Google's AI Mode is now broadly available rather than a US-weighted experiment, and the same week's recaps report heavy unconfirmed ranking volatility. Separately, Similarweb data reported by TechCrunch on 27 July 2026 puts AI Overviews on 43% of Google searches, up from 15% a year ago.
Practitioner tier, not confirmed by Google documentation. The claim is that AI Mode traffic is now distinguishable in Search Console performance reports, mostly by spotting conversational-style queries. Google has not published query-level generative reporting.
Google-Extended governs training use, not inclusion in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Blocking it does not remove a site from the answer surfaces. The Wall Street Journal reported in July 2026 that some publications lost more than 40% of traffic between June 2025 and June 2026, on Semrush data.
Tested the top 1,000 sites. 40.9% are unreadable to GPTBot. 18.4% are completely dark to every AI crawler tested. The finding that matters most: 17.6% allow GPTBot in robots.txt but return a 403 when GPTBot actually requests the page, because a firewall or CDN is silently blocking traffic the published policy permits. GPTBot is disallowed by 19.1% of sites against 2.8% for Bingbot, a 7x gap.
Caveat worth carrying: this is the top 1,000 sites, which are far more likely to sit behind an aggressive enterprise CDN than a coach on a small host. The 40.9% describes those sites, not a small independent one, and quoting it as if it did would be wrong. What transfers is the failure mode, not the rate.
6.8 million citations from 1.6 million queries per model across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, collected July to August 2025, across four industries. First-party websites 44%, business listings 42%, reviews and social 8%. Reddit and similar came to 2% once location and intent were controlled for. Model preferences differ: Gemini leans on websites (52.1%), OpenAI leans on listings (48.7%).
863,000 keyword SERPs and 4 million AI Overview URLs. 38% of cited pages also rank top 10, around 31% rank 11 to 100, and around 31% do not appear in the top 100 at all. 18.2% of non-ranking citations are YouTube URLs.
The Radar is free to read and always will be. If you want to know whether AI names your business when a buyer asks, the free check asks ChatGPT 25 real buyer questions and emails you the answer within the hour.