Five Insites archive

Every issue of Five Insites

Five sharp insights from the SEO, AEO and AI-visibility world - the same digest we send subscribers every Thursday. Catch up below, then get the next one in your inbox.

Searchers now pause, scroll and reconsider before clicking

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.

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The biggest AI categories are the emptiest

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.

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68% of US searches now end without a click

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.

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AI recommends businesses on review volume, not star rating

AI recommends local businesses on review volume rather than star rating, ChatGPT's ads manager goes self-serve with the $50k minimum spend scrapped, the highest-converting pages are boring "X vs Y" comparisons rather than blog posts, ChatGPT cites Reddit and Wikipedia four times more than the press, and the social accounts actually growing are the ones willing to be a bit cringe.

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When and how consistency wins

A newsletter writer who sent 366 daily emails without missing one, the newsletters hitting 55% open rates through nothing cleverer than showing up on schedule, why AI search cites listicles and comparison pages more than anything else, Google's new AI Overview impressions report and why it isn't a scoreboard, and our own benchmark of 10,000 local businesses proving ChatGPT 'knowing' a business is worth roughly nothing if it never recommends it.

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89% of AI search demand has no owner yet, and neither does most of your clients' patch

Kevin Indig's data shows 89% of AI search demand sits in categories with no clear owner, Telepathic's technical checklist for getting AI crawlers to actually read a site, how Notion's growth came from unglamorous community grunt work rather than luck, why the AI ad that converted for HiBob was deliberately made to look less like AI, and where AI actually earns its keep in a newsletter workflow.

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Client's Google reviews vanished this week? It's not just them

Google's confirmed a bug wiping reviews off Business Profiles with no ETA, Frontera's seven rules for messaging that actually sticks, our own Andrew Waite splits AI visibility reporting into the two jobs it actually is, Anthropic's new Record a Skill feature turns a screen recording into a repeatable Claude skill, and 45 subreddits worth bookmarking before the next client pitch.

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Google's spam filter just ate your clients' reviews

Google confirms it's investigating reviews vanishing from Business Profiles, Frontera's seven rules for messaging that actually sticks, Claude learns to repeat a job by watching it done once, why AI visibility reporting needs splitting in two, and 45 subreddits worth bookmarking before the next pitch.

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Google just made you liable for whatever its AI does in your ad account

Google's new Ads terms shift AI liability onto advertisers as of 1 July, a data firm finally puts a real number on ChatGPT ad spend, marketers love AI but 78% of their customers wish they didn't, the nonprofit newsroom outgrowing everyone on social without a single growth hack, and the technical checklist for getting a client's site AI-crawlable.

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Someone read ChatGPT's network traffic, here's the tea

Why proving GEO's ROI is the wrong question to ask, what ChatGPT's raw network traffic reveals about how it picks sources, turning one-off Claude prompts into repeatable content audits, why B2B buyers aren't as rational as they think, and the onboarding moment that actually keeps users around.

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