Welcome to SEO Pulse: this week’s updates affect how AI Overviews select sources, how far AI search has expanded across industries, and what two search engines now say about optimizing for AI.
Here’s what matters for you and your work.
AI Overview Citations From Top-Ranking Pages Drop To 38%
Ranking in Google’s top 10 is a weaker predictor of being cited in AI Overviews than it was seven months ago, according to an updated Ahrefs analysis of 863,000 keywords and 4 million AI Overview URLs.
Key Facts: Previously, Ahrefs found 76% of cited pages also ranked in the top 10 for the same query. That number is now 38%. The remaining citations are split almost evenly between positions 11 through 100 (31.2%) and pages beyond position 100 (31.0%). A separate BrightEdge analysis from February put the top 10 overlap even lower at about 17%, though the two studies use different methodologies and datasets.
Why This Matters
Seven months ago, ranking in the top 10 and getting cited in AI Overviews were mostly the same goal. Now, roughly two out of three AI Overview citations come from pages that don’t rank in the top 10 organic results for the same query.
Ahrefs attributes part of the gap to improved parsing, meaning the two datasets aren’t directly comparable. But Ahrefs also points to Google’s query fan-out process, where a single search gets split into multiple sub-queries, with citations drawn from pages that appear most often across those results. Google upgraded AI Overviews to Gemini 3 globally in January, which Ahrefs notes as additional timing context.
YouTube is the most cited domain in AI Overviews overall and has grown 34% over the past six months, according to Ahrefs’ Brand Radar data. SE Ranking and Ahrefs’ own AI Mode study from December both showed the same pattern.
What People Are Saying
Louise Linehan, content marketer at Ahrefs and author of the study, summarized the core finding in a LinkedIn post:
“Google is citing far fewer pages straight from the original SERP: ~76% in July 2025 vs. ~38% today.”
Read our full coverage: Google AI Overview Citations From Top-Ranking Pages Drop Sharply
AI Overviews Now Trigger On Nearly Half Of All Searches
BrightEdge research shows AI Overviews grew 58% year-over-year and now appear on approximately 48% of all tracked queries.
Key Facts: Education queries went from triggering AI Overviews 18% of the time to 83%. B2B technology grew from 36% to 82%. Restaurants went from 10% to 78%. Healthcare, already high at 72%, edged up to 88%. Despite those numbers, classic search results still appear for 52% of all queries, meaning organic rankings remain the entire experience for most searches.
Why This Matters
The 52% of queries still without any AI Overview may matter more than the 58% growth rate for how you plan your time. Education, B2B technology, healthcare, and restaurant queries are now dominated by AI Overviews. Verticals with lower AI Overview frequency still depend primarily on organic rankings.
BrightEdge also reported about 17% top 10 citation overlap, consistent with the Ahrefs data above. Roger Montti noted in his coverage that AI Overviews now consume more than 1,200 pixels on average, pushing the first organic result below the fold on a standard desktop screen. Even when your query space still triggers classic results, the visual real estate has changed.
What People Are Saying
Grant Bartel, senior SEO manager at Walker Sands, wrote in a LinkedIn post:
“You’re not just competing for blue links anymore. You’re competing to be cited, summarized, and surfaced inside the AI Overview.”
Read our full coverage: Google AI Overviews Surges Across 9 Industries
Google Removes JavaScript Accessibility Guidance, Calls It Outdated
Google removed its “Design for accessibility” section from its JavaScript SEO basics documentation, saying the advice was no longer helpful.
Key Facts: The removed section advised developers to test sites with JavaScript turned off and view them in text-only browsers like Lynx. Google’s changelog entry said the information was “out of date” and that JavaScript content is no longer “making it harder for Google Search.” Google also said most assistive technologies now work with JavaScript. Google has updated this page several times since late 2025.
Why This Matters
Testing with JavaScript disabled was a standard recommendation for years, and Google’s own docs were the citation backing it up. That citation no longer exists.
The same page still describes an additional rendering step for JavaScript content before indexing, and still says server-side rendering is faster for users and crawlers. But each recent update to this page has replaced a broad warning with specific implementation guidance. Google added canonical URL advice in December and clarified noindex behavior for JavaScript pages around the same time.
One caveat: This applies to Googlebot. Other crawlers, including those used by AI platforms, may still handle JavaScript-rendered content differently.
Read our full coverage: Google Removes JavaScript SEO Warning, Says It’s Outdated
Bing Rewrites Webmaster Guidelines To Cover Copilot And AI Answers
Microsoft rewrote the Bing Webmaster Guidelines from scratch, extending coverage beyond traditional search to include how content appears in Copilot’s AI-generated answers and grounding results.
Key Facts: The rewrite spells out how each meta directive affects AI experiences. Bing’s guidelines say NOARCHIVE prevents content from being used in Copilot responses and grounding results. The abuse sections were renamed and expanded. “Keyword Stuffing” became “Keyword Stuffing and Artificially Engineered Language,” and a new “Prompt Injection and AI Manipulation” section covers attempts to interfere with Bing’s language models.
Bing also softened its stance on AI-generated content and noted that a decline in clicks doesn’t always mean visibility has dropped.
Why This Matters
The directive-by-directive breakdown gives you documented controls for managing how content appears in Copilot answers. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode follow the same preview controls used in Search, but hasn’t published anything at this level of detail.
NOARCHIVE is one example. Bing’s guidelines say that the tag prevents content from being used in Copilot responses and grounding results, which goes beyond cached page access. Combined with the AI Performance dashboard Bing launched two weeks ago, you now have both the controls and the measurement for managing AI search visibility on Bing’s side.
Bing also codified prompt injection as a new abuse category. Microsoft published research in February documenting 31 companies that hid prompt injections inside “Summarize with AI” buttons aimed at biasing AI recommendations.
Read our full coverage: Bing Adds GEO To Official Guidelines, Expands AI Abuse Definitions
Theme Of The Week: The Gap Between Rankings And AI Visibility Is Getting Wider, And More Measurable
What works for traditional organic rankings and what works for AI search visibility are becoming two different conversations.
Ahrefs shows the top 10 citation overlap falling from 76% to 38% in seven months. BrightEdge puts it at 17% using a different dataset.
AI Overviews now appear on nearly half of all tracked queries, meaning the gap affects a growing share of search traffic. Google’s JavaScript SEO documentation has steadily trimmed older warnings and replaced them with more specific implementation guidance. And Bing is giving you both the directive controls and the citation data to manage visibility in AI answers, while Google’s tooling for AI-specific measurement remains limited.
The data and tools for understanding AI search are becoming more specific, while the relationship between traditional SEO and AI visibility is becoming less predictable.
More Resources:
- Google AI Overviews Impact On Publishers & How To Adapt Into 2026
- Beyond Rankings: Important Metrics To Measure For SEO Success
- The State Of AI In Marketing
Featured Image: Cheer-J-ane/Shutterstock; Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
