SEO from SLEED: The Freshest Facts, Stats & News

SEO from SLEED
Facts, Stats & latest news from SEO, Search & Marketing Industry

July 2026

July 2026 had a common thread across all the major headlines: transparency. Google started labeling which ads were created with AI, Search Console opened up its data to Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube with the new platform properties, and Cloudflare gave every site owner detailed control over which AI bots can access their content and for what purpose.

At the same time, this month’s data shows that AI search is now entering the commercial part of the funnel: AI Overviews increased by 71% on commercial queries, and ChatGPT is sending visitors with shaped purchase intent directly to product pages. As if that weren’t enough, a two-day spam update in late June managed to shake up rankings before it was even noticed.

For Greek businesses, this month’s takeaway is simple: the question is no longer whether AI is changing search, but whether you are measuring correctly where you appear and who is reading your content.

KPIs & Metrics (July 2026)

Metric	Finding	Context
+71%	AI Overviews in commercial queries	Semrush (Nov 2025 – Apr 2026)
231%	Increase in AI Overviews in commercial queries (finance)	Semrush
-5%	Decrease in AI Overviews in transactional queries	Semrush
92.4%	ChatGPT share of AI referral traffic	Previsible (6.77M LLM sessions)
28.8%	ChatGPT referrals to internal search pages	Previsible
25.6%	Overlap of cited domains between Instant/Thinking mode	Semrush x Kevin Indig (GPT-5.2)
82% vs 6%	Effectiveness of self-promotional “best of” (new vs established brand)	Ahrefs experiment
$5.41B	Forecast for the U.S. chatbot ads market by 2030	Emarketer
$100B	OpenAI target for ad revenue by 2030	OpenAI (reported in the press)

🔍 The FACTS

Platform Properties: Search Console now measures your Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube too

On July 7, Google introduced platform properties, a new property type in Search Console that shows how your content performs on Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube within Google Search and Discover. You connect the platform account, verify ownership, and view a Performance report with clicks, impressions, and queries, Insights with top posts, and even data export. The feature will roll out gradually over the coming weeks.

Why Google is doing it: users are turning to firsthand content and different formats, and more and more of it lives outside traditional websites. Google wants to keep creators and brands close to Search by finally giving them visibility into how their social content performs there.

For Greek companies, this closes a real reporting gap. If you invest in Instagram Reels or TikTok and until now didn’t know whether and how they appear on Google, you’ll now see it with data. Add platform properties to your monthly reporting alongside the classic site property: your organic presence is now the sum of your site and your platforms—and that’s how it should be measured.

June 2026 Spam Update: Two-Day Rollout, No Warning

The second spam update of the year started on June 24 and completed on June 26—in just two days—while the first update of the year took more than a week. Google did not announce new spam policies: this is a refresh of the systems that detect practices that already violate the rules, such as scaled content abuse, doorway pages, and manipulated links.

The speed is the story here. As spam updates become faster and more frequent, the margin for borderline practices gets smaller. Many SEOs reported ranking movement before the update was even officially announced.

If you saw an abrupt change in late June, first check whether it aligns with the dates June 24 to 26 before attributing it elsewhere, and add an annotation in your tools. If your site was hit, don’t look for a technical mistake: look for which part of your content or links looks like spam in Google’s eyes.

Google Images: Pinterest-Like Redesign and Image Generation in AI Overviews

On July 14, marking the 25th anniversary of Google Images, Google announced two things. First, Images is getting a new interface focused on visual discovery, without the classic minimal search box, with a feed that resembles Pinterest. Second, AI Overviews are getting built-in image generation via the Nano Banana model: the user describes what they want to see and receives the image right in the results.

The logic is obvious: Google wants inspiration and visual research to happen inside Search, not on Pinterest or TikTok. The more users visualize ideas without leaving results, the more time and data stay with Google.

“How This Ad Was Made”: AI Labels on Ads and New Terms in Google Ads

During July, Google is adding the “How this ad was made” section to My Ad Center, where users can see whether an ad in Search, YouTube, or Discover was created with generative AI. When the ad is made with Google’s own AI tools, the label is applied automatically. If the creative was made with third-party tools, the advertiser self-declares AI usage, without Google verifying it.

