Publishers focused on Top Stories should take note - there are growing reports that Google AIOs are appearing for more news-related queries than before.

Glenn Gabe, a veteran SEO and respected industry voice, flagged several instances of AIOs returning for breaking news topics, including searches around 'Uber Rivian', with Top Stories being pushed down as a result.

When I spoke with Harry Clarkson-Bennett, SEO Director at The Telegraph, back in January, he described the pattern most publishers had come to expect:

There's also a reputational risk for Google here. If an AIO returns incorrect information on a breaking news story, the accountability sits with them in a way it never did before.

Traditional search has always given Google cover, it's a gateway, not a publisher, and if a story turns out to be wrong, that's on the outlet. An AIO removes that distance.

If Google can't ensure accuracy on fast-moving stories, it risks dragging itself into the kind of misinformation controversy it has spent years trying to avoid.

With these latest developments, could AIOs for breaking news become the new norm, and if so, what does that mean for the publishers who've built their traffic strategy around Top Stories?

Trustpilot's annual results made for striking reading.

Operating profit quadrupled, shares jumped nearly 19%, and the company credited a 1,490% surge in click-throughs from AI search tools as a key driver.

Trustpilot's reviews are increasingly appearing across the web and in AI-generated search results, placing it among the platforms with large stores of user-generated content benefiting directly from the AI boom.

RBC analysts summed it up bluntly: "LLM citations reinforce our view that Trustpilot is an AI winner." The platform ranked as the fifth most-cited domain globally on ChatGPT in January, according to the Reuters article.

At Obsero, we've been tracking this pattern for a while. In our analysis of 171,000+ AI search citations across five consumer verticals, verified social proof consistently emerges as one of the most powerful citation drivers we track.

85% of the top 40 most-cited brands display strong E-E-A-T trust signals, and reviews are one of the clearest signals AI can verify. Trustpilot sits in the top 50 most-cited domains by LLMs regularly, and results like these show exactly why.

This isn't a story about a review platform getting lucky. It's about a business that had something AI models genuinely want, trustworthy, structured, user-generated signals, and is now being rewarded for it at scale.

Citation volume isn't a vanity metric. For Trustpilot, it moved the share price.

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The protein category in AI search is more interesting than it sounds. We tracked citations and brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews for protein-related queries.

Healthline is the most cited source in the category, not a brand, an educator. Myprotein leads on brand mentions, not because of one campaign, but because they built a content ecosystem across influencers, affiliates, Reddit and YouTube that AI now treats as consensus.

The Organic Protein Co, a relatively small brand, has a bigger AI search presence than brands with far larger budgets. The lesson: AI doesn't reward spend, it rewards trust signals.

You can take a look at the report here.

On the strategy side, I've been thinking a lot about CX research as the foundation of AI search visibility. The playbook most teams traditionally ran 👉 keyword research, on-page optimisation, rank tracking, was built for a world where discovery was linear.

It isn't anymore. Half of consumers now use AI-powered search to guide buying decisions and the prompts they're using look nothing like the keywords your SEO tool is showing you.

I work with specialist CX researchers like Ankita Suresh to help brands understand their ICP at a deeper level. That means getting into how their customers actually think, what they ask, and how they search, and using that to build a prompt strategy that reflects real buying behaviour, not assumed keyword intent.

Closing that gap starts with actually understanding how your customers think and search.

We also shipped something (well a number of things!) at Obsero this week.

Citation categorisation is now live - every domain cited in an AI response is automatically classified by type: social media and UGC platforms, brand and commercial sites, niche and specialist publishers, national media, government sources.

The reason it matters: what you do about Reddit dominating your category is completely different to what you do about a niche publisher dominating it.

We have a free trial, so you can test it out for yourself.

And finally, I got a two-page feature in The Intermediary this month discussing the shift in search.

The piece covers the shift from traditional search to AI-powered discovery, what GEO actually is (and isn't), and what businesses need to do to stay visible when customers stop Googling and start prompting.

If you work in financial services or property, it's worth a read.

🔍 Google & Search