Author
Search & Digital Discovery Specialist
Writes at the intersection of AI Search, consumer behaviour, and measurement. Tracks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, and Google AI Overviews each week.
SISTRIX's post-rollout analysis confirms what the AI Overview era was already signalling: pages that match search intent are out-ranking pages that match keywords.
A 61% CTR collapse on AI Overview queries isn't a bug, it's a feedback loop. Here's what Google is actually measuring and why low-engagement Overviews quietly vanish.
The post-HCU SERP has a clear pattern: deep specialists are taking traffic from generalist content brands. Here's why, and what category leaders can do about it.
AI Overviews aren't just a new SERP feature, they're a re-architecting of the discovery funnel. Five shifts every search leader needs to plan for in 2026.
OpenAI's Signals data confirms it: at work, people are more than twice as likely to do a task in ChatGPT than to ask a question, which means a big slice of commercial intent now resolves inside the assistant. Meanwhile Claude Code flips auto-approve to default, Google Analytics revives annotations, GPT-Live kills the voice pause, and GPT-5.6 has started optimising its own serving stack. Here is what shifted and what to do about each.
OpenAI cut Luna 80% and Anthropic shipped Opus 5 at last year's prices, which means always-on conversational agents and long-running discovery workflows just cleared the cost hurdle. At the same time GA4 finally made AI-referral traffic legible with a new Source Group dimension, so you can measure the channel you could not see before. This week is about the economics of AI search flipping, and the tooling catching up to prove it.
The European Commission has hit Google with an €890M DMA fine and, in separate binding measures, forced it to open Android to rival AI assistants and share its Search data vault. Meanwhile OpenAI is warning that long-running agents drift the more they run, and news publishers are formalising how their content feeds AI answers. The discovery front door is fragmenting, and the rules for staying visible are being rewritten this month.