Lastly, I wrote about technology outpacing distribution, and why this rapid acceleration of tooling is putting power in the hands of smarter operators. If you're reading this, you're likely already ahead of the curve, but it's a good way to think about how to speak to what will matter more and more in the coming months.
Short video I made on search leaning more on brand than ever. Another about zero-click, measurement & new benchmarking. I’ll find a neat way to embed these eventually.
Marketers have a lot of new reporting coming from the primary players this week, and as summer is in full effect, it's a good time to recharge the batteries.
Talking about our agentic AI workflows
No, seriously, disconnect and touch grass. You aren't doing your best thinking while at a keyboard actively doing work. While cruising Boston Harbor last weekend, I thought of some great ideas that I'll be sharing here soon.
Onward!
Google is now penalizing AI manipulation, per its June spam algorithm update. Excellent news. As searchers, we get better quality. As practitioners, it heralds the end of the “black hat” days and a move into a more honest future.
Google also shipped an update in Search Console: a new property type to help site owners and creators understand how their social and video posts perform. You should absolutely be using this to show the further impact that search has on other channels. As marketers, we're looking for all the data we can get to tell the story.
Microsoft just handed us the first real AI visibility benchmark, and it is free. Bing Webmaster Tools shipped a Citation Share metric a few weeks back. Not raw citation counts, which are useless without context, but your percentage of citations for a given query.
This matters more than it looks, because ChatGPT's index leans heavily on Bing. Visibility there is directly tied to your retrieval eligibility. If you're not in the Bing index, you're not in the candidate set ChatGPT largely pulls from. In a similar vein, Claude uses Brave as its search backend.
I know, this is a lot to keep track of. Google is still the dominant global platform to optimize for, but there are nuances depending on the audience, and that's something to consider.
Microsoft set the standard and Google is playing catch-up, which is not a sentence I expected to write in 2026. Google has been cutting back for a long time on what they want to give marketers, clutching their data pearls.
I, for one, am enjoying the popcorn while watching the two duke it out.
What to do: get your properties into Bing Webmaster Tools this month, submit the sitemap, and start pulling Citation Share weekly.
Microsoft and Google are giving us new insight. Use it. This is table stakes if you ever report on the value of SEO performance.
“Beautifully optimized and completely alone.”
That's one way to describe the sentiment around investing strictly in your owned properties and not in earned. The fact is, query fan-out and grounding queries are used for web pulls, and there's a lot of corroboration happening. You need to own that corroboration layer too if you want a consistent presence the models can trust.
Otterly.ai called out the value of LinkedIn in its recent June research. Named individuals pull 91.7% of LinkedIn citations. Company pages get 8.3%. Pulse articles take 72% of content citations, posts take 28%.
This has been widely known for a while, but if your leadership isn't posting on X or LinkedIn, or even publishing, you're handing citation share to competitors whose executives are.
In small and mid-sized companies, founder-led content is one of your biggest growth levers.
What to do: build your operating system around getting your leadership to communicate outward (post, publish). It will require trust, the right seeded ideas, and workflow around distribution.
But done right, it helps the company, it helps personal branding, and it empowers the workforce. People connect with people!
Reddit, meanwhile, is stuck on measurement. The recurring thread is some version of "X% of marketers are running AEO tactics with no proven attribution," and the comments are becoming less angry and more defeated.
“Six pitches, six scores, zero explanations. Two vendors said their methodology was under NDA. It doesn’t feel like a sales process, more like a trust test.”
A quote I ripped from r/bigseo that definitely contributes to the perceived cash grab around SEO 2.0. Transparency goes a long way toward vendor selection and finding the right solution. If you're evaluating options, listen to how they respond to the important questions.
