SEO 101 Ep 529: Bing’s Growth, Ask.com’s Demise, and AI Overviews Link and Schema Updates

Google's AI overviews are evolving rapidly, with new updates that prioritize inline links, hover previews, and author attribution—changes designed to boost click-through rates and credibility. Yet, a major Ahrefs study reveals that adding schema markup has no measurable impact on AI citations across Google, ChatGPT, or Gemini, challenging long-held SEO assumptions. Meanwhile, Bing is making historic gains, hitting a billion monthly users—driven by a 2%+ market share increase in the US—while Google faces a high-profile lawsuit over a false AI-generated claim that labeled a musician as a convicted sex offender. On the technical side, Google has quietly fixed a 50-week data logging error in Search Console that distorted impressions and CTR metrics, rendering past year-over-year comparisons unreliable. And in a surprising oversight, Google’s own example code still includes the dead meta keyword tag—despite its irrelevance for over a decade. The demise of Ask.com, a pioneer in conversational search, marks the end of an era, underscoring how quickly digital landscapes shift. The episode delivers a sobering truth: SEO best practices are in flux. Schema markup, once considered essential for AI visibility, now appears ineffective for citation in major models. Webmasters should focus on content quality, authority, and structured data for organic search, not AI citations.