Purchases placed through AI shopping agents are growing about 43% a month and have roughly quadrupled since April, per BrightEdge data cited by The Wall…
<span class="preheader" style="display:none;font-size:1px;color:#fdfcf8;max-height:0;overflow:hidden">ChatGPT dropped its link tags for a week · Google…
AI agent traffic across DataDome's network grew 41.5% quarter over quarter to nearly 25 billion requests in Q3 2026, up from about 17.7 billion in Q2, per…
OpenAEO, an AI-visibility vendor, measured 131 publisher, SaaS, ecommerce and agency domains for how they treat AI crawlers by name, narrowing to 12 sites…
Profound's research blog says the share of ChatGPT answers with cited links carrying a tagged chatgpt.com source link has recovered to about 99% as of…
A Typeface survey of more than 500 U.S. and U.K. marketing leaders found 49% plan to deprioritize or stop investing in traditional SEO, while 44% plan to…
Profound's research blog attributes ChatGPT's disappearing UTM tags to the rollout of its Intelligent UI answer format rather than a bug — a different…
University of Toronto researchers tracked 90 days of ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answers to commercial questions — 158,099 answers, 468,037 citations…
Ahrefs analyzed 66.6 million free, logged-out ChatGPT-5.6 Luna responses from August and September 2026 and found only 14.4% triggered a web search at…
Just 13 of 6,735 working robots.txt files use the IETF's Content-Usage directive — the draft standard letting a site separately flag AI training, AI use…
A study by researchers Mingyue Zha and Ho-Chun Herbert Chang audited 1,920 health queries across 12 countries and 4 languages on Google and Baidu's AI…
At Best Buy, dated press releases draw 71.7% of ChatGPT's Black Friday citations versus 10.5% for the retailer's current store hub page, per BrightEdge…
A Peec AI researcher generated 50,000 pages of fabricated statistics with GPT-4.1 for about $50 and published them to test how AI systems source data, per…
Google AI Overviews now appear on 82.06% of branded search queries tracked by DemandSphere as of Sept. 29, up from 26.12% on Sept. 1 — a jump DemandSphere…
Ad-verification vendor TrafficGuard said invalid-click rates on ChatGPT ads ranged from 0.1% to 34% by advertiser, per PPC Land, in an analysis of 40,021…
self-published analyst data — Lily Ray/Amsive, 100 queries in one vertical; contradicted by Kevin Indig's 62% traffic-gain finding and Scrunch's 24.3% competitor-recommendation rate
Self-ranking "best of" pages — where a company ranks itself first on its own comparison page — are showing up less often in Google AI Overviews, per an…
UK answer-engine agency Recrawled tested ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode with 1,608 queries about 40 UK B2B software firms, and…
LintLab crawled the 1,000 most-visited sites on Chrome's August 2026 top-sites list on Oct. 1, checking both XML sitemaps and llms.txt files, per PPC Land.