Side note: if you ever want help with vendor selection, reach out and I'll help :)
A quick hit this week. Four numbers from the last two weeks that should be read together:
1. AI Overviews now appear in 48% of searches, up from 34.5% in December 2025. When one appears, CTR drops from 15% to 8%. Only about 1% of users click a cited link inside the overview. (via Semrush & Seer Interactive)
2. The citation-to-ranking link has collapsed. Updated research shows only 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews also rank in the top 10. Seven months ago that number was 76%. Ranking #1 no longer buys you a seat in the answer. (via Ahrefs)
3. AI referral traffic converts at 14.2% versus 2.8% for traditional organic. A 5x multiplier. AI traffic is roughly 1% of total sessions, which makes it easy to dismiss. It’s becoming better than your best salesman at converting. (via Conductor 2026 Benchmarks)
4. Consumer trust in AI search dropped 28 points in twelve months. The share of people finding it "more helpful" fell from 82% to 54%. The skeptic camp grew from 3% to 17%. (via Fractl, Q2 2026) I'd put this in front of any client planning an AI-first content strategy to make sure their content is bulletproof.
What does it all mean?
Exposure is way up, clicks are way down, trust is wobbling. The clicks you do get are worth five times what they used to be.
And the audience is getting more skeptical of the machine even as it uses the machine more.
But wait, there's more.
A July 2026 study from the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon contradicts Google VP Liz Reid's claim that AI Overviews merely filter out low-engagement traffic. However, the data shows a 39.8% drop in outbound clicks with no change in bounce rates or time-on-site, which means brands are losing genuine, engaged visits, not low-value traffic.
AirOps found that pages going more than three months without an update are 3x more likely to lose visibility. Perplexity shows an even stronger bias, with 82% of its citations in one analysis coming from content published within the last 30 days.
This is partly a publishing cadence game now, not just a content quality game. There's a reason you land on a page, see today's date as the last-updated stamp, and think “no way.”
If your brand mentions are coming from third-party surfaces, the fastest way to buy yourself some of those surfaces isn't a PR retainer or a Reddit strategy.
Go fix your review platform coverage (but finish reading this first):
The logic is boring and it works. Domains with profiles on Trustpilot, G2, and Capterra have roughly 3x higher citation chances from ChatGPT than domains without them.
AI systems treat these platforms as third-party validators, and they lean on them hard for evaluation queries. "Best [category] software for [use case]" is exactly the query where a G2 profile does more work than your own comparison page ever will.
What that looks like in practice:
Audit where you actually appear, not where you think you have a profile. Go look.
Prioritize by category. G2 and Capterra if you're B2B software, Trustpilot if you sell to consumers, and so on.
Build a post-purchase review acquisition workflow, not a one-time review drive. Volume and recency both matter, and a profile with eleven reviews from 2023 is going to make you look cooked.
Medium effort, two to four months to see it move, owned jointly by marketing and customer success. That last part is why it doesn't get done. It sits in the gap between two teams and nobody owns the gap.
Own the gap.
"My org is extremely siloed and I haven’t built trust in search with our leadership. They don’t know what I do."
An actual quote I grabbed from a call on Granola.
I responded by asking, “What influence do you think you currently have? What are your interactions with those beside or above you? And how do you demonstrate what you're working on and how it ties to what they care about?” Pretty good response in the moment.
They said little to no influence (frustration), that they don't get invited to meetings, and that tying effort to pipeline has been the most difficult part of their job.
The call quickly turned into what felt like coaching, because this person was not set up for success. In my head, I felt like their job was on the line.
It was clear they weren't connecting with their leadership. They were speaking their own language and not demonstrating what they were working on.
I worked with this person on the steps they need to take to get a seat at the table. What I advised:
Speak in business metrics.
Don't speak in impressions, ranks, or AI visibility scores. Your Head of Engineering or your PR/Comms lead doesn't know what any of that is.
Match familiarity with how they operate.
Is the way you communicate similar to theirs? Are you sending over spreadsheets and pivot tables, or giving them logins to another piece of software they need to learn?
Get them interested in your work.
Show how your work supports them or the greater business. Tie your objectives to theirs. Make your impact known. Don't just cook in a dimly lit basement.
As companies scale and there's more rigor around process, I find that communication and alignment matter more than the strategies when it comes to moving forward.
That's the thread I'm pulling on for the rest of the summer: connecting search to the greater marketing and organizational effort. Search might strategize solo, but it executes as a company.
If your team is wrestling with the same thing, reply and tell me where you're stuck.
Appreciate you all. Until next time,
Andrew