From the article:
“The tl;dr is that clicks to links in AI mode are not being recorded at all in Google Search Console, and they’re not sending a referrer value when you click. They’re treated as Unknown or Direct, depending on your analytics system.
That’s a big problem if we don’t have correct attribution. Does Google not want us to be able to track these?”
My opinion, based on watching this space daily since day 1:
The answer is YES. Google does NOT want us having access to traffic data for AI Mode, or AI Overviews for that matter, because it will reveal just how little traffic both are actually driving to external websites.
It’s much more convenient to continue repeating some carefully crafted statement about how these tools “drive traffic to more websites than ever,” without giving us any tools to confirm this.
Yesterday, Google also announced that there will be ways to track AI Overview terms in Performance Max (Google Ads) (h/t Ryan Jones) - so it’s not as if it’s technologically impossible.
They don’t want us knowing the truth. It’s “Not Provided 2.0”
Our industry needs to continue putting major pressure on Google to give us any type of reporting for both of these AI products. Their silence on these issues has been deafening.
seo aimode
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