Google's AI Mode can now book a home-service pro inside the answer, but only through four partner platforms, so the software a business uses decides whether it can be booked.

Robby Stein (Google Search) announced "direct links in AI Mode" for booking home services through Angi, Thumbtack, Housecall Pro and Jobber, with ServiceTitan "coming soon", US only. His own example: AI Mode "compared local pricing, checked reviews, and made recommendations" before he booked a plumber. Jobber says eligible paid customers need a full address and a Google Business Profile matching the Jobber address, with no lead fee; Housecall Pro says no lead fee and no Business Profile required, though its integration is "coming soon". Jobber's help page says reviews and a booking form can get a business recommended "more frequently" (Jobber's claim, no data). Google has not said how it chooses which businesses to show. SEJ's summary: a business on none of these platforms "has no route to direct bookings through AI Mode."

DataForSEO and Serper say Google now slows down "google.com/goto" redirect links per results page: the first five or six resolve, later ones wait seconds to minutes. SerpApi's status page shows its Google Search API returning goto links in organic results from 30 October, fixed 2 November, then a new incident on 3 November still open. Today the same page lists the AI Overview API and AI Mode API as "Degraded Performance". No Google statement. The incidents name organic results, not AI Overview sources.

Cloudflare added a "Personal Assistants" category to its traffic analytics and renamed its setting to "AI Crawler and Agent access policies". Site owners can now set an overall agents policy, then Allow, "Block on pages with ads", or Block for each supported personal agent. New sites are asked during setup whether they run ads, and the recommended policy is tailored to the answer. The post does not name which agents are supported. Search and training policies are unchanged.

New since yesterday's item: Adam Fry's counting rule is "Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that's a search." SEJ adds Ahrefs' referral tracker (3 November update, tracker itself not read): across 118,671 sites in October, Google sent 24.74% of tracked traffic and ChatGPT 0.36%.