AI Search & SEO News (July 2026): Google Trends Update, ChatGPT + Yelp, AI Mode Ads & New Studies

0:00Jack Chambers-Ward: On this episode of Search With Candor, I'll be talking about all the important AI search and SEO news from July 2026, including social media data from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X being integrated into Google Search Console, ChatGPT introducing Yelp reviews into their data, as well as some studies from SE Ranking, Ahrefs, SimilarWeb. Stay tuned for that on this week's episode.

0:29Jack Chambers-Ward: Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Search With Candor. I am Jack Chambers-Ward. I am your host as always and this is another monthly news recap episode. I'm going to be rounding up all of the important news from July 2026 and it's one of those things where we've got some really, really juicy, really interesting and important news stories and some really cool data studies in here as well. Don't often do a mixture of the two, but I thought I'd do a nice little mix this time and get into some of the great work that some of the reach searches and some of the cool tools and things like that and teams have been doing out there to help us better understand the state of search as we know it in 2026.

1:09Jack Chambers-Ward: If you haven't already, please do like and subscribe on YouTube, follow us on Spotify, all the usual podcast platforms, wherever you're watching or listening. If you want to go and watch this, since these episodes are quite visual, I do literally show the articles, studies, all that kind of stuff on screen so we can read it together. We can look at the visuals. Some of them do have graphs and videos and GIFs and all that kind of stuff. So I would recommend either watching this on YouTube or Spotify if you can, if that is your kind of thing for your podcast preferences. These episodes tend to be a bit more visual, but I will make sure to describe everything and explain everything in case you are just listening audio only.

1:48Jack Chambers-Ward: Of course, before I get to the news and all of that lovely stuff, here is a quick word from some cool things we have coming up, including a live podcast that I will be collaborating with the wonderful folks at the SEM Mindset about, which is going to be happening on the 7th of October, just before Brighton SEO in Brighton in the UK. Okay, we've done the live podcast for many years now. We love doing this crossover. And yeah, here is a bit more information about the live podcast from me, Sarah and Tasman from the SEO Mindset. The live podcast collaboration between Search With Candor and the SEO Mindset is back again.

2:26Sarah, Jack and I are reuniting to bring you yet another live podcast experience in Brighton. And this time we're going to be discussing how to ditch hustle culture and build career longevity. Now, hustle culture has taught many of us that constant growth, productivity, pushing through, all of that stuff is what builds success. But what it doesn't build is sustainable success. And during this live podcast, we'll be exploring why career longevity isn't just about keeping up with change. It's learning how to lead yourself through it. Very excitedly, we're at a new venue, brand new venue. We are at the wonderful Comedia Studio in Brighton, which is a short seven minute walk from Brighton train station and 12 minutes from the Brighton Centre.

3:20It's happening the night before Brighton SEO, which is of course Wednesday, the 7th of October, 2026. And even though it is happening the night before Brighton SEO, you don't have to be attending the conference to come along. if you're in the area or you fancy a trip to the seaside we'd love to see you there

3:41Jack Chambers-Ward: our early bird tickets are just five pounds what a bargain i know because we want to make this event as accessible to everyone as possible but these early bird tickets will only be available for the first month prices will go up to 15 pounds on the 8th of september so get your tickets as soon as you can to get that bargain price of five pounds tickets also include food a drink token and a q a so you can be part of the show as well. And you can find us by searching on Eventbrite or click the link down below to get your tickets now. Looking forward to see you on the 7th of October.

4:18Jack Chambers-Ward: Okay, let's kick things off with a little bit of Google Trends data. I know we don't often talk about Google Trends on this show. I feel like it's a often misunderstood, often misinterpreted data set, but they have added something that I think is pretty essential and pretty interesting. I know we covered how Gemini is being integrated into that and you can ask it questions and things like that. But now they actually have little time comparison chips, the little filters at the top of the page there. I will read the little statement from the Google Search Central LinkedIn here and then we'll get into a bit of a discussion.

4:55Jack Chambers-Ward: Add a search term or topic to see new chips above your timeline and these chips show percentage changes for various periods. You can look at month over month, week over week, or even specific year over year benchmarks. And basically what this does is lets you see how trends are changing over time. And I will always, always clarify and explain Google Trends data is not search volume. You should never interpret the score out of 100 as search volume. It is comparative and relative. So it is never just, you know, a straight comparison score between different things. You should always take it with a grain of salt.

