AI search is evolving faster than any channel in digital marketing, and June and July 2026 delivered some of the most significant updates yet. Google crossed a major user milestone and opened AI Mode up to third-party apps, Perplexity turned its search box into a workspace, OpenAI shipped a new flagship model, and Microsoft did something nobody expected: it gave users a way to switch AI off. Here's everything that changed, and why it matters for your visibility.

Google AI Mode: 1 billion users, a new default model, and app integrations

Google's AI Mode has passed 1 billion monthly users in its first year, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. Announced at Google I/O 2026, the feature is now available in nearly 200 countries and 98 languages, and Gemini 3.5 Flash is now the default model powering it globally, part of what Google calls the biggest change to the Search box in over 25 years. Users can now attach images, documents, videos, and even open browser tabs directly to their queries.

The bigger story landed on July 16: AI Mode can now link to and interact with third-party apps. At launch, supported apps include Instacart, Canva, and YouTube. Planning a barbecue? Ask AI Mode to build the grocery list and send the ingredients straight to your Instacart cart. Curating a playlist? Save it directly to YouTube Music. The rollout starts in the US, with more partner apps promised soon. This moves Google Search from answering questions to completing tasks — a meaningful step toward the agentic web.

For marketers, there was another quiet but critical release: on June 3, Google launched Generative AI Performance Reports inside Search Console — the first native way to measure impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, and device. A content opt-out toggle (effective June 17) lets publishers remove content from AI features without affecting organic rankings. Google also published its first official guide to optimising for generative AI in Search, confirming that llms.txt files receive no special treatment and that original research, first-hand experience, and unique data are what earn AI citations.

ChatGPT: still the referral king, now running GPT-5.6

A July study from Previsible, covering 6.77 million LLM-driven sessions across 166 websites, found that ChatGPT now commands 92.4% of all standalone AI referral traffic — up from roughly 84% in December 2025. Monthly LLM-referred sessions grew nearly 10x year over year. One caveat for site owners: ChatGPT sends 28.8% of its referrals to internal site search pages rather than the page that answers the query, which makes your internal search experience an acquisition surface worth optimising.

On the product side, OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.6 across ChatGPT and the API, retired GPT-5.2 and GPT-4.5, and shipped a new unified search across your chats, projects, images, and documents (July 14). Monitoring tasks can now watch the web and connected apps and notify you only when something worth reporting changes, effectively, a scheduled AI search.

Perplexity: search becomes a workspace

Perplexity's June updates blurred the line between searching and working. Users can now create and edit slides, spreadsheets, and documents directly inside a search — no copying results out to Google Slides or Excel. Enterprise users can query Snowflake and Databricks in plain English, and a rebuilt memory engine now recalls the right details in 95% of cases, up from 77%.

In July, Perplexity launched its Comet browser for all iOS users, completing availability across iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows. Its agentic "Computer" assistant gained Deep Research capabilities, a dedicated coding subagent, and inline editing for generated documents and presentations.

Worth noting alongside the product momentum: the same Previsible referral study found Perplexity's referral traffic has fallen 61% from its peak, while Anthropic's Claude quietly overtook it in March 2026 — a reminder that features and traffic share don't always move together.

Microsoft: a Bing "kill switch" for AI, and Claude inside Copilot

Microsoft made the most counterintuitive move of the summer: a new browser extension for Chrome and Edge that lets users toggle off AI-generated Copilot answers in Bing search results entirely. As Microsoft's search lead put it, "not everyone wants AI for everything."

Elsewhere, Copilot Chat added Anthropic's Claude as a selectable model, began surfacing Bing's rich answer cards (weather, stocks, and other structured data), and Copilot Cowork — Microsoft's agentic system that plans and completes entire tasks — reached general availability worldwide.

What does this mean for your search strategy?

Three themes run through every one of these updates. First, AI search is becoming agentic: Google's app integrations, Perplexity's Computer, and Copilot Cowork all point toward search engines that complete tasks, not just answer questions. Second, measurement is finally maturing. Search Console's Generative AI reports mean AI visibility is now a native metric you can track, not something to infer from third-party tools. Third, the referral landscape is concentrating around ChatGPT while remaining volatile everywhere else, so a category-level audit of where your brand appears across ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Perplexity should be on your Q3 roadmap.

The brands winning in AI search aren't chasing every platform; they're publishing original research, unique data, and first-hand expertise that AI systems want to cite, then measuring where those citations land. If you haven't enabled Search Console's new AI reports yet, that's your first move this month. 

See how well your business shows up in AI search engines: Click the link to get your audit today

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