Being seen no longer means getting paid, and someone else keeps the score

Last week I wrote that visitors from search are thinning out. This week that thinning reached a balance sheet. Ziff Davis said its content appeared billions of times in Google’s AI answers while its clicks from Google Search came nowhere close. In Turkey, where I work, the competition regulator is now looking at exactly that gap. A second pattern ran alongside it. Which discount appears in your ad, what you pay in an auction, how far a video gets pushed: more and more, the platform does that math. The distance between being seen and getting paid is growing, and you don’t hold the ruler.

Ziff Davis: 37% less Google traffic, 2.7 billion AI citations

PPC Land reported on November 7 that Vivek Shah, CEO of CNET, PCMag and IGN owner Ziff Davis, told analysts on November 6 that organic referrals from Google fell about 37% year over year in the third quarter. A year earlier the drop was about 23%, which Shah said makes the two-year decline more than 50%. Quarterly revenue fell 5.6% to $289.3 million. Advertising and performance marketing revenue fell 7.7%.

The striking number came next. Shah said the company’s content was cited in AI Overviews and AI Mode roughly 2.7 billion times in the quarter, nearly 10 times the clicks the same sites received from Google Search. By PPC Land’s arithmetic, that puts Google Search clicks around 270 million or somewhat above. The figure comes from Google’s new Search Console reports, which, as PPC Land notes, carry no click or query data. So the comparison sets AI impressions against all Google Search clicks, and the clicks sent by the AI features themselves remain unknown. Shah was candid: “there is a gap between usage and monetization.”

To me that line sums up the week. If content brings you traffic, put your AI impressions in Search Console next to your clicks and log the ratio every month. It is the first-party evidence you will have when you decide where to invest.

Turkey: the competition authority turns to Google’s AI summaries

Writing in the Turkish trade publication Marketing Türkiye on November 5, Dr. Bülent Gökdemir, who retired as a chief expert from Turkey’s Competition Authority (Rekabet Kurumu) in 2025, reported that the authority has opened an investigation into how Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode affect news publishers and what they are paid for content. He says this comes roughly a year after the EU’s competition authority moved. I could not find the decision date or the authority’s own announcement in this source, so the details are his account.

The investigation covers four questions: whether traffic to publishers suffered, whether Google’s contract terms are unfair, whether there is an exclusionary effect, and whether there is discrimination. The difference Gökdemir stresses is that Turkey’s authority imposed an interim measure on grounds of strong suspicion, while the EU investigation has none. The measure asks Google for terms that don’t discriminate among publishers, reflect the economic value of their content and let them exercise their preferences. His prediction: Google has little option left but to offer commitments.

I see this as the gap Ziff Davis described, now on a regulator’s desk. A related note: on October 30, OpenAI wrote that it will honor a shared robots.txt signal for AI training preferences. I could see only a short summary, not the full page. If you publish in Turkey, reread the AI clauses in your Google agreements this week.

ChatGPT builds its own counter, without the why

PPC Land reported on November 6 that ChatGPT is building a tool showing businesses how often they appear in its answers and how many people click through to their sites. The source is a LinkedIn post by Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse. OpenAI has not announced it. According to Kaziukėnas, the charts sit in a Business Hub open to businesses that verify ownership, for example by connecting a Shopify store, and count impressions and clicks daily.

What’s missing matters as much. Per Kaziukėnas, there is no prompt data, no user data and no competitive benchmark. You see the score, not the reasons. Definitions matter too. PPC Land points to an OpenAI report described by Vincent Terrasi in Search Engine Journal, where one URL’s click-through rate was 2% without repeat appearances. Counting repeats, Terrasi gave 0.80%, while PPC Land calculates 4,400 clicks over 518,000 impressions at about 0.85%.

I think the tool would be useful if it ships. But whoever writes the definition also writes the number. Start keeping your own ChatGPT referral data separately now, so you can check one figure against the other.

Meta: a discount from your site can appear in a copied ad

PPC Land reported on November 6 that Bram Van der Hallen, a Meta advertising specialist, wrote on LinkedIn that Meta can show discounts it detects on your website in Facebook and Instagram ads. The control isn’t in the ad. It sits in Commerce Manager under Settings, then Offer merchandising, in a “Detected offers” checkbox that applies to all ads. A Meta notice he shared says that when you duplicate an ad, eligible promotions can appear in the copy even if they were off on the original.

Whether the setting is on by default, when it arrived and whether every advertiser has it are all unclear. PPC Land says it could not review Meta documentation. The same report notes Meta moved its revised commercial terms, which make advertisers solely responsible for what its AI features create or change, to November 20 without saying it would change the text.

PPC Land’s sharpest point, in my view: a discount is a price claim. If an expired code, or one meant for a narrow audience, lands in your ad, the customer disappointed at checkout sees your name. Before Black Friday, set that checkbox yourself.

Amazon: the hidden layer in the auction

Search Engine Journal reported on November 6 that the US Federal Trade Commission and 22 state attorneys general filed an updated complaint, with newly unredacted details, in the suit they brought against Amazon in August. The unsealed material alleges Amazon raised search ad prices up to 50% above auction results on ordinary days and up to 250% during events like Prime Day and Black Friday. Per the FTC’s November 5 announcement, average cost per click allegedly rose 20% in the 2021 holiday season, and in 2022 the surcharges allegedly generated an additional $87 million worldwide.

At the center are “soft reserve prices,” which can push the final CPC above what competing bids would produce and which, the FTC alleges, went undisclosed. Responding to the original suit, Amazon denied deceiving advertisers and said they never pay more than their maximum bid. The case continues.

My takeaway: a report tells you what you paid, not how the price was set. If your benchmarks lean on 2021 to 2023 peak periods, review them, and during Black Friday watch CPC alongside conversion rate and impression share, as SEJ suggests.

Turkey: a push up YouTube’s chart is now for sale

PPC Land reported on November 6 that YouTube extended paid hype to nine more markets, including Turkey, the US and the UK. Hype lets viewers boost a new video from a smaller creator. After three free hypes a week, viewers can continue with Jewels, YouTube’s in-app currency. Each paid hype adds points to a country leaderboard and earns the creator Rubies, paid through AdSense. It is open to Partner Program channels with 500 to 500,000 subscribers. YouTube hasn’t said what a hype costs or what creators earn.

Turkey was one of three markets, with Taiwan and Brazil, in hype’s free beta in 2024. The scoring favors small channels: one hype is worth 7,500 points on a 500-subscriber channel and 50 on a 500,000-subscriber one. Whether paid hypes carry the same weight isn’t stated. YouTube’s help page says paid hype may not work on videos with third-party music, a limit tested in Brazil and Turkey on Android.

Here’s a prediction: for small channels, this leaderboard will become a shop window that brands watch too. If your channel is in the band, sign the Virtual Items Module, verify your identity and check that “Let viewers hype” is on in YouTube Studio.

What the week leaves behind

Ziff Davis’s content appears billions of times in AI answers, and nobody reports how many clicks those appearances send. Turkey’s competition authority is reminding Google that this visibility has economic value. ChatGPT is preparing a counter, Meta can choose the discount in your ad, and how Amazon set its prices is now before a court. Where I land is this: while the platform holds the ruler, your most valuable asset is your own record. Your own orders, your own referral data, your own baseline.

What I’ll be watching:

• Details of the Turkish interim measure, and whether Google offers commitments.
• Whether OpenAI officially announces Business Hub, and how it defines an impression.
• The default state of Meta’s “Detected offers” setting and the final commercial terms on November 20.
• What a paid hype costs in Jewels in Turkey.