June 2026 SEO News: Google is in legal trouble for AI Overviews, AI traffic reports in Google and Bing

0:00Jack Chambers-Ward: All the biggest SEO news from the last month, including Google bringing preferred sources to AI search, Google launching search profiles, AI reporting coming for UK-based websites in Google Search Console, Google Business Profile now directly connecting to GA4, and German courts ruling that Google can be found liable for AI overview results. All of that coming up on this week's episode of Search with Candor.

0:29Jack Chambers-Ward: hello and welcome to this week's episode of search with candor i am your host jack chambers ward and this is one of our monthly news episodes where i'll run down the biggest seo news from the last month i'm going to dive into all things that happened in june 2026 and it's a lot of google news unsurprisingly obviously we're working in the search and seo industry here but there's a lot happening at Google when it comes to the kind of metrics and the kind of features that they're rolling out. Before I get to all of the latest news, please do like and subscribe and do all of the usual YouTube stuff.

1:03Jack Chambers-Ward: If you're watching on YouTube, hit the like button, hit subscribe, use that notification bell to make sure you get notified every time we publish a new episode every single Monday. And if you're on Spotify or Apple podcasts, you can leave us a review and let us know what you think of the show in the comments down below as well without any further ado i'm gonna get stuck in straight away let's talk about preferred sources shall we and preferred sources is a feature that was quite prevalent in google discover and was launched a little while ago and it's become very very popular for a lot of publishers to ensure that their users are subscribing to the right publishers.

1:44Jack Chambers-Ward: This is now appearing in AI search, AI mode and AI overviews as well. If you're not watching this, if you are just experiencing this via audio, I am actually sharing all of the things on screen as I'm talking about them. But if you do want to read the articles yourself, you can go down to the video description or the show notes with this episode and go and check them out yourself directly as well. So like I said, this is preferred sources, a feature from google discover coming to ai mode and ai overviews as we look here there is basically an option for publishers to register and you basically like let them know hey you i am a publisher and i want to be featured on preferred sources and users can then add your site to preferred sources basically they type in your domain and they're like yep i want to regularly see your content and it highlights you in a section that is basically labeled out and uh it's an interesting thing i think because it feels more like a discover feature right it feels more like that social media feed kind of thing that we see so much from google discover but i think it's really interesting because we get a lot of these kind of features now bleeding over into ai mode and ai overviews you can see some examples here of what it looks like so if you select preferred sources you actually get a little designation like preferred next to the the domain there which i think is very very cool and basically the links in ai responses get that little label if they are in your selected preferred thing and there is a whole sort of like documentation stuff i mentioned funnily enough this in my brighton seo talk last year that was focused on the google discover side of things is now even more relevant um i'll be doing a talk coming up at om conference in october that will be discussing this exact thing and this is a real kind of yeah like i said lean towards the social media kind of things giving you more prominent links and more visibility in people's feeds when it comes to ai mode in their chats and their conversations and even things like highly cited being a thing here so this is a uh not part of the preferred sources but another element where a lot of people are referring to it then you can see that a lot of other stories and a lot of other publishers and articles are referring to it you can see what's influential and what's not i think these are nice little labels but i think preferred sources is definitely something you if you're making regular content on your website if you're publishing regular content on your website you should be doing this and there is actually a button you can add to your website that is like add me as a preferred source kind of thing we have already had these conversations with our clients and i think it's definitely something you should be doing if you are publishing informational content regularly you should be thinking about doing this preferred sources option for you to be more heavily featured especially if you know you have a loyal audience if you know you have the kind of audience that wants to specifically get information from you this is the perfect opportunity for that this is a real way to harness and focus and ensure that your audience are fully engaged with what you are doing and essentially subscribing to like they would a youtube or a podcast and things like that next up we have a new profile for creators to highlight their work on search surprise surprise right this is more of this very similar kind of thing where we're seeing google giving trying to give publishers and creators ways to highlight themselves without relying directly on the organic algorithm and i think this is interesting because this feels quite like knowledge panel they mentioned knowledge panel there and this is part of the knowledge panel section and you actually get to you know craft your own little profile essentially kind of like a social media profile funnily enough i keep saying social media because these seem to be where these uh features and elements are stealing ideas from one of my phrase this is of course on google discover as well as we were talking about just now this is google's kind of version of the social media feed and you can access this if you are a notable publisher i think it's rolling out just for notable publishers in the us at the moment you can register yourself and ensure that you are basically able to use a thing called a search profile and it is essentially a profile page like you would see on instagram or x or linkedin or whatever it is you get a little bio you can follow people there's a little animation here it gives you like your websites and other social links and recent content and all that kind of stuff it is basically literally a little social media profile i think that works quite well again if we're treating discover and now seemingly ai mode as a way to follow creators you care about way to track information from publishers you want to be aware of the ability to follow and subscribe and all that kind of stuff i think is really really cool if enough people use it and that is the huge caveat here right this is where a lot of this comes down to like yeah cool this is a lovely idea thanks google are people actually using this service are people actually using this feature do normal everyday people actually know that preferred sources and social profiles are a thing in order for them to even find it and use it that is the big question i have i am not sure how many people that aren't you know seos are aware of what's going on in search and very aware of that are actually using this kind of thing because it's not really something you can accidentally stumble upon do you know what i mean like obviously this is launching from the creator side for big creators but do do people know that this exists from a a normal everyday user kind of perspective i'm not convinced i like the idea i like the way google are integrating this kind of more social media-y kind of google discover style feed into things like ai mode but i'm still not convinced that this is actually the right thing to you know rebuild traffic to publishers if that's even possible at this point anyway i'll stop ranting uh we'll talk about some very interesting things let's get into some reporting shall we so this is search console data that will give you ai performance reports generative ai performance reports so this will basically help your you to understand your site's visibility within generative ai stuff ai reviews ai mode and also the ai features in discover as well it is included in the overall performance report so like those numbers include that automatically however this is you know rolling out they said they're doing tests and stuff at the moment so don't expect to see this anytime soon this is still in beta and kind of behind the scenes with search console but it is kind of what you expect they're showing you impressions here they give you an idea of the kind of impressions what pages are getting those kind of impressions there's a under search results performance report you get a generative ai performance report there as well notice there's no clicks mentioned here no click-through rate or anything like that i would imagine they probably don't want to talk about that because the numbers are not good so it's focused very much on impressions here again i'll get into this a bit more later on we've already talked about bing but i'll get into my last stories about being here and there ai visibility data this is the step in the right direction from google we talked a lot about the transparency of data from google the lack of transparency of data from google you get things as I mentioned here, impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates.

