Want to stay in the loop on what’s happening with Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other answer engines?
Bookmark this page and check in regularly—I’ll update it with fresh AI search news and trends every month.
December
- Google’s home page search bar adds an option to upload an image or file, and it will take you to AI Mode instead of traditional SERPs or Google Lens. (Search Engine Roundtable)
November
October
- Google is experimenting with AI-generated descriptions on SERPs. (Paul Shapiro)
- AI Mode is finally coming to Europe. The feature is now available in over 35 new languages and 40 new countries, including Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, and The Netherlands. (Google)
- After the US, Google’s AI shopping feature “try on” will be available in Japan, Australia, and Canada. It also adds a new category: shoes. (Google)
- Google rolls out AI previews in Discover to users in the US, South Korea, and India. (Google)
- Walmart partners with OpenAI to allow customers to complete purchases directly from ChatGPT. (Walmart)
- After the US, Google will introduce ads within AI Overviews to select English-speaking markets by the end of 2025. (Search Engine Journal)
- OpenAI releases ChatGPT Atlas, its own web browser with ChatGPT built in. (OpenAI)
- Reddit sues Perplexity for scraping its data to train Perplexity’s AI systems. (Reuters)
September
- AI Mode is now available in 6 new languages: Indonesian, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish. (Google & Google)
- Google is rolling out Gemini in Chrome for Mac and Windows desktop users in the US. (Google)
- In the upcoming months, Google will introduce agentic capabilities to Gemini in Chrome, allowing users to automate tasks like booking a haircut and ordering groceries. (Google)
- AI Mode will be directly accessible from the Chrome address bar. This update will be rolling out to US users in English by the end of September and expand to more countries and languages in the weeks ahead. (Google)
- Cloudflare is launching The Content Signal Policy, a robots.txt directive that allows website owners to control how AI bots access and use their content. (Cloudflare)
- Google has launched Search Live in the US. Users can now have voice conversations in AI Mode and share their camera feed to get contextual, accurate, and real-time answers. (Google)
- ChatGPT has launched Instant Checkout, powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol and built with Stripe. This means users can now buy products directly from ChatGPT. (OpenAI)
August
- ChatGPT is reportedly scraping Google search results (instead of Bing) to answer questions. (ZDNet)
- The launch of GPT-5 actually makes SEO irreplaceable, because it relies on search engines to access the world’s information. (Dejan)
- After the US, India, and the UK, Google rolls out AI Mode to 180 additional countries and territories. (Google)
- Google launches embedded link carousels in AI Mode on desktop, with mobile coming soon. (Robby Stein)
July
- Google is experimenting with Web Guide, a new AI feature that organizes search results into topic groups instead of the usual 10 blue links. (Google)
- OpenAI quietly adds Shopify as a shopping search partner. ChatGPT can now show rich results for users looking to browse products. (Search Engine Journal)
