THRIVE: eCom News - 31 July 2026
This week: AI Overviews now show on 43% of searches, Google is running ads on nearly a third of commercial keywords in AI Mode and more.
Happy Friday!
Here's what you need to know this week across organic and paid that matters for your ecom store:
01 · AI Overviews now show on 43% of searches, up from 15% a year ago
What it means for you: Close to half your category's searches now resolve inside Google, which means the organic session count you are likely still reporting on every month is measuring a shrinking slice of demand, not shrinking demand. Slowly start to move your metrics to focus on share of voice/citation score, showing whether you are cited, on which prompts, and against whom, before your board reads a traffic dip as a market dip and cuts the budget that's still working.
02 · Google is running ads on nearly a third of commercial keywords in AI Mode, and the advertisers buying them are rarely cited in the answer
What it means for you: In SE Ranking's sample, the advertiser's domain appeared in AI Mode's cited sources around 11% of the time and the exact landing page under 2%, so paying to sit next to the answer buys you precisely nothing inside it. Budget and measure them as two separate things… media buys the slot, digital PR and GEO buy the citation, and the brands winning this quarter are holding both at once rather than assuming one funds the other.
03 · Google changes how budget-capped bidding works on 17 August - if your campaigns beat their targets, your costs are about to go up
What it means for you: Any Target CPA or Target ROAS campaign flagged "Limited by budget" has been outperforming because the cap, not the target, was doing the work but from 17 August the algorithm spends that headroom to hit the number you actually typed in, so a campaign running at 600% ROAS against a 400% target drifts down to 400%. Look at every budget-limited campaign this week and either reset targets to reflect real 90-day performance or deliberately raise the budget. On a thin-margin catalogue, that drift is going to be your profit.
To read more:
The 2026 Generative AI Landscape — Similarweb
Google AI Mode Ads: What the data shows — SE Ranking
Google Ads’ Target-Based Bidding Update For Ecommerce — Search Engine Journal (Google’s own note on the change)
Worth your time
AI Search Has Killed the Channel Silo: our Paid Media Director Benoit Legendre on why SEO, GEO, paid, creative and product feed have stopped being separate channels, plus the AI-ready feed blueprint and the Clarins numbers.
Coming up: THRIVE Fashion: Be the answer™
Wednesday 16 September · The Line, 58 Victoria Embankment, London
A morning of keynotes, panels and live demos on how fashion brands are being discovered now across Google, AI search, social, marketplaces and communities. Sessions on why fashion discoverability is breaking, the tech foundation of discovery, the paid and creative engine, digital PR for LLM presence, and retention and returns. Places are limited, and registration is subject to approval.