10:08Cool. We're not getting queries. We're not getting nuanced data that would help us be more strategic, if you see what I mean. Compare that to, in fact, I might skip ahead. I'm going to go crazy and skip ahead. We'll move on to Bing AI visibility tools because don't get me wrong,

10:31Jack Chambers-Ward: I think this is cool. This is heading in the right direction. but what Bing is doing is way more interesting so Bing Webmaster Tools if you haven't already please go and set up a Bing Webmaster Tools for your website or for your client it is sure not as big of a deal as the usual things we have with Google Numbers you're not going to get the same amount of traffic you're not going to get the same amount of numbers of course but some of the insights and some of the tools from bing webmaster tools are so useful and it's all completely free as well this is legit one of the only ways to get genuine ai visibility insights directly from search data there are plenty of tools out there they're all third-party tools this is first-party data from bing itself so they have added four new capabilities intense topics citation share and a comparison tool as well so the original rollout of the ai performance report had some cool features was kind of giving you a share of voice kind of thing this is a little bit more in depth and we actually if i zoom in here if you're watching at home you can actually see intent topic citations and citation share as the columns here so you can see which what the grounding queries are for that and then what kind of intent that is is it informational is it local event-based uh they've got comparison navigational in there as well then this essentially categorize it learn and solve research creation and a few other types of intents as well we're getting official intent data from a search company why aren't people freaking out about this i know because it's bing i know because bing's not cool and bing's not as big as google and it's not crazy google doesn't do any of this stuff we are not getting any intent data from google this is like kind of crazy to me and you should be doing this right now uh seeing visibility through topics again this is essentially clustering bing is doing clustering of your data for you if you look in their ai performance reports that is wild this is really juicy information if you have clients if you have a website if you aren't big and big enough to get usable data from bing do this stuff like today like yesterday you need to be having a look at this ai performance report trust me so the topics this will basically give you like say clustering in a way you can now understand what kind of areas you are most visible in and which ones are getting the most citations and things like that you can then understand where your gaps are in terms of coverage and all that kind of stuff you probably know what i'm talking about when it comes to topics and like you know topic clustering and stuff like that except google isn't doing that bing is doing that for you next up is citation share so obviously they had total citation the citation count previously this shows how much of the citation space your domain or your site receives for a specific grounding query so it's the percent and then I'll read it off here, the official calculation, if you're not watching on YouTube.

