Yahoo today introduced MyScout, a customizable homepage inside Yahoo Scout, its beta AI answer engine.

How MyScout works. Logged-in users can customize the homepage with tiles that pull information from Yahoo properties (e.g., Mail, News, Sports, Finance, Games). Examples include:

• Inbox previews from Yahoo Mail.
• Stock updates from Yahoo Finance watchlists.
• News topics and trending stories.
• Scores and schedules for favorite teams.
• Weather, shopping comparisons, and games.

Users can add, remove, reorder, or create tiles based on topics or queries they want to follow.

• Some tiles update in real time, such as stock prices.
• Other tiles refresh throughout the day with updates like email, sports scores, and breaking news.
• The experience will become more “agentic and personalized” as the system learns from user activity, Yahoo said.

New publisher features. Yahoo says Scout supports the open web by linking users directly to original sources used in its AI answers. To support that goal, Yahoo News is also launching new publisher features designed to help you grow recurring audiences on its platform:

• Publisher brand pages that aggregate your articles, videos, and social feeds on Yahoo.
• A follow feature that lets users subscribe to your content and receive curated newsletters in their inbox.

Availability: Yahoo Scout — including MyScout — is available in beta for U.S. users at Scout.com and through the Yahoo Search app on iOS and Android.

Yahoo’s announcement. Yahoo Introduces MyScout, the First Personalized Homepage for AI Answers

Google’s branded queries filter in Search Console is now available to all eligible sites. Google’s new branded queries filter, announced Nov. 20, lets you separate branded and non-branded search traffic in the Performance report.

Why we care. Separating branded and non-branded queries has long required manual regex filters or keyword lists. This update gives you native segmentation in Search Console, making it easier to measure brand demand versus discovery traffic.

Google’s announcement. Google confirmed the broader availability in a LinkedIn post today:

• “The branded queries filter in Search Console is now available to all eligible sites! This feature helps you analyze the queries driving traffic to your site by automatically differentiating between branded and non-branded queries.”

The details. The branded queries filter appears in the Search results Performance report. It lets you segment queries into two groups:

• Branded: Queries containing your brand name, variations, misspellings, or brand-related products and services.
• Non-branded: All other queries.

When applied, Search Console limits metrics — impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position — to the selected group. The filter works across all search types (Web, Image, Video, News) in the report.

Insights report. Google also added a new card to the Search Console Insights report that shows a click breakdown between branded and non-branded traffic.

• The card helps you measure brand recognition by comparing traffic from users already familiar with your brand versus those discovering your site for the first time, Google said.

Google’s brand classification. Google uses an internal AI-assisted system to determine whether queries are branded. The system can recognize:

• Brand names in multiple languages
• Misspellings and variations
• Queries referring to unique brand products or services

Some queries may be misclassified due to the contextual nature of brand detection, Google said. The filter is strictly a reporting feature and doesn’t affect search rankings.

What to watch. Today’s announcement indicates it has reached all eligible sites, though some properties may still not qualify due to query and impression volume requirements.

Perplexity AI must stop using its Comet browser agent to make purchases on Amazon. A federal judge sided with Amazon in an early ruling over AI shopping bots.

Why we care. The case targets a core promise of AI agents: completing tasks like shopping on a user’s behalf. If courts restrict how agents access sites, AI agents could face strict limits when interacting with logged-in accounts on major websites.

What happened. U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney granted Amazon a preliminary injunction Monday in San Francisco federal court.

• The order blocks Perplexity from using its Comet browser agent to access password-protected parts of Amazon, including Prime subscriber accounts.
• Chesney wrote that Amazon presented “strong evidence” that Comet accessed accounts “with the Amazon user’s permission but without authorization by Amazon.”
• The ruling also requires Perplexity to destroy any Amazon data it previously collected.

Catch-up quick. Amazon sued Perplexity in November, accusing the startup of computer fraud and unauthorized access. The company said Comet made purchases from Amazon on behalf of users without properly identifying itself as a bot.

What’s next. The order is paused for one week to allow Perplexity to appeal.

What they’re saying. Amazon spokesperson Lara Hendrickson told Bloomberg (subscription required) the injunction “will prevent Perplexity’s unauthorized access to the Amazon store and is an important step in maintaining a trusted shopping experience for Amazon customers.”