At the same time, as of July 1, new Google Ads terms of service were automatically applied to all accounts, clarifying how your inputs are used in AI tools and that responsibility for campaign oversight remains with you. The move is part of a broader wave of transparency around AI-generated content and preempts potential regulatory pressure, especially in Europe.

Practically, for Greek companies: if you run campaigns with AI-generated visuals or videos, check how the label appears on your ads and decide deliberately what you declare for creatives made with third-party tools. And remember: the new terms already apply, without you having clicked any acceptance button.

Cloudflare: Search, Agent, Training. Which AI Bot Do You Want on Your Site?

As of July 1, Cloudflare is giving all customers—even on the free plan—the ability to manage AI bots by purpose:

Search: crawlers that power search and bring referrals
Agent: bots that perform tasks on behalf of a user in real time
Training: crawlers that collect content for model training

Defaults are also changing from September 15: on new domains, on pages that show ads, Training and Agent bots will be blocked automatically, while Search will remain open.

There is, however, a detail: multi-purpose crawlers such as Googlebot, which crawls for both Search and Training, will be judged by their overall behavior. Anyone who chooses to block Training also blocks Googlebot. Cloudflare is essentially pressuring major providers to separate their bots by purpose.

For Greek companies with sites behind Cloudflare, the message is one: don’t let the defaults decide for you.

Whether you will provide your content for AI training, whether you will accept agents that make purchases, and whether you will remain visible in search are strategic decisions with an immediate impact on traffic—not a technical setting a developer configures and we forget.

📊 The STATS

+71%: AI Overviews Expand into Commercial Queries

Semrush analyzed more than 600,000 keywords in its U.S. database, from November 2025 to April 2026, across 10 industries. The appearance of AI Overviews on queries with commercial intent increased by 71% in six months, while Google Ads and AI Overviews appear together on the same SERP about twice as often as last year. In finance, the increase on commercial queries reached 231%.

The reverse is also interesting: on purely transactional queries, the presence of AI Overviews decreased slightly, by 5%. This shows that Google tested AI Overviews on “safe” informational queries and is now pushing them where products and services are compared—i.e., the part of the funnel with the highest commercial value.

For Greek brands, comparison pages, category pages, and buying guides now need an AI visibility check: do you show up inside the AI Overviews for your industry’s commercial queries, or is only your competition being seen?

92.4%: ChatGPT Dominates AI Referral Traffic

Previsible published the largest AI traffic study it has done: 6.77 million LLM sessions from 166 GA4 properties, from November 2024 to May 2026. Total AI referral traffic nearly decupled in 19 months, and 92.4% comes from ChatGPT. Claude grew sixty-fourfold and overtook Perplexity, while Copilot collapsed by 96% from its peak.

In e-commerce, LLM traffic increased thirty-sevenfold and lands mainly on product pages, from users who have already decided what they’re looking for. In addition, 28.8% of ChatGPT referrals end up on sites’ internal search pages: the model trusts the domain, but often doesn’t know which exact page to recommend.

Two practical takeaways for Greek e-shops:

Product pages need clean, comparable, structured data, because they are now an entry point—not only a conversion point.
Internal search is an acquisition channel: if a visitor sent by ChatGPT lands on poor search results, you’ve lost a ready buyer.

25.6%: ChatGPT’s Two Reasoning Modes Are Two Different Search Engines

Semrush, in collaboration with Kevin Indig, ran 100 prompts in GPT-5.2 twice: once with minimal reasoning (Instant mode) and once with high reasoning (Thinking mode). Only 25.6% of cited domains overlapped between the two. Different mode means different sources, different content types, and even different brand recommendations for the exact same question.

In finance, the citation rate increases by 28 percentage points with high reasoning. With high reasoning, the model performs more research steps, retrieves more and more specialized sources, and keeps the brands it encountered early in the conversation for subsequent, more specific queries.

If you measure AI visibility with only one tool or only one mode, you’re seeing half the picture.

Check how your brand appears in both.

82% vs 6%: When Self-Promotional Content Works in AI Search

Ahrefs published on July 6 an experiment, using February 2026 data, on whether your own “best of” listicles influence AI answers. For a new, unknown brand—such as the Ahrefs Evolve conference—the pages worked impressively: the brand appeared in 72 prompt-and-engine combinations where it had previously been completely absent, and in 82% of those the answer cited the new pages.

