November SEO News: Gemini 3, AIO’s, AI Mode & More

November has passed and so has the busiest month of the year with the increased stress, pressure, and major spending events of the year.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday were in full force and are now finally over. And to add to your relief, we’ve gathered some essential SEO updates to get you through to the end of the year.

Google Updates

Gemini 3

Google’s AI assistant is getting a facelift! Google have announced an upgrade to its main AI engine, Gemini.

Dubbed as their “most intelligent model that helps you bring any idea to life”, Gemini 3 is stated to be a big leap towards AGI (artificial general intelligence) with a variety of features to explore.

These include:

1. A minimal number of prompts needed to understand a user’s query
2. Improved visualisations and interactivity
3. Gemini 3 Deep Think – offering multimodal understanding, which allows for even the most complex of problems to be solved by understanding multimedia (such as text and images together).

With development beginning with Gemini Pro, Gemini 3 will be rolled out to all Google features: AI Mode, the Gemini App, AI Studio, Vertex AI, and Google Antigravity.

Google Structured Data

Have you heard of the Practise Problem Markup? If not, you’re not alone as Google have identified this as an unused feature within their search results pages.

It’s a feature used to assist students, teachers, and parents alike in finding learning material online by utilising structured data to markup practice problems.

As a result of the low usage, Google plan to deprecate this feature, making way for more efficient and simpler ways to reach your ideal destination when searching.

Whilst users may not notice any difference to the phasing out, it’s worth noting there may be ongoing advancements to Google’s results pages which means the potential tweaking of SEO strategies.

AIOs effects on CTR

AI Overviews have been a blessing and a curse to SEO teams across the world. While there’s been enhanced visibility for businesses of all scales, and the growing public use of AI, there has also been a rapid decline in click-through rates.

Seer Interactive carried out a study which analysed 3,119 informational, and educational queries from June ’24 – September ’25 across both organic and paid media. The results were astounding:

1. When you’re cited in an AIO, you get 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks compared to when you’re not cited at all.
2. Organic CTRs are down by -61% for informational queries, and paid CTRs are down by -65%. Even in listings where AIOs aren’t present, we’re seeing a -25-41% drop.

The evidence found solidifies what your typical user’s search journey now looks like, with social search and visual shopping on the rise. This needs to be a consideration for future strategies to ensure that visibility aligns with consumer behaviour.

New agentic features for AI Mode

More exciting growth in the Google AI space – some additional features to their advanced search “AI Mode”. It’s become even smarter, introducing three brand new agentic features alongside the mode’s recently announced ability to book restaurant reservations. These are:

1. Booking event tickets
2. Booking beauty appointments
3. Booking wellness appointments

This is explicitly an opt-in feature, with the main objective being to streamline the browsing and buying experience, with easy viewing of various pricing/package options – a helpful tool for the average disloyal customer.

If your business doesn’t rely on these systems, ensure you have competitive pricing options to stay ahead of the curve with further advancements to come!

Google’s New Additions to Opal

Among Google’s many suites of tools, Opal is a new addition. Released in July, it’s a tool that allows the user to easily develop mini apps. A recent upgrade to its capabilities includes the optimisation of content for efficiency and scalability. Including:

1. Blog posts
2. Social media content
3. Video ad scripts

However, if you’re wondering if this will be a tool for the SEO-ers, you’d be wrong.

Opal helps with uploads and non-SEO-friendly content, but that’s as far as it’ll go. It’s unable to provide original, valuable content that’d avoid the scaled content abuse policy which clearly labels the practise of manipulating search rankings as “abusive”.

Digital PR for AI Search

When we shop, it’s highly likely that we lean towards businesses that have a good reputation – be that from online recommendations or by word of mouth. Well, the same goes for ranking in AI search queries!

Google Search’s VP says that PR might be a factor in how well you rank in AI search, especially for recommendation type services. This means that AI search has more reason to recommend your business as a source or option if you’ve been referred to in notable public articles. The visibility is important to AI search as it’ll view the business as having good authority, reputation, and integrity.

If you aren’t already, ensure that SEO teams are aligned with PR teams in all projects. When certain categories need to be pushed, PR can action this and SEO can monitor the impact.

GSC Adds Annotations

Google Search Console has delighted users this month by adding a brand-new feature that lets them add up to 200 new annotations per property.

The feature allows for 120 characters attached to a specific date; however, the annotations cannot be edited, only deleted. On a better note, anybody with access to the property is able to view these annotations.

This will be exceptionally helpful as they can be used as compiled digital notes to assist with keeping track of any key insights that have impacted performance. They can then be referred to at a later date to help with any reporting or presenting needs.

ChatGPT Update

ChatGPT’s Agent Mode

If someone asked you to choose between Bing and Google, which would you choose? We all have our preferences, but if your answer isn’t Bing, this may come as a shock!

Early 2025, ChatGPT introduced ChatGPT agent – built to handle more complex requests by utilising websites, information gathered, and ChatGPT’s overall intelligence. This allowed users to use Agent to perform various tasks like book appointments, create presentations, buy ingredients for a recipe, and more.

Recent findings show that ChatGPT’s agent uses Bing a surprising 92% of the time and chooses only the top 63% of results to present.

Now is the time to act if you’re not already optimising for Bing as the ChatGPT Agent may not be as “independent thinking” as we were led to believe, making the Agent just another search interface.

Stay up to date with Summit

We’ll soon be heading into the new year – so make sure to be up to date and ready to hit the ground running with our blogs and guides.

New year, new products and new feed. Here’s our advice for how to optimise your products for ChatGPT shopping.

Interested in learning how you can boost your online performance even further? Get in touch with our team at hello@summitmedia.com.