July 2026 Insights and Action Items
- 1. ChatGPT ads are here, and the early data says this is more than an awareness play.
- What's happening: Our team has been piloting ChatGPT ads for clients, and with blended click-through rates running higher than expected and CPM and CPC data now showing up as of June, the biggest early lesson is to bid to the prompt, not the page, since your ad lands at the bottom of a live conversation.
- Action: Run the prompts that matter to your brand in a free ChatGPT account and see whose ad shows up.
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- 2. A query fan-out is the model's behind-the-scenes research, and brands are now showing up inside it.
- What's happening: When an LLM answers it runs its own set of searches to validate the response, and we ran one prompt 30 times to find iPullRank in the fan-outs 97% of the time and Mike King 63%, a sign that certain brands are getting hardwired to certain topics through years of publishing a real point of view.
- Action: Pick 3 priority prompts, run them through SE Ranking’s query fan out tool, assess ChatGPT’s association of the prompts with your brand (and your competitors’ brands).
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- 3. Visibility reports are a trap if you don't tie them to an outcome.
- What's happening: Measuring GEO is hard, and if you hand an executive a visibility report they'll love it for three or four months and then ask what it did for the business, so overlay visibility against a real outcome like traffic, signups, or conversions to catch when visibility climbs but the business impact doesn't follow.
- Action: What metric do you wish you could measure? Come back next month with your idea for new measurement KPIs - starting with the next metric.
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