5:36Jack Chambers-Ward: You should always understand it's a popularity measurement. It is not necessarily search volume. It is not necessarily, you know, building of a brand or anything like that. It is kind of what is being talked about online at the moment. And they have a little visual here. I'll scroll down and show Google here, actually doing, you know, percentage different. The kind of things we're used to seeing on Search Console and GA4 and things like that for a while now, you actually get these little comparison graphs and the filters allow you to very quickly do that comparison. To be honest, I would quite like those little easy little comparison things on Search Console.

6:15Jack Chambers-Ward: I had to fiddle around with manually putting in the dates when I was doing my client reporting early this week. it's very frustrating. I quite like this little handy clicker button and it does year on year comparison automatically. But yeah, I think this is something this makes, to me, makes Google Trends a lot more useful. This is quite a significant change. Being able to compare month on month, but I think, as we always say in SEO, year over year being a really important thing. You can check seasonal trends. You can check, was it more popular last Christmas or this Christmas? All that kind of stuff.

6:48Jack Chambers-Ward: you just need to go to trends.google.com slash explore. And of course, I'll put links for everything I talk about in this episode in the show notes down below. So you can go and explore it yourself and test it out yourself. But yeah, I thought this was a really cool, really interesting little tool to kind of get a better idea of Google Trends. I feel like I'm not enough people using this data and it's a nice little addition that Google have introduced. And I thought it'd be fun to do a little live Google trend example here. So I'll show you how it works. Let me click through to my Google Trends here.

7:23Jack Chambers-Ward: So as you can see, we're on the Explore page of Google Trends. We've got your basic data and stuff. Everybody's talking about the World Cup still, seemingly. You can add a search term here and it will give you a little pop-up, a little chip that will appear. So let's take, what have we been doing recently? Oh, I've been enjoying some video games recently, funnily enough. So let's do Elden Ring, one of my favorite games, and click on that. And you'll see straight away here, minus 30 % versus preceding year. If I click on that, it adds it to my graph automatically. And you can see average interest there.

8:03Jack Chambers-Ward: Again, data is comparative and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, super easy, super straightforward. You can just unclick that little button and it just does it automatically. It's fantastic. And of course, you get all the nice data here as well. You get related queries, rising queries, so things people more and more people are talking about. I know we've got the Elden Ring coming out on Switch 2 discussion that's been happening recently. So I think that is why Elden Ring Switch 2 and the Collector's Edition here as well. There's a big discussion about doing a cool Collector's Edition for the release on Switch 2.

8:38Jack Chambers-Ward: Recently got Switch 2, relatively recently. Have been very much enjoying it. Very, very nice. Bit of kit, bit of a handheld tech stuff. I'm very much into my gaming handhelds, if you didn't already know. But yeah, you can do this for all sorts of stuff. Let's take, for example, SEO as a search term. Search engine optimization as a topic. It's up 80 % the preceding year. That's pretty cool. Everyone's saying SEO is dead. Google Trends disagrees with you. You can see a lovely graph here of how we are consistently higher than we were in 2025. Five. Pretty cool, right? Nice little addition to Google Trends that you should definitely be going and checking out.

9:18Jack Chambers-Ward: And they've also added insights with Gemini so you can query stuff and get more detailed feedback there as well. So yeah, I recommend you go and check out what is the latest cool little additions to Google Trends. Next up, we have an addition to ChatGPT. And this is something I think a lot of people have been wondering about is how ChatGPT will start doing more local focused. SEO because I guess local searches is the proper term I should use there because obviously Google has this huge ecosystem that we talk about so often. It's Google Maps, it's Google My Business, now Google Business Profile, of course, turning into connecting business profile to analytics, all of this stuff combining to give a really complete search experience.

10:04Jack Chambers-Ward: ChatGPT doesn't have that. And I think Google reviews on the business profile side of things, Having worked in local SEO and worked with very small local businesses over the years in my career, those reviews make a huge, huge difference. And ask people like Claire Kyle, ask people like Darren Shaw, all of these local SEO experts. Reviews are a huge part of building your reputation and building your local SEO experience. This is ChatHPT kind of doing that. They are partnering with Yelp to integrate review data directly into their search results. So you can see this article from Axios. It's exclusive to Axios, by the way.

