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Dated events

AI search timeline: the launches that changed citations

A running list of dated changes in AI search, kept short on purpose. If we could not pin an event to a date, it is not here.

AlgoLink research team ·

Timelines flatter the story. They make a messy year look like a staircase, when most of these launches overlapped and some were quietly reversed.

We keep it for a practical reason. Why? When someone asks why their citations moved, the first check is whether a product changed that month. A shift in March 2025 means something different from one in September 2024.

The list stops where our verified entries stop. Newer events are added only after we can confirm the month from the vendor's own announcement.

What happened, month by month

  1. ChatGPT released

    OpenAI opens a chat interface to the public. At launch it has no live web access.

  2. Perplexity launches its answer engine

    Answers arrive with numbered source links, which set the citation style many later products copied.

  3. Microsoft shows a Bing with chat

    Chat answers inside Bing, with footnoted sources. Later renamed Copilot in November 2023.

  4. Google announces SGE in Labs

    The Search Generative Experience previews AI answers above results, only for people who opt in.

  5. OpenAI documents GPTBot

    A crawler with a published opt-out in robots.txt. Google-Extended followed in September 2023.

  6. Bard becomes Gemini

    The rename also brought Gemini to Google's mobile app experience.

  7. AI Overviews launch in the US

    Announced at Google I/O. Unusual answers circulated within days, and Google narrowed some triggers.

  8. ChatGPT search arrives

    Web answers with linked sources inside ChatGPT, rolled out in stages to more users.

  9. AI Mode announced in Labs

    A conversational results page. The US rollout widened in May 2025.

  10. Claude gets web search

    Anthropic adds search with citations for some paid users in the US, extended later.

What the timeline cannot do

It shows when a product shipped, not when its source selection changed. Vendors rarely announce the second kind of change, so a drop in your citations usually has no dated cause.

Three patterns in the dates

First, citations came before Google did. Perplexity and Bing put numbered sources next to generated text in 2022 and early 2023, and Google followed with SGE in May 2023 and AI Overviews a year later.

Second, rollouts are staged. A launch date usually means a first group of users, in one country, on one plan. If you cannot reproduce a screenshot, you may simply not be in that group yet.

Third, crawlers got names. OpenAI documented GPTBot in August 2023 and Google published Google-Extended a few weeks later. Blocking either is a choice about training or product use, and it is worth reading each vendor's current documentation.

None of this explains source choice. It does give you a calendar to hold against your own logs, and the source claims table shows how little can be said about causes.

Using it with your own logs

Pair a launch date with your own sightings. If your page lost an overview link the month AI Mode widened, note it. Do not conclude anything yet.

One sighting is an anecdote, and three months of the same prompts is a series. The experiment list shows how to keep one cheaply, and the source claims table shows which assumptions to hold loosely.

One last note on method. Where vendors changed a date after the fact, we use the first public announcement. We would rather be a month early than quote a rumour.