iPullRank

What should we be measuring now? That question has come up on nearly every client call we've had this year, and it makes complete sense. AI models are answering questions directly and guiding people toward decisions in ways that often never touch a brand's website. The rankings and clicks so many teams relied on for years can only tell part of the story now. In our latest blog post, Brittan King, fractional CRO at iPullRank, talks about how to choose KPIs for the new era of AI Search that reflect where your business is today and where you want it to go. It also covers: - How often leaders actually use the KPIs they track (according to McKinsey & Company, only 29 percent of the time). - How to tell a citation that looks good in a report apart from one that means something. - What impacts your org chart can have on what you’re measuring. As Brittan put it, "KPIs are crucial, but there's no one answer to what your KPIs should be." Read the full post below:

Please join us in welcoming Chase Edwards to iPullRank as our new Marketing Manager, PR & Content Promotion. Chase brings 13+ years of experience in public relations, communications, and marketing to our organization through turning strategy into stories people care about. He believes curiosity leads to the best ideas (and we agree). Chase focuses on asking smart questions, building strong relationships, and making sure great ideas get the attention they deserve. We're thrilled to have him on the team. Welcome, Chase!

ChatGPT’s prompt volume fell from 70% to 50% in the first half of 2026, according to recent data from Comscore. Meanwhile, the data also showed that Gemini and Claude are both experiencing increases in use. It’s clear that as more people use AI models, they’re spreading their usage across a wider range of platforms. "Publishers should stop asking 'how do we show up in ChatGPT' and start asking 'where is our audience actually asking questions, and are we showing up there?'" said iPullRank CEO Michael King. More of Mike’s thoughts on AI and getting in front of your audience are in today’s Digiday article called, “Comscore data shows how AI discovery is splintering beyond ChatGPT.” Check it out in the link below:

Accuracy can be an unhelpful word when it comes to AI Search. You may have two AI visibility tools running together, but if one is saying your brand shows up in 41% of prompts, while the other sits at 23%, which one is most accurate? That might be the wrong question to ask. Accuracy only means something when a true value exists to measure against, and in AI Search, there isn't one. What you can have is precision, like when an instrument gives you the same reading under the same conditions repeatedly. In his latest blog, Michael King talks accuracy vs. precision in AI Search and looks at new methodologies for measurement, like scraping vs. API, logged in vs. out, single collection vs. many, and what each one really measures. If you’re still trying to figure out how to measure AI Search, check out the blog at the link below:

We're immensely PROUD of our brilliant VP of Relevance Engineering and Analytics Zach Chahalis for taking the stage at brightonSEO in San Diego yesterday and wowing the crowd. His presentation was titled "Log File Forensics - How To Analyze Log Files for AI Search." If you missed it, check out his slide deck here: https://lnkd.in/ec4sQ_Wp (Thanks to Shantel Y. Branch for the photo of Zach in action.)

What factors are most important for ranking on Google in 2026?  Cyrus Shepard of Zyppy SEO (Zyggy Signal) sent this question to 131 experts in the SEO industry and had them score and evaluate over 100 potential Google ranking factors to determine the 10 most important. iPullRank’s own CEO Michael King, Director of Marketing Garrett Sussman, and VP of Relevance Engineering and Analytics Zach Chahalis all contributed their rankings to the survey. “Getting consensus from a wide variety of extremely talented and thoughtful SEO practitioners provides a balanced and appropriately weighted assessment of what is most important,” Garrett said. “I think that you can take away some valuable insights from the survey.” Take a look at all of the results at the link below and see if they line up with your thoughts on what is most important to Google. Then see if your AI Search/SEO strategy matches up.

Has excessive use of AI slop knocked us back to an “anti-digital” age? A recent study by Glassdoor found that reviews on its site mentioning AI back in 2019 were 81% positive, but today, that number dropped to 43% positive. You’ve probably seen a few local businesses in your area display AI posters and use AI-generated food images on their social media. But there has been some resistance to this from customers. The fake imagery just doesn’t resonate with people. iPullRank Content Writer Carly Stoenner has been studying this evolving attitude towards AI. “Many brands want to create real-world experiences these days to stand out and get noticed,” she said. At our staff meeting this week, Carly shared an article from 404 Media titled, “We Are Living in a ‘ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic’,” which talked about how frequently the same AI flyer appears online. She also discussed many brands that are using physical experiences to differentiate themselves these days. Carly found: 📌 Brands are betting that AI saturation is going to make their real-world marketing experiences stand out. 📌 Brands are hoping that by going analog, they differentiate more easily. 📌 Physical experiences are supposed to drive earned media, user-generated social content, and press coverage. Sign up for the Rank Report newsletter to read the whole story; link in comments

The recent Google spam update seemed to take a wrecking ball to the rankings. New data from SE Ranking, shared with Search Engine Land, found that during the August 2026 update, 16.71% of URLs that had been ranking in the top 10 fell past position 100 for the same keyword. Some of our own iPullRank staff took a look at the data and shared their own thoughts on different aspects of the update: BI Analyst Cate Dombrowski: “Looking at MoM, your rankings may jump into the top 3 and appear as a demand spike or your content updates working, when it could just be that the site ahead of yours fell down. That's not a gain you really earned, and you can't count on it to stick.” SEO Engineer Michael Tandoh: “We ran the same rank-movement check monthly since May across four client sites. On a B2B SaaS site, non-branded queries gaining rank went from 38.4% to 48.5% during the update while declines fell from 46.5% to 37.2%. Another B2B site went the other way. Whatever separated the winners from the losers is operating at the site level rather than the category level.” Assoc. Dir. of Relevance Engineering Patrick Schofield: "Manipulating AI Overviews or AI Mode answers is now spam under Google's own policy, so the sites that need to worry aren't just the ones buying links but anyone over-optimizing for machines." The lesson for marketers is that the data doesn't tell its own story. Knowing what happened in the broader ecosystem is what turns a number into an insight you can act on. Learn more about how to stay ahead in the age of AI Search in the link below👇

What features would you like to see in AI Mode? VP of Product at Google Search Robby Stein recently asked this question on X and the industry had a lot to say, good and bad. The biggest request was around links, with industry experts like Barry Schwartz, Aleyda Solis, and Gianluca Fiorelli asking for more (and more prominent) links to publishers in the answers. The second most common request was paying creators and publishers for the content used in AI Mode answers. And it wouldn’t be a Google post without a healthy amount of trolling, with many people requesting the option of turning AI Mode off completely (and one person even asking for a self-destruct button). We asked the team at iPullRank for their thoughts and they shared some great insights on features that would make AI Mode better. They’re all in next week’s Rank Report newsletter, so if you want to see more (along with helpful AI Search/SEO tips, industry news, and expert insights each Monday), sign up at the link below

Dashboards can point to the challenge your brand is facing, but solving it depends on how ready your organization is for the AI Search era. Brands are moving beyond simply tracking results toward understanding them, acting on them, and testing what works. That means asking who owns AI Search at your organization, and how the right teams can come together to ensure your brand is represented accurately across AI models. Tom Critchlow calls this AI Search maturity. He's developed a matrix with five levels of organizational readiness, built around three dimensions: measurement capability, executive knowledge, and strategic posture. In his experience, companies rarely advance evenly across all three. We couldn't agree more. Every brand starts from a different place, with different resources and needs, and a real strategy has to be built around where your company stands today. That's why we built our own AI Search readiness assessment, to help you see who owns this work at your organization, how your team operates, how complex your needs are, and what would help you move forward. Take the two-minute assessment in the link in the comments to find your next step👇