Seer's AI "Need-To-Knows" for June 2026
1. Bing Webmaster Tools now gives you grounding queries. It's the first to do it.
What's happening: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot: none of them give you the prompts, and none gave you the grounding queries either. Bing is the first one. Google added AI reporting two days later, but it's likely "mostly useless" because it isn't giving you queries.
What to do about it: Set up Bing Webmaster Tools and read your grounding queries. When one surfaces an old page, make the page better. We've got to turn that visibility into believability, not just another citation in a report.
2. Personalization is now a search input.
What's happening: Garrett Sussman found that once you connect personal intelligence to your Google account, brands got mentioned more in his AI answers when he had receipts in Gmail or a brand of hoodie in his Photos. Google's had Gmail, Photos, and Calendar for years and never used them. Now, with competition from ChatGPT and Claude, they are.
What to do about it: Start treating every search as an MSV of one. Ask how you're partnering with the team sending your emails, or deciding where your logo gets imprinted. Those are inputs now.
3. Reviews are a huge part of AI discoverability, and most of us don't own them.
What's happening: In a Trustpilot-commissioned study, even a thin profile beat no profile by 52 percentage points in AI search visibility.
What to do about it: This isn't a "go buy Trustpilot" recommendation. Audit your third-party review presence and fix your zero or near-zero profiles. You have to lead a horse to water here: meet customers where they are and build a real mechanism to solicit reviews.
4. Stop chasing citations as a success metric. They're chaotic, and Reddit is surging.
What's happening: What's visible on ChatGPT is very different from Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews, and it shifts with every new model. Matt Boxbom found a ridiculous surge in Reddit's influence on Google's AI Overviews specifically.
What to do about it: Don't go off on an island. Correlate citation data to what your customer actually engages with. If that's Reddit, stand up a real, resourced presence.
5. AI Overviews and AI Mode are two different behaviors. Track them separately.
What's happening: Kevin Indig's research shows AI Mode users mostly take the first answer (around 74% go with whatever's listed first), while AI Overview users behave more like browsing Netflix: scrolling down, then back up, weighing every citation. Google now reports AI Mode at ~1 billion weekly active users.
What to do about it: Split AIO and AI Mode into two optimization tracks with their own metrics. Treat AIO presence more like a CPM impression than a click, and apply a meta-description mentality to your titles so your UVP lands without a visit.
6. Amazon's Alexa for Shopping: discovery and purchase are moving inside the agent.
What's happening: Amazon made agentic commerce mainstream overnight, to an audience where few even know what an agent is. It's not a search portal, it's an action portal: find me the best deal, remind me when I'm low.
What to do about it: Pressure test your category on Alexa for Shopping, even if you don't sell on Amazon. See who's winning.
7. Google I/O: the minimalist roots are long gone.
What's happening: Google's biggest search-bar change in 25 years: a choose-your-own-adventure experience with Gemini powering the bar, and AI Mode now at ~1 billion weekly active users.
What to do about it: Educate your execs, because an old mental model of Google leads to wrong investments. Getting added as a preferred source could be a minor cheat code.
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