Search Disrupted Newsletter (Issue 36)

What AI cites on LinkedIn, and what it ignores

We pulled 24,412 LinkedIn URLs cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google’s AI products over the last 90 days and broke them down by URL type. The result is our new report: How AI Search Cites LinkedIn in 2026.

57% of those citations are long-form articles. That’s the single biggest finding, and it’s a strange one. LinkedIn has been deprecating articles in its UI for years: the Pulse branding is gone, the article composer is buried, and most users assume the feature is dead. The URLs still live at /pulse/ for legacy reasons, and AI search keeps citing them anyway. Everything else is a long way behind.

• Articles (/pulse/): 57%
• Feed posts (/posts/): 15.6%
• Company pages (/company/): 9.3%
• Personal profiles (/in/): 2.7%

In plain English: AI search cites what you publicly publish on LinkedIn. It does not cite your profile, your company page, or anything that requires a login.

Link: How AI Search Cites LinkedIn in 2026

A German court says Google is on the hook for AI Overviews

It’s hard to find sympathy for Google in most stories, but I think it’s warranted here. AI Overviews are more summarization of existing search results than generation of new content.

It’s the same defense Google has used for twenty years of search: we’re not the publisher, just surfacing third-party content. For Overviews, the defense fits.

A regional court in Germany disagreed, treating AI Overviews as Google’s own statements. If an Overview says something false about your brand, the publishable defendant is Google.

Google will appeal. But every EU legal system is going to look at the same question over the next year.

Monitoring what AI says about your brand is now a brand-safety category, not an SEO nice-to-have. If a German court can make Google liable for a hallucinated claim, your customers can sue you over one too.

Link: Landmark German ruling: Google’s AI Overviews are Google’s own words

Publishers tell Common Crawl to stop

Common Crawl is a nonprofit that’s been archiving the open web since 2008 and publishing it as open datasets. The data gets used by:

• Academic researchers studying linguistics and machine learning
• Search engine builders looking for a starting corpus
• AI labs training nearly every major LLM in production (open-source or commercial)

If you’ve used an AI model, you’ve used data from Common Crawl.

This week a coalition of major publishers sent Common Crawl a cease-and-desist letter alleging copyright infringement and accusing them of ignoring robots.txt opt-outs.

In our experience, Common Crawl has been polite. They identify themselves with CCBot and honor robots.txt. But CCBot is just a string, and less ethical scrapers forge it the same way they forge Googlebot and Bingbot. The cease-and-desist may be addressed to the wrong operator entirely.

If you’re a brand monitoring AI search, you want CCBot reading your site. Knowatoa’s AI Search Console tests CCBot and 20+ other AI crawlers, flagging any blocked by your firewall, CDN, or WAF.

Link: Publishers push Common Crawl to stop collecting content for AI training

Apple’s new Siri runs on Gemini, but what does Gemini say about you?

At WWDC last week, Apple confirmed that every Siri voice query now passes through Gemini.

As people ask more questions of Siri (and Gemini behind it), it matters whether your brand is thought of positively by the model. The model doesn’t actually think anything; sentiment is a collective average of all the data that’s gone into it. That’s what Knowatoa tracks, and what you work to improve over time. As sentiment improves, your visibility and appearances improve across all the answers.

If a model’s opinion of you shifts after a launch, a press cycle, a competitor campaign, or a Reddit thread you didn’t know existed, you see it on the dashboard.

Link: Apple unveils next generation of Apple Intelligence, Siri AI, and more

Thanks

Thanks for reading. These take real time to put together and the replies are what keep them going. Hit reply and tell me what you’re seeing on your dashboards.