10:42Jack Chambers-Ward: So this is a really nice little scoop they got here. I will give the details here for how it's integrated. Yelp's branding and links will appear when OpenAI uses its content, though OpenAI controls the design of that experience. Yelp's request a quote feature will also be added to ChatGPT, allowing users to contact local service providers for quotes directly in the LLM. And companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal. Surprise, surprise. And it doesn't preclude Yelp from making similar deals with other AI companies as well. So we may see this for similar kind of things, for Anthropic, for Perplexity, all this kind of stuff.

11:23Jack Chambers-Ward: And yeah, there's an interesting kind of shift here. It already, they say, yep, Yelp already supplies data to Yahoo and Apple Maps as well. So they're already having non-Google partners, as is relevant here. And this essentially adds a whole layer, an extra data layer to ChatGPT search when it comes to local recommendations and real-time local recommendations as well. More and more people are using that kind of conversational search style to search locally. I am looking for this kind of restaurant and da-da-da-da-da in a more conversational style than good restaurant near me, the old school search way, right?

12:08Jack Chambers-Ward: So this is, I think, pretty interesting. I have never used Yelp in my entire life. I know it's a big review platform. I feel like it's not as big here in the UK as it is in the US. I might be wrong about that. That's just my impression. That's my thought. I've never used it personally, but I know it is a big deal and a lot of people use it for reviewing businesses and things like that. So an interesting little bit of news for Yelp being integrated into ChatGPT. Next up, we're going to be moving on to some data studies. I'm going to kick things off with our friends from SE Ranking. Their study says AI mode now shows ads on nearly one in three commercial queries.

12:50Jack Chambers-Ward: This is a really interesting study. Shout out to SE Ranking. They do great work and great studies here. And I'm not going to read you the whole study. Don't worry. As always, like I said, I will put links for everything in the show notes if you want to delve a little bit deeper into all of the data. And this is an interesting thing for me because it's focusing on commercial terms specifically. Obviously, we've talked so much about how AI mode is affecting informational search. This is analysis of commercial search specifically and also ads within that, which I think is, again, obviously ads taking up more and more real estate on search engine result pages, being a huge discussion we've been having in the industry for a little while now.

13:34Jack Chambers-Ward: I'll give you the quick key takeaways from this study. Ads now appear in nearly one in three commercial AI mode queries. In 71.1 % of cases, an AI mode answer contained two ads. So not even just one, but two. and I know obviously we were kind of worried about ads coming to AI mode and here they are. Buying an ad won't get your site cited. In 88 % of ad keywords, the advertiser's domain wasn't among the sources AI mode cited. So that's an interesting conversation we've had again when it comes to traditional SERPs. If you are in the paid results at the top of the page and also in the organic results, you are really got a, you're really staking a claim to that SERP, right?

14:19Jack Chambers-Ward: This is kind of the opposite of that. There's far less correlation, it seems, by buying an ad. And then because, probably because AI mode results are so personalized and so volatile, you're unlikely to also be referred to in the organic AI mode result as well. and ad presence wildly swings by niche with 72 % to under 3 % across different niches. I think that's really interesting. Lead generation vertical surface ads heavily, informational and YMYL verticals rarely do. If you missed my recent episode with Sean Barber talking about AI search and YMYL verticals, go and check that out. I'll put a little card up here on YouTube and link that in the show notes as well.

15:04Jack Chambers-Ward: But the most interesting stat for me here is cost per click, which is, of course, a very common PPC metric. CPC predicts placement better than any other metric. Ad presence climbs from 24.33 % if your keyword has a CPC less than$2, and it climbs up to 53.56 % as soon as you cross that$10 CPC mark. That is very interesting to me. There is obviously like no direct correlation, I don't think, but that being a key factor influencing how many ads appear in AI mode, I think is very, very interesting. and to kind of cap it all off here most advertisers don't rank organically for the keywords they bid on for about 85 percent of ad keywords the advertiser site wasn't in organic results at all so that's got traditional results and ai mode they don't appear at all but yeah i think the cost per click predictor here is very interesting if you are essentially you know combining ppc data if you're using google ads and understanding cpc and i've done that a lot and I know my colleagues and the team here do this a lot to get a rough estimated value of ranking for something.

