Growth Intelligence Brief #22
AI Mode started leaning into products over content
Welcome to another Growth Intelligence Brief, where organic growth leaders discover what matters and guidance on how to stay ahead of the competition in under 5 minutes. Data window: SEO visibility and AI prompt counts June 15 to July 15, 2026 (30 days, matched windows).
Exec Summary
AI Mode cut its mentions of publishers nearly in half in the 30 days to July 15, while tripling Home Depot’s and quadrupling Wayfair’s. The shift from informational to commercial mentions runs across 15 of 20 verticals.
Underneath it, the organic index whip-sawed: the platform rebound GIB 21 measured through June 29 has already unwound.
Reddit gave back its entire June recovery, down 14.0% in the 30 days to July 15 to 2,312.5, a hair above its June 8 bottom of 2,297.6. Its AI Overview mentions rose 5.0% over the same window.
AI Mode mentions contracted 12.9% across the index in the 30 days to July 15, while AI Overviews held dead flat at 0.0% and ChatGPT fell 5.9%.
The rank correlation between SEO movement and AI Overview movement flipped from -0.21 in June to +0.22 in July among the 143 largest companies.
Jobs led every vertical in SEO visibility at +12.4% in 30 days, and ZipRecruiter printed an all-time index high of 113.42 on July 27.
Images lost 19.9% of their visibility in 30 days. All 9 named stock-photo and photo-print brands declined, from Pixabay at -8.7% to Shutterfly at -44.7%.
Let’s dig in.
SEO landscape check
Below is a quick read on the current state of search, built from the SSI (Search Signals Index): roughly 2,600 companies tracked across 26 verticals on 2 dimensions, SEO visibility and AI mentions.
The June platform recovery lasted 3 weeks. GIB 21 measured Reddit up 18.1% through June 29 and called the reshuffle the fingerprint of Google’s May core update. Reddit has since given all of it back: down 14.0% in the 30 days to July 15, closing at 2,312.5 against the June 8 bottom of 2,297.6. YouTube ran the same arc, down 12.2% over the window.
The trigger is murkier this time. No core update ran in July. Google’s June spam update completed on June 26 (Search Engine Land), right as the give-back began, and trackers logged unconfirmed volatility around July 11 (Search Engine Roundtable). Whatever drove the June reshuffle is still settling week to week.
The platforms gave their June gains back
Reddit’s weekly series tells a story:
➡️2,690 on June 15
⬆️A peak of 3,041 on June 22
⬇️Then 3 straight down weeks to 2,312.
Up and down. The catch: Reddit’s AI Overview mentions moved the other way, up 5.0% to 352,298 per week over the same 30 days. Google’s organic ranker and its AI ranker disagree about Reddit again.
YouTube matches a similar shape:
➡️4,670 on June 15
⬆️A peak of 5,288 on June 22
⬇️Down to 4,099
YouTube declined 12.2% for the window. Social Networks fell 2.3% as a vertical in the same 30 days.
LinkedIn is the exception: It climbed every week and closed at 424.9, up 26.6% in the 30 days to July 15 and now just 6.9% below its April 2024 all-time high of 456.3. The recovery reported in GIB 21 is still compounding while the rest of the vertical retreats.
The reclaimed shelf space went to utility categories, all in the same 30 days.
Jobs gained 12.4%, the strongest vertical move in the index
Delivery gained 10.6%
Local Search gained 10.6%
References gained 4.6%, with Wikipedia up 6.5%
All stock photo brands lost visibility
The Images vertical lost 19.9% of its visibility in the 30 days to July 15, the steepest decline in the index. Every named brand in the vertical fell.
Shutterfly -44.7%
Alamy -25.3%
Shutterstock -24.1%
iStockphoto -21.6%
Getty Images -20.2%
Unsplash -16.6%
Flickr -13.5%
Pexels -10.6%
Pixabay -8.7%
A decline this broad and synchronized reads as category “repricing” rather than 9 separate site problems. Google needs fewer stock-photo rankings when generated images answer more of the demand, and the SERP is starting to price that in.
However, the Image vertical’s AI Mode mentions grew 31.1% in the same 30 days, on a small pool of roughly 10,100 mentions a week. AI surfaces still cite stock libraries; the decline is confined to organic.
The 3 AI surfaces split 3 ways
AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT each told a different story in the 30 days to July 15, across the same 345 companies.
AI Overviews: dead flat at 0.0% (5.31 million mentions per week at both endpoints)
ChatGPT: down 5.9% to 955,000 per week
AI Mode: down 12.9% to 626,000 per week
The index still generates roughly 5.9 million AI Overview and AI Mode mentions a week, so the level story hasn’t changed since GIB 21 called the plateau. What changed is what’s happening inside AI Mode’s shrinking pool. Let’s Double Click.
