Welcome to SEO Pulse of the Week: Updates impact how links appear in AI search results, where organic clicks go, and what languages ChatGPT uses to find sources.
Here you will find out what is important for you and your work.
Google is redesigning links in AI overviews and AI mode
Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, announced on X that AI Overviews and AI Mode are getting a redesigned link experience on both desktop and mobile.
Important facts: On desktop, groups of links now appear in a pop-up when you hover over them, showing site names, favorites, and short descriptions. Google is also introducing more descriptive and eye-catching link icons on desktop and mobile devices.
Why this is important
This is the latest in a series of link visibility updates that Stein has announced since last summer, when he called showing more inline links Google’s “North Star” for AI search. The pattern is consistent. Google is continually investigating how links appear in AI-generated answers.
The hover popup is a new interaction pattern for AI overviews. Instead of small inline quotes that are easy to miss, users now get a preview card with enough context to decide whether to click. That changes the equation for publishers wondering how much traffic AI results are actually sending.
What the industry says
SEO consultant Lily Ray (Amsive) wrote on X that she saw the new link cards and was “REALLY hoping they stuck.”
Read our full coverage: Google says links will be more visible in AI overviews
43% of ChatGPT fanout queries for non-English prompts are executed in English
A report from AI search analytics firm Peec AI found that a large portion of ChatGPT’s fanout requests are executed in English, even if the original prompt was in another language.
Important facts: Peec AI analyzed over 10 million prompts and 20 million fanout requests from its platform data. Of the non-English prompts analyzed, 43% of fanout requests were in English. Nearly 78% of non-English prompt sessions contained at least one English-language fan-out request.
Why this is important
When ChatGPT Search creates a response, it can rewrite the user’s prompt into “one or more targeted queries,” according to OpenAI’s documentation. OpenAI does not describe how the language is selected for these rewritten queries. Peec AI’s data suggests that English is included in the process even when the user and their location are clearly non-English proficient.
SEO and content teams working in non-English markets may be at a disadvantage with ChatGPT’s source selection, which is not aligned with traditional ranking signals. Speech filtering appears to occur before citation signals come into play.
Read our full coverage: ChatGPT search frequently switches to English for fan-out requests: Report
Google’s Search Relations team can’t say you still need a website
Google’s Search Relations team was asked directly whether they would still need a website in 2026. There was no clear yes.
Important facts: In a new episode of the Search Off the Record podcast, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt spent about 28 minutes exploring the question. Both acknowledged that websites still offer benefits including data sovereignty, control over monetization and freedom from platform content moderation. But no one argued that the open web offered something irreplaceable.
Why this is important
Google search is based on crawling and indexing web content. The fact that Google’s own Search Relations team asks the question “Do I need a website?” treated. This is more of a business decision than a straight yes and is therefore worth mentioning.
Illyes offered the closest thing to a position. He said if you want to make information available to as many people as possible, a website is probably still the way to go. But he called it a personal opinion, not a recommendation.
The conversation aligns with increasingly fragmented user journeys that now include AI chatbots, social feeds, community platforms and traditional search. For practitioners advising clients on building websites, the answer increasingly depends on where the audience is, rather than where they used to be.
Read our full coverage: Google’s Search Relations team advises whether you still need a website
Topic of the week: The soil moves under organic
Each story this week highlights a different force drawing attention, clicks, or visibility away from the organic channel as practitioners know it.
Google is redesigning the way it displays links in AI responses, acknowledging traffic concerns. ChatGPT’s background queries introduce a language filter that can exclude non-English content before relevance signals are even applied. And Google’s own team will no longer say that websites are the default solution for visibility.
These stories reinforce the idea of spreading your content across different platforms to reach more people. And track where your clicks really come from.
Additional resources:
Featured image: TippaPatt/Shutterstock; Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
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