16:31Jack Chambers-Ward: Comparing organic results to the paid results and using the CPC as a kind of little bit of a vague predictor metric. It having a significant influence on the ad placement is very interesting to me. Obviously Google want more clicks for higher CPC words because you're paying more for them. But it's interesting that they're kind of so clearly pushing that, it seems. There's a correlation here between ad presence and cost by click, which is not as present in traditional organic results, to clarify. That's why that's interesting to me. This is the first time I've seen this kind of data where CPC affects the number of ads and ad placement rather than, you know, a blanket kind of general thing or differences across niches.

17:19Jack Chambers-Ward: so yeah go and read this full study by se ranking i highly recommend it again i'll put links in the show notes it's just se ranking.com slash blog slash google ai mode ads again put links for everything shout out to uh yvenia and svitlana from se ranking to get that kind of data to us and it is i'll give you a quick scroll here pretty to see your length there's got some really nice data here, really kind of the mid CPC data here. So as I mentioned, just over 24 % if your CPC is less than$2, it climbs up to 32.45 % if your CPC is 2 to 10. As soon as you cross that$10 CPC mark, it goes up to 53.56.

18:03Jack Chambers-Ward: So it's over twice as likely to appear for high CPC keywords than it is for below CPC keywords. Like I said, go and check it out. Pets and healthcare are the opposites. So pet queries and the niche of pets, 72.4%, whereas healthcare, sports, news, e-commerce is much, much less. And there's a nice little breakdown of the different types of niches and things here as well. And across the study. I won't read the whole thing. Go and check it out. Check it out in the link in the show notes down below. Next up, we have a study from Davis McCain at Profound. If you don't know about Profound, they are one of the big sort of AI visibility tools at the moment.

18:50Jack Chambers-Ward: And there is a really interesting kind of statistic here. We've seen a lot of it before, but this is getting into the actual data. Google AI modes shift to siting itself. We've seen links to Google search results in AI mode and AI overviews. We've seen links to a huge increase in links to YouTube and other Google services. There's obviously the whole Digital Markets Act that Google links to its own services. So things like Google Hotel and Google Flights, more so than competitor services. That was deemed antitrust and monopolizing of the industry. So Google have been called out on that quite a lot.

19:31Jack Chambers-Ward: Here is the couple of key takeaways from this study from Profound. Again, want to go and read the whole thing, go and check it out in the show notes. Google's AI mode saw an 8.4 times surge in citation share from 15th April to the 30th of June, making Google.com the second ranked domain driven almost entirely by its business profile and product knowledge panels. Google Cards now intermediate the brand consumer relationship for local intent verticals. So again, talking about local search as we were covered in that first story. And comparison driven product queries inserting itself as the touchpoint rather than passing traffic through to brand homepages.

20:12Jack Chambers-Ward: So this is particularly interesting. I have talked extensively on this podcast in many conversations about how comparison driven product queries are such a big use of LLMs. That kind of conversational search, the way you can please create a table to compare these products, listing all the attributes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. all that kind of stuff is heavily used when it comes to AI search and LLMs. And the last section here, winning the click through now takes one more step, optimizing your Google owned cards. That means fixing profile completeness and actively managing the reviews that sit front and center.

20:49Jack Chambers-Ward: We were talking about reviews earlier, since they're what your next customer sees before deciding whether to continue to your site. So this is an interesting topic, right? Because this is a discussion about Google inserting itself in the middle there, brings in another layer of optimization. You should already be optimizing your business profile and your knowledge panel stuff, especially product knowledge panel stuff. But there is, we talk so much about customer journeys. We talk so much about user journeys, about the multiple touch points that people have before they make a decision, buying a product, using a service, purchasing a service, whatever it is.

21:27Jack Chambers-Ward: This is now adding an extra layer in here where Google is kind of sneaking itself in the middle there and saying, hey, I'm still here. I'm still worth referring to. There is a pretty significant jump as well. And there's the graph on screen here for quite a significant jump around sort of mid to late, around late May heading into June. This graph spikes significantly going up from where it was relatively non-existent back in April. Like I said, local intent vertical. So across hospitality, travel, home services, restaurants, real estate and health care. They are all very affected, essentially.