For the already established Ahrefs brand, the corresponding rate was only 6%: AI mentioned it anyway, with or without the pages. Pages that AI systems found but did not cite had the worst outcome: visibility without credibility backfires.

For Greek companies, the translation is clear:

If you are a new brand or entering a new category, your own comparison content can get you into the AI answer conversation—provided it’s honest and useful.
If you are an established brand, don’t spend resources there: your AI visibility is judged on authority, reviews, and brand signals.

$5.41 Billion: The Reality Check on Chatbot Ads

Emarketer estimates that the entire U.S. advertising market for standalone chatbots—including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode, and Amazon—will reach $5.41 billion in 2030, up from under $1 billion this year. OpenAI, which began testing ads in ChatGPT in February, has set a target of $100 billion in ad revenue by 2030.

That is, a target almost 20 times larger than the forecast for the entire market. One of the two is making a very big mistake—and that alone is useful information.

Conversational advertising is real but small, and search advertising remains the channel where the volume happens.

For Greek media plans: experiment with the new AI ad formats where it makes sense, but don’t shift budget based on headlines. The data doesn’t yet justify hasty budget reallocations.

💼 Marketing, Business & Management News

HBR: AI Comes Between You and Your Customer

Graham Kenny and Ganna Pogrebna write in Harvard Business Review that, as customers research and select suppliers via AI, competitive advantage shifts from knowing the customer to managing how AI presents you. In their examples, a boutique hotel monitored how AI tools described it and corrected its public content, while a manufacturer started filtering AI-generated inquiries before investing engineers’ time in quotes.

For every Greek company, especially B2B, the practical step costs one hour: ask ChatGPT and Gemini what they say about your business and your competitors. Any inaccuracy or generic statement you find is your new content backlog.

Upvotes for Sale: The Dark Market of AI Visibility

MarketingProfs documents a worrying trend: vendors selling aged Reddit accounts and paid upvotes to influence AI tool answers, because models often cite Reddit discussions. It’s the new version of bought links and it will have the same ending: systems will adapt, and the brands caught will pay the credibility cost.

Our position: an authentic presence in communities—Greek and international—where your industry is discussed is one of the best AI visibility investments.

Google Delayed Gemini 3.5 Pro. A Good Sign.

Google pushed the launch of Gemini 3.5 Pro from June to July to incorporate feedback from early users and additional reliability testing. After two years, the major providers are starting to prioritize making the model work consistently in practice, not just impress on metrics.

From the SLEED SEO team ♡

Sources

Google Search Central: Search Console social/video platform properties — https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/07/search-console-social-video-platforms
Search Engine Land: Google June 2026 spam update done rolling out — https://searchengineland.com/google-june-2026-spam-update-done-rolling-out-481063
Search Engine Journal: Image generation in AI Overviews & Images redesign — https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-adds-image-generation-to-ai-overviews-revamps-images/582242/
TechCrunch: Google will disclose which ads are made with AI — https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/09/google-will-now-disclose-which-ads-are-made-with-ai/
Cloudflare Blog: Content Independence Day: AI options — https://blog.cloudflare.com/content-independence-day-ai-options/
Semrush: AI Overviews commercial search study — https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-overviews-commercial-search-study/
Previsible: AI traffic report (July 2026) — https://previsible.com/seo-strategy/ai-traffic-report-july-2026/
Semrush: ChatGPT reasoning & AI visibility — https://www.semrush.com/blog/chatgpt-reasoning-ai-visibility/
Ahrefs: Self-promotional content AI SEO experiment — https://ahrefs.com/blog/self-promotional-content-ai-seo-experiment/
Search Engine Land: OpenAI ChatGPT ads revenue target — https://searchengineland.com/openai-chatgpt-ads-100-billion-revenue-target-482365
Harvard Business Review: AI is changing how customers choose your business — https://hbr.org/2026/07/ai-is-changing-how-customers-choose-your-business
MarketingProfs: AI news and views (July 3, 2026) — https://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/2026/55197/ai-update-july-3-2026-ai-news-and-views-from-the-past-week
MarketingProfs: AI news and views (July 10, 2026) — https://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/2026/55247/ai-update-july-10-2026-ai-news-and-views-from-the-past-week