Profound traced Meta's Muse — a personal-agent app that passed 2.5 million downloads after its September 8 launch — through 50 test prompts in one retail…
AI Overviews appeared in 82.91% of US desktop Google results for branded keywords — any search containing a brand name — as of September 29, up from a…
A randomized field experiment with 37,561 Washington Post readers found that generative AI search can diversify what people read while also increasing…
Profound tracked 883,000 pages across seven AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot…
Insurance companies' own domains are the cited source on branded searches only — one of four question types BrightEdge tracked in ChatGPT and Google AI…
preprint study — vendor-adjacent; co-author Assaf Elovic co-founded Tavily, an AI-agent web-search company acquired by Nebius — no affiliation disclosed in the paper
A preprint posted to arXiv September 28 argues that "agent experience," or AX — whether an AI agent can successfully fetch and read a business's own site…
An arXiv paper analyzing 34,960 unbranded prompt-engine observations across 75 anonymized client projects tracked by AI-visibility platform Aiso, covering…
Brands that publish their own "best of" or comparison listicles, and get those pages cited by AI assistants, see their recommendation rate rise from about…
ChatGPT-5.6 Luna, now OpenAI's default ChatGPT model, runs far more site-targeted searches than its predecessor GPT-5.5, per a Seer Interactive analysis…
Across 74,752 websites tracked by Ahrefs's chatgpt-vs-google.com, all AI chatbots combined sent 3.5 million visitors in March 2026 — 0.28% of the sites'…
Comscore's Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report, released Sept. 22, found sponsored ads appeared in 47% of gaming-related ChatGPT conversations in June, up from…
ChatGPT's share of AI assistant prompt volume fell from 70% in January 2026 to 50% by June, while Gemini nearly doubled from 17% to 30% and Claude climbed…
ChatGPT named 27.9% fewer B2B tech brands per answer in September 2026 than in March, per BrightEdge — an average of 3.87 brands per response, down from…
A preregistered field experiment by researchers at Northeastern University and the University of Pennsylvania — Stephanie Wang, Jeffrey Gleason, Yakov…
A field experiment by Saharsh Agarwal (Indian School of Business) and Ananya Sen (Carnegie Mellon) randomly assigned 1,065 U.S. desktop searchers to see…
A preprint audit by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers traced 30,000 Reddit AI search answers back through 14.68 million comments across…
Revision 08 of the IETF's AI Preference Vocabulary draft, published this week, restructures its usage categories: the previous single "AI Model Training"…
A University of Washington paper estimates Google's AI Overviews cut monthly search referrals to English Wikipedia by roughly 5% since the feature became…
Profound tested ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude with personas built from combinations of income, age, gender, and occupation, asking each about credit cards…
A cross-platform audit tested ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overview on 20 English mental-health questions plus queries in six additional languages…
A new arXiv benchmark, HAE-GEO, tests whether AI shopping agents verify suspicious evidence and recover before finalizing a recommendation, rather than…
AI Overviews appeared in 38% of manufacturing search results in January 2026, rising to 57% by July, per a Semrush analysis of 458 manufacturing keywords…
Peec AI's Tomek Rudzki reports that OpenAI has built its own retrieval index, internally named Labrador, spanning separate vertical indexes for web pages…
Ten Speed analyzed 170 B2B buyer-evaluation prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, generating 7,387 citation appearances tracked via the…
Sensor Tower found ad density on ChatGPT rose 163% between April and August 2026, averaging 26% monthly growth, with about 1,200 unique advertisers active…
A Productrise study of 2 million-plus product listings tracked Aug 9-31, 2026 found Google AI Mode prices averaged 21.6% higher than matching items in…
A new arXiv preprint introduces Counter-GEO-Bench, a benchmark for testing whether AI safety guardrails catch misinformation delivered through generative…
A technical audit of 50 major websites across retail, SaaS, travel, publishing and finance — run by SALT.agency and published by Search Engine Journal…
Across the 400-plus news publishers NewzDash tracks, Google Discover supplied 67.51% of Google traffic in the fourth quarter of 2025 against 27% for Web…
A new arXiv preprint describes PersonaGen-1M, a corpus of 1,031,732 synthetic buyer personas spanning 511 industry labels and 4 market contexts, built to…
Common Crawl analyzed 584,107 llms.txt files gathered in its July 2026 crawl archive and found 68% were produced by templates or SEO plugins — Wix alone…
ChatGPT's top five cited domains for health questions are all government agencies or hospital systems, with YouTube absent from its top ten, while Google…
A listicle with an old or unreadable publish date had 56% lower odds of reaching the Google top 3, the single strongest factor in a Growth Memo analysis…
wire analysis connecting two published measurements — both single-source, both ChatGPT-only; Google describes a fan-out technique for AI Mode but no comparable measurement of it has been published
