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.
$6,850
a month
was the median GEO and AEO retainer in First Page Sage's October 2026 study of 1,146 price quotes from 214 agencies.
AI SEO services from a GEO agency spend a month or two on setup, then repeat four jobs: prompt tracking, content, outside mentions and crawler access.
Explainer
1.73
%
of US ChatGPT answers name Walmart, the most mentioned brand
Brief
12
%
of AI assistant citations ranked in Google's top 10 for the same query, on average, in an Ahrefs study of 15,000 long-tail queries.
Explainer
3 of 22
GEO and AEO agencies showed a named client with a before-and-after AI metric on their public pages in a September 2026 review.
Explainer
62.7
%
of 158 software buyers who already had candidates added a vendor through AI, in Kevin Indig's Growth Memo survey of 200.
Brief
20
%
more average visibility for a ranking prompt than for an open-ended question, in Peec AI's 2026 study of 37,804 AI responses.
Explainer
4
of 11
US GEO agencies in this ranking publish a monthly price of 5,000 dollars or euros or more on their own website.
Ranking
64
%
of 282 brand and product names BrightEdge tracks showed a Google AI Overview in late October 2026, up from 19% in mid-August.
Brief
26
%
fewer core sessions at People Inc. in Q3 2026 than a year earlier, which the publisher put down mainly to AI-oriented search.
Brief
204,489
placements
of ChatGPT ads that Adthena tracked from June to September 2026, from an advertiser base that grew nearly 6x in two months.
Brief
5 to 10
prompts
per segment of topic and buying stage, so seven topics across three stages make a prompt set of 105 to 210 prompts.
Explainer
55.9
%
of the visits that followed a ChatGPT brand recommendation arrived through search, in Similarweb's US desktop panel of July to December 2025.
Explainer
0.75
Spearman correlation between Reddit mentions and AI mentions across 10,000 US brands, the highest of the seven mention types Ahrefs compared.
Brief
20
%
of Google's query volume is OpenAI's spoken estimate for ChatGPT's search-like queries, given by Adam Fry on 2 November 2026.
Brief
97
%
of the llms.txt files on the 137,210 domains in Ahrefs' server-log study received no request in May 2026.
Explainer
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.
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.
Brief
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.
Brief
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.
Brief
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.
Brief
10
more
countries get ads in Google AI Mode, among them Australia, Canada and India.
Brief
89
countries
where OpenAI now sells ChatGPT Ads, after adding 26 on 21 October.
Brief
Gemini 4 Hydrogen in Google Search runs simultaneous queries across a question's subtopics and links more sites, so pages that answer one subtopic gain.
Podqi's review of 6,795 shopping answers shows AI chatbots recommend fake websites and dead stores, so brands must check where AI sends their buyers.
What changed in AI search this week: ChatGPT ads move to cost targets and Google rolls out a core update, so brands check bids, crawlers and rankings.
Stores hold six of Ahrefs' top 10 most mentioned brands in ChatGPT, so a mid-size brand should measure its share of its own category's buying questions.
Bing searchers can now turn off AI answers with a browser toggle or the -ai operator, so brands need a place in Bing's ranked links as well as its answers.
Businesses can now claim a verified profile in ChatGPT Business Hub and see 28-day mentions and clicks, while ChatGPT still picks whom it recommends.
Seer Interactive's client tests found AI info pages fetched and cited while llms.txt drew almost no bot requests, so wrong AI facts belong on an HTML page.
The ChatGPT Business Hub mention count records only answers that reference an online business's website, so expect a small number and keep it anyway.
Search Console data on the AI Overviews France launch shows clicks falling on three of five sites, so brands selling in France must now be in Google's answer.
A survey on how software buyers use AI found assistants added a vendor for 62.7% of buyers who had candidates, so vendors missing from AI answers lose deals.
The best GEO agencies in the US in 2026, scored from their own websites on prompt tracking, attribution, dated client cases, price and research.
Perplexity ranks pages in its own index with its own engine, and the block that keeps a brand out of its answers usually sits in the CDN or firewall.
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.