Search Engine Watch

Official announcement: Search Engine Watch is beginning a new independent chapter. 🤠

We are genuinely excited about what comes next.

Under new owner and publisher @RTirsina 🫡, we are investing in SEW’s future, growing the team and bringing new energy to one of the search industry’s original publications.

Our plans go well beyond written articles. We want to create excellent work in whatever form serves the story best, including original research, interviews, video, audio, newsletters, webinars and live events.

Search is changing quickly, and this feels like exactly the right moment to rebuild Search Engine Watch for a new era.

We have ambitious plans, a great deal of work ahead and enormous respect for everyone who helped shape SEW over the past 30 years.

This is only the beginning. We hope you’ll join us for what comes next.

We're bringing Answer Engine Strategies to Search Engine Watch tomorrow, October 27, and it's completely FREE!

I've been seeing more and more SEO professionals trying to figure out how to get their brands mentioned, cited, and recommended by AI search engines. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of noise around GEO and AEO, with everyone claiming to have figured out how these systems work.

So, we're doing something a little different at Search Engine Watch.

We've brought together three experienced practitioners for 90 minutes of practical discussions, live demonstrations, and real-world data, without any sales pitches.

- Ann Smarty, who has 20+ years of experience in search, will show how online reputation affects AI recommendations, backed by six months of tracking data.

- Kevin Lee will demonstrate practical GEO strategies, including a live competitive analysis using an attendee's website, and explain which tactics actually deliver ROI.

- Ivan Palii will share what happened when he grew three B2B communities on Reddit, including their impact on Google rankings and AI citations.

I'm particularly excited about the live demo and the Reddit findings, because I think we need more actual experiments and fewer assumptions about AI search.

The event starts tomorrow at 11 AM ET, is completely online, and registration is free.

I'd love to see our SEO and publishing community there!

Register here: searchenginewatch.com/events/answer-…

I still remember tech gurus saying Google was dead when ChatGPT started taking over, but fast forward to 2026 (we're almost in 2027), Google Search is far from dead, and those who use ChatGPT still end up using traditional search.

Google reached a whopping 93.7% of ChatGPT's website visitors in September 2026

In other words, nearly everyone who visited ChatGPT also visited Google at least once that month!

Interestingly, the overlap looks very different from Google's side, with only 14.1% of Google's visitors also visiting ChatGPT.

Before anyone concludes that Google has won the AI search war, there's something important to understand about these numbers.

Similarweb is counting unique monthly visitors, not how many times someone searched on Google or asked ChatGPT a question.

For example, I could move 90% of my searches to ChatGPT, visit Google just once during the month, and Similarweb would still count me as part of Google's shared audience.

I think this is particularly interesting for publishers and SEO professionals who are trying to understand whether ChatGPT is replacing traditional search.

It's not, and you should not stop optimizing for Google!

What have you actually learned from testing AI search?

Pitch a talk for Answer Engine Strategies, SEW’s free online event planned for Q4 2026.

DM us with what you tried, the evidence and a strategy others can use. Useful failures welcome.

searchenginewatch.com/answer-engine-…

Answer Engine Strategies — Coming Q4 2026 | Search Engine Watch

searchenginewatch.com/events/