The July reading, in plain numbers.
We build this site to be read by people and by machines, and the two turn out to want the same thing: structure. So this month the note leads with the data itself, laid out as one plain table you can read top to bottom, tab through with a keyboard, or hear read aloud by a screen reader in the order it is written. Every row names its source. Ranges appear where sources genuinely disagree, because the spread is the honest number.
The July reading at a glance
| Measure | July 2026 | Change from June | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| The monthly reading (0 to 100) | 75 | Up 3 points from 72 | The Mention Report index |
| Google searches ending without a click | 68% | Up from about 60% [1] | SparkToro / Similarweb panel |
| Searches that trigger an AI Overview | 48 to 60% | Wider methodology [2] | Semrush, 2026 AI Visibility Index |
| Zero-click rate inside Google AI Mode | About 93% | No change | Semrush / Seer Interactive |
| Largest share of AI referral traffic (ChatGPT) | 62.6% | Still first, share narrowing [3] | Goodie, April 2026 |
| Overlap of top-10 ranking and AI Overview citation | 17 to 38% | No change, now corroborated [4] | Aggregated SEO firms; 5W Research |
| Conversion rate, AI referral vs organic visitors | 14.2% vs 2.8% | No change | Opollo / RankScience |
- The panel partner behind this lineage changed from Datos to Similarweb between editions. Same source family, noted for transparency.
- This figure comes from a different, wider Semrush study than June's single-search number, so read it as an updated range, not a clean doubling.
- Reported as Goodie's own monthly trend line, which falls from 72.5% in January to 62.6% in April. First place, narrowing lead.
- 5W Research independently reports the same collapse, from about 70% down to under 20%. That is new corroboration, not new movement.
How to read it
Two numbers carry most of the month. Zero-click crossed to roughly two in three Google searches, and the monthly reading ticked up to 75, which is our single measure of how hard it has become for a brand to be reached inside an AI answer. Higher is harder. The rest of the table is context around those two.
The engine row is the one people misread most. ChatGPT is still comfortably first in AI referrals, but its share is drifting down as Claude and Gemini pick up ground. That is not a collapse, it is a market widening. Where your customers ask is becoming as real a question as what they ask, and the answer is no longer just one name.
What we are watching, not predicting
Same discipline as always. We track whether the engine mix keeps widening, whether citation keeps concentrating into fewer sources, and whether the pages that get cited keep skewing toward clean structure: real text, clear entities, sourced claims, semantic markup. Answer engines parse a page much the way assistive technology does, which is why a table like the one above is not a stylistic choice. Pages built to be read by everyone tend to be read by machines. We hold this site to a published accessibility standard for the same reason.
The full July reading, with every source and range, is in the current edition. The previous reading is the June 2026 edition. The next edition publishes the first Friday of August, numbers locked the Wednesday prior.