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Research

Peer reviewed work, or work that at least states its method. Not a vendor deck with a percentage on it.

66 marks · first on 14 August 2026 · latest on 24 August 2026

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Monday 24 August 20261 mark

marketingdive.com

Creator fit beats follower count for brands: here's what the numbers say

CreatorIQ surveyed 5,095 creators across 100 regions with Influencers.club. Brands rank creator suitability first and content performance second, with follower count only eighth, yet pay is still strongly indexed on follower count across every platform. On the creator side 67 percent earn under 10,000 dollars a year and compensation has become the top expectation from a partnership, up 16 points on 2025. A rare dataset measuring the gap between stated selection criteria and actual payment structures.

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Friday 21 August 20263 marks

techcrunch.com

A third of web pages published since ChatGPT's launch show signs of AI authorship, study finds

A new study finds roughly a third of web pages published since ChatGPT's launch show signs of AI authorship or heavy AI editing, complicating any assumption that organic web content is human-written. For GEO and content strategy, this raises the bar on differentiation: generic AI-assisted content is now a baseline, not a point of difference. Worth revisiting how AI-assisted versus AI-generated content gets defined internally.

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searchengineland.com

3 phases to build authority and earn AI citations

A three-phase model for AI citations: crawlability, then fresh owned content, then digital PR and third-party coverage. The one hard number, from AirOps research, is that up to 85% of top-of-funnel B2B brand mentions in AI search come from third-party content rather than a brand's own pages. Worth keeping with its caveat: the sample is B2B and top-of-funnel, so it corroborates rather than proves.

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thedrum.com

CMOs need to stop mistaking creator engagement for impact

Kantar's Chief Insights Officer puts numbers on the gap between creator engagement and brand outcome. Only 6% of measured creator content scores strongly on both, and 27% reaches medium to high on both, while a net 61% of marketers plan to spend more on creators in 2026. The argument is that creator work should be run as a capability with its own measurement, not as a channel for buying views.

Read at thedrum.com , opens in a new tab
Thursday 20 August 20263 marks

searchengineland.com

Reddit's ChatGPT Search citations fell 86% in four days: report

Promptwatch analysis of millions of AI responses found Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations collapsed from 3.83 percent to 0.52 percent between 14 and 17 August. Google AI Overviews showed only a gradual decline over the same window, pointing to a change inside ChatGPT rather than a shift in the wider web. If a source that size can lose most of its citation share in a weekend, no AI visibility position is durable.

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searchengineland.com

Business websites dominate Gemini local AI search citations: study

Across 14,472 citations, business websites made up close to 60 percent of Gemini's local search sources and Reddit came second at 13.7 percent. The more useful finding is instability: identical repeated searches overlapped only 40 percent of the time, against roughly 90 percent for the traditional Google local pack. Any one-shot AI visibility measurement is a sample, not a position.

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Wednesday 19 August 20262 marks

technologyreview.com

We still don't know how people are really using AI

A research-grounded look at the gap between assumed and actual AI usage patterns, pushing back on some standard narratives brands and platforms lean on to justify AI features. Good grounding piece before taking usage claims from vendors or platforms at face value. Relevant context for anyone benchmarking AI adoption claims against real behavioral data.

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searchengineland.com

What 9 months of AI Overview data and 51,000+ tracked events reveal

A study tracking more than 51,000 events over nine months puts Google AI Overviews at roughly 7.53% of organic sessions on average, with heavy volatility: a peak around 16 to 17% in February and March 2026, down to 2 to 4% recently. The harder finding is attribution, with 22.4% of AI Overview traffic landing in analytics as Direct rather than Organic. AI search traffic is smaller than the hype and larger than the dashboards say. One dataset from one vendor, to be cited as such.

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Tuesday 18 August 20264 marks

searchengineland.com

The $113,000 paid search test: How much traffic did organic replace?

A 13-week controlled experiment pausing branded paid search found organic recaptured 65% of the paid-attributed revenue at zero acquisition cost, while running paid was mostly defending clicks organic would have earned anyway. It's a rare, real budget-scale test of a question most teams only argue about anecdotally. Directly useful evidence for anyone building the case to reallocate branded paid-search budget toward organic or content investment.