22:06Jack Chambers-Ward: And yeah, there's an interesting thing here. I think you've got to be aware of things like reputation management. Again, something we've talked about a lot, that brand reputation management, aware of the sentiment of what people are saying about your brand, what people are saying about your company, answering reviews, being honest, being up to date, getting testimonials, all that kind of stuff as well. And also the profile completeness, but having clear up to date opening times, having clear product information, having clear sale information, all this kind of stuff is you need to be as fresh and up to date as possible when it comes to the data you are giving through these Google cards and Google features as well.

22:53Jack Chambers-Ward: Like I said, I'll put the link for that in the show notes as well. Go and read Davis's full study from Profound there as well. We'll now move on to a bit of Ahrefs. From the main man, Ryan Law himself, shout out to Ryan. He'll be coming on and joining me on a future episode about AI search. We're going to be announcing that at the end of the episode, by the way, for our new season, that AI search focus. and worked along with Javija Guan as well. Google doesn't punish AI content, it punishes bad content. This is interesting. We covered this a couple of weeks ago in Core Updates. If you haven't already worked out where I'm getting all of this news from, I've already covered it in Core Updates, our weekly newsletter.

23:40Jack Chambers-Ward: So they say, this is the quote from Google, automation has long been used in publishing to create useful content. AI can assist with and generate useful content in exciting new ways. A lot of people, again, Ryan mentions people like Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe have shared a lot of examples of websites scaling content with AI and they do really well. They get loads of traffic. Eventually that traffic disappears because the content is crap and it's just made at scale. There's some examples here. So the study from Ahrefs and why I appreciate their approach to this set out to answer four main questions.

24:23Jack Chambers-Ward: Are there any fully AI generated pages in top ranking positions? That is a very interesting question to me. Fully AI generated pages is a great clarifier there. Credit to the team again. How common is AI generated content throughout the top 10? How, sorry, does Google index content with a very high likelihood of being AI. So comparing is this AI to Google indexing? Does the organic performance of AI generated content tank within a few months? Does it show that graph, the mount AI traffic graph that Lily and Gabe, Glenn Gabe have talked about? The key takeaways are 5.3 % of positions one to three in Google are 100 % AI generated.

25:10Jack Chambers-Ward: 9 % are more than 80 % AI generated. So fully written pages that are made by AI with no human review, no human editing or anything like that, can still rank and do still rank significantly in traditional search. Pages with under 50 % of AI content, so it's the opposite of this, with under 50 % of AI content, account for 82 % of top three rankings. So AI generated content is still very much in the minority, but it is ranking. It is possible. It is happening. This is perhaps the most interesting one, the least surprising, but probably the most interesting. Every position in the top 10 contains a meaningful share of heavily AI generated pages.

25:59Jack Chambers-Ward: 8.4 % for position one and going up to 11.7 % for position 10 of those pages have more than 80 % AI generated content. Actually, it doesn't change that much depending on which position you're looking at. If you look at those top 10 rankings, but the indexing rate does drop a little bit from low AI content pages, which is just under 50 % to just over 40 % for very high AI content pages. But even in the fully AI generated options, 40 % of pages were still indexed. And low to moderate AI-generated content pages receive up to two or three times the organic impressions of almost completely AI-generated content.

26:51Jack Chambers-Ward: So this is interesting. Ryan mentioned there also a little, there is no significant drop-off. The methodology they go into here, obviously they're using Ahrefs and the tools there to go through. There's some nice links there as well. I think this is interesting because so many people are talking about how the nature of fully AI generated content is just slop. It's just crap. It never works. It doesn't rank. And we've seen plenty of studies that reinforce that, right? The mentions there for Lily Ray, Glenn Gabe, so many other people who have these examples of, I saw a site scale their content out of nowhere and they've just absolutely tanked and gone to often worse positions to where they were when they started scaling.

27:34But this is also saying certain domains, certain niches, certain industries,

27:40Jack Chambers-Ward: you can still rank with fully AI generated content. It is still possible. It is an interesting, I don't want to say anything, it necessarily encourages people because obviously they're not shouting out specific domains here. but i wonder how this accounts for for want of a better phrase how protected the domain is as a whole if a huge household name millions of visitors a week or a month or whatever it is then can get away with more of that than a smaller site could it will get penalized more right

28:23this kind of thing does say overall heavy AI content correlates to lower performance

28:31Jack Chambers-Ward: there's lower impressions lower ranking musicians and lower indexing rate but I don't think those I don't think the change is that significant it's not like you know a 50 percent 70 percent difference or something like that. It's dropping indexing drops is from like 49 to like just over 40. That's not a huge difference. To me, that's not a deal breaker. That's not a game changer. I'm not creating fully AI generated content for the record, but there is no sort of like clear, I guess, cutoff point of when you should just chuck out an AI. Is chucking out just an AI generated page better than not doing anything at all?

