Selling to SMBs? Make this your Thursday read

46% of searchers are still active on the results page at 21 seconds when an AI Overview is present, ABM has stopped targeting accounts and started targeting named humans, Google's agentic video understanding cut token usage 88% while getting 7% more accurate, email and SMS together click 97% better than email alone, and the five hooks that stop a thumb on a UGC video haven't changed in years.

Half of ChatGPT's 1,094 categories still have no clear owner and the biggest ones are the emptiest, the passages Google quotes most are 117 words with the answer in the first sentence, only 38% of AI Overview citations come from top-ten ranking pages, pages loading in under 0.4 seconds get three times the AI citations, and 80% of the B2B buying journey now happens without a rep in the room.

68% of US searches end without a click while only 20% of marketers have started on AEO, a company switched off $113,000 a month of paid search and found 89% of it was brand defence, the queries worth targeting are the ones a human would actually say out loud, Google pulled Facebook content into 19.5 million AI Overviews without naming the brands, and AI search favours the businesses it can verify rather than the better ones.