Table of Contents
AI Search Tripled. Regular Search Still Brought More People.
The rest of the week, in bite-sized pieces
"A competitor told me they're doing 'AI optimization' now. Should I be worried that I'm not?"
Epic Web Studios
Epic Insights
Edition 33  ·  Aug 18, 2026

The Search Pie Got Bigger

If you've been bracing for the month AI search finally empties out your website traffic, you can loosen your grip a little. The first solid numbers landed last week, and they point somewhere else entirely.
The Big Story

AI Search Tripled. Regular Search Still Brought More People.

Shopify published its Q2 commerce data on August 11. Sessions referred to its merchants by AI assistants grew 197% year over year, roughly triple. That's the number everyone quoted. The one they skipped: over the same period, ordinary organic search grew 12%, on a base so much larger that it still sent more visitors than every AI platform Shopify tracks, combined.

Separately, a Scrunch study covered by Search Engine Land found that only 1.1% of visits to news publishers came directly out of a conversation with an AI assistant. Most readers still showed up the old way, by searching or by typing the address.

Picture a restaurant that joins a new delivery app. Orders through the app triple in a year. Real growth, worth paying attention to. It's still a thin slice of the covers, and the dining room got busier over the same stretch. Nobody closes the dining room.

Worth being straight about the source. This is ecommerce data, pulled from online stores rather than from a heating contractor or a dental practice, so a local service business will see different proportions. What carries over is the shape of it: one small channel climbing fast, one large channel still doing the heavy lifting, and both of them moving up.

Here's why it matters for your budget. Google's own developer guidance says AI Overviews and AI Mode run on the same core ranking systems as regular Search. Pages that answer the questions your customers actually ask, accurate details, real reviews. Same kitchen, two doors.
What this means for your site
AI referrals are climbing fast from a small base, while regular search is still doing most of the work. The foundations feed both, so this is no reason to rebuild anything. What genuinely is new is measurement, because most businesses still can't see whether AI is naming them at all.

Your move: Open your analytics and look at where last month's visitors came from. If AI referrals are a sliver and organic search is the bulk, that's normal right now, and it should settle where your attention goes this quarter.
Quick Hits

The rest of the week, in bite-sized pieces
Customers Can Now Report Your Review Replies
Google added a "Report owner response" option to Business Profiles. Anyone can now flag an owner's reply as off-topic, harassing, discriminatory, or containing personal information, and a reply that gets pulled takes your side of the conversation with it.
Your move: Read back through your last dozen review replies, especially any you fired off while irritated. If one names a customer or repeats their personal details, edit it today.
Google's AI Answers Are Drawing Their Own Pictures
Google began rolling out AI-generated images inside AI Overviews this week. A recipe publisher documented cartoon illustrations of steps their own tested photography already covered, and pointed out readers may assume a cited site made the drawings.
Your move: Nothing to fix. Just know that if you sell something visual, the picture in the AI answer may not be yours or even real, which makes photos on your own pages worth more.
If You're on WordPress, a Plugin Update Wasn't Enough
Seven BdThemes plugins were pulled from the WordPress directory in early August after a compromised feed was used to create hidden admin accounts and drop a web shell. Sites were hit without installing any update. This touches only WordPress, a small slice of what we manage.
Your move: If your site runs on WordPress, check your user list for admin accounts nobody recognizes. If we manage your site, no worries, we got you.
Another Week, Another Unconfirmed Shake-Up
Ranking trackers spiked on August 12 and 13, and Google's status dashboard still shows nothing confirmed since the June spam update. Glenn Gabe has tied some of this summer's swings to changes in how Google handles reviews, which remains a hypothesis, not a Google statement.
Your move: If you saw a dip, sit tight for a week before touching anything. Reacting to an unconfirmed wobble is how good sites get worse.
Ask Epic

"A competitor told me they're doing 'AI optimization' now. Should I be worried that I'm not?"

Worried? You're on the other side of that conversation. We've been building for AI search for close to two years, well before it became a sales pitch.

Here's the part most "AI optimization" offers leave out. Much of the foundation genuinely is good SEO: clear pages that answer real questions, accurate business details, current reviews. That work carries straight over, and a vendor charging a premium to redo it is selling you something you already own.

What's truly different is measurement. Until recently nobody could tell you whether an AI assistant was naming your business or your competitor's, so we built AI visibility tracking into Local Falcon. For managed clients it's already running, and the reports sit in your Client Center.

So when someone says "AI optimization," ask them to show you a number. If they can't measure it, they can't improve it.
What Epic's doing for you this week
This week the team is going through AI visibility reports for managed clients, checking which assistants name your business and which name a competitor instead. Those land in your Client Center. We're also setting up AI referral groupings in analytics so the traffic side gets measured the same way, reading back through Google Business Profile replies now that Google has given customers a way to report them, and finishing security patching on the handful of WordPress sites we maintain.
Your 15-minute self-audit

Your Real AI Number

Fifteen minutes in your analytics, and you'll stop guessing.

1. Pull one month of traffic by source. Open your acquisition report and look at last month. Note the split between organic search, direct, referral, and paid.

2. Find the AI names. Scan the referral list for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, or Claude, and add them up. That's your real AI number. It's likely small, and it's also an undercount, since visits that begin in a Google AI Overview usually get logged as organic search.

3. Ask the honest question. Whichever source sent you the most people, is your site actually good at what those people came looking for? That's where the next hour of work goes.

Thanks for reading! Got questions? Ideas? I'm all ears. Share your thoughts with me and help shape future editions of Epic Insights.

— Kristy Freeman
Epic Web Studios
k.freeman@epicwebstudios.com
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