Author
Search & Digital Discovery Leader
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 says agent tools now account for more than half of AI use among its EU business customers, which means a growing share of European vendor research happens with no session, no tag and no referrer. Google shipped Gemini 4 Argon into AI Mode in Search on 13 October, so every AI visibility number you reported before that date is now a dead benchmark. Add a natural-language analyst landing inside Google Analytics and voice answers expanding into six more languages, and this is the week discovery and measurement moved further apart.
OpenAI rolled out GPT-6 Intelligent UI to all ChatGPT users on 7 and 8 October, replacing text-only answers with interactive charts, calculators, and functional forms across every plan tier. Anthropic cut Claude Haiku 5.5 pricing to 75 per cent cheaper per task than its predecessor and added effort control to the Haiku range for the first time, while Perplexity reduced its Agent API web search cost by 60 per cent and released pplx-decider-v1, an open-weight 27B model that returns structured decisions rather than text. Against that backdrop of falling costs and richer interfaces, Google confirmed the most significant development in search economics this cycle: an invitation-only pilot paying around 100 publishers monthly for content used in AI Overviews and AI Mode, with payouts varying from under $1,000 to more than $1 million per year and no published formula for how they are calculated.
**Google has told you in writing that the risk is not AI content, it is volume without human review, and that review now covers your title tags, meta descriptions, structured data and alt text.** At the same time, OpenAI shipped GPT-6 with Intelligent UI to more than 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users, so an answer can now arrive as a working tool rather than a paragraph with links. Add a 75% price cut on Anthropic's small model, ten new attribution partners for ChatGPT Ads and invisible watermarking on EU ChatGPT text, and this is the week the cost of producing content collapsed while the cost of not reviewing it went up.
Primary research · August 2026
An audit across 10 categories and 60 buying questions. I recorded what ChatGPT reads, throws away and links to when a buyer asks it which software to buy, and what that decides.
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