Shopify says orders from AI search grew 3.3x year over year, and AI-referred sessions convert 64% more often than organic search. Paris Childress also covers an EU court advisor's two routes to Gemini infringement, Google switching off Search for K-12 student accounts, Reddit search ads, AI Mode flight answers, shifting Google search budgets and People Inc.'s APIs for AI agents.
Shopify says orders arriving from AI search grew 3.3 times year over year, from a base it called small and didn't size, and that AI-referred sessions convert 64% more often than organic search. Paris Childress also unpacks an EU Advocate General opinion that sets out two ways a Gemini answer can infringe press publishers' rights.
He also covers Google switching off Search and Gemini for K-12 student accounts, Reddit testing ads in its own search results, AI Mode flight answers that link only to Google Flights, media buyers questioning 10 to 30% of Google search budgets, and People Inc. building custom APIs so AI agents can read its journalism.
On November 3rd, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar gave his opinion in Like Company v Google, the first generative AI case to reach the EU's top court. He set out two routes. Route one is unlawful access: the bot got around a paywall, bot block or other technical measures to reach the article. Route two is substitution: the article's form of expression is systematically recognizable in the answers, so users can skip the original. Repeating the same facts isn't reproduction, even if it pulls traffic away, and paraphrasing alone doesn't avoid liability. Training is, as a rule, covered by the Article 4 text and data mining exception, as long as access was lawful and there was no opt-out. On the Gemini answer at issue, he said the conditions don't appear to be met. The Hungarian court will decide.
If the court follows this, recognizable expression becomes the EU test for answers built from retrieved webpages. AI answers would lean toward facts plus a citation rather than a close paraphrase, and paywalls and bot blocks would carry legal weight.
Google said on November 3rd that Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search will be off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators turn them on. Google's education chief told The New York Times that Search and AI are deeply integrated. For this group, Google is publicly treating Search and AI as one product that cannot be split. It is an admin control for minors' accounts, not a statement about search for everyone.
Shopify reported Q3 revenue of $3.7 billion, up 32%. Alongside the 3.3x growth in AI search orders:
Harley Finkelstein said the volume is still small, and that Q3 was the first time shoppers tried delegating purchasing through personal agents. Heading into Black Friday, Paris's advice for Shopify merchants: check that your products are in Catalog, and track AI referrals and referrers as their own segment.
Reddit is testing ads on its search results pages with a select group of advertisers. A search for espresso station could show ads for espresso machines, coffee beans or mugs. Reddit hasn't said which markets, formats or pricing will apply, or whether Reddit Answers will carry ads. The test comes days after Reddit said Google referrals fell by more than one million a week in October. Reddit, which AI engines still cite heavily, is now selling against search intent on its own site.
Barry Schwartz tested AI Mode with flight questions on domestic US and international routes and says that every time, the only links went to Google Flights. Google hasn't commented, and Schwartz raises a possible link to the EU's Digital Markets Act. If it holds, online travel agencies and airlines lose a critical click path, and Google favoring its own services becomes a regulatory question again. The counterpoint: Google Flights may simply be the best structured data source, and the test may be anecdotal.
Digiday interviewed 18 media buyers. Three named buyers put the questioned or moved slice at 10 to 30% of client search budgets: Above the Bar Marketing at 10 to 20%, Power Digital at 10 to 30% reallocated based on media mix modeling and geo tests, and Accuracast at about 10% now, possibly 20 to 30% around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Tinuiti says brand keyword CPCs rose 5% in Q3, while Google search ad revenue still grew 12% in Q3. Before cutting, keep testing brand terms with a geographic holdout.
People Inc. is building custom APIs that hand AI agents its articles in Markdown with author names, dates and trust signals. Its chief innovation officer said, "Most of a webpage is junk meant for a browser." The company moved from web crawling to Amazon S3 buckets to custom APIs, and The Economist, Time and Forbes are making similar agent-ready versions. Paris's advice for big publishers: test serving clean Markdown versions of key pages, with dates and authors, and compare AI bot crawl rates against your HTML pages.
Hi, everybody, and welcome to The GEO Show on Wednesday, November 4th. The GEO Show is brought to you by GEOforge: Full Self-Driving for AI Visibility. And I'm your host, Paris Childress. So we've got some great stories lined up for today. Let's dive right into the first one, shall we?
An EU court advisor says Gemini answers can infringe press publishers' rights in two ways. On November 3rd, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar gave his opinion in Like Company versus Google. It's the first generative AI case to reach the EU's top court. He said a chatbot answer can infringe if the bot got around a paywall or bot block to reach the article, or if the answer is so recognizable it replaces the original.
Repeating the same facts doesn't infringe, and training is generally covered by the text and data mining exception. So to be clear here, there are two different routes. Route one is unlawful access, meaning that the bot got around technical measures or scraped past them to reach the article. And route two is substitution, meaning that the article's form of expression is systematically recognizable in the answers, so users can skip the original.
Paraphrasing alone doesn't avoid this. Reporting alone or reporting the same facts isn't reproduction, even if it pulls traffic away. The provider is liable when the copying is inherent to its business model, or when it didn't take reasonable measures to prevent it.
The investigator here found the training questions inadmissible. He still said training is, as a rule, covered by Article four TDM exception, and TDM here stands for text and data mining. As long as access was lawful and there was no opt-out. On the Gemini answer at issue in the case, he said the conditions don't appear to be met.
