October was a busy month for anyone who wants customers to find them on Google or in ChatGPT. Some of the news was big (Google put ads inside AI Mode in Canada and nine other countries), some of it was small and technical, and one piece of it, the ChatGPT tracking bug, made many owners open their reports and see half their ChatGPT visitors gone.
So let us go through it in order. For each change I will say what happened, where it comes from, and what, if anything, a small business owner should do about it. And at the end there are a few new ideas from the research published this month, because two studies came out in the last days of October that I think every owner who cares about AI search should know.
Google puts ads inside AI Mode, and Canada is on the list
On October 28, 2026, Google announced that it is scaling ads in AI Mode, the chat-style search page, in ten more countries: Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore. The announcement by Shashi Thakur, vice president and general manager of Search ads at Google, also says Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom come next, in the fourth quarter of this year. In the United States, Google is starting what it calls "multiturn ads", which means an ad can appear in the follow-up questions of the same conversation, after the first answer.
Why now? The same day was Alphabet's earnings call, and the call explains it. Philipp Schindler of Google spoke on the call of "the lower monetization we're seeing in AI Mode", as 9to5Google reported. In simple words, people use AI Mode more and more, and Google earns less from each AI Mode search than from a normal one. Alphabet shares fell 12 percent by October 29, by 9to5Google's count. Google needs ads in AI Mode, and so the ads are coming.
What does it mean for a plumber in Burnaby or a dentist in Calgary? For the moment, less than the headline suggests. Google's own post gives one figure, from its internal United States data between August 20 and September 3: sponsored and organic product listings inside AI Mode get "similar" click rates. That figure covers shopping products only. The truth is, nobody outside Google knows yet how these ads will change the clicks that go to businesses that do not pay. My advice is simple: do not change your budget because of a press release. Watch your own numbers in Search Console and Google Analytics for the next two or three months, and decide then.
Google says AI answers will show more links, and tests a box for official websites
Two weeks earlier, on October 15, Google published a post by Hema Budaraju, a vice president of product management at Google, with several changes to how AI Mode and the AI summaries at the top of Google results show their sources. The links inside the answer text will appear higher in the answer more often. The links at the bottom of some answers get small pictures and a design that is easier to click. And news carousels, the rows of recent articles, are coming to more countries and languages.
The part that matters most for a small business is a test. Google is trying a section at the top of some answers that shows the official website for a task, when there are "only one or two official places on the web" to do it, with a short line on why each link is useful. Think of the questions a customer asks that have only one right answer: how to book with your clinic, what time your shop closes, where to pay a city permit, how to order from one specific restaurant.
In my view, if Google is going to point to the official page for a task, your website must have one clear page for each task a customer comes to do. One page to book, with the booking on it. One page with your hours and address, written as text and kept correct. One page per service, saying plainly what you do and where. Too many small business sites I see hide the booking in a pop-up, or put the hours inside an image, or have three old pages that say three different things. A machine choosing "the official page" will pass over a site like that, and who could blame it?
The same post says that use of Preferred Sources, the setting where a person picks the news sites they want to see more of, "has grown by more than 7x since the start of the year". That is for publishers more than for a local business, but it shows where Google is going: more say for the user over which sources they see.
The ChatGPT traffic drop that was mostly a counting error
If you opened Google Analytics in mid-October and saw your ChatGPT visitors cut in half, you were not alone, and on most sites the visitors were still arriving.
When ChatGPT sends someone to your website, the link normally carries a small label at the end, utm_source=chatgpt.com, which tells Google Analytics where the visitor came from. Starting October 8, many ChatGPT links opened without that label and without the usual note to the browser about the page the visitor came from. With neither, Google Analytics files the visit under "Direct", as if the person had typed your address by hand.
LLM Pulse measured a 46 percent fall in ChatGPT sessions on the sites it watches between October 9 and 11, against the same days of the two weeks before. Total traffic on those same sites fell by 2 percent. So the visitors kept arriving, and Google Analytics put most of them under Direct. On October 15, Cedric Huesler of Adobe reported "It was a bug," and that ChatGPT was labelling its links again, as Search Engine Roundtable noted. OpenAI has not commented in public.
What should you do? Two things. First, when you report on October, put a note on the week of October 8 to 15, so that nobody in six months looks at the chart and draws the wrong conclusion. Second, and this is the lesson that stays, never judge AI traffic by the ChatGPT line alone. Look at ChatGPT and Direct together. If one falls and the other rises by a similar number on the same day, the problem is the counting, and your customers are fine. We wrote a longer guide on setting up Google Analytics to track AI visitors if you want to do this properly.