29:13Jack Chambers-Ward: In some cases, probably yes. In some cases, it could do more damage than not. And yeah, I think this is an interesting topic to discuss, something I think I'm sure there'll be more studies on in the future as well, and we'll get into that in general as this situation evolves, as more and more people are creating AI generated content as well. And now let's get on to our final study. This comes to us from SimilarWeb, and it is the 2026 Generative AI Landscape Report. This is one of those typical industry reports where it kind of discusses a lot of big stuff, but you need to download it. I will not share their content without their permission, so I will not give you anything that isn't available on the landing page here.

30:03Jack Chambers-Ward: If you do want to read the report in full, you can go to this page here, which of course I'll put a link in the show notes, and you will have to go and download it yourself. I'm not going to get past their paywall and give you their stuff for free. Don't worry, SimilarWeb. I'm not giving away your content for free. But I will summarize some bits here. Over 40 % of US searches now trigger an AI overview. There's a 6 % decline in Gen Z, so 18 to 24 year olds, share of AI chatbot usage in the last two years. This is something I've been talking about a lot with friends, with colleagues, with my partner as well, who is younger than me and is in Gen Z, there's that real kind of everyone is getting more frustrated.

30:44Jack Chambers-Ward: The younger generations are more skeptical and more cynical of slop and AI slop than some of the older generations. And I think this is a really potentially impactful trend where technology typically has to be adopted by the younger people who are going to be sticking around for longer and are going to be the people who are developing it into the future. Otherwise, it fades off into, you know, obscurity. That's not always the case, but that is broadly true. You need younger people to adopt your new technologies to really kind of integrate it into society for longer periods of time. In general, we're seeing more of my generation, the millennials and older, so Gen X, the boomers and all that kind of stuff, like my parents and things like that, are a more easily fooled by AI stuff, less able to spot AI generated images and content and text and things like that, and are happy to just like play around with it and just not think about the consequences of it.

31:58Jack Chambers-Ward: So I thought that was interesting. there is a 5.4 % increase in google search length since the introduction of ai mode again that probably doesn't surprise many a lot of us are now doing that kind of conversational search that we talk about there is a two and a half times increase in the chance of site visit after an ai mentioned so if you're linked and mentioned in ai user ai mode you're 2.5 times more likely to get a visit to your website as if you're not mentioned it. And 26 % of chat GPT responses now contain ads. So that kind of correlates to what we were talking about earlier with the AI mode ads we covered earlier with the SE ranking study.

32:43Jack Chambers-Ward: A little glimpse of the report here. There's a couple of nice little stats here talking about the competitiveness of AI and Gen AI. So average monthly web visits, 9.5 billion. That's more than everybody in the world per month. That's kind of crazy. 50 % of Gen AI users are age 18 to 34. I'm just outside of that age bracket. I'm 35, unfortunately. And there is an overlap. I thought this was particularly interesting because we see it as a very competitive market, right? The overlap between ChatGPT and Google users is 95%. Are we surprised? Google is so unanimous, synonymous, omnipresent in so many ways.

33:30Jack Chambers-Ward: And generative AI has become one of the web's fastest growing ecosystems. That's kind of terrifying. Like that is a pretty stark graph and stark contrast there. And yeah, there is a share of market here discussion comparing ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok. Who uses Grok? Like, come on, grow up. Perplexity and Copilot. Interesting to see Gemini absolutely smashed through ChatGPT there. That's something we've been talking about a lot. I think has been covered a lot in sort of tech circles is the fact that Google is so big, they can outlast all of these other companies. OpenAI, they're not as big as Google.