The Hungarian court will decide. All right, this has pretty major implications. If the court follows this, recognizable expression becomes the EU test for answers built from retrieved webpages. AI answers would lean toward facts plus a citation rather than a close paraphrase, and paywalls and bot blocks would carry legal weight.
So this would kind of move things a little bit backwards to where they seem to be trending today. Some interesting questions arise from this, such as, does the statement "facts are free, expression isn't," does that actually help publishers, or does it really bless zero-click answers?
Okay, let's move on to the next story. Google will switch Search off for K-12 student accounts until schools turn it on. Google said on November 3rd that Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators turn them on.
Google's education chief told The New York Times that Search and AI are deeply integrated. What's most interesting here is that for this group, K-12 student users, Google is publicly treating Search and AI as one product that cannot be split. So is Google admitting here that there's no longer a non-AI Google search?
Perhaps. And of course, this is an admin control setting for minors' accounts. It's not a statement about search for everyone. All right, on to the next story. Shopify says orders from AI search are up three point three x year-over-year from a small base. Shopify reported Q3 revenue of three point seven billion, up thirty-two percent.
It said orders arriving from AI search grew three point three times year-over-year from a base that it called small, and it didn't size. It also said AI-referred sessions convert sixty-four percent more often than organic search. A few other notable figures here. AI traffic to merchant storefronts is up two point six x year-over-year.
AI-referred sessions, as I said previously, convert sixty-four percent more often than organic search. Searches powered by Shopify catalog convert at two times general AI search. And Shopify says that the data comes from Shopify global search API usage. Harley Finkelstein said the volume is still small.
He said Q3 was the first time shoppers tried delegating purchasing through personal agents, naming Muse, Claude Duet, and Grok as partners. So this is pretty significant. As we are seeing now that the biggest commerce platform, Shopify, now reports AI referrals converting much better than organic search, which is not a big surprise.
And of course, as we head into Black Friday, if you're a Shopify merchant, you should definitely check that your products are in catalog and that you are tracking AI referrals and referrers as their own segment. Okay, the next story is Reddit tests ads in its own search results. Reddit is testing ads on its search results pages with a select group of advertisers.
In its example, a search for espresso station could show ads for espresso machines, coffee beans, or mugs.
Reddit didn't yet say which markets, formats, or pricing will apply, or whether Reddit Answers will carry ads. And it's interesting timing because this announcement comes days after Reddit said that Google referrals to Reddit fell by more than one million a week in October. And Reddit, which AI engines cite heavily still, is now selling against search intent on its own site.
So in a way, competing with Google here. Is Reddit turning itself into a search engine? It's interesting to think about that, but this is a small test, and people that are searching Reddit may be researching only. On to the next story. AI mode flight answers link only to Google Flights, a tester finds.
Barry Schwartz tested AI mode with flight questions on domestic US and international routes. He says that every time, the only links were to Google Flights. Google hasn't yet commented. Schwartz says 100% of the time, the only links in the answers went to Google Flights. And Schwartz raises a possible link to the EU's Digital Markets Act here. If this holds, if this is true, then online travel agencies and airlines will really lose a very critical click path, and Google favoring its own services becomes a regulatory question again.
So will AI mode be the next fight, a renewed fight over Google favoring its own services? The counterpoint here is that Google Flights may just be the best structured data source, and maybe this is just anecdotal. Next story, media buyers put 10 to 30% of Google search budgets in play.
Digiday interviewed 18 media buyers about Google search budgets. Three named buyers put the questioned or moved slice at 10 to 30% of client search budgets.
Some more details revealed in Digiday's article. Above the Bar Marketing, ten to twenty percent of budgets are now in question. From Power Digital, ten to thirty percent are reallocated based on media mix modeling and geo tests. From Accuracast, about ten percent now, but possibly twenty to thirty percent of these budgets are being questioned around Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Tinuiti says that brand keyword CPCs rose by five percent in Q3, and Google says AI Overviews create new opportunities for brands to be discovered. This is the first big sign from the buying side that AI mode and AI Overviews are changing search budgets, not just traffic. That said, if you're wondering where does this ten to thirty percent go, well, Google search ad revenue still grew twelve percent in Q3.
So before cutting, keep testing those brand terms with a geographic holdout now that brand AI Overviews sit in the right column. And the last story of today, People Inc. builds custom APIs so AI agents can read its journalism. People Inc. is building custom APIs that hand AI agents its articles in Markdown with author names, dates, and trust signals.
Its chief innovation officer said, "Most of a webpage is junk meant for a browser." So People Inc. moved from web crawling to Amazon S3 buckets to custom APIs. The Economist, Time, and Forbes magazines are making similar agent-ready versions. And Human says that traffic from AI agents is up a whopping seven thousand eight hundred and fifty-one percent year over year. So big publishers are building a second front door for machines. Question here, is Agent Ready Markdown the new mobile-friendly?
Agents can already parse HTML though. If you're a big publisher, I would start testing serving clean markdown versions of your key pages with dates and authors to AI and see if those are going to be achieving better AI bot crawl rates than your HTML pages. Okay, let's wrap it up with four lightning round updates.
First, Google is reportedly testing removing the AI mode button from the search bar. Interesting. Next, Google rewrote its crawled currently not indexed help text. It now says that the status doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem, and the wording about quality issues is gone. Next, ChatGPT pulled voting information from Democracy Works more than 16.5 million times by the afternoon of election day.
And last, Supermetrics now lets Claude create ad campaigns on six platforms. Campaigns stay paused until a person approves them. All right, that's a wrap for today, November 4th. Thank you all for tuning in, and see you on the next one.
