Welcome to the week’s SEO Pulse: updates affect how links appear in AI search results, where organic clicks are going, and which languages ChatGPT uses to find sources.
Here’s what matters for you and your work.
Google Redesigns 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.
Key Facts: On desktop, groups of links will now appear in a pop-up when you hover over them, showing site names, favicons, and short descriptions. Google is also rolling out more descriptive and prominent link icons across desktop and mobile.
Why This Matters
This is the latest in a series of link-visibility updates 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 keeps iterating on how links surface inside AI-generated responses.
The hover pop-up is a new interaction pattern for AI Overviews. Instead of small inline citations that are easy to miss, users now get a preview card with enough context to decide whether to click. That changes the calculus for publishers wondering how much traffic AI results actually send.
What The Industry Is Saying
SEO consultant Lily Ray (Amsive) wrote on X that she had been seeing the new link cards and was “REALLY hoping it sticks.”
Read our full coverage: Google Says Links Will Be More Visible In AI Overviews
43% Of ChatGPT Fan-Out Queries For Non-English Prompts Run In English
A report from AI search analytics firm Peec AI found that a large share of ChatGPT’s fan-out queries run in English, even when the original prompt was in another language.
Key Facts: Peec AI analyzed over 10 million prompts and 20 million fan-out queries from its platform data. Across non-English prompts analyzed, 43% of the fan-out queries ran in English. Nearly 78% of non-English prompt sessions included at least one English-language fan-out query.
Why This Matters
When ChatGPT Search builds an answer, it can rewrite the user’s prompt into “one or more targeted queries,” according to OpenAI’s documentation. OpenAI does not describe how language is chosen for those rewritten queries. Peec AI’s data suggests that English gets inserted into the process even when the user and their location are clearly non-English.
SEO and content teams working in non-English markets may face a disadvantage in ChatGPT’s source selection that doesn’t map to traditional ranking signals. Language filtering appears to happen before citation signals come into play.
Read our full coverage: ChatGPT Search Often Switches To English In Fan-Out Queries: Report
Google’s Search Relations Team Can’t Say You Still Need A Website
Google’s Search Relations team was asked directly whether you still need a website in 2026. They didn’t give a definitive yes.
Key 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 advantages, including data sovereignty, control over monetization, and freedom from platform content moderation. But neither argued that the open web offers something irreplaceable.
Why This Matters
Google Search is built around crawling and indexing web content. The fact that Google’s own Search Relations team treats “do I need a website?” as a business decision rather than an obvious yes is worth noting.
Illyes offered the closest thing to a position. He said that 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, now spanning 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, not where it used to be.
Read our full coverage: Google’s Search Relations Team Debates If You Still Need A Website
Theme Of The Week: The Ground Keeps Moving Under Organic
Each story this week shows a different force pulling attention, clicks, or visibility away from the organic channel as practitioners have known it.
Google is redesigning how links appear in AI responses, acknowledging the traffic concern. ChatGPT’s background queries introduce a language filter that can exclude non-English content before relevance signals even apply. And Google’s own team won’t say that websites are the default answer for visibility anymore.
These stories reinforce the idea of spreading your content across different platforms to reach more people. And track where your clicks are really coming from.
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Featured Image: TippaPatt/Shutterstock; Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