Read at searchengineland.com , opens in a new tab

searchengineland.com

The AI Visibility Index: which brands are vanishing from AI search

Fractl compared how brands rank in traditional search against how often large language models actually mention them, and the two come apart. Brands with strong Google authority can be nearly absent from LLM answers, while smaller search footprints outperform them. Patagonia outranks Sephora on AI recall despite a smaller presence in search. AI recall is a separate asset from search ranking and has to be earned separately.

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socialmediatoday.com

75 percent of LinkedIn AI citations come from individual profiles, not company pages

An analysis of 9.5 million citations finds that when AI engines cite LinkedIn, roughly three quarters of the time they are quoting an individual's profile or posts rather than a company page. The person is cited about three times as often as the brand. It puts a hard ratio on something the executive and employee communications argument previously had to assert. Worth noting the piece is sponsored content, so the figure needs tracing back to the underlying study before it gets reused.

Read at socialmediatoday.com , opens in a new tab

marketingdive.com

Gen Alpha report: parents outrank influencers on brand preference

A study of Gen Alpha teens puts Amazon and Nike at the top of brand preference, but the interesting finding is the source of influence. Parents, and mothers in particular, carry more weight than creators or platforms. A useful corrective to the assumption that the youngest cohort is shaped mainly by whoever they follow. Household decisions still route through the parent, even for the most online generation measured so far.

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Monday 17 August 20262 marks

searchengineland.com

Why creator content belongs in your AI search strategy

Tinuiti's Q1 2026 research found roughly 82% of AI citations point to earned media rather than a brand's own site. YouTube's presence in Google AI Overviews grew from 3.6 million to 36.2 million keywords year over year, with citation share varying sharply by category, 13% for apparel against 3% for over-the-counter health. The striking number: 40.83% of cited videos had fewer than 1,000 views, which inverts the assumption that visibility follows audience size.

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tubefilter.com

Creators rely on brand deals, but only 15% fully trust sponsored content from other creators

CreatorIQ surveyed 5,095 creators. 46% depend on brand partnerships as their primary income, yet only 15% say they fully trust sponsored content from other creators when deciding what to buy. Above 500K followers, 53% report tension between what the audience wants and what the sponsor wants. The trust-building behaviour is naming a product's downsides as well as its upsides.

Read at tubefilter.com , opens in a new tab
Saturday 15 August 20261 mark

searchengineland.com

Traffic from AI engines converts at 20 percent, some 61 percent above paid search

Internal data shows LLM referral traffic converting at 20 percent, roughly 61 percent higher than paid search on the same properties. The explanation is intent: someone arriving through an AI citation has already had the comparison done for them and wants authoritative depth, not a funnel, so aggressive landing pages underperform on precisely this audience. It moves AI visibility out of the unmeasurable category and gives it a conversion figure that survives a finance conversation.

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Friday 14 August 20264 marks

searchengineland.com

Shopify: AI referrals up 197%, but organic search still leads traffic

AI-referred sessions grew 197% year on year across Shopify's merchant base while organic search stayed dominant by a wide margin. The detail that matters is where AI performs best: in research-intensive product categories, conversion from AI-referred sessions doubled. Low volume, high intent, which means considered purchases are the category where AI citation earns its keep.

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digiday.com

European publishers are getting hit harder by AI bot scraping, report finds

A TollBit analysis shows European publishers face disproportionate AI scraping compared with North American sites, with robots.txt ignored more often. The disparity raises questions about why enforcement appears to differ by region despite stricter European rules on paper. Relevant to anyone weighing whether crawler policy actually protects content.

Read at digiday.com , opens in a new tab

searchengineland.com

Only 1.1% of news publisher visits come directly from AI: Study

A Scrunch study found that just 1.1% of publisher visits arrive as direct AI referrals, with the rest still coming through direct navigation and traditional search. It cleanly separates two things that get conflated in every AI search conversation: being cited by an engine, and receiving traffic from it. The first is happening at scale, the second is not, which makes AI visibility a consideration play rather than an acquisition one.

Read at searchengineland.com , opens in a new tab

tubefilter.com

Agentio study: creator Partnership Ads beat licensed UGC by 19% on clickthrough

Agentio analysed 65,000 Meta Partnership Ads representing $130 million in spend. Ads running from the creator's own handle delivered 19% better clickthrough than the same content licensed and run from the brand handle. The lesson is that identity is the variable, not the edit: relicensing creator content into brand channels destroys most of what paying the creator bought.

Read at tubefilter.com , opens in a new tab

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