February was a busy month across search, AI and media. From Google’s recent Discover core update and AI link visibility changes, to new AI-powered tools from TikTok, Microsoft and Meta. Here’s a look at the latest updates from the past month.

Google rolled out their February Discover core update. Discover is a part of Google Search that shows people content related to their interests, and this was the first core update done for Discover. This update aims to ensure that users are shown the most local and relevant content based on their location, along with reducing the amount of clickbait content shown and surfacing more original content from sites with expertise. Content is now evaluated using E-E-A-T signals and topical authority, rather than previous metrics such as CTR and bounce rate. Google has also revised their Discover guidelines with a heavy focus on avoiding sensationalism tactics which manipulate clicks.

AI Overviews: Now with Visible Sources

Google has announced that they are designing their AI Overviews and AI mode by making links more visible. In a recent statement, Robby Stein, the VP of Product for Google Search, has said that Google will show more descriptive and prominent link Icons on both desktop and mobile devices, and now links will appear in a pop-up display when you hover over them. The visibility of links within AI-overviews has been a talked about issue over the last year, with research showing that only 1% of users clicked a link from within an AI summary, and so this new update from Google is an attempt to address these concerns by making source links easier to find and access.

Google has also introduced a new A/B testing feature in Performance Max campaigns, which makes it easier for users to run A/B tests on a single creative asset group. Before this update, creative testing relied heavily on assumptions and indirect comparisons, however now advertisers can measure ad performance in a controlled environment, and can split traffic between two creative ad sets. This new feature means that we can now assess the creative impact of ads within the same asset group, making it easier to compare performance and resulting in cleaner campaign reporting.

From Rankings to Robot Citations

Microsoft introduced a new feature in Bing Webmaster Tools called AI Performance, which shows how a website is appearing in Microsoft CoPilot, Bing Ai Summaries and selected AI partner integrations. For the first time, website owners can now see and track how often their content is being cited in AI-generated answers. This new AI performance dashboard shows the total citations, average cited pages, grounded queries used when referencing content, and the specific URLS which are most often cited. With this new update, Microsoft is signalling that AI citations are playing a critical role in search visibility, and making it easier for users to better understand and measure their performance as search evolves.

Manus AI: Ads, But Smarter

Meta has also jumped on the AI-bandwagon by embedding the Manus AI into their ads manager. This means that advertisers can now use Meta’s own AI automation tools for audience research, report building and campaign analysis. This feature can be found within Meta’s Tools menu, with the goal of helping advertisers optimise their campaigns faster and aid in smarter audience targeting.

AI Steals Clicks, Radio Steals Customers

As AI summaries across search engines become the new norm and move toward a projected 75% search saturation by 2028, the industry has started to find ways to address a “zero-click result” issue in the funnel as more consumers start finding their answer without having to click into a site. 

However, in Radiocentre’s latest study, they suggest the best way to beat the AI middleman is to produce paths to bypass it entirely: they found radio advertising in particular drove a 43% increase in direct web traffic for participating brands. By pairing a high-trust broadcast reach with a clear call-to-action, radio acts as a “performance multiplier” that bypasses volatile search landscapes and sends high-intent audiences straight to your URL. This trend is starting to put even more emphasis on brand and offline media, as consumer searches are getting more platform driven rather than network driven.