14:06Jack Chambers-Ward: It is calculated as a percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown across all sites for that same grounding query. So you can understand not just how many times you've been cited, but how visible are you compared to the other companies and other brands and other websites? In theory, your competitors, right? how visible are you compared to them when people search for this kind of thing and you're taking up 60 of the space compared to everyone else doing like five and ten percent that's game changing that's huge it's not a ranking thing or anything like that but it gives you a representative idea of how often your site is being cited in ai results on bing it's really cool it's really interesting data i think it's really worth people exploring more in more detail then of course we have a comparison tool feel like this kind of should have come day one personally but like always nice to see comparison stuff i'll get on to some uh we talked about some comparison stuff later on because Google Trends now has comparison data if you didn't already know.

15:21I will discuss that in a later episode don't worry but now you can do 30 day 30 day period comparisons and actually see and compare how much your total citations and your average cited pages have changed over time. Very cool again it feels like something that should have been included but I'm not going to turn my nose up at something that is a very very useful metric. if you're doing month-on-month analysis if you're doing like client reporting and stuff like that this stuff is really really handy and like i said if you're not already using bing webmaster tools you're missing out on a lot of cool insights and uh last but not least i guess they talk about transparency so this is why i think bing are trying to separate themselves from google when it comes to this sort of thing they're trying to give us more data they're trying to give us more of a direct perspective about how our sites are being represented in ai search credit to them right i think this is very cool i think this is very nice very innovative as often is the case from ping they do cool stuff and then because google isn't doing it nobody cares and then google will either copy them or adapt them or whatever and then suddenly people care i'm telling you right now get in on the ground floor for this stuff so you can get these insights and when it is relevant think about how you can apply that across different search platforms again broadly speaking good seo is good geo good ai search optimization all that kind of stuff i'm not saying you should change your strategy based on big data i'm saying you should get as much data as you can and this is one of the only first-hand sources of AI search data that you can get and it's totally free there's basically no excuse not to do it right another thing I thought was really interesting and I can't believe it's taken this long and I saw people like Darren Shaw and Claire Carlisle talking about this recently with finally finally finally google business profile data in ga4 you can now report directly on your local search data with your google business profile in ga4 why it's taken this long to do this i don't know you basically need to connect the two services obviously you have to it says here you have to be an administrator or an editor or an owner whatever like obviously you can see correlations between things you can now cross reference data for local data versus non-local data you kind of gain insights into how people visit your website from your gbp and then how they then explore the rest of your site if you've ever seen you know like user funnels and looking through user tracking data and things like that

18:28Jack Chambers-Ward: you need to link the two and then create new reports this is there is already already be a new report in your ga4 you don't need to go out and do this manually you can then get data on things like interactions website clicks calls people asking for directions messages bookings menus if you're a restaurant as well and they give you six months of data for your google business profile. Again, pretty handy, pretty nice to see that you can also link multiple profiles. So if you have a business that is franchised, or you have multiple branches, you can link them all to a single GA4 and report from there.

