Trends & News

Forget Traditional Search As AI Decides Who Gets Found

6 min read

Models race forward, browsers begin chatting, and AI Overviews now cover one‑fifth of Google queries.

Seven brisk days delivered record code scores, fresh tracking dashboards, and a brand that quadrupled search demand.

Skip the fluff; here is the signal tied straight to visibility. Read on and turn headlines into actions.

Also read: The AI Traffic Surge Nobody Saw Coming

1. 45 Seconds News Hits That You Can't Ignore

  • Anthropic – Claude 4 Sonnet hits 80.2 % on SWE‑bench, the best public coding score to date (OutrightCRM)
  • Google confirms AI Overviews now show on 18 % of 118 M keywords, up 29 % since May (Conductor)
  • Perplexity launches “Comet,” an AI browser with always‑on citation sidebar (TechCrunch)
  • Copilot Studio adds Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint as real‑time knowledge sources for custom agents (Microsoft Blog)
  • RASE method for GEO drops, mapping Relevance‑Authority‑Structure‑Engagement into a four‑step playbook (Intero Digital)
  • Surfer rolls out AI Tracker dashboards that show brand mentions inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, and Google’s AI Mode (SurferSEO)

Also read: Hidden Upgrades Push Search from Links to Live Answers

2. Deep Dives on Hidden Shifts Redrawing the GEO Map

Claude 4 Sonnet raises the bar for code answers

Claude 4 Sonnet now tops coding benchmarks at 80.2 percent SWE‑bench, outranking Gemini 1.5‑Flash and GPT‑4o. Answer engines love higher reasoning scores, so many will swap models soon.

When the base model changes the citation stack often reshuffles too. Pages that supplied the best snippets last week might fall tomorrow.

Developers and GEO teams must watch model releases and update code examples fast to keep answer visibility. (OutrightCRM)

AI Overviews: one in five queries now skips the blue links

Conductor reports AI Overviews on 18% of 118 million keywords, up 29% in six weeks.

One in five searches now skips classic rank. Brands counting only blue links are missing huge exposure gaps.

Entity signals, schema depth, and concise Q and A blocks earn space inside Overviews. Track AIO share for your terms, then rebuild priority pages for snippet readiness. (Conductor)

Comet turns every webpage into a chat prompt

Perplexity’s Comet browser brings an answer sidebar to every site and has 600 thousand installs in 48 hours.

Users can summon a summary before a page loads, which changes how trust flows. Old content or mismatched metadata can seed poor answers quickly.

Refresh high‑traffic pages with clear takeaways and updated citations, then test how Comet presents them. This new surface will grow fast. (TechCrunch)

Copilot Studio widens its memory

Copilot Studio now reads Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint in real time. Internal notes can surface inside user chats without warnings.

Hidden drafts or outdated slides risk appearing as official guidance. Run a permissions audit, clean stale files, and add date stamps on evergreen docs.

If agents quote you, you want the words to be accurate and current. Governance is now a search task. (Microsoft Blog)

RASE shows how to earn mentions, not just rankings

The RASE framework links Relevance, Authority, Structure, and Engagement into one repeatable checklist.

Early testers saw ChatGPT mentions rise by double digits within two weeks. The method forces clear questions, credible sources, and rich schema on every page.

Teams can run a page audit Monday and push fixes by Thursday. Use RASE on fresh content first, then roll back to legacy hubs.. (Intero Digital)

Also read: Infrastructure Shake-Up in Generative Engine Optimization

3. Fresh Stats That Pry Open Marketing Budgets

  • 69 % of news queries with AI Overviews ended in zero clicks, up from 56 % a year earlier. (New York Post)
  • CBS News lost clicks on 75 % of its top 100 keywords when AI Overviews fired, 21 points worse than non‑AIO terms. (Digiday)
  • AI Overviews now hit the top spot only 87.6 % of the time, down from 98 % in May (‑10.4 pts) (Digida)
  • Only 31 % of AI‑generated brand mentions are positive, and just 20 % include a direct recommendation. (Search Engine Journal)
  • ChatGPT traffic grew 21 % MoM in June, keeping it far ahead of rival AI engines. (Search Engine Journal)
  • Overviews dropping below position 1 jumped from 0.4 % to 2.4 % month‑to‑month—almost a 600 % rise (Digiday)
  • xAI’s Grok 4 debut drove a 17 % next‑day user surge and a 51 % jump in app downloads. (ppc.land)
  • Search referral visits to 1 000 major domains fell 6.7 % YoY, sliding from 12 B to 11.2 B (Digiday)
  • On mobile, e‑commerce AI Overviews fire in 13.5 % of searches, triple the desktop rate of 4.5 %. (Search Engine Journal)
  • Desktop AI Overviews take 80 % more screen space and appear 39 % more often than mobile. (Search Engine Journal)
  • Non‑Google AI platforms sent 35.9 M visits to news sites in June, up from 35.3 M in May; ChatGPT accounted for 81.7 % of that flow (Digiday)
  • AI Overviews surface on 11 % of Google queries, a 22 % jump since launch. (Search Engine Journal)
  • Perplexity processed 780 M queries in May, growing 20 %+ MoM ahead of its Comet browser launch. (techcrunch.com)

Also read: Google's Core Update Shakes AI Search as Citation Accuracy Plummets

4. Brand Spotlight – Scale AI

  • What changed? Meta’s $14 B strategic stake catapulted branded search and media coverage.
  • Evidence: Search volume quadrupled to 276 k MoM; Foundation Labs charts show organic traffic peaking near 270 k visits before stabilising at 85 k.
  • Takeaway: Timely news plus high‑authority explainers can turn PR buzz into lasting AI citations—if pages ship within hours, not weeks. (Foundation Labs | MarTech)

Also read: Multimodal Content Dominates AI Search

5. GEO Tool of the Week – Surfer AI Tracker

Image Source

Surfer’s new add‑on pings ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode once a day, recording every time your domain, author name, or product shows up in an answer.

The dashboard groups mentions by model and prompt, so you can see which pages feed the answers and where gaps exist.

Early beta users say it replaces hours of manual copy‑paste checks and gives a clear before/after view when content is revised. Pricing:
$95/month → 25 prompts
$195/month → 100 prompts
$495/month → 300 prompts

(SurferSEO)

Also read: 5 Game-Changing GEO Trends That Will Define Search in the Next 90 Days

6. Actions That Move GEO Results Right Now

  • Run the RASE checklist on one high‑value page and add explicit Q&A markup this week.
  • Install an AI‑citation tracker (Surfer or similar) and set baseline metrics before the next Google core tweak.
  • Review internal docs now indexed by Copilot Studio; clean sensitive or outdated content to avoid unwanted agent responses.