25 October 2026 · Week 4

AI answers are the new reviews

This weekend I did something slightly unreasonable: I built a small team of AI agents that read the news, draft my posts and brief me before I'm out of bed. Then one piece of data stopped me cold, and it's changing what my agency sells. This is week 4 of building in public — it started with my own websites as client #0.

The number

When someone searches “[your brand] reviews”, Google now shows an AI Overview about 90% of the time — up from 30% a year ago. Semrush tracked 400 commercial keywords on US desktop for a full year: overall AI Overview presence nearly doubled, 46% to 88%. For ecommerce queries: 33% to 85%. Price and cost searches: 5% to 71%.

Read that again. When a buyer searches “[your brand] reviews”, AI now writes the summary of your reputation before they read a single review.

(Caveats I flag every time: US desktop data, small fixed panel, measures presence not clicks, and the vendor sells tracking tools. Direction matters more than precision here.)

Three studies, one direction

Three studies landed in my morning brief this week:

AI sends almost no traffic. A 100-site, 145M-session dataset puts ChatGPT at 0.62% of Google organic volume. All LLMs combined: 0.73%.
But its visitors convert 4.5× better — 13.8% versus 3.02% from Google organic. When AI does send someone, they arrive pre-sold.
And the answers aren't even consistent with themselves. The same question across four engines returns the same top-5 brands only 17% of the time. Ask the same engine twice: 43%.

Translation: AI visibility isn't a traffic channel. It's a trust channel. Being named in the answer wins the consideration set; the click is a bonus. And because answers vary run to run, you measure it like a range, not a rank.

What I actually built

The agent team that surfaced all of this, in one weekend:

A research agent that reads primary sources at 6am and briefs me on what changed in AI search.
A content pipeline that drafts platform-native posts — LinkedIn and X run on different psychology, so they get different posts — and waits for my approval before anything ships.
A memory layer with local embeddings, so the system compounds instead of forgetting.

Total new spend this week: about a pub lunch. Most of it runs on free tiers. The live status of the whole crew is on the build page.

Why I'm writing this here

Because “building in public” is only worth reading if the public part is real. I'll document the build on this site as it happens — the agents, the agency, the numbers, the misses. My own websites are client #0; the same baseline I run on myself is what I'll run for brands.

Try this today

Search your brand name + “reviews”. Read what the AI wrote before you read your reviews. Then map which sources it quoted — that's where your reputation is actually written now.

Because AI doesn't trust what you say about yourself. It trusts what others say about you.

When did you last check what the AI tells people about you?