Google's AI is citing your content, then sending leads to your competitors
It's all about AI search this week - Google's quietly building profiles on every business, a new study confirms people are using AI search more than ever while trusting it less, and Google's AI Overviews have been helping themselves to your clients' content, then sending the leads elsewhere. Here are your five.
1. Google's AI has been quietly building a file on your clients
A newly surfaced Google patent reveals its large language model doesn't just crawl pages - it builds structured "entity profiles" on businesses from website content, reviews, third-party mentions and other public signals. SEO is no longer just about the right keywords; it's about making sure Google's AI actually understands who a client is, what they do and who they do it for. If a client's website, reviews and social profiles all tell a different story, a confused AI won't recommend them - it'll recommend the competitor with their story straight. Search Engine Land
2. AI search is booming, but nobody quite trusts it yet
A study of 1,008 consumers and 150 marketers confirms AI search adoption is growing fast while consumer trust heads the other way. More people use ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode as their first port of call, but fewer believe what those tools tell them - meaning clients need to show up in AI answers while sceptical users keep cross-referencing those answers against reviews and familiar names. The businesses that win are the ones that look consistently trustworthy across every surface. Search Engine Land
3. Google AI Overviews are using your content, then recommending your competitors
SEO analyst Lily Ray studied how Google's AI Overviews cite sources and found that when AI pulls from a brand's own "best of" listicle content, it recommends a competitor 69% of the time. In practice: a business publishes a "best plumbers in Leeds" article, Google AI cites it as a source, then recommends three other plumbers in the snippet instead. Listicle content still drives citations - it's just a reminder that AI Overviews have their own agenda, and it isn't always the client's. Search Engine Land
4. What actually gets you cited in AI search
New research from Reads to Leads tracked AI citations across real client work. The headline stat: AI sessions are now 56% the size of all search traffic globally, and total search has grown 26% since ChatGPT launched - the pie is bigger, you just need a new knife. Narrow positioning is the biggest lever, since AI can't recommend a business it can't categorise; freshness matters more than most realise, with AI citing recently updated pages over older, "better" ones; and the formats that get cited most are listicles, comparison articles and pricing guides. Reads to Leads
5. LinkedIn just added collaborative posts, and agencies should take note
LinkedIn has started rolling out collaborative posts, tested publicly at Cannes with a broader rollout to follow - letting two accounts co-author a single post, both listed as contributors and shared to both audiences. For agencies managing LinkedIn for clients, this makes agency-and-client co-authoring far more native, and gives clients a cleaner route to work with external voices than a tag and a hope. Social Media Today