AI tools now generate 45 billion monthly sessions worldwide — about 56% of search engine volume, according to a study by Graphite.io CEO Ethan Smith.

• The analysis combines web traffic and mobile app usage across major AI tools and estimates AI activity equals 56% of global search usage and 34% in the U.S.
• Much of this growth is occurring in mobile apps such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and Claude.

Why we care. AI is expanding discovery, not shrinking search demand. Total usage across search engines and AI assistants has grown 26% globally since 2023. In other words, it’s not SEO vs. GEO — you need both LLM visibility and traditional rankings.

The details. The report analyzed usage across the five largest LLM products — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and Claude — and compared them with the six largest search engines. Key findings:

• AI platforms generate 45 billion monthly sessions worldwide.
• In the U.S., AI accounts for 5.4 billion monthly sessions.
• 83% of global AI usage occurs inside mobile apps (75% in the U.S.).
• ChatGPT dominates AI usage, representing 89% of global AI sessions.
• When isolating search-like prompts (“asking”), AI usage equals 28% of search worldwide and 17% in the U.S.

The report excludes prompts categorized as “doing” or “expressing.” According to OpenAI research, about 52% of prompts are information-seeking, the closest equivalent to traditional search queries.

Between the lines. Most projections comparing AI to search use web traffic alone, typically comparing Google.com visits with ChatGPT website traffic. That misses most AI usage.

• The analysis argues these comparisons underestimate AI activity by 4–5x because most usage occurs in mobile apps.
• It also includes multiple LLMs and multiple search engines rather than comparing only Google and ChatGPT.

What to watch. Google still dominates discovery, but its share of search-related activity fell from 89% in 2023 to 71% in Q4 2025, the report estimates.

• Global AI usage appears to have plateaued since July 2025, while U.S. usage continues to grow rapidly — up roughly 300% year over year by December 2025.

The report. AI Is Much Bigger Than You Think

Google’s AI Mode is increasingly citing Google itself — and often sending users back to another Google search, according to new SE Ranking research.

Why we care. AI search is meant to surface the best sources on the web. If Google increasingly cites itself, you may see fewer direct links and less traffic as more users stay inside Google.

The details. Google.com was the most cited source in AI Mode answers, accounting for 17.42% of all citations, SE Ranking found.

• That makes Google.com the most referenced domain — more than the next six domains combined: YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, Indeed, and Zillow.

Accelerating trend. In June 2025, Google cited itself in just 5.7% of AI Mode answers. That share is now tripled.

• Nearly one in five AI citations now comes from Google. Including YouTube, Google-controlled properties account for roughly 20% of sources.

Self-preferencing on steroids. AI Overviews already link heavily to Google properties like Maps, Images, and YouTube. AI Mode appears to extend that approach by pushing users deeper into Google’s ecosystem, often through additional search results rather than external sites.

• This keeps users interacting with Google surfaces where ads, reviews, and other monetized content appear.

What changed. Earlier AI Mode research showed Google mainly citing Google Business Profiles. That’s no longer the case:

• 59% of Google citations now point to traditional Google search results.
• 36.1% still reference Google Business Profiles.
• Smaller shares link to Google Support (1.7%), Google Flights (0.1%), and other Google properties.
• In many cases, AI Mode citations now show a mini search results panel beside the answer — effectively turning the citation into another search experience.

Industry differences. Google dominates citations across most topics. Some niches rely on Google even more:

• Travel: 53.18% of citations
• Entertainment & hobbies: 48.74% of citations
• Real estate: 30.54% of citations

The only category where Google wasn’t the top source was Careers and Jobs, where Indeed appeared 3.1x more often than Google.

About the data. SE Ranking analyzed 68,313 keywords across 20 industries and more than 1.3 million AI Mode citations to measure how often Google.com appears as a cited source.

The report. Is Google stealing your clicks in AI Mode? (1.3M+ citations analyzed)

OpenAI is backing away from putting checkout directly inside ChatGPT. Instead, purchases will shift to retailer apps that connect to ChatGPT, The Information reported.

Why we care. ChatGPT aims to be more than a discovery engine. Right now, though, product discovery inside ChatGPT is gaining traction faster than purchases. That suggests AI-powered shopping is only influencing the consideration stage (at least for now), not driving conversions.

