Ranking Weather
The strongest signal today is ranking turbulence. Search Engine Roundtable is seeing chatter and tool movement around May 13-14, with reports of rankings swinging, Discover traffic dropping for some sites, and a continuing “Crawled - currently not indexed” pattern. Our tracker lines up with that: today’s partial score is 6/10, still moderate-high, but cooler than the 6.9/10 peak on May 9. Translation: don’t panic over one bad day, but do watch your money pages closely.
AI Traffic Gets More Measurable
A useful break in the clouds: GA4 is getting a clearer AI Assistant traffic bucket for visits from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. That matters because AI referrals have often been buried in messy source data, making it hard for site owners to know whether AI search is helping or quietly replacing clicks from Google.
Search Engine Land also published fresh research on ChatGPT Search today, showing fewer domains are being cited per answer after model changes, which means AI visibility may be concentrating around stronger, trusted sources. Smaller sites need to make pages easier to cite: clear answers, named experts, original data, and crawlable pages.
Rich Result Cleanup
Google Search Central’s current structured data warning is still important: FAQ rich results stopped appearing May 7, 2026, with Search Console FAQ reporting going away in June and API support ending in August. Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land both framed this correctly: FAQ schema can stay, but it no longer earns that old Google FAQ dropdown visibility.
What to Do
- Check Search Console for drops starting May 13.
- Separate AI assistant traffic in analytics.
- Don’t delete FAQ content, but stop expecting FAQ rich-result clicks.
- Strengthen brand, author, and source signals so AI systems trust your pages.
