AI Search Updates & Core Update Winners & Losers – SEO Pulse

This week’s SEO Pulse focuses on how links are evolving inside AI search results, which site categories gained or lost ground in the March core update, and the global expansion of Google’s Preferred Sources feature. Here is what you need to know.

Google has rolled out five updates to how links appear in both AI Overviews and AI Mode. The changes include more inline links, additional links at the end of some AI responses, previews from public forum discussions, and desktop hover previews. This matters because inline links placed next to the text they support could fundamentally change click-through rates for pages cited in AI results. Previously, most citations were clustered at the bottom of the response, where they competed for attention and were easy to skip. Now, placing them closer to the relevant sentence gives each link more context. Additionally, previews from public discussions create a new surface for content from Reddit, forums, and similar platforms. If your brand is discussed there, that content may now appear alongside AI-generated answers.

New analysis from Amsive reveals that aggregators and user-generated content platforms lost significant US search visibility after Google’s March 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 data. YouTube suffered the largest single-domain drop, losing 567 visibility points , roughly 30% larger than Wikipedia’s December decline. Reddit lost 64 points, Instagram 48, and X 46. In the travel sector, OTAs like 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. Benchmark these category breakdowns against your vertical to determine if the update affected your industry overall or just your site. The pattern is clear: domains owning the product or service tended to gain, while aggregators and discussion platforms lost. Amsive interprets this as Google favoring “the company that owns the thing” over “the platform to discuss it.”

Google’s Preferred Sources feature is now available in all languages supported by Google Search. This update allows users to select publishers they want to see more often in Top Stories and Google Discover. The feature works as a user-controlled signal alongside Google’s ranking systems. This expansion is especially critical for non-English markets, as the feature was previously English-only, limiting multilingual publishers. You can use the Preferred Sources button on your site to influence how your site appears in Discover.

Google’s John Mueller warns that vibe coding won’t handle your SEO for you. In a recent episode of Search Off The Record, Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed AI-coded websites. Both found that while AI coding tools can produce functional sites quickly, getting SEO right still requires specific technical direction. Mueller said vague prompts like “add some SEO” lead to vague results, comparing it to working with a developer who doesn’t specialize in search. He noted that the sites he built produced reasonable HTML that wouldn’t stand out as vibe-coded, but these tools don’t make informed choices about canonicals, sitemaps, or crawlability without explicit instructions. Mueller previously flagged similar gaps in a vibe-coded Bento Grid Generator on Reddit, finding issues with crawlability, obsolete meta tags, and content stored in inaccessible JavaScript files.

Ask Jeeves is gone after nearly 30 years of search. Parent company IAC discontinued the Ask.com search business as part of a broader refocus. Founded in 1996, Ask Jeeves pioneered the natural-language question format with 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 closed with: “Jeeves’ spirit endures.” The irony is striking: the search engine that pioneered conversational search closed the same year conversational search became the industry’s direction with Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews.

The theme of the week is clear: source identity matters more than ever. Google adds labels, previews, and signals to links. Amsive’s analysis shows visibility shifting toward brands that own the products or services. Preferred Sources allow users to tell Google which publishers they trust. If your site is the original source, every signal this week points the same way: Google is building more paths back to you. If your site summarizes what others produce, the math is getting harder.