SEO Recap covering September 4, 2026: Google-ChatGPT overlap studies and US traffic winners and losers

Built by Stephanie Chung·6 min read·7 stories

Daily summary of what matters in SEO, GEO, AEO, and AI search generated with Claude Code (beware of hallucinations)

AI in Search / AI Overviews

Similarweb found 95% of ChatGPT users also appear in Google's audience in September 2025, holding at 95% through May 2026 even as generative AI visits grew 70% year over year, which it reads as AI being added to search rather than replacing it.
A Bocconi University study using Comscore desktop clickstream data found households that gained ChatGPT Search access cut traditional search queries by 9.4% on average, rising to 17.0% after 20 weeks, with the steepest referral drops in informational categories:
- Academic sites down 32.8%
- Reference sites down 26.5%
- Developer sites down 15.1%
- News sites down 13.4%
A pre-registered field experiment (Wang et al.) that forced 1,100 Chrome users into AI Mode found an 18.8 percentage point drop in click-through to external sites, with news clicks down 12.5 points, Reddit down 21.2, and Wikipedia down 9.9.
The datasets reconcile because they measure different things. Overlap counts people, Bocconi counts queries per household, and Wang tracks clicks, so Google can keep the user and the query while still losing the click.
None of the studies track individual users across Google, AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Gemini at the task level, and Google has not released user-level data to verify its I/O claims of record query volumes.

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said on the February 2026 earnings call that orders arriving through AI-powered search have grown 15 times since January 2025, routing through Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, and Salesforce's Agentforce Commerce.
AI agents fire rapid structured API calls and buy in seconds, which trips rate limiting, bot detection, and session logic built around a single continuous human visit.
The likely failure mode is systems disagreeing about the state of a purchase, such as an inventory feed showing in stock while checkout shows sold out, or a refund clearing before the order state syncs back to the agent.
QAwerk's Konstantin Klyagin recommends 3 tests before adding another AI platform:
- Load-test the checkout API with many parallel calls, not one human session
- Check product data accuracy the way a machine reads it, not how a browser renders it
- Verify refunds and returns clear correctly on the first attempt

Microsoft is testing bolding the HTTPS part of URLs in Bing search results, a subtler approach than the lock icons and HTTPS labels it has tried before.
The test, spotted by Sachin Patel on sponsored results, may extend to organic listings, though Barry Schwartz could not replicate it.

Semrush Traffic Analytics data as of July 2026 shows the top ranks unchanged but volumes up sharply:
- Google first at 25.3 billion monthly visits, up 10.72% year over year
- YouTube second at 10.3 billion, up 36.6%
- Reddit third at 2.61 billion
ChatGPT.com jumped 48.38% year over year to ninth overall with 1.09 billion monthly visits, passing both DuckDuckGo and Bing.
The steepest top-20 decline belonged to Bing, down 50.43%, with Temu down 28.55% (tied to the mid-2025 de minimis tariff change), Amazon down 15.31%, and DuckDuckGo down 15.83%.
Concentration tightened rather than loosened. The top 10 sites still account for 68.6% of top-150 traffic, nearly unchanged from 68.8% a year earlier.
GA4 attribution is degrading. On one niche publisher, direct traffic rose more than 157% to over 78% of total, and only 0.47% of traffic showed up in GA4's native AI Assistant channel since it launched May 13, 2026, because AI chat links strip referrer data.

USA TODAY is restructuring its audience team alongside broader layoffs, with SVP Monica Richardson saying "search traffic is under pressure" and platforms are "increasingly keeping user experiences to themselves instead of sending them back to us."
The existing audience organization is being replaced by a new Audience and Digital Production Team with 3 desks:
- Central Production Desk for daily content and publishing workflows
- Content Pillars Audience Desk to grow audiences around core coverage
- Strategic Platforms Desk to build off-platform audiences and manage platform relationships
The memos do not name Google, but publishers have reported declining search referrals since AI Overviews launched in 2024.
SEO consultant Glenn Gabe cautioned the drop looks like more than AI Overviews eating clicks, arguing algorithm updates likely tanked USA TODAY's search visibility and that it can recover.

More than two-thirds of US Google searches ended without a click in the first 4 months of 2026, and Pew found users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits with an AI summary versus 15% without one.
Treat the SEO budget as a portfolio:
- A maintenance floor to protect assets the business already depends on
- A growth budget tied to evidence of a specific business problem or opportunity
- An experimentation budget for questions that need answering
- Defensive, expected, and expansion scenarios with reallocation rules
Adobe reports AI-referred visitors to US retail sites converted 42% better than non-AI traffic in March 2026, a sharp reversal from a year earlier when AI-referred traffic converted 38% worse.
For every growth expense, ask what outcome it supports, which evidence shows the opportunity, how long it deserves funding, and what would make you adjust the investment.

Running SEO and PPC as separate channel strategies wastes budget, most obviously by paying for clicks on terms the site already ranks first for organically.
Duplicate landing pages are a common cost when one team builds a page the other already has, splitting authority and confusing Google about which to rank.
3 low-effort fixes close most of the gap:
- Start from shared keyword research so both teams work off one list
- Check what pages already exist before building a new paid landing page
- Hold joint monthly client calls so both teams hear the same priorities
Share data both directions. PPC search term reports guide organic content priorities and negative keyword exclusions, while organic rankings show where to pause or redirect paid spend.

Published on September 5, 2026