Welcome to the week’s Pulse: updates affect how links appear inside AI search results, which types of sites gained or lost visibility in the March core update, and how Google’s Preferred Sources feature works across new markets.
Here’s what matters for you and your work.
Google Adds More Links And Link Context To AI Search
Google announced five updates to how links appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Key facts: The updates add more inline links, more links at the end of some AI responses, previews from public forum discussions, and desktop hover previews.
Why This Matters
Inline links placed next to the text they support could change the click math for pages cited in AI results. Until now, most AI Overview citations have clustered at the bottom of the response, where they compete with one another and are easy to skip. Placing them closer to the relevant sentence gives each link more context.
Previews from public discussions add a new surface for content from Reddit, forums, and similar platforms. If your brand or product is discussed on those platforms, that content may now appear alongside AI-generated answers with your name attached.
Read our full coverage: Google Adds More Links & Link Context To AI Search
Core Update Data Shows Aggregators Losing Ground
An analysis from Amsive found that aggregators and user-generated content platforms lost US search visibility after Google’s recent core update, while first-party brand sites and government domains gained. Lily Ray, VP of SEO and AI Search at Amsive, examined over 2,000 domains using SISTRIX Visibility Index data.
Key facts: YouTube lost 567 SISTRIX visibility points, the largest single-domain drop in the dataset, and roughly 30% larger than Wikipedia’s December decline. 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, rebounded shortly after the rollout window closed.
Why This Matters
Benchmark these category breakdowns against your vertical. If you work in travel, health, finance, or jobs, Amsive shows which sites gained or lost. This helps distinguish whether the update affected your vertical overall or your site specifically.
The YouTube number is the headline, but it has returned to pre-March levels, making it a correction rather than a new low. The pattern across verticals is more telling. Domains owning the product or service tended to gain, while aggregators or discussion platforms tended to lose.
Amsive interprets Google as favoring “the company that owns the thing” over “the platform to discuss it.” This aligns with the data, but it’s Amsive’s view, not Google’s.
What SEO Professionals Are Saying
Lily Ray, VP of SEO and AI Search at Amsive, wrote on LinkedIn:
“This was a weird core update, but I think the main takeaways are consistent with broader trends we are seeing in Google search: the push toward elevating the actual companies selling the product/service, not the companies ‘writing about them.’”
Read our full coverage: Google’s March Core Update Shifted Visibility Away From Aggregators
Google Preferred Sources Feature Expands To All Languages
Google updated its Search Central documentation to reflect that the Preferred Sources feature is now available in all languages supported by Google Search.
Key facts: Preferred Sources lets users choose publishers they want to see more often in Top Stories and Google Discover. It’s available in all languages supported by Google Search and has added translated downloadable button assets for publishers. The feature works as a user-controlled signal alongside Google’s ranking systems.
Why This Matters
You can use the Preferred Sources button on your site to influence how your site appears in Discover. This expansion is especially important for non-English markets, as the feature was previously English-only, limiting multilingual publishers.
Read our full coverage: Google’s Preferred Sources Is Now A Global SEO Signal
Mueller Says Vibe Coding Won’t Handle Your SEO For You
Google Search Relations team members John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed vibe-coding websites in a recent episode of Search Off The Record. Both found that AI coding tools could produce functional sites quickly, but getting SEO right still required specific technical direction.
Key facts: Mueller said vague prompts like “add some SEO” lead to vague results. He compared vibe coding to working with a developer who does not specialize in search. The sites he built produced reasonable HTML that would not stand out as vibe-coded. Mueller named Claude Code and Gemini CLI as his current tools.
Why This Matters
Mueller’s experience suggests these tools handle HTML structure and layout well enough, but they don’t make informed choices about canonicals, sitemaps, or crawlability without specific instructions.
Mueller flagged similar gaps in vibe-coded sites before. He reviewed a vibe-coded Bento Grid Generator on Reddit and found issues with crawlability, obsolete meta tags, and content stored in JavaScript files that search engines couldn’t access.
Read our full coverage: Google’s Mueller: Vibe Coding Won’t Handle Your SEO For You
Ask Jeeves Is Gone After Nearly 30 Years Of Search
Ask.com, the search engine that started as Ask Jeeves, shut down. Parent company IAC discontinued its search business as part of a broader refocus.
Key facts: 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 branding, and by 2010 had shut down the web crawler and outsourced core search. The farewell message on Ask.com closed with: “Jeeves’ spirit endures.”
Why This Matters
Ask Jeeves was the first search engine built on the premise that people should be able to type full questions instead of keywords. That idea did not save the company, but it describes what Google is now building with AI Mode and AI Overviews. The search engine that pioneered conversational search closed the same year conversational search became the industry’s direction.
The closure marks the end of one of the last recognizable consumer search brands from the pre-Google era.
Read our full coverage: Ask Jeeves Is Gone After Nearly 30 Years Of Search
Theme Of The Week: Source Identity Matters More
Every story this week comes back to source identity.
Google adds labels, previews, and signals to links. Amsive’s analysis shows visibility shifting toward brands owning the products or services. Preferred Sources allow users to tell Google which publishers they trust.
If your site is the original source, this week’s signals all point the same way. Google is building more paths back to you. If your site summarizes what others produce, the math is getting harder.
Top Stories Of The Week:
Featured Image: PeopleImages/Shutterstock; Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