34:18Jack Chambers-Ward: DeepSeek, sure they've got Chinese backing and things like that. Not as big as Alphabet and Google. Anthropic and Claude, Perplexity and Sonar, not a chance. What we're finding is a lot of the LLMs having to niche down and become more specific. Claude is now Claude for nerds, basically. You've got Claude Code, you've got all this other stuff where it's being used by techie people, it's being used professionally in things like web design, development, coding, all this kind of stuff. I think the issue, I believe I said this on the show before, the issue for things like ChatGPT is that it doesn't feel specific.

34:59Jack Chambers-Ward: It feels very broad and it directly competes with Gemini, AI mode and what Google is doing. And Google, of course, just has such a significant market saturation for Gmail, Google Photos, Google Maps, Chrome. So many elements here of what the Google ecosystem is so integrated into our lives is kind of inescapable and unavoidable. And I think that is such a big difference maker. And the fact that Google can kind of just keep putting money into this and just like outlast everyone else. Because obviously we saw way back Google I.O. So I said two years ago now, I think it was. ChatGPT launched ChatGPT search.

35:47Jack Chambers-Ward: Google realized, uh-oh, they beat us. They're the first to the market kind of thing with AI powered search. We need to then launch Bard, as it was at the time, Gemini, all this kind of stuff and start launching everything. Ah, they started freaking out. AI overviews came out of nowhere and they were terrible and it was all a big mess. Now Google is settling. Google is maturing into this market. Google is maturing. The product is a lot more reliable in many ways. And I think Google, at the end of the day, will be the last chatbot standing, I guess, in this marketplace, in this competitive, seemingly competitive marketplace.

36:28Jack Chambers-Ward: Anyway, go and read that study and download the report from a similar web. Go and check out the HRF study. go and check out the profound study, the SE ranking study, all that kind of stuff. And I'll link to everything else, the two topics and news stories I covered there as well. Put all of those in the show notes down below. I'll also link to our live podcast if you do want to come and join us on the 7th of October. And if you want to come and join us in person in Norwich for Search Norwich Excel on the 24th of September, 2026. It's our one day conference featuring 12 incredible speakers right here in Norwich run by me, the Canada team here, Mark Williams Cook.

37:07Jack Chambers-Ward: We're all in it together. It's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be a really, really amazing lineup of speakers. And we're having some really cool discussions with sponsors for cool branded merch and things like that. So stay tuned for that. Go and follow Canada and Search Norwich on social media and go to searchnorwich.org if you want to go and get your tickets. The price will increase in a couple of weeks. It goes up on the 25th of August. you can currently get your tickets for£125 they will go up to£175 on the 25th we've got one month left before the event itself so go and get them now as soon as you can basically you can also ask one of our speakers get a discount code from them you can then get it for£100 or you can DM me and I can get you some group discounts I can get you some nice little offers and discounts and stuff like that if you want to get a cheaper ticket and come and hang out in Norwich It's a lovely city.

38:01Jack Chambers-Ward: It's my home city. It's where Candor is based and where we're going to be hosting our first conference. So come and join us. I'll be back next week with some more conversations. I've got two of my fellow Candelorians joining, funnily enough. Our principal SEO consultant, Brendan Bennett, will be joining me on the show, along with our design lead, Mark Salisbury. Yes, we have another Mark here at Candor as well. It's not Mark Williams Cook. Mark and Brendan will be discussing the overlap between web design, UX, SEO, CRO, and where we think the future of the internet lies. How much of those disciplines do they cross over?

38:41Jack Chambers-Ward: How much do they integrate with each other? All this kind of stuff. It's a really, really great conversation. We obviously had it here in the Canada studio. And I'll be back. Little tease, little announcement here. we will be launching a brand new season coming up in September as well. It's going to be focused on NLMs and AI search, GEO, AEO, whatever you want to call it. It's going to be really kind of directed and purposeful because I feel like I love the topics, all of the conversations we have on Search of the Candor. So many brilliant guests and really interesting insights, but it will often jump from topic to topic each week.

39:20So we're going to have a bit more of a clear direction for the upcoming season.

39:25Jack Chambers-Ward: We're going to be focused on AI search, optimizing for it, understanding it, building content, understanding things like UCP, MCP, all the technical stuff, as well as the content side of things. And I'm going to bring on, I've already got some amazing guests lined up to discuss the kind of tactics and strategies and techniques that we're using when it comes to this modern the era of AI driven search. So stay tuned for that in September. Links for everything will be down in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me on this week's episode, and I will see you next week. Have a lovely week.