Notes · Opinion 004 · Search and AI
Sites are now built to be cited, not read
This summer, Google made three changes. Together, they point to one fact: the visitor to your page may no longer be human. The bad news is that there is no metric for this yet.
Founder, BLN Global · · 8 min read
Short answer
Google now tells you how often your page appears in AI answers, but not how many clicks those appearances bring. During the same period, it removed FAQ rich results and urged sites to prepare for AI agents to crawl them. The practical result is clear. Build your page to be cited inside an answer, not clicked in search results. Use direct answers, a clear question-and-answer structure, a clean accessibility tree and near-zero layout shift.
Google made three separate announcements over the summer. One by one, each looks routine. Put them side by side and they point in the same direction.
Three events
7 May: FAQ rich results were removed
On 15 June, Google removed expandable Q&A boxes from search results. FAQPage It also took the documentation offline. Rankings didn't change. What you lost was the extra space in the results. The tactic sold for years as "add FAQ schema and take up twice the space in the SERP" ended in a day.
3 June: AI reports arrived in Search Console
Google now shows how often your page appears in generative AI features such as AI Overview and AI Mode. The separate report includes impressions, page, country, device and date.
What is missing from the list matters more than what is on it: no clicks, no click-through rate, no queries. Google says it will add more metrics later.
June: Chrome released its agent-ready site toolkit
Chrome released a three-part set so AI agents can browse sites: a new Lighthouse Agentic Browsing audit category, the WebMCP draft standard that exposes site functions to agents, and DevTools tools that mimic agent behavior. The audits are informational for now. They do not affect the score.
Chrome’s reasoning is the interesting part here. It describes how agents see the page like this:
Agents use the accessibility tree derived from the DOM as their primary data model.
In the same document, the reason for lowering layout shift also changed: no longer "so you do not tap the wrong place", so the agent does not click the wrong place so.
This category is now really in Lighthouse. While writing this, we measured our own home page and a fifth column appeared on the top line of the report:
What the three say together
Rich results are closing, AI visibility is being measured, and the browser wants you to prepare your site for machine visitors. The common point: the page’s job is increasingly being clicked stops being being cited as a source in an answer becomes.
This doesn’t mean SEO is dead. In fact, old and unglamorous work such as accessibility, clear heading structure and structured data now matters more. The target has changed. You’re formatting the page for the system that will summarize it, not only for the person reading it. Most of the time, both want the same thing. That’s the good news.
The bad news is in the metric. An impression count tells you very little. Appearing in an AI answer does not mean the reader visited your site. Most of the time, they did not. They already got the answer. Google gave you a new counter without showing how it relates to revenue. Managing a budget by this count is flying blind for now.
We tested this on our own site
A few hours before reading Chrome’s documentation, we measured a layout shift of 0,287 on our Arabic pages. Lighthouse showed the cause directly: the Arabic font loaded late and reflowed the page.
Layout shift (CLS) on Arabic pages
font-display:swap instead of optional we did it. We measured the live site with Lighthouse. The same pages’ performance score rose from 83-85 to 98-100.We made the fix for human visitors because the page jumped as you read it. Later, we saw Chrome’s documentation justify the same metric as a way to stop agents from clicking the wrong thing. Good work serves both. That may be the most encouraging point in this article.
A separate note explains how we found the shift and why it appeared only in Arabic: the final 18 points on a static site.
What Google says, what the research says
You need to separate two sources here because they don’t say the same thing. One is a set of third-party studies on generative search optimization. The other is Google’s own guide, published in May.
Google’s guide directly rejects several common recommendations. You don’t need a separate machine-readable file, special markup or Markdown for AI. Google says these are ignored. Structured data isn’t required for generative search, and there’s no special schema to add. You don’t have to split content into small sections, and there’s no ideal page length. There is one technical requirement: the page must be indexed and eligible to appear in search results with a snippet.
Publishing content that people find original, interesting and useful will do more for your long-term presence in generative search than any other advice.
Third-party studies use a very different language. They report that %44,2 of citations come from the first %30 of a document, %53,4 of cited pages contain fewer than 1.000 words, and pages with a question-and-answer structure receive about 2,3 times more citations.
They do not exactly conflict, but they get mixed up. What the studies found was relation: this is what cited pages look like. What Google says is requirement: you don’t have to do any of this. A well-written page already gives a clear answer near the top and doesn’t drag on. These studies are probably measuring quality, not a formula. The danger is turning correlation into a prescription and chopping up the page for AI.
What to do on Monday
You won't go wrong where the two overlap. In order:
- Put a clear answer at the top of every important page. Do this for the reader, not for AI: the first paragraph should make the page clear. That is the only concrete point both sources agree on.
- Keep the Q&A section. Don't add schema.
FAQPagemarkup no longer produces anything in Google, and Google clearly says structured data is not required for generative search. Visible Q&A text still helps the reader. - Don't lengthen or split the page. Google says there is no ideal length and no need to split content into small pieces. Write as much as the subject needs.
- Don't create a separate file for AI. Google ignores these. Part of the "AEO package" sold this year does exactly that.
- Take accessibility seriously. The button name, link text, heading order. This is the exact tree the agent sees.
- Bring layout shift down to zero. It has two reasons now.
- Don’t rush WebMCP. The standard is still a draft, and audits do not affect your score yet. Track it, but do not budget for it today.
A warning
Be skeptical of anyone who sounds certain in this area, including this article. Our data is six weeks old, and Google reports are still open to a limited number of sites. People selling AI optimization packages are selling that uncertainty too.
Our view is simple: every item above would still be good practice without AI. Write a clear answer. Don’t pad the page. Make it accessible. Prevent layout shifts. All of this was true in 2015. The only change is that poor execution now costs more.