What changed in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Copilot, and what it means for the people responsible for being found.
62.8
%
of the questions AirOps tracked on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode had the same most-named brand in September as in January and February.
AirOps's study of the cost of waiting in AI search found brands named early kept their place for months, so a brand that begins late fights for a shorter list.
Brief
$0.89
per visit
in revenue from a paid ChatGPT visit in US traffic, against $2.45 for a paid Google Search visit, in a working paper of October 2026.
Brief
64
%
of the URLs Perplexity retrieved were never cited in its answers, in Peec AI's February 2026 study of over 1 million citations.
Explainer
72
%
of 90 tracked European brands appeared in fewer than 15% of AI answers in their category, April to August 2026.
Data
2
of 10
most cited websites shared by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity for the same brand, the median across 109 business projects.
Data
0.5
%
of all visits came from AI referrals across 10,000 domains each in the US and France, in Similarweb data analyzed by the Growth Memo.
Brief
37
%
fall in GA4 sessions from ChatGPT across a few hundred websites from 9 October 2026, as ChatGPT's links lost their tracking tag.
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0.9
%
estimated click-through rate of one site's Google AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions, measured by opting the site out of Google's AI features.
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1,900
characters
of a typical 14,600-character page reach the model that writes Claude's answer, Peec AI measured through the Claude API.
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72,000
requests
from ChatGPT-User in 30 days to a site of 50,000 invented statistics, months after Google deindexed its pages.
Brief
6
of 7
user-triggered AI fetchers may skip robots.txt, by their own companies' documentation; Anthropic's Claude-User is the one that follows it.
Explainer
9
days
from a new page going live to its first ChatGPT citation, the median across the 83 of 236 new pages ChatGPT cited.
Data
85.5
%
of 138 business projects saw ChatGPT cite the brand's own website, at a median rank of 12 on its list of sources.
Data
400+
publications are now paid through Google's News AI pilot program, Axios, CNN and the Financial Times among them.
Brief
5
%
of AI answers about its own product category name the median European SMB brand, in Agenzy's 2026 study.
Explainer
2.5B+
monthly users of Google AI Overviews, Sundar Pichai told investors in June 2026.
Explainer
31.0
%
of the URLs Google AI Overviews cited sat beyond position 100 in Google's results, in an Ahrefs study of 4 million.
Explainer
85
%
of the 548,534 pages ChatGPT retrieved went uncited, a 2026 AirOps study found.
Explainer
3
×
Google AI Mode queries run three times longer than traditional searches on average, Sundar Pichai said on 28 October.
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10
more
countries get ads in Google AI Mode, among them Australia, Canada and India.
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89
countries
where OpenAI now sells ChatGPT Ads, after adding 26 on 21 October.
Brief
AirOps's study of the cost of waiting in AI search found brands named early kept their place for months, so a brand that begins late fights for a shorter list.
A working paper puts ChatGPT ads revenue per visit at $0.89 against $2.45 for Google Search ads in the US, so the answer above the ad counts most.
Google and Microsoft plan to read one AI training opt-out in robots.txt in 2027, and at Google the same line also takes a site out of Gemini Apps grounding.
Google spam guidance now tells services with shareable pages, generated outputs or tools to noindex link-only pages, and only indexed pages reach AI Overviews.
AI referral traffic grew 5.6x in the US in two years and is still 0.5% of visits, so the recommendation inside the answer is what brands should track.
AI search visibility for the median European brand is 5% of answers about its category, and 72% of 90 brands stay below 15% in their category.
ChatGPT referral traffic was counted as Direct from 8 to 16 October 2026, so GA4 reports for those days undercount ChatGPT and need a note.
An opt-out test put AI Overviews and AI Mode CTR at about 0.9% for one site, and Google gives no separate AI click data, so brands measure value themselves.
Peec AI found Claude search draws on Brave and passes about an eighth of a page to its model, so the answer passage has to sit near the top.
ChatGPT kept fetching a Peec AI researcher's site of fake statistics after Google dropped it, so brands that publish sourced numbers of their own gain.
A University of Toronto study of what drives AI citations found search retrieval outweighs page features, so pages have to match how the model searches.
The websites ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity cite most differ by engine, and for one brand the three share a median 2 of their top 10.
AI search visibility for the median European brand is 5% of answers about its category, and 72% of 90 brands stay below 15% in their category.
Also in this piece
The websites ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity cite most differ by engine, and for one brand the three share a median 2 of their top 10.
Google's AI summaries in Search, and how a page gets into them
Where its answers come from, and how a brand gets cited in them
What the work is called, and what it covers
Counting how often AI answers name and cite a brand
One email a week with what changed in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini, and the week's data piece.
