Latest organic search news – November 25

We’ve compiled the essential updates from Google and the broader world of search from the last month – keeping you up to date with everything you need to know.

TL:DR

The release of Atlas ChatGPT Browser

Agentic Checkouts for OpenAI

New keyword analysis released for your TikTok videos

New study shows how content types have shifted in the AI landscape

ChatGPT’s most-cited pages highlight what AI actually “trusts” online

SEMrush study shows links and mentions still matter for AI visibility

A new tool just launched – and it’s making monitoring PR coverage easier

The release of Atlas ChatGPT Browser

ChatGPT released its own browser called Atlas in early October. The browser provides ChatGPT’s functionality and allows users to ask questions, summarise pages and execute/complete tasks all in agent mode. This marks another major step in OpenAI’s competition with Google — though Google continues to dominate user search discovery.

What does this mean for SEO’s?

The core objectives remain focused on LLM optimisation and how you enable your website to be cited by these platforms. Three key areas demand attention:

• Structured, machine-readable and accessible content is essential. Structured data continues to play a key role in assisting Google and LLMs to understand your content’s  context
• Off-site signals are more crucial than ever. Your brand needs to lead,  or at least participate meaningfully in conversations around your target products and services. These signals strengthen LLMs’ understanding of your experience, credibility and trustworthiness, much like Google’s extensive E-E-A-T criteria has functioned for years.
• Referral traffic analysis requires deeper investigation. As user behaviour shifts with increased adoptionof agent mode, the traditional metrics and legacy discovery paths may become less reliable. While this won’t change overnight, it’s worth monitoring your referral data closely. Here’s a useful guide on diagnosing possible Atlas data in your GA4 profile.

Agentic Checkouts for OpenAI

ChatGPT now supports a built-in checkout experience. Users can discover, compare and buy products directly within ChatGPT (or associated AI agent interface) without being redirected to a separate merchant website. 

What’s the current state of play?

Merchants who participate (initially U.S.-based sellers on platforms like Etsy and soon many on Shopify) can enable their product feeds + checkout integration via the “Agentic Commerce Protocol” (ACP) so that their products can show up and transact in-chat.

There are also plugins being made available to vendors to support this new configuration such as Agentic Cart for merchants like WooCommerce, prominent across WordPress websites. Installation requires an open submission to OpenAI, but plugin access will likely expand soon.

New keyword analysis released for your TikTok videos

Optimise where your audience is active. If TikTok is a popular channel for your business then you may have seen a new keyword feature whereby you can discover what queries users are searching behind each of your videos.

In a landscape where marketers are struggling to obtain trustworthy keyword data or guidance to how users are reaching your content, this feature provides some useful insights to improve your content strategy for TikTok. The breakdown of data is split into ‘Search Queries’ and ‘Traffic Sources’, see image below:

New study shows how content types have shifted in the AI landscape

SiegeMedia released a really informative study examining the migration toward bottom-of-funnel-content. This trend isn’t a huge surprise given organic click-through rates have been in decline with the huge surge of new search features and enablement by Google to provide the ultimate zero click experience. 

What makes this study valuable is its holistic view of the actual content types that have increased in popularity and the ones that have dropped. See below the image from the original study released in late October:

General tips if embarking on a new content strategy in 2026:

• Heavily analyse how each of your marketing channels perform and how your audience groups behave, interact and take action.
• Content diversification. Businesses shouldn’t just have a running blog strategy for their website and rely on this bringing in new business.
• Stick to your product offering and optimise for that keyword group(s) and deploy that content in its suitable format for that channel.
• Focus on offsite signals to ensure your brand is part of the conversation in relevant publications.
• Keep your content fresh. Google and LLMs are geared to content recency, plenty of studies have shown the success of updating your existing content. This is nothing new and could turn out to be a very valuable tactic given the competitive landscape and the rise of AI Overviews.

ChatGPT’s most-cited pages highlight what AI actually “trusts” online

Ahrefs’ recent insights into ChatGPT’s most-cited pages have sparked discussion here at Distinctly – particularly around what’s actually influenceable from a DPR and SEO perspective.

The study found that only 32.3% of the top 1,000 citations in ChatGPT are pitch/outreach-able, meaning they’re on blogs, publications, and other content-driven sites where coverage can realistically be earned. The rest? Largely off-limits from a typical outreach perspective (think Wikipedia pages and other static resources that you simply can’t pitch to the way you would a media publication).

So what does that mean for digital PR? Essentially, it’s a signal that outreach strategies need to evolve to:

• Expand outreach beyond mainstream media to also include credible, sometimes niche blogs, educational resources, and industry-specific publications that AI tools cite frequently.
• Build real relationships with expert-led sites that may not have traditional newsroom structures but consistently publish high-quality, relevant, referenced content. This also ties back to relationships with journalists and building trust as a core focus (and seeing this as a part of your overall strategy).
• Building data-led campaigns for long-term trust, not just viewing it as a ‘link building’ activity.
  

SEMrush study shows links and mentions still matter for AI visibility

SEMrush’s latest research confirms what most PR teams have known for years: links still matter, and quality outweighs quantity by a long shot – and this now translates to not just how high-quality coverage impacts your site’s authority and position in the SERPS, but AI visibility too.

Domains with stronger backlink profiles appear far more often in AI-generated answers. ChatGPT (without Search enabled) shows the tightest link between backlinks and inclusion, while Gemini and Perplexity weigh nofollow links almost as heavily as follow ones – which is a huge consideration for digital PR strategies.

What’s also interesting is that image-based links are also being treated as reliable reference signals across LLMs. 

That opens up a whole host of opportunities for creative PR placements, from infographics and visual data stories to multimedia campaigns. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years around whether ‘Hero Campaigns’ are dead – but taking into account these insights, the argument changes: well-executed visual campaigns that earn image-based backlinks can still deliver significant long-term AI visibility and credibility

A new tool just launched – and it’s making monitoring PR coverage easier

On the topic of staying visible, a very handy new tool, AlertMouse, was launched in October. It’s been described as “a better version of Google Alerts” by co-founder Rand Fishkin in a recent LinkedIn post – and it’s a fantastic way to monitor mentions of your brand online. 

It’s built to help you track mentions, backlinks, and media references in real time – across both traditional outlets and new platforms like newsletters or Substack-style publications. With journalists moving to independent spaces and AI surfacing content from everywhere, this kind of visibility monitoring is extremely useful. Definitely worth checking out! 

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