What happened. OpenAI had planned to let shoppers buy products directly from listings in ChatGPT search results. Instead, an OpenAI spokesperson said that Instant Checkout is moving to Apps, where purchases happen inside connected services rather than natively in ChatGPT.

• The company will now prioritize product search and discovery inside ChatGPT.
• It will also keep working with Stripe on the Agentic Commerce Protocol to support app-based transactions.

What changed: OpenAI found that users research products in ChatGPT but don’t complete purchases there. Only a small number of merchants were actively using native ChatGPT checkout, according to the report.

• In September, OpenAI positioned Instant Checkout as a big commerce opportunity. At the time, it said U.S. users could buy from Etsy sellers inside ChatGPT, with plans to expand to Shopify merchants, add multi-item carts, and roll out beyond the U.S.

Meanwhile. Shopify president Harley Finkelstein said this week that only about a dozen Shopify merchants were using AI tools, despite Shopify supporting integrations with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. That’s tiny relative to Shopify’s overall merchant base.

What to watch. Can OpenAI make ChatGPT more valuable as a shopping discovery engine without owning the final transaction? Also, how does OpenAI’s commerce strategy intersect with its advertising ambitions? If transactions stay outside ChatGPT, monetizing product discovery through ads could become even more important.

Why this is happening. Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust. Real-time catalog normalization across tens of millions of SKUs is a decade-scale problem Google already solved with Merchant Center, and consumers still default to checkout flows they trust — Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and Amazon one-click.

The report. OpenAI Scales Back Shopping Plans for ChatGPT (subscription required)

Google’s Liz Reid, VP and head of Search, drew a clearer line between Google Search and Gemini but said it’s still unclear whether the products will converge, diverge further, or be superseded.

The big picture. Reid said Search is an information product focused on helping people connect with the web, while Gemini is centered more on assisting with productivity and creation. She added that the boundaries are fluid, especially as AI products evolve quickly and agentic experiences reshape how people use the internet.

What she’s saying. In short, Reid said Search and Gemini share technology but have different product “north stars.” They could overlap more over time, but the eventual long-term direction is still open. Here’s what she said in an interview on Access Podcast:

• “I don’t know the answer is the short answer.”
• “I think what we see is some areas they’re converging more and some areas they’re diverging more, right? And like and so what are they going to net out? Like do the areas that diverged eventually all come or do the areas that diverge become even bigger over time? I think we’ll see.”
• “So I don’t know in in all honesty, but I think we are right now at a point where depending on what angle you look at, you’d think they’re getting closer or they’re getting further apart.”
• “Who knows, maybe agents will mean like the right product is neither of the two of them is a third product altogether that they merge into. I don’t know yet.”

Gemini vs. Search. Here’s the distinction Reid made:

• On Gemini: “Gemini’s focus is on sort of being this assistant and so it tends to lean in more heavily on things like productivity or creation, right?”
• On Search: “Search is more information based and it believes that often in those information use cases you also want to connect and hear from other people. And so how do you bring out the web?”

Agents and the web’s future. Reid also said Google expects a future with more agent-to-agent internet activity, not just humans browsing directly.

• “I certainly think the there will be a world in which sort of agents are doing a lot of interaction on the internet, not just people.”
• “I do think probably means there’s a world in which a lot of agents are talking with each other, and not just with humans going forward as we evolve.”

Google vs. ChatGPT. Reid pushed back on the idea that AI is a simple winner-take-all battle between Google and ChatGPT.

• “I don’t know, by the way, that we’re going to end up in a world where there’s only one product, right?”
• “I think what we’re seeing is like simultaneously people are adopting more tools and search is growing, right? because the the possibility of the tech is just allowing many more questions.”

Trusted sources. Reid also said Google wants to do more to surface sources users trust or pay for.

• “I think one thing Google is trying to do a lot more of and we’ve taken small steps so far but want to do more. How do you help when there is that relationship?”

She pointed to Google’s Preferred Sources feature and broader subscription-aware experiences:

• “If you love this source and you do have a relationship with it then that content should surface more easily for you on Google.”
• “We should surface the the one that they’re paying for and not the six that they can’t get access to more.”

Why we care. Reid’s comments suggest Google hasn’t settled on Search’s long-term role in an AI-first ecosystem. So keep watching closely as AI assistants, agents, and search results evolve.

The interview. What happens to Google when AI answers everything? with Liz Reid

💾