19:09Jack Chambers-Ward: If you're using something like Data Studio, we use that for our reporting here at Google, for example, this means you for the first time, you can pull in Google Business Profile data directly into Data Studio using a data source from GA4. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but it's a pretty big deal. You have now so much more power and flexibility to understand and process the data from Google Business Profile compared to the relative lack of transparency you had with the previous little performance insights and things like that very cool you'll be able to basically get into a bunch of things there's a few different limitations here they explain you know you can't uh use them in like custom explorations or comparisons or anything like that you can't filter it or anything like that you can't use like custom filters or anything like that um the only problem with connecting multiple google business profiles is that it pulls through aggregated data across all of them you can't then separate it out so be careful if you're doing that if you want to connect all of like i said all the different branches or franchises or whatever it is you can't then separate it out and say okay now branch number one is doing this branch number two is doing that it will collate and compile all the data into a single report so be careful with that um and yeah i think this is just interesting stuff if you're doing local seo you're almost certainly using google business profile right and this is like i said basically gives you the power to report so much more clearly and more impactfully when it comes to your local search data and you're getting it from google business profile as you should you should be getting your data from google business profile as someone who's done a lot of local seo my career hugely relevant hugely important i've already had conversations with a couple of friends who run local businesses and i was like i know you don't care about all my like seo stuff trust me you'll want to do this do it now and you can worry about it later because it is a real thing of like if you don't link it now you don't get the backtrack of data and that's often the case we know we talk so much about when the swap happened from universal analytics to ga4 or when you connect anything to anything get it set up as soon as possible big query big and if you're looking to archive your data that's a huge factor as well get the link set up sooner rather than later so you will have historic data you can fiddle around and update it later on but start that initial link like as i was saying about big webmas tools early do it yesterday and get it done as soon as possible so you will have as much data as you possibly can for future reports future discussions and future analysis i think that's something that goes overlooked quite a lot and i think that's something that more of us need to be aware of don't get me wrong i have totally been guilty of this myself of i'll set up eventually it'll be fine and then it's not fine and we have to you know get things set up right on to our last story here which is an interesting one i'm going to kind of come away from a bit of the direct search stuff and we're going to talk about some legalities uh this is the decoder.com and it says landmark German ruling declares Google AIOVs are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers.

22:57Jack Chambers-Ward: I think I've referred to this a couple of times in podcast episodes since because it feels like more people should be talking about this. This is a huge deal. This is a huge deal. And obviously my partner is German, you know, and I am always like paying attention to what's happening politically and culturally in Germany and stuff like that. but this respect to the germans respect to you know the eu and european commission and things like that in general they seem to be the companies uh sorry the organizations and the countries that are calling out google and these huge conglomerates and corporations for the dodgy stuff they're doing with ai and lms so i'll give you key points and then i'll go through my takes as well a german regional court has ruled that google is directly liable for false claims in ai generated search overviews in this case google's ai had wrongly linked to publishers to scams and shady business practices the court treated the ai overviews as google's own content and rejected google's argument that users were responsible for fact checking the rules themselves so this is important because in false information incorrect information the example here where it was the scam and dodgy business stuff can cause some pretty serious brand reputation damage when actually you didn't do any of that you can be found liable for that now thanks to google and google's argument was um it's not our content it's put it's generated from other people's content we didn't write that technically it's pulled from different sources and we have a little disclaimer that is like go and fact check this yourselves and what this ruling says is no google it is your content you have marketed this you have branded this you have labeled it ai overviews ai mode you have labeled it gemini and all that kind of stuff as a google product so the results of that google product are your problem legally and also doing a little sorry llm sometimes hallucinating get things wrong isn't enough to cover your ass legally even 91 of accuracy means millions of wrong answers what a brilliant statement there and i think that is really interesting because google basically came back with a bunch of days like yeah well it's like 91 accurate it's so accurate most of the time and but then they also talk about well now there's a billion users using this thing well then that's quite a lot of people that's millions and millions of wrong things the yeah i think this is really interesting the argument that google had here was that the company says ai views are designed to reflect information that already exists reflect is such a dodgy choice of words from google like come on oh sorry yes we're just reflecting other people's content we know what you're doing here it's very clear that you scrape and take other people's content present it as your own in ai views and ai mode because you label it as google products you're not reflecting other people's writing it's ridiculous anyway i think this is particularly interesting and they're basically saying like well it's basically like traditional search results and the court said no no it's not people know that you know this is a search but they don't necessarily have to look into it they shouldn't need to verify their own searches you should be the source of information if that's how you're providing that's how you're declaring this essentially so i think this is big for google whether this becomes a bigger deal whether and oh yeah the the the reasoning here the users can check for themselves defense the court replied that basically users almost never click on sources in AI areas like yeah they can but they don't so shut up very very like very cheeky by Google very sneaky by Google and I thought this was really interesting as well free speech protection and I'll read this section because I thought it was interesting as if the rest wasn't bad enough for google the court also went after free speech protection for ai generated content and ai's opinion is and i quote not the expression of an acquired conviction of the person expressing it but result of an algorithm according to the court offering ai powered research is above and i quote above all an expression of google's business activities unquote and quote at most secondary expression of an interest in being able to freely express one's opinion and beliefs.

