🗞️ Opening Line
Happy Friday — and happy end of April. We're closing the month with a story that hits close to home for anyone with a website, a business, or a brand trying to show up online. Let's get into it.
💡 The Big Update
Google AI Mode Has 75 Million Daily Users. Your Website Traffic Is Paying the Price.
Google's AI Mode — the successor to its Search Generative Experience — now has 75 million daily active users. And it's changing how people find information in a way that should get every business owner's attention.
Zero-click searches are skyrocketing. That means users are getting their answers directly from Google's AI without ever clicking through to a website. The traffic that used to flow to blogs, product pages, and resource centers is increasingly staying inside Google.
But here's the flip side — and it matters. Brands that get cited inside AI Overviews are earning 35% more organic clicks than brands that just rank in traditional results. Being mentioned by the AI isn't a consolation prize. It's becoming the new first page.
This has given rise to a new discipline: Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO. Where traditional SEO focused on ranking for keywords, GEO focuses on building topical authority deep enough that AI systems cite your content as a primary source for complex, multi-step questions. It's less about individual pages and more about becoming a trusted reference across a topic area.
For small and mid-size businesses, this is both a warning and an opportunity. The old playbook of stuffing keywords and building backlinks is losing ground fast. The new playbook is about depth, authority, and being the source AI systems trust.
This is a story we'll keep coming back to. The rules of online visibility are being rewritten in real time.
⚡ Quick Commits
Meta's Business AI Is Handling 10 Million Conversations a Week — and It's Free At the start of 2026, Meta's business AI tools were handling about 1 million conversations per week. By late March: 10 million. It's currently free for small businesses as Meta scales adoption globally. CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted that monetization is coming — which means the free window won't last forever. If you haven't looked at Meta's business AI tools yet, now is a good time. TechCrunch
Big Tech Just Committed $725 Billion to AI Infrastructure This Year Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon reported a combined $130 billion in Q1 capital expenditures alone — primarily for AI data centers. Full year projections now sit at $725 billion, up from earlier estimates of $600 billion. Wall Street analysts are already projecting over $1 trillion in 2027. Google Cloud grew 63% year-over-year. The AI infrastructure race isn't slowing down. It's accelerating. Bloomberg
🛠️ The Tool Drop
Perplexity Pages If GEO is the new game — building content that AI systems cite as authoritative — Perplexity Pages is worth adding to your toolkit. It lets you create structured, in-depth reference pages on any topic that are designed to be indexed and cited by AI search engines. Think of it as a way to publish the kind of deep, authoritative content that GEO rewards, without needing a full website build. For anyone trying to get ahead of the AI search shift, it's one of the most practical tools available right now. perplexity.ai/pages
🎯 The So What
April was a big month for AI news. A trial that could reshape OpenAI. A $60 billion startup deal. Layoffs credited to AI rewarded by Wall Street. And now a fundamental shift in how people find things online.
The through-line is the same every week: the rules are changing faster than most businesses are moving.
GEO is a perfect example. A year ago it didn't exist as a concept. Today it's the strategy that determines whether your business shows up in the AI-powered search results that 75 million people are using every day.
The Changelog exists to help you keep up with exactly this kind of shift. If you found today's issue useful, forward it to someone who needs to hear it.
See you Monday.
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