ChatGPT now drives 92.4% of AI referral traffic, and a quarter of it lands on the wrong page
It's a "who's actually in control here" sort of week. ChatGPT now decides where nearly all your AI referral traffic goes, and cheerfully dumps a big chunk of it on the wrong page, Google's finally letting you watch how your social posts do in Search, most B2B buyers have made their minds up long before they'll deign to speak to a human, and Google's handing small business owners a shiny Gemini upgrade that, naturally, doesn't work over here. And somewhere in the middle of all that, one bloke's side-project newsletter is now worth twenty million dollars. Here are your five.
1. ChatGPT now drives 92.4% of AI referral traffic, and a quarter of it lands on the wrong page
Previsible's 2026 State of AI Discovery report went through 6.77 million LLM-driven sessions across 166 GA4 properties, and the headline is one-sided to the point of rudeness: ChatGPT now commands 92.4% of trackable AI referral traffic, up 12.8x in nineteen months. Everyone else is scrapping over the crumbs, though the growth curves are wild in their own right: Claude grew 64x (from 133 sessions to 8,528) and quietly overtook Perplexity, while Copilot fell off a cliff, down 96% from its peak. The genuinely useful nugget is that ChatGPT sends 28.8% of the traffic it refers straight to a site's internal search results page rather than the actual content, so nearly a third of hard-won visits land somewhere with no answer on it. So the win was never just getting cited, it's making sure the click has somewhere to land. If ChatGPT keeps depositing people on an empty search page, that's a leaky bucket dressed up as a visibility success. "We're showing up in ChatGPT" and "ChatGPT is sending people somewhere useful" turn out to be two very different sentences, and only one of them is worth celebrating. Search Engine Land
2. Search Console will now show you how your Instagram and TikTok posts do in Google
Google's added a new "platform properties" type to Search Console that finally lets you see how content on social and video platforms, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube among them, actually performs in Google Search and Discover: clicks, impressions and the queries pulling people in. Until now that whole slice of visibility was a black box, posts were quietly showing up in Search results with no way of knowing which ones, or how often. It's rolling out gradually, and connecting a profile runs through Search Console's usual verification flow. The quietly significant bit is that a website of your own is no longer required to get Search Console data, which rather reframes "SEO" for any client whose entire presence is a TikTok account or a YouTube channel. A social post has always been a page Google can rank, now it can be measured like one. Worth remembering the next time someone insists social "does nothing for search". Search Engine Journal
3. 61% of B2B buyers would rather research you than talk to you, and that's fine
Writing in Demand Gen Report, Sinch's Sophie Cheng makes the case that most B2B personalisation still isn't personal, it's just segmentation in a nicer outfit. Her anchor stat: 61% of buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience, doing their own digging through digital channels before they'll speak to sales at all. Two people with the same job title, she points out, are often trying to solve completely different problems, so slicing an audience by company size and seniority tells you almost nothing about what any of them actually want right now. Her fix is to read behaviour instead of demographics, what someone's engaging with, exploring, coming back to, and to turn up on the one channel that suits the moment rather than carpet-bombing all of them at once. "Reach alone doesn't drive action," as she puts it, "relevance does." AI can do the heavy lifting on spotting the patterns, but only if the data underneath it isn't a mess, which, for most agencies, it usually is. Demand Gen Report
4. How a solo Hollywood newsletter became a $20 million media company
Inbox Collective told the story of The Ankler, the entertainment-industry newsletter Richard Rushfield started in 2016 that's now Ankler Media, valued at over $20 million and reportedly on pace to break $10 million a year in revenue, with subscriptions alone bringing in more than $1.9 million. It's grown into over a dozen newsletters and around twenty staff, profitable since year one, adding subscribers about 13% a year. And when it needed ad tech its platform couldn't offer, it packed up and left Substack for Passport back in April. The lesson buried in the growth chart isn't "start a newsletter", it's that a single sharp voice in one narrow niche can compound into an actual media business, provided you keep showing up and eventually treat it like one. Rushfield built the audience, bringing in Janice Min as CEO in 2022 built the company around it. Proof that the humble email, written off roughly once a year by someone with a keynote, remains quietly undefeated. Inbox Collective
5. Google Business Profile now lives inside Gemini, unless you're in Britain
Google's wired Business Profile management straight into Gemini, so an owner can update opening hours, draft replies to reviews, write posts and ask how the listing's performing, all in plain conversation rather than clicking through the dashboard. There's a catch, several actually: it's one person, one profile only, personal Google accounts, no Workspace, and explicitly off-limits to anyone managing more than one location. Oh, and it isn't available in the UK or the EEA, so for most agencies reading this it's a spectator sport for now. It's a small feature with a big tell: Google clearly sees the solo owner chatting to Gemini as the default way local listings get managed next. The single-profile lockout won't hold forever, and "the owner just asked the AI to sort it" is a workflow worth understanding now, even if it can't be touched here yet. File under "not available in your region", that most British of error messages. Vizup
Small business shout-out
This week's shout-out goes to Babipur, a family-run ethical shop in Porthmadog, tucked under the mountains of Eryri, that's been quietly doing the sustainable thing since 2007, long before it was a marketing bullet point. It's where you go for cloth nappies, wooden toys and organic kids' clothes that don't cost the earth in either sense: Grimm's rainbows, Frugi, Tula carriers, Klean Kanteen, Bio-D, all the good stuff, curated so you don't have to vet every brand yourself. It started at Jolene's kitchen table in North Wales with a husband, two kids, a dog and a simple idea: sell fair trade things that are made properly and free from exploitation. Fifteen-odd years on it's grown into a proper Welsh employer with its own warehouse, still independent, still family-run, and still stocking only the brands it actually believes in. Ethical shopping that happens to be lovely, which is the only kind that sticks. Know a small business we should feature? Reply and let us know.
