The Search Engine Signal Happened
Google’s “AI Mode” hits US search and social media emerges as #1 source for news just as we reach peak social?
This issue of Social Signals was written to Chutes Too Narrow by The Shins.
Wow! Thanks for all the great feedback on Wednesday’s paid subscriber-only post: My Bee, Myself, and I: Living with an AI That Remembers Everything. I’m so happy that you’re finding this content valuable, and those paid subscriptions have literally already paid for a really amazing piece of technology I’ve been testing and am going to cover in the coming weeks. THANK YOU!
For the public post this week, we’re talking Search & Social.
You remember searching for things, right? Booting up a search engine and entering a boolean query and then manually parsing 20 blue links to try to figure out the answer to what you wanted? Very 2022 vibes.
There’s a lot of bloviating on LinkedIn about search. And a lot of agencies standing up tools that mostly seem to be vaporware or held together with scotch tape and good branding.
So this week I dug into the signals I’m seeing on search, and also unpacked the new research that shows more Americans now get their news from social media than from television. Although, I think that lead may change this time next year.
Damn. Things keep changing! It’s why we track the signals, right? Right. Let’s get into it. -Greg
Google’s “AI Mode” Hits U.S. Search
Google flipped a big switch.
As of last week, AI Mode (announced at Google I/O just three weeks ago) is now live for all U.S. users, with no opt-in required.
What that means = the new AI-powered experience is baked into standard Google Search and starting to show up for longer, more complex queries even when you’re signed out or in incognito mode.
What’s AI Mode?
Think of it as a smarter, more conversational Google. It lives in a new tab inside Search and activates when your question needs more depth, for comparison shopping, reasoning through options, or just exploring a topic.
It uses a “query fan-out” technique to search subtopics in parallel and return a synthesized AI response. If you’re asking WTF is Query Fan-Out, read this piece in Digiday by
. It also works across text, voice, and images, and supports follow-up questions. This is similar to Gemini or AI Overviews.
Why it matters:
SEO & search visibility may shift fast: Depending on how normal people use this, it may further impact impressions, clicks, and rankings as AI answers take up more SERP real estate.
Search Console will roll AI Mode data into web search: So if someone sees your site mentioned in an AI-generated overview or clicks through from it, that traffic just shows up like any other Google Search traffic. There’s no separate label or breakout for "AI Mode" or "AI Overview." Not yet.
This is just the U.S. for now: But we can expect a global rollout in the coming months.
I absolutely love this take from Greg Isenberg:
📉 Traffic Trends
Since Google began rolling out AI Overviews (now “AI Mode”) in May 2024 and expanded it in June 2025, publishers and brands have been reporting notable dips in organic traffic.
Here are a few signals I’ve been tracking and aggregating:
Red Ventures (parent of CNET, Bankrate, The Points Guy) has reportedly seen double-digit drops in search traffic on some properties.
Forum and community-based sites like Reddit and Stack Overflow are reporting inconsistent visibility, often cited by the AI but not clicked.
Smaller niche content sites are losing featured snippet visibility as AI Mode takes over those top spots.
A study by Search Engine Journal in late May 2025 showed that websites across categories like health, finance, and how-to saw traffic declines between 12–25% following the AI Overview rollout.
Sistrix published data showing that AI Overviews are reducing click-throughs on top-ranking results because the answer is now "zero-click" inside the AI block.
Google shows “source bubbles” in AI Mode, but users don’t always click them.
According to Similarweb, as of June 2025, Google Search has slightly increased in engagement time (suggesting people are using AI Mode), but outbound traffic from Google is down 8–10% year-over-year for many content publishers.
BUT WAIT!! THERE IS 📈 ⬆️ DATA HERE TO NOTE!
As Google's AI Mode reduces click-through rates and search traffic for many content-focused publishers, other legacy platforms may be quietly staging a comeback!?
Case in point: Facebook.
A Similarweb analysis shared via Press Gazette showed that Facebook referral traffic surged in March 2025, and out of the 68 biggest global news websites, 75% saw an increase in desktop social referral traffic from Facebook compared to the previous year.
So… what’s going on?
Meta has seemingly relaxed its restrictions on political and news content, which were imposed back in 2021 after the U.S. Capitol insurrection. That crackdown tanked referral traffic across the board, as Meta leaned into Reels, entertainment, and keeping users inside the walled garden. And they killed Facebook News. RIP.
This data signals a key shift: while Google is becoming a walled garden, Meta is reopening the gates, kind of. Maybe. Selectively.
Confused? I am. A little.
Facebook will (now?) allow link traffic, just don’t put the link in the post itself. Okay.
In fact, Meta is now quietly advising Page managers to add URLs in the first comment, not the caption. The reason? Posts without visible outbound links perform better in the feed.
It's not a ban, it’s a workaround. A Facebook endorsed one? And one that matters if Facebook is finally becoming a legit traffic source again.
What Brands & Marketers Can Do Now
If you lived through the pre-SEM phase of SEO, you’ve already lived through the in-between place we’re sitting right now waiting for more tools to impact these tools.
Can’t believe it was already six months ago I was quoted in The Drum about ads coming to OpenAI and ChatGPT. These products aren’t yet ready to be rolled out and prioritized in the media plan, but it’s coming.
So for now, you’re seeing lots of “experts” sharing lots of advice about what to do. My LinkedIn is full of proselytizations and expert hot takes and vaporware products. But more pragmatically, this is just the evolution of SEO. We’re hypothesizing, piloting, and testing. Soon there will be more formal ways to impact search and results with more tried and true replicable strategies. But for now, it seems like there are some basic recos.
