Someone finally ran the test properly. For 41 days, half the internal links on a website were written straight into the HTML and the other half were injected by JavaScript after the page loaded. Then the server logs were checked to see which crawlers found what.
The result is worse than most people would guess. Googlebot reached 2% of the JavaScript linked pages. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Bingbot, Amazonbot and Meta’s crawlers found close to none of them at all.
Search and SEO
Your JavaScript links are invisible to almost every crawler
Vinicius Stanula published the experiment on Search Engine Land yesterday. He split a site’s internal linking in two, hard coded HTML on one side and JavaScript injected links on the other, then tracked 41 days of logs to see who followed what.
Google’s wider crawler stack was the only one that executed the JavaScript and followed the injected links at all. The catch is that almost none of that work came from Googlebot itself, which is the crawler that actually builds the search index. Googlebot reached 2% of those pages. Every other crawler tested found virtually nothing.
Why this matters for your business: if your menu, your filters or your product listings only appear once JavaScript runs, whole sections of your site do not exist as far as AI assistants are concerned. Open your own site in a browser with JavaScript switched off and look at what survives. That is roughly the version the machines read. On WordPress the usual culprits are filter widgets, lazy loaded listing modules and anything that builds navigation in the browser. Ship the links in the initial HTML and let JavaScript improve them rather than create them.
AI cannot agree with itself about who to recommend
A study of 14,472 AI citations across 50 metros and 10 business categories looked at where Gemini and ChatGPT source their local recommendations. Business websites came out ahead of directories in Gemini’s local answers, which is the encouraging half of the finding.
The discouraging half is consistency. Ask the same question again and the sources rarely repeat. A business cited this morning can be gone by the afternoon with nothing at all having changed on its website.
Why this matters for your business: treat AI citations as weather, not as rankings. Checking once tells you almost nothing. If you want to track this properly, pick a handful of questions a customer would really ask, run them every week, and measure how often you show up rather than whether you showed up today. And because business websites are beating directories here, the underlying work has not changed. Keep your own site accurate, detailed and easy to crawl.
Advertising and AI
ChatGPT ads reach 31 European markets on Monday
OpenAI confirmed yesterday that ChatGPT advertising opens in 31 European countries on 24 August. Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Austria are all in the first group. It is the largest single expansion since the format started testing in the United States about six months ago.
Ads only appear for people on the Free and Go plans, so Plus, Pro and Enterprise stay clean. Buying runs through OpenAI’s own ads team, agency partners and technology partners for now, with self service through Ads Manager promised later. OpenAI says advertisers get no access to chat histories and that ads sit visually separated from the answer itself.
Why this matters for your business: South Africa is not in this round, so nothing changes on your media plan today. What does change is the timeline. Six months from a single country test to 31 markets tells you roughly how quickly this will arrive here. If you already sell to European customers, it is buyable from Monday through an agency partner, and early inventory in a new ad format is usually cheap for a while.
Social
YouTube doubles the bar for new creators
YouTube announced its first real change to Partner Programme entry since 2018. From 1 February 2027 a new channel needs 1,000 subscribers plus either 8,000 watch hours in twelve months or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days. Both of those figures are double what they are today.
Existing partners keep their status but must accept updated terms by 31 January 2027. Shorts ad revenue picks up a separate condition of 10 million rolling views over 90 days, and a channel that drops under it keeps earning on long form while Shorts payouts pause. YouTube also added a 45% share for creators when an advertiser targets five or fewer channels. Amjad Hanif, the VP running creator products, pointed at 200 billion Shorts views a day as the reason.
Why this matters for your business: if you were planning to build a branded YouTube channel through to monetisation, the window to qualify on the old numbers closes at the end of January. If you buy creator placements instead, expect the smallest channels to get squeezed out and mid sized ones to put their rates up.
Automotive
What the crawler problem looks like on a dealership website
This one is a read across rather than fresh automotive news, because today’s lead story lands harder on dealer websites than almost anywhere else.
Dealership sites are built on exactly the pattern the experiment punished. Search result pages filter stock in the browser. Vehicle detail pages load specification, pricing and finance panels after the fact. Stock turns over weekly, so links appear and vanish constantly. A separate benchmark of 100 dealership websites found 84 of them scored below 60 out of 100 for AI visibility, with an average score of 34, and found that 48% of dealerships block AI crawlers outright at the server.
Why this matters for your dealership: a buyer asking an assistant for a used hybrid under R300,000 near them gets an answer assembled from whatever the crawlers could actually read. Check two things this week. First, whether your robots.txt or your security plugin is blocking GPTBot and ClaudeBot, because that was a decision somebody made, quite possibly by accident. Second, load one of your vehicle detail pages with JavaScript off and see whether the price, the mileage and the specification survive. If they do not, that vehicle does not exist to an AI assistant.
What to do this week
- Load your site with JavaScript disabled and write down what disappears from the navigation.
- Check robots.txt and your security or firewall plugin for AI crawlers you are blocking without meaning to.
- Pick five questions a customer would ask an assistant and run them weekly instead of once.
- If you sell into Europe, speak to your agency partner about ChatGPT ads before Monday.
- Decide now whether a branded YouTube channel needs to qualify before 1 February.
If you want a hand working through any of that on your own site, get in touch and we will take a look.
Sources
- Search Engine Land, the 41 day JavaScript navigation and AI crawler experiment
- Steady Demand, 14,472 local AI citations from Gemini and ChatGPT analysed
- OpenAI, ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe
- Search Engine Land, ChatGPT ads are expanding to 31 European countries
- YouTube Blog, new opportunities to earn and changes to the Partner Programme
- Dealership Guy, 84 out of 100 dealership websites are basically invisible to AI search