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Daniel & Friends / Blog / GEO & AI

What happened in AI over the past year, and what it means for marketers

A year in AI is worth a decade elsewhere. We filtered out the press releases and demo videos and kept five events from 2025 and 2026 that genuinely change a marketer's job. Each with one concrete thing to do about it.

Daniel Votruba · 6 July 2026 · 4 min read

1) AI search stopped being a fringe discipline

Google AI Overviews now appear on more than 40% of queries, up from around 15% at the start of 2025. ChatGPT grew from roughly 300 million weekly users (December 2024) to around 900 million (February 2026) and was already handling 2.5 billion queries a day in July 2025. Perplexity doubled its active users in a year to around 45 million. And crucially: industry measurements show a visitor from AI search converts an order of magnitude better than one from a classic SERP (14.2% versus 2.8%), because they arrive pre-decided.

What to do: stop counting positions alone and start measuring citations. Structured content, clear entities, numbers and sources: that is GEO. We wrote a detailed guide to it.

2) Frontier models: average text is free

GPT-5 (August 2025), Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 (both November 2025) moved the bar so far that producing decent text, images or video costs essentially nothing. The consequence for content is brutally simple: mediocrity is the new zero. When anyone can generate the same thing, value migrates to where models cannot reach: proprietary data, a pointed opinion, real experience and distribution. The second effect is subtler, namely that models have become readers. Your website is now read more often by a machine assembling an answer from it than by a person browsing it, and a machine values structure, facts and clarity, not metaphors in headlines.

What to do: less content, more evidence. One study with your own numbers beats twenty generic articles, both with people and in AI answers.

3) Ad platforms engaged autopilot

Meta is heading toward fully automated campaigns: you supply a URL and a budget, and AI handles creative, targeting and bidding. From late 2025 Google rolled out AI Max, search campaigns with no keywords at all, where Gemini derives targeting from the landing page. But the data counsels caution. An analysis of 55,000 Meta campaigns showed the cost per new customer through Advantage+ doubled between May 2024 and 2025 (257 to 528 USD), and a series of 640 incrementality tests found automated campaigns fall behind well-run manual ones over time.

What to do: autopilot yes, but feed it clean conversion data (server-side measurement, order values) and measure incrementality yourself. A ROAS the platform issues for its own work is not a measurement, it is a school report the pupil writes themselves.

4) Agents got a standard: MCP

Model Context Protocol, the way AI connects to a CRM, analytics or ad accounts, was introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 and donated in December 2025 to a foundation under the Linux Foundation, co-founded with OpenAI and Block. ChatGPT, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot support it and there are over 10,000 public MCP servers. What to do: the biggest obstacle to agentic automation is no longer technology but the state of your data. Cleaning up the CRM is an investment in AI in 2026, even if it does not look like one.

5) The AI Act: transparency stops being voluntary

Obligations for providers of general-purpose AI models (documentation, copyright, summary training data) took effect on 2 August 2025. For marketers the key date is 2 August 2026: synthetic content will have to carry machine-readable marking, chatbots will have to admit they are AI, and the Commission will start enforcing compliance with fines. For European companies this is not an abstract Brussels threat: it covers every AI voiceover in an ad, every generated visual and every chatbot on a website. What to do: audit where AI generates public content across your company, appoint an owner and set the rules now, not in a panic in July 2026. Whoever manages it early can turn transparency into credibility.

Not sure which of those five to tackle first? That is what we are here for. Or just write to us. The first opinion is free.

Key takeaways (TL;DR)

  • AI search is mainstream: AI Overviews on 40%+ of queries, ChatGPT at around 900 million weekly users, and an AI visitor converts several times better. Invest in GEO.
  • New models (GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3) cut the cost of average content to zero. Value shifts to proprietary data, opinion and distribution.
  • Autopilot on Meta and Google only works with clean conversion data; the cost of a new customer through Advantage+ doubled year on year, so measure incrementality yourself.
  • From 2 August 2026 the AI Act requires marking of synthetic content and is enforced with fines. Audit your AI outputs well in advance.

FAQ

Is classic SEO still worth investing in?

Yes, but with a shifted goal. Google remains the largest source of traffic, but AI Overviews are eating clicks. The winning strategy is a hybrid: SEO for volume, GEO for citations in AI answers, structured content, clear entities, measurable facts.

Do I have to label AI content from August 2026?

From 2 August 2026 synthetic content (audio, video, images, text) must carry machine-readable marking and people must know they are talking to an AI. In practice: audit where AI generates content and set internal rules, because the Commission enforces with fines from that date.

Should I move to fully automated AI campaigns?

Gradually and with your own measurement. An analysis of 55,000 Meta campaigns showed the cost per new customer through Advantage+ doubled in a year (257 to 528 USD). Autopilot is only as good as the data you send it, so measure incrementality yourself.

Sources: Exposure Ninja / Omnibound, AI Search Statistics 2025-2026 · Stackmatix, AI Search Market Share 2026 · Digital Applied, Social Media AI Advertising: Meta & Google (2026) · Google, DSA upgrade to AI Max (2026) · Anthropic, Donating the Model Context Protocol (December 2025) · European Commission, AI Act, digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu.