is a breakout Google Trends item related to AI search optimization.

Two things happened in the last year that make dashboards look way worse than reality, and I still get asked about both of them. September 10th of last year, Google changed the results page so rank trackers can't see past the first page. Before that most trackers were pulling the first 100 results for a query. Now it's more like the top 10 to 20. So if you open Ahrefs and look at how many pages you've had indexed over the years, there's a huge drop right around that date. The pages aren't deindexed. They just aren't in the top 20, so Ahrefs can't find them anymore. Same thing shows up in Search Console, because for most businesses the majority of your impressions were coming from rank tracking tools hitting the SERP. Big decline in impressions, no decline in clicks. Those were never the impressions you wanted anyway. The other one is more recent. Week of June 8th, AI mode started recommending fewer brands, and Google's more and more likely to link to and recommend its own properties. If you're tracking brand visibility in AI mode you probably saw a dip that week. Your competitors did too. You might be getting recommended less often but your share of voice is probably about the same. That second one is the main reason I think it's worth tracking a few competitor brands alongside your own, not just for benchmarking. If everybody drops the same week, that tells you it's the system, and you save yourself a week of trying to figure out what you broke.