Google has published a new guide on how to optimize for Google’s generative AI features, like AI Mode, AI Overviews and more. A lot of this content is put together from previous communication from Google but all in a neat new help document named Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search.

What’s in the document. The document covers the following topics:

• SEO is relevant for generative AI search, follow Google’s best practices for SEO.
• Create valuable, non-commodity content for your audience
  • Provide a unique point of view
  • Create non-commodity content that’s helpful, reliable and people-first
  • Organize content in a way that helps your readers
  • Add high-quality images and video
  • Focus on what your users want, and avoid overdoing it
  • Make sure your AI tools you use follow Google’s guidelines and best practices
• Build and maintain a clear technical structure
  • Meet the search technical requirements
  • Follow crawling best practices
  • When it comes to semantic HTML, focus on human readability, not code
  • JavaScript should follow Google’s best practices as well
  • Provide a good page experience
  • Reduce duplicate content
• Optimize your local business and ecommerce details
• Mythbusting – what you don’t need to do
  • You don’t need LLMS.txt files
  • You don’t need other special markup
  • You don’t need to “Chunk” content
  • You don’t need to rewrite content for AI systems
  • You don’t need to seek inauthentic mentions
  • You shouldn’t overfocus on structured data
• Explore agentic experiences
• Next steps

Why we care. This document sums up a lot of the advice Google has posted on its blogs, videos, spoken about at in-person events and more. It is a good document to see how Google thinks site owners should optimize their sites for AI-generative engines.

Check out the document over here.

Microsoft has rolled out the Citations dashboard within Microsoft Clarity, the analytics tool. Microsoft announced, “With this release, Citations in Microsoft Clarity moves into general availability with those refinements incorporated into the product.”

This should give you access to see how well your pages are performing within AI-experiences.

Citations dashboard. The Citation dashboard shows how your content is referenced in AI-generated answers across supported AI experiences by summarizing and aggregating citation activity across the following areas:

• Page citations: The total number of times pages from your domain were referenced in AI-generated answers during the selected time period, including multiple citations within the same answer. 
• Share of authority: A competitive view showing the percentage of total citations attributed to your domain compared to other cited domains within the same set of queries where your domain appeared.  
• AI referral traffic: The percentage of sessions on your site originating from AI assistants during the selected time period, calculated as AI-referred sessions divided by total sessions. 
• Queries: The queries used by AI systems to retrieve and evaluate your content before generating an answer, helping you understand how AI systems interpret user intent and connect it to your content. 
• My cited pages: A page-level view showing which URLs from your domain were cited in AI-generated answers, along with citation counts and associated grounding queries. This helps identify which content is most frequently selected as a trusted source by AI systems. 
• Trendlines: With trendlines for cited pages and queries, you can analyze how activity changes over time as content evolves and AI query patterns shift. 

Microsoft also said it updated Clarity to include “reporting model, query views, filtering, and pagination to improve performance across larger datasets and longer time ranges while creating a more streamlined visibility analysis experience.”

You can access Citations within the Dashboards then clicking on AI Visibility and then Citations.

For more details, see this help document.

What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of the Citations dashboard in Microsoft Clarity:

Why we care. As AI search becomes more popular, any insights we can get on how users are finding our content and websites through AI is useful. Clarity added the Citations report to help us do just that.

Google Analytics also recently added AI assistant traffic reporting to help with that as well.

And you can expect these reports to get better over time.

Google updated its Search spam policies to clarify that they also apply to generative AI features in Google Search. Using spam tactics to get your site or brand featured in AI Overviews, AI Mode, or other AI-generated responses can be treated as spam, and Google may take action against those sites, Google said.

What changed. Google updated the introductory line to say:

• “In the context of Google Search, spam refers to techniques used to deceive users or manipulate our Search systems into featuring content prominently, such as attempting to manipulate Search systems into ranking content highly or attempting to manipulate generative Al responses in Google Search.”

Previously, that line said:

• “In the context of Google Search, spam refers to techniques used to deceive users or manipulate our Search systems into ranking content highly.”

Here is a screenshot of the addition:

Why we care. There’s a lot of advice about how to rank and get cited in AI search engines. Some of it may violate Google’s spam policies. Review those policies carefully and make sure you’re not using spam tactics to gain visibility in Google’s AI-generated Search responses.

Google has confirmed a bug with the Discover report within Google Search Console. Google had a data “logging” error that caused a decrease in clicks and impressions for the Discover report between the dates of May 7, 2026 until May 8, 2026.

Google said this is just a “data logging only” and your positioning in Google Discover was not impacted.

The issue. Google again said a data logging issue caused reporting issues with the Discover report between May 7, 2026, and May 8, 2026.

This may have resulted in a “decrease in clicks and impressions in the Discover performance report,” Google posted.

Why we care. There were a number of publishers noticing a drop in clicks and impressions based on this report, keep in mind, if you do also, it is likely related to this reporting bug.

Annotate your reporting and update your stakeholders that May 7 – May 8 data for Discover was broken and should be disregarded.

Google will no longer support FAQ rich results as of May 7, 2026. This means you will no longer see FAQ rich results in the Google Search results going forward.

Plus, Google Search Console will stop reporting on FAQ structured data.

What Google said. Google posted a note at the top of the FAQ structured data developer documentation saying:

FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search. We will be dropping the FAQ search appearance, rich result report, and support in the Rich results test in June 2026. To allow time for adjusting your API calls, support for the FAQ rich result in the Search Console API will be removed in August 2026.

Remove code. You can remove the FAQ structured data from your code, if you want but you can also leave it. Other search engines may be able to continue to process it and use it for their own purposes.

Why we care. Rich results have helped web pages with click-through rates and get more traffic. FAQ rich results may have helped as well. But that is now no longer supported.

Keep an eye on your pages with FAQ structured data to see if your traffic from Google is impacted or not.

Google is dropping the back button trigger for AdSense vignette ads on June 15, 2026 due to the new Google search penalty for back button hijacking. Google wrote, “Starting June 15, 2026, the browser back button will no longer trigger a vignette ad.”

What is changing. Google explained that the back button trigger will no longer work after June 15th. The “change will apply automatically for all publishers who have opted in to “Allow additional triggers for vignette ads” and will take effect across all supported browsers (including Chrome, Edge, and Opera).” Google added.

A Google spokesperson told me these same updates will apply to Ad Manager as well.

Why the change. Google explained that the Google Search team “recently introduced a new policy against “back button hijacking” — a practice where websites or scripts interfere with a user’s ability to navigate back to their previous page. To ensure our publishers remain compliant with these latest user experience and search quality guidelines, we are removing the trigger that shows a vignette ad when the user navigates backward from the suite of vignette ad triggers.”

This comes after the search community called this out to Google and Google is making the right change here. Of course, some publishers will not be happy because that trigger may have earned them a lot of money.

Why we care. If you currently have the allow additional triggers for vignette ads setting on with AdSense, keep in mind, one of the triggers, the back button trigger, will be disabled on June 15th. It may impact your earnings, but it will ensure that your site does not get penalized by the back button hijacking penalty.