Google gave readers a button to pick your site as a source

✦A chatbot invented a policy and the airline paid

This episode was recorded straight after the last one. Where that one was about AI describing a person incorrectly, this one starts where the wrong answer turns into money.

A man in Vancouver needed to fly to Toronto for his grandmother's funeral. Airlines sometimes offer bereavement fares. Air Canada's chatbot told him he could buy a full price ticket and claim the discount retroactively within 90 days by submitting a refund form.

No such policy existed. The chatbot had made it up.

On 14 February 2024 the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal found the airline liable for negligent misrepresentation. It had not taken reasonable care to ensure its chatbot was accurate. Damages came to CAD 812.02 including fees.

The sum is small. What was settled is not.

The chatbot cited it and answered, and the whole thing came back as the company's responsibility.

If you are launching in a market whose language you do not read, that is the line to sit with. Whatever an AI system says about your policies in Korean is said in your name.

✦Neglected sites are the entry point

Jaeseung moved from there to the black hat side. The people who manipulate rankings are now aiming at AI answers, using methods they have run for years.

The most common one in Korea, he said, is the abandoned website. A tutoring academy or a restaurant builds a site and stops maintaining it, or closes down while the site stays up. Those sites get compromised and stuffed with keywords and links, often hidden so the owner never notices.

Worth checking if you run a Korean site you no longer actively manage. A site that is alive but unattended is the qualifying condition.

✦Fake phone numbers inside AI answers

The same technique pointed at AI answers produces something more direct.

They scatter information targeting people searching for airline or travel details, and they put their own scam phone number in. So the AI answer shows the scam number rather than the airline's real one.

On a results page you can at least look at the domain. An AI answer lifts the number out and places it in a sentence. The material you would use to judge it is gone.

Which returns to the running theme of the episode. AI recommendations are not yet something to accept whole. For anything that matters, open the citations under the answer and read the source.

✦Why GEO and PR rarely meet

For a brand this becomes an organisational problem. AI answers are built from material already on the web, and much of that material was produced by the PR team rather than marketing.

Those two teams run on separate budgets and separate calendars.

Should GEO, AI search, be treated as PR? Even on budget the teams are different. Marketing has its budget, PR has its budget, and how do you get this out?

Jaeseung did not see this as new. Since the SEO days he has asked for the same message across external channels with links pointing back to the company domain, and it rarely happened, because it is not how a PR organisation works. PR prioritises the launch that is coming, not the consistency of what is already published.

Which order SEO and GEO go in is covered in the EP 09 note.

✦The preferred sources button

Here the episode turns. Reading Search Engine Journal, Jaeseung found a button he had not seen before.

It registers the channel with Google as one you prefer and trust. It feels like a subscribe button.

In Google Search a reader can press a star to mark a site as a preferred source. That site's new posts then appear more often in that reader's own results. They need to be signed in to a Google account.

It applies across every language Google Search supports, so it works in Korea. My own footer already had it when we recorded.

✦What the documentation actually says

Being precise here, because we described the reach loosely on the recording. Google's help page lists three places.

• AI Mode and AI Overviews
• The Top Stories section, which appears on news-oriented queries
• The News tab in Search

Discover is not on that list. The sentence mentioning it was cut from the published video.

Three limits worth stating plainly. This does not raise rankings. It changes results only for the person who registered. It does not guarantee a place in Top Stories. And Google notes that sources which are not updated regularly may be unavailable.

✦Adding it to your own site

Check eligibility before you add anything. Search for your site in Google's source preferences. If it does not come up there, the button has nothing to register.

Searching the full domain does not always match. For insungsong.com the full domain returns an empty list, while typing insungsong returns it under the name Hosoo Media, because the index is keyed on the name.

Scope is fixed too. Domains and subdomains work, subdirectories do not. You cannot register a site section on its own.

The button itself is one script and one placeholder. Load Google's library once in the document, then put an element with the documented attribute where the button should sit, and Google draws it there. You do not write your domain anywhere. Search Engine Journal has the full code and a WordPress walkthrough.

This site now uses that method. The button in the footer and the one inside this article are both drawn by Google.

✦goto URLs and rank tracking

One more observation from late in the episode. Google appears to be testing result links that pass through a goto path on its own domain rather than exposing the destination URL directly.

That affects rank tracking. Tools that read URLs off the results page cannot see the real destination. Jaeseung said he had seen the pattern in Ahrefs, where impressions can look like they suddenly dropped.

This is an industry observation, not a Google announcement. It reads as part of the same direction as removing pagination from results, but how far it goes is unknown. If your rank tracking numbers move sharply without an obvious cause, check this first.

✦What to take from it

Two things landed in the same few weeks. A tribunal held a company responsible for what its AI said, and Google gave readers a way to name the sources they trust.

The button will not move your rankings. It puts your writing in front of people who already chose you. If you publish regularly, it costs one script tag.

For a brand entering Korea the first half matters more than the second. You are liable for what AI says about you in a language you may not read, and the material it draws on is whatever exists. The EP 14 note covers how to fill that in.

How I work is on the service page, and the other episodes are in the episode list.

✦Common questions