Last updated June 2026
The June 2026 GEO recap. A round-up of what we have been seeing in AI search over the last couple of weeks.
The June 2026 GEO round-up in one read. GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation, is the unglamorous name for getting your brand mentioned by AI when someone asks it a question. This month: four AirOps numbers on how unstable AI visibility really is, Reddit’s grip on the models, a new Google report that shows your AI mentions but hides every click, publishers drawing battle lines, and a row over whether being cited is even the point.
A measurement firm called AirOps put out a run of studies recently. Four stats stuck with me. Each comes from its own piece of work, so treat them as four separate readings, not one stacked case.
Visibility is jumpy. Only about 30% of brands stay visible from one AI answer to the next, and just 20% show up across five runs of the same question. So one snapshot lies. This is exactly why we ask upwards of 6,000 prompts over seven days. It is the only way we have found to see past the wobble and give a client a number they can actually trust. AirOps volatility report.
Stale pages fall out. Pages not updated in over a year are roughly twice as likely to lose their AI citations. So keeping fresh content moving is not optional, and we tend to push clients toward a quarterly refresh. The answer is not cheap automated content, because that will not cut through. It takes real writing, maybe started by AI and then finessed by good copywriters, or you quietly drop out of the answers without ever knowing why. AirOps freshness report.
Other people’s pages do the work. You are around 6.5 times more likely to be cited on someone else’s page than your own. So your own website is not where most of the battle is won. It means good PR people who know what they are doing are worth their weight, and getting you mentioned in the right third-party places is exactly the sort of thing we help with. AirOps citations report.
Communities count. Community sites make up nearly half of all AI citations, and Reddit alone turns up in over a fifth of answers. So community matters and we do include guidance on it. But it is not the be-all and end-all. In your particular category Reddit might not show up at all, which is exactly what we have seen across recent work with 25 to 30 different businesses, so it is worth checking before you pour effort in. AirOps 2026 State of AI Search.
Steve Huffman, who runs Reddit, stood up at a Fast Company summit in late May and said large language models, the tech behind ChatGPT and the rest, “would not exist as we know them” without Reddit. He called all that human conversation “modern oil”. He has also been backing it up: Reddit has signed licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, says it is open for more, and is suing the AI firms it reckons helped themselves without paying.
Reddit is genuinely important to LLMs. It is also a useful signal because it is hard to influence, and it often holds the kind of natural consumer insight worth factoring in. That said, it is not the whole story. Your own category may not lean on Reddit at all. Read the piece on Search Engine Journal.
This one is fresh. Google has switched on a new report inside Search Console, the free tool most marketing teams already use to see how they turn up in search. For the first time it pulls your appearances inside AI answers out as their own line, and shows you impressions, the pages involved, countries, devices and dates. What it does not show you is a single click, or what anyone actually asked.
It is a genuinely useful start, but it is only a small part of the full picture. There is plenty more you can do once you know how Google’s data fits with everything else. For the whole story rather than one slice of it, you need someone running queries, capturing answers and scoring citations over time. That is the work an AVS run is built to do. Read Google’s announcement.
Two things landed on the publisher side. The UK competition regulator, the CMA, used new powers to force Google to let sites opt out of appearing in its AI summaries without being punished in normal search, a world-first ruling that the BBC and other big UK names had been pushing for. And in Marseille, AG Sulzberger, who runs the New York Times, told a room of the world’s news publishers that AI scraping is “brazen theft” and that they should fight it in court, in parliament, and by setting licensing terms together.
Honestly, this looks like a tactic to force commercial agreements. There is no way these publishers do not want their content read by LLMs, they need the reach. Any publisher without LLM access, or without a commercial deal, just becomes less and less important. We have already seen where this goes: OpenAI struck a deal with Reddit, and Stack Overflow, the site every developer and IT person lives on, signed one with OpenAI too. The endgame is not walls. It is contracts. CMA ruling · Sulzberger’s speech, via Press Gazette.
Burson, one of the largest PR firms in the world, put out a report called The Credibility Paradox: being mentioned by AI is necessary but no longer enough, because a mention is worthless if the reader does not believe it. AMEC, the body that sets the rules for PR measurement, made the sharper point that citation share must not become the new vanity number. It is only one part of the picture, alongside being described accurately and whether any of it leads anywhere.
Both are right on the substance. Here is where I push harder. Being cited is the point, because it is the beginning. You cannot go beyond a starting line that nine in ten brands have not crossed yet. Credibility comes after, and it comes from a solid strategy, good content, and consistency in your message. All the things great copywriters and great PR people deliver, and all things we can help with. AMEC GEO Principles · Burson’s Credibility Paradox.
Put the month together and the position is simple. AI visibility is unstable, it is mostly won on other people’s pages, and the tools now appearing will tell you that you were mentioned without telling you whether it held or whether it mattered. Measurement that takes one snapshot will mislead you. Measurement that runs deep, over time, across the three engines that count, will not.
So we will keep saying the unfashionable thing. Being cited is not a vanity metric to grow out of. It is the line nine in ten brands have not crossed. Cross it first, measure it honestly, then build the credibility on top with real strategy, real content, and a consistent message. That is the order. That is the work.
Be Known. Be Cited.
An AVS Exec Brief measures how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity talk about your business right now. Same methodology as the full AI Visibility Strategy, delivered manually, free of charge.
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