SEO news: October 2025

ChatGPT Atlas Browser

OpenAI has released its first browser with integrated ChatGPT, which you can download for free on macOS.

"Browser with ChatGPT brings us closer to a true super-assistant who understands your world and helps you achieve your goals."

Examples of what ChatGPT Atlas can do:

• Accommodation reservations - will advise you about the selected destination, whether there are interesting trips, restaurants, etc. in the area.
• Shopping advisor - if you are looking for beach gear, AI will offer you tailored products.
• Flight tickets - will help you get information about the selected airline and flight, whether luggage/refreshments on board are free, connections to the final destination, etc.

What does OpenAI gain from this:

1. User Acquisition
2. Integration into users' web tasks, including agent tasks
3. Use of information for memory/training/improvement
4. Implementation into a full-fledged operating system in the future.

Google drives 831 times more traffic than AI search

Google remains a major source of traffic to websites, according to TollBit's State of the Bots survey for the second quarter of this year.

Key points of the report:

• Google dominance - organic sends 831 times more visitors to websites than AI systems (ChatGPT, etc.)
• Small share of AI - systems account for only 0.102% of all visits.
• Low click-through rate from AI - the click-through rate (CTR) from the AI interface was 91% lower than the top 10 organic search results.
• Decrease in real traffic - user visits to the monitored sites decreased by 9.4% between Q1 and Q2 2025.
• AI bot traffic has soared - it has now surpassed Bingbot (the second largest search crawler), at the beginning of 2025 it was 1 in 200 AI bot visitors, by Q2 it was already 1 in 50 (a 4x increase).
• Scraping Grows, Costs Increase - AI bots are intensively scraping web content, which increases costs for site owners but doesn't pay off in traffic.
• Influencing consumer behaviour - AI tools change user behaviour by directly answering questions instead of directing them to the web.
• Website owners are fighting back - AI bot blocking is up 336% year-over-year.
• Ignoring rules - 13.26% of AI bot requests ignored rules in the robots.txt file (up from 3.3% in Q4 2024).
• Content licensing and traffic - site owners who had licensing agreements with OpenAI saw 88% more scraping, but also significantly stronger referral rates.

Google AI mode expands

The AI mode tab has been available in the Czech Republic since the beginning of October. Marketing Miner was very quick to respond, you can measure statistics on a selected dataset in the tool, similar to AIO.

Outside the Czech Republic, AI mode has spread to more than 40 countries and 35 languages. The current number of countries is over 200, including Europe.

AI mode and user behaviour

The Growth Memo case study featured 37 test users on 7 different tasks.

Results:

• 75% of users did not leave the AI mode panel.
• The first interaction (in 88% of cases) was with text generated by artificial intelligence.
• Users do not need much time to get the information they need (52 and 77 seconds per task).
• Clicking on links is rather rare.

The test had some limitations: small sample of users, testing only in AI mode without the option to select another system, users living in the US.

Google Try-on

Need new shoes? With Google Try-on, you don't have to browse the stores and wait in lines. Simply upload your photo to your mobile phone and try on the shoes virtually.

The feature is so far available in selected countries such as Canada, Australia and Japan.

Google Goldmine: How SERP rankings are made

Google Data Warehouse has reportedly leaked documentation related to the ranking of websites.

There are several factors involved, we have selected the most interesting ones:

• User behaviour as part of the evaluation - short dwell time, poor interaction with the site - these factors also negatively affect the quality score.
• Complexity of content - content is not just generated keywords in sentences or text that has been repeated 100 times, but unique information.
• Content harmony - h1, title, description and content are about the same thing, they are not in conflict.
• Visual content - headlines, text and other elements are visually different according to standard expectations.
• Title is not a dogma - if it is not completely relevant or a better naming convention is possible, Google will do it, for example based on h1 or content on the page.

All the findings are therefore nothing new, other than confirming that user-orientation, quality content and the web are the basis for success.

Reddit vs AI scraping

Reddit is suing four data scraping companies, including artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity and SEO firm SerpApi.

It accuses them of illegally using content on Reddit through Google search results. "Reddit claimed the companies hid its identity to get around technical restrictions, scraping its data in bulk."

Ads in AIO

By the end of the year, Google should allow advertising in AI Overviews in the US and selected English-speaking countries. The company confirmed the intention at a Google Access event.

Sources

• https://searchengineland.com/reddit-sues-perplexity-serpapi-scraping-google-463681
• https://searchengineland.com/google-more-visitors-ai-systems-report-462905
• https://blog.google/intl/cs-cz/produkty-sluzby/objevujte-ziskavejte-odpovedi/rezim-ai-novinka-ve-vyhledavani-prichazi-do-ceska/
• https://www.marketingminer.com/cs/blog/pridali-jsme-mereni-ai-modu
• https://blog.google/products/search/ai-mode-expands-languages-locations
• https://www.growth-memo.com/p/what-our-ai-mode-user-behavior-study
• https://blog.google/products/shopping/virtual-try-on-shoes
• https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/google-goldmine/
• https://searchengineland.com/google-expand-ads-ai-overviews-463273