Seer Interactive tracked 1,562 branded prompts about its own company across six AI platforms — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews…
Testing GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet and Gemini on skincare product recommendations, researchers Xi Chu and Yupeng Hou found that when competing products…
Google's share of listicles holding position 1 fell from roughly 19-20% in January 2026 to about 15-16% in August, while top-3 listicle rates dropped from…
Profound's analysis of 24,135 responses collected July 13–23 found Claude searched the web in over 93% of responses versus just 13% for Claude Code, and…
A Fractl survey of 343 U.S. marketing decision-makers found 81% still refer to their AI search strategy internally as "SEO," with only 27% having formally…
A Norly Research audit of 4,776 food-service venues across two Bali submarkets found ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity failed to recommend at least…
Google's own testing shows AI Overviews' generated interfaces beating the top organic search result in 90% of head-to-head comparisons, per Search Engine…
Pew Research analyzed almost 500,000 English-language pages from the Common Crawl archive using the Open Pangram detection tool, finding 10% of a July…
Google AI Overviews links to a timestamped moment in 50% of its YouTube citations and to Shorts in 17.5%, versus 0.6% and 1.1% for ChatGPT, according to a…
An SEO tested crawler discovery on a 2,400-page site by splitting internal links between hard-coded HTML and JavaScript-injected versions, then logging…
An independent analysis of raw traffic from a ChatGPT Plus account found the model injects brand names into its own search queries that the user never…
A nine-month GA4 tracking study of 51,200 clicks across 1,661 AI Overview-cited snippets found an average of 22.4% of that traffic was misattributed to…
An Ahrefs analysis spanning roughly 15 million data points found 97% of sites' llms.txt files were never read by AI crawlers and that adding schema markup…
A GEOFlagBench study — 3,200 pages spanning eight GEO optimizer families — trained a detector, Intervention-Paired Training on ModernBERT, that raised F1…
A Fractl analysis of 4,320 AI responses to 96 industry prompts across GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Flash and Claude Sonnet 4.6 — drawn from roughly 8,500 unique…
A new Google research paper finds that encoding isn't the bottleneck for LLM fact recall — frontier models including Gemini-3-Pro and GPT-5 encode 95-98%…
Reddit's tracked search footprint expanded roughly 33x between June 2025 and February 2026, and its AI citations grew about 84% between February and July…
Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT cite different assets within the same social platforms, not just different domains, according to a BrightEdge analysis of…
AI assistants including ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and Microsoft Copilot described real brands more positively when their names scored…
A study by SE Ranking of more than 50,000 commercial prompts across 20 niches found ads appeared on 25.94% of them, with 14.35% of those ads unrelated to…
UGC platforms accounted for 17.1% of domains cited in ChatGPT answers to SaaS buying queries — more than four times publishers' 4.0% — and outcited review…
Gen Z consideration of Claude climbed from 14.2% to 28.1% and of OpenAI from 10.1% to 22.1% between Q1 and Q2 2026, per YouGov BrandIndex data reported by…
Seer Interactive analyzed 47,097 citations across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for four brands over a four-month window and found 75% of cited pages had…
Google AI Mode's mentions of publisher sites fell nearly in half over the 30 days ending July 15, 2026, while mentions of retailers like Home Depot and…
Optimove's survey of 648 U.S. consumers found 72% regularly or occasionally use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for gift ideas and shopping…
Just 40% of U.S. searches and 40.7% in the EU/UK sent a click to the open web in June 2026, a record low, per Datos and SparkToro's Q2 State of Search…
The Association of Online Publishers' AI Publisher Impact Study, conducted by Ipsos among 1,000 UK adults and reported by Press Gazette, finds trust in an…
A geoSurge study found AI models search for familiar brands 3.2 times more often than unfamiliar ones — 55.7% versus 17.4% of the time — per Search Engine…
Google's AI & Economy ATLAS report, built with Google DeepMind researchers, compared 14.65 million Gemini app, AI Mode and Gemini API conversations from…
An audit of 71 verified businesses on Prince Edward Island, scored against a modified E-E-A-T framework, found the average business met only 15.6% of AI…
Researchers introduce GPE, a multi-domain fact-verification benchmark and evaluation framework that lets evaluators control evidence sources and poisoning…
Ahrefs published July citation-share rankings of the most-cited websites in Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity, tracked across US queries…
A Semrush analysis of ChatGPT visibility across 50,000 brands finds most topics still have no clearly dominant brand, and argues AI visibility accrues at…
A critical survey of 45 studies frames GEO as a stochastic, partially observable pipeline spanning retrieval, citation, prominence and user behavior — not…