Here are my four recos. These aren’t from ChatGPT. These are what I’m doing and recommending:
1. Shift from Search-First to Search-Plus AI-Supportive Content Strategy. Immediately.
Develop a content strategy that answers broader questions and is semantically structured to serve traditional search engines, AI models, your website, your email campaigns, and your social feeds. In 2025, “AI-optimized” is just a modern way of saying “human-optimized.”
2. Continue to Prioritize Earned PR
We’re seeing that indexed news stories from credible publications are consistently surfacing in AI responses. Investing in earned media is as critical as ever, possibly more so. While national outlets are heavily featured, don’t overlook trade pubs, regional media, podcasts, and op-eds. These also appear to seed content into AI results. And believe it or not, my experience also shows that a PRNewswire release could be a key way to inject credible, controlled messages into LLMs.
3. Do Your Own Share of Model Audits
It’s not hard to scan what’s being surfaced. Think of it like the early 2000s “Google yourself” moment. Log out of your profile, open an incognito window, and search your company, product, or category through the public AI search lens. What shows up? Who’s shaping the narrative?
4. Social-First Still Matters in 2025-2026
This hasn’t changed. Social platforms are still where communities form, culture spreads, and discovery begins. Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, and podcasts aren’t just where people search before (or instead of) Google—they’re also being indexed and cited by AI search tools.
So… Google’s AI Mode is a big signal in reshaping how people discover and interact with content. For marketers, this is less about ranking #1 and more about being the source behind the synthesis. And it’s such early days we need to keep an eye on it. Because it changed before, and it will change again. -Greg
📣 Signal confirmed: Social is now the #1 way Americans get their news. Except there’s a twist.
The algorithm has officially replaced the anchor.
According to the 2025 Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute, more Americans now get their news from social media and video platforms than from television. That’s a milestone, and a major signal that the media landscape isn’t just evolving, it’s realigning.
But wait—there’s a twist.
New data from @emarketer shows that time spent on social platforms will peak in 2025 at 1 hour and 54 minutes per day for U.S. adults, before beginning a slow decline.
At the same time, the number of social users is still growing. More people, but a little less time per person. So while individual engagement may flatten, total minutes will continue to rise.
What does this mean?
News has been decentralized. TikTok and YouTube are the new evening news. The new Walter Cronkite might be on the Forbes creator list.
Trust flows differently now. Creators are the new correspondents, but also the editorial filter, distribution channel, and community builder.
Attention is no longer guaranteed. Platforms will compete for time with short-form video, creator content, and 1:1 messaging tools. Brands need to compete by creating value and building relationships.
So yes, the pivot to social news is complete.We’re witnessing a fragmentation and personalization of news like never before. How long will social own #1? Will AI just obliterate this next year? Too soon to tell.
Just know when you see next year’s data with an update on this study, it’ll probably be via social. -Greg
🧠 Minecraft as a Learning Lab?
In a new study published in Nature, researchers used the Minecraft universe to uncover how people balance individual vs. social learning. The findings are as fascinating as the gameplay. I LOVE THIS!
Cognitive scientist Charley Wu designed custom scenarios in Minecraft for 100+ participants and found the most successful learners weren’t lone wolves or copycats. They were adaptive players, switching between learning on their own and mimicking others depending on the situation. THIS IS HOW I LEARN.
Sometimes it was more advantageous for a player to mimic others, as in the case of choosing to mine around the spot where a participant saw other players gathering gems on their screen.
Wu and his team created a computer model that took in what each player saw on their screen across the scenarios and predicted how individual learning works in conjunction with social learning.
The results gave a new way of looking at how these modes of learning interact.
"We show that rather than potentially one accounting for the other, that they actually strengthen, amplify one another," Wu says.
The study found that the most successful players were the most adaptive, switching between individual mining and using social learning when the situation called for it.
Key takeaway? Social and individual learning amplify each other. They’re not competing forces, they’re complementary tools.
Also notable: this research signals a new frontier in behavioral science and those screaming headlines about how bad screens are all the time. Metaverse communities and games aren’t just for escape and to as a toy, but can be used in understanding how we think, act, and learn together.
Listen to this podcast here about it. Amazing. -Greg
📊Chart of the Week
Facebook, you guys. Facebook.
⚡️Social Signals
For the first time, a growing number of people (especially under 35!) are turning to AI chatbots like ChatGPT for daily news, according to the 2025 Reuters Institute report, signaling a major shift in how younger audiences consume and trust media. Massive signal here.
As reported months ago, DIGG IS COMING BACK! I’m in the beta community, and got access this week, and it’s so fun! Best $5 I ever spent. Well, that’s not true. But it was worth it.
Move over Forbes list of billionaires! Here’s the Forbes list of Top Creators for 2025, where YouTubers, TikTokers, and podcasters are raking in $853M, launching brands, and taking over your TV screen.
Instagram is testing reposts in the main feed echoing Twitter’s retweet and TikTok’s re-share, potentially giving creators more reach.
All Facebook Videos are now Reels. Okay.
Video of the Week: The founder of Netflix literally dropped his best business advice in under a minute.
Thread of the Week: “Stop doomscrolling” I literally opened my phone and the doom just appeared on the screen
LinkedIn Video of the Week: Netflix CMO Marian Lee on how she uses AI.
Emdash Shame of the Week: I’m sorry to the people who used the em dash before ChatGPT.
Reel of the Week: What if the next level of audiobooks are transcripts? At the library.
This Made Me Laugh Out Loud of the Week: Lawyers watch John Wick.
Internet Fun of the Week: How human is your dog’s name? How doggy is your name? (note: apparently 7 out of 100,000 dogs are named Greg!?)
Keep going! 🚀✨
Greg