No core update in October, but a spam update ended on the 8th
Some owners saw their positions move around in October and asked us if Google had changed its rules again. According to Google's Search Status Dashboard, the only confirmed change in this period was the September 2026 spam update, which started on September 24 and ran for 13 days and 16 hours, so it finished on October 8. When we checked on October 29, no core update was listed for October. The last core update began on May 21.
A spam update targets sites that try to trick Google: pages copied in bulk, fake authors, pages made only to catch a search with nothing useful on them. If your site is honest and was written for your customers, a spam update is no reason to worry. If you bought a pack of fifty "city pages" that all say the same thing with a different town name, fix them before the next spam update.
Bing shows you the questions where other sites get cited and you do not
This one is free. On October 13, Microsoft added a beta view called Topics Portfolio to Bing Webmaster Tools. It takes the questions where Bing's AI answers already cite your site and groups them into topics. More useful still, it lists "opportunity queries": questions in your topics where other sites are cited and yours is not.
That list is, let's say, a ready-made plan for your next pages. If Bing's AI keeps citing a competitor for "how long does a hardwood floor refinish take" and never you, you know which page to write next. Bing is honest about the limits: smaller sites may see few topics or none, the figures are approximate, and the team calls them "directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger." Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools is free and takes one sign-in with a Microsoft account.
Restaurants can now remove delivery apps from their Google listing
A small one, but useful to every restaurant owner. Since October 28, a restaurant can turn third-party ordering services (Uber Eats, DoorDash, Instacart, Grubhub and the others) fully or partly off in its Google Business Profile, for pickup, delivery or both. Google's Lisa Landsman announced it on LinkedIn, as Search Engine Roundtable reported. Before this, the restaurant had to ask each delivery company, one by one, to take its listing down.
If your own ordering page charges you less than the delivery apps do, check your profile this week. Every order that goes through your own page instead of an app is margin you keep.
New ideas from this month's research
Two studies from the last days of October change how I think about AI search for small businesses, and I want to share them, because both go against advice that is common in our industry.
Check your AI visibility with many questions, once a week
Some owners (and some agencies, it must be said) check their AI visibility the same way: they ask ChatGPT the same question, "best roofer in Surrey", every morning, and they celebrate or worry depending on the answer. A SISTRIX study published on October 28 shows why this method tells you little.
SISTRIX looked at 10,826 daily measurement series across four AI models and eight countries. Take a brand whose true share is 25 percent of answers. If you ask one question on 20 different days, the result can come out anywhere from 0 to 59 percent. If you ask 20 different questions on one day, it lands between 16 and 35 percent. With 100 different questions, between 21 and 29 percent. The difference between questions is larger than the difference between days, so repeating the same question mostly measures chance.
The Muck Rack report of the same day shows the same thing from another side: when the same question was asked twice in one day, ChatGPT repeated only 41 percent of the sites it cited, Gemini 45 percent, Perplexity 94 percent. So write down the 30, 50 or 100 questions your customers actually ask, in their words, and check them once a week. Look at the trend over a month, and ignore the result of a single day.
Your website matters, and other sites matter more
The Muck Rack and Generative Pulse report studied more than 40 million AI answers and 207 million citations in 2026, plus 1,020 questions in September across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. More than 84 percent of citations came from earned and third-party sources: news articles, government and nonprofit pages, encyclopedias and other sites that collect information, research papers, and pages from other companies. Pages owned by the brand itself rose from 13.7 percent to 15.2 percent of citations, and the pages cited most were product pages and practical guides. Only 212 sites were cited by all four assistants.
What does this mean for a small business? Your own site still matters, because it is the page an AI quotes for the practical questions (prices, process, what is included, how long it takes). But more than eight in ten citations point to pages that other people wrote. So the places where others talk about you count most: your Google reviews, your listing on the local business association's site, a mention in the local newspaper, your profile on the directories of your trade. A good website that nobody else mentions can be quoted for a how-to answer and still be missing when someone asks whom to call.
And one more reason not to build your whole plan on a single site: in August, Semrush reported data from Promptwatch showing Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations falling from 3.8 percent to 0.5 percent in a few days. Promptwatch itself called the figure provisional. Still, whatever an AI cites heavily this year it may cite much less next year, so spread your presence across many honest places.
What I would do this week
If you own a small business and you have one hour, here is how I would spend it. Open your website and check that each thing a customer comes to do (book, call, find you, see a service) has one clear page, with the facts written as text. Add a note in your October report on the ChatGPT week of October 8 to 15. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools if you have not, and look for the opportunity questions. And write down the questions your customers ask, so that next month you can check ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode with many questions instead of one.
If you would like to see how your site looks to Google and the AI assistants today, you can run the free Get Found Check. It takes under a minute and shows what to fix first.