on Search.

SEO agency analyzes 75k AI Overviews, finds that one-fifth cited media as sources. 31 percent came from BBC, NYT, and CNN.

Google’s new AI chatbot mimics Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, prompting questions about the future of information discovery. (Tripp Mickle, New York Times)