28:24Jack Chambers-Ward: When weighing the plaintiff's privacy rights against Google's interests, Google had to take a backseat, especially since the challenge statements were based on untrue facts. The AI had linked the plaintiffs to companies that, according to sworn affidavits, had no connection to them whatsoever.

28:43So what this, I think, essentially says is we could see this escalate.

28:51Jack Chambers-Ward: This could become a much bigger story. The little section in the end there is saying this may reach international courts as well. And whether this is enough for Google to kind of take a step back a little bit and whether this may, you know, cascade onto other AI search and LLM platforms. Will this affect open AI? Will this affect Anthropic? You know, I think it's a really big, interesting question. and this could be the thing that stops the AI search bubble, the recent growth and surge of AI search in this industry, if they are being fully held accountable for the things that are being published, reflecting the information from the internet, the things that are being generated by these LLMs, then a lot of companies like OpenAI, like Google, like Anthropic could get into some legal hot water incredibly quickly.

29:52Jack Chambers-Ward: Will that be enough to stop them? Will that be enough to slow them down? I don't know whether this will go to an international war. I think it will, personally. I have seen how dogged, and I mean that in an entirely affectionate way, how determined companies like the ICO and the European Commission are for going after this kind of stuff. they have been repeatedly bringing up a thing we have in the uk is the digital markets act which is a anti-monopoly thing that google has been battling recently as well it has been relentless it has been here is another thing you have reached this thing you have not done enough to reach the minimum thresholds you need to sort this out over and over and over again it's happened a few times already since the act was passed we're going to see this more and more and i think the more that these companies are held accountable the less quickly they can grow without fully testing and and doing all this kind of stuff i think it's really interesting i think this could be a absolute game changer that's why i thought it was worth sharing even if it's not directly literally seo news this could have a huge impact on the future of search as we know it so that is pretty much this week's episode folks i hope you enjoyed some of the most important news topics obviously we covered everything from preferred sources to google profiles to search generative reporting in ga4 to connecting your google business profile to ga4 to ai visibility insights in bing webmaster the tools and the potential legalities that may stop all of this AI search stuff expanding so quickly.

31:40I will put links for every single article I've talked about and showed on screen in the video description and the show notes down below so please do go and read them in full

31:48Jack Chambers-Ward: go and check them out. I as always I do briefly skim through them and give you the highlights so if you do want any extra research or let me know basically let me know if you're interested and clicking through and doing extra reading in the meantime i'll be back in the next couple of weeks i've got a couple of guests i've got ellie and live from digital loft coming up mark will be back here in the studio i've got a couple of my fellow candor colleagues brendan and uh designer one of our lead designers mark salisbury will be joining us in a new in studio style episode and I'm also working on a mini series essentially focused on AI search.

32:31Jack Chambers-Ward: If there are any topics you would like for us to discuss on AI search, if there are any experts that you want more guests you want me to get on the show to discuss AI search and specific topics, I've already signed a list of guests and a list of topics and now need to kind of cross-reference them, but I am looking for recommendations and you folks, the viewers and the listeners at home, please do let me know who you want to see and who you want to hear on the show in our AI Search mini series coming up later this year. Of course, we'll be back next week. If you haven't already and you're in the UK and you want to come and check it out, Search Norwich XL is happening on the 24th of September, 2026.

33:12Come and check it out. I'll put a link for the tickets down below searchnorwich.org if you want to get that. And you can get 25 % off your tickets by using the code podcast the discount code podcast to get 25 % off your ticket prices so I'll put that link in the show notes you can go and check that out come and check out our amazing lineup for our SEO conference that is happening in September we have Google's Martin Splitt we have Daniel Foley Carter we have Charlie Martin we have Julie Penazzo we have Arnett Hellman's we have Estella Franco we have all these amazing people coming to norwich one day it's going to be an amazing event come and check it out in september tickets are just 125 pounds but they're less than 100 if you use the code podcast so come and join us come and check it out and hopefully i will see you in person come and say hello in person to me mark and the team in september thank you for watching thank you for listening and i'll see you next week have a lovely week