Microsoft has released an upgrade to Copilot, bringing what it calls “the best of AI Search” to its AI engine – Copilot. Microsoft said its Copilot responses “will now include more prominent, clickable citations and the option to see aggregated sources.” Plus, Microsoft added a new dedicated search experiment within Copilot.

Prominent citations. Microsoft said “Copilot’s responses will have more prominent citations to show you the publisher content that it was sourced from” in this new experience. The Copilot responses will not just give you a summary response but now also include “exactly where the information comes from, with relevant, clear, and clickable sources.”

Here is a video overview:

Consolidated lists of sources. Part of this is where Copilot now shows a consolidated list of the sources used to generate Copilot’s response in one place. To see this, click “Show all” to see the full list of references, including related results, in the right pane. Copilot will curate a response side-by-side with the sources themselves so you can find the information you’re looking for.

Here is a screenshot of this:

Dedicated search in Copilot. Also, Microsoft is rolling out a dedicated search experience directly in Copilot. To access this click the drop-down and select “Search”. “Responses are adaptive, delivering concise answers for simple queries or in-depth summaries for analytical, or more complex queries,” Microsoft added.

Dedicated navigational links. Also, there are now dedicated navigation links at the top of responses. This should make clicks to publishers more likely in this AI search experience.

Ecosystem. I love it how Microsoft specifically said they made these choices to drive a better and healthier ecosystem between the publisher and the AI engines. Microsoft wrote:

“We’ve designed these changes to Copilot and the new Search experience within Copilot with publishers and content owners in mind to support a healthy web ecosystem. Cited sources are easily accessible in-line, highlighted prominently at the bottom of the response, and all references are available in the right pane. This allows you to be just a click away from the publisher and content owner sources that were used.”

Why we care. This is a nice improvement for publishers within AI Search features. It is not only nice to hear Microsoft talk about how important publishers are to the success of search and AI engines, but also to see them implement user experience details that actually convey their messaging.

What this means for Bing, Microsoft’s main search engine – is not clear.

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Google will be removing more search features in the coming months, but it has not disclosed the full list of which features. It appears that Google will do away with some of the currently supported structured data types used for rich results in Google Search, plus some search features.

This comes after Google dropped support for several search features back in June, but then Google documented which ones those were. Later, Google confirmed the removal of those structured data types.

What Google said. John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, wrote:

• “We’re beginning to phase these lesser-used features out.
• “This update will simplify the page and improve the speed of search results.
• “This is part of our ongoing work to make sure we’re helping you find what you need as efficiently as possible, and we’ll continue to look for ways to make Search work better for you.”

But it does not specifically list which structured data types are being removed. Mueller wrote:

• “Starting in January 2026, we’ll remove support for the structured data types in Search Console and its API.”

More details. A Google spokesperson told me this is not the end of all structured data/rich results. Google will deprecate the practice problems structured data and that Dataset structured data is only used by Dataset Search, and not Google Search. Plus, Google said it undeprecated the book actions as there are still some features using the markup in Google Search.

Google also said it will remove the “Today’s Doodle” box, nutrition facts, nearby offers and events, local bikeshare station status, and a TV season selector.

This is not the full list of what is being removed, but just some examples of the small, organizational elements of the page that were rarely used and in many instances didn’t have official names, Google told me.

Why we care. These changes may require you to remove unsupported code from your webpages. As a result, your site’s click-through rates from Google Search could be affected, and some search features you’re familiar with might no longer appear. Without knowing all the specifics, it’s difficult to predict the exact impact. Hopefully, any effects on your site will be minimal.

Google has added a new user agent to its help documentation named Google-CWS. This is the Chrome Web Store user agent that is a user-triggered fetchers.

More details. Google posted about the new user agent over here, it reads; “The Chrome Web Store fetcher requests URLs that developers provide in the metadata of their Chrome extensions and themes.”

What are user-triggered fetchers. A user-triggered fetchers are initiated by users to perform a fetching function within a Google product.

The example provided by Google was “Google Site Verifier acts on a user’s request, or a site hosted on Google Cloud (GCP) has a feature that allows the site’s users to retrieve an external RSS feed. Because the fetch was requested by a user, these fetchers generally ignore robots.txt rules. The general technical properties of Google’s crawlers also apply to the user-triggered fetchers.”

Why we care. If you see this user agent in your crawl logs, you now know where it is from. The Chrome Web Store fetcher requests URLs that developers provide in the metadata of their Chrome extensions and themes.