The Writesonic Newsletter Edition 04 · 28 July 2026 Fresh data, and how one brand tripled its leads from AI search. |
Hey BTC, It’s been a couple of weeks, and this time there’s a lot to share. So let’s get to it. We ran the numbers on something everyone assumes is stable, and it isn’t: the brand sitting at #1 in AI search changes more than half the time you ask again. That study leads the edition, and it should change how you read every visibility screenshot you’ve ever taken. Alongside it: how a manufacturer tripled its leads from AI search while competitors stood still, the new AI Shopping Tracker that shows whether AI recommends your products or a rival’s, the first issues of a newsletter I’ve started writing, and a recording worth an hour of your week. |
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The brand at #1 in AI changes 52% of the time.Ask ChatGPT the same question ten times and watch who lands on top. It changes more than half of them. We ran 631,999 prompts across seven platforms, and there is no throne to defend. The slot is real; the name in it keeps rotating, shared between seven to nine brands taking turns. |
What moves you into that rotation isn’t where most teams spend. Brand mentions scattered across the open web predict your AI ranking about three times better than backlinks do. So a single good screenshot means almost nothing. The pattern across many runs is the only number worth trusting.
Also new  When you win in AI, someone specific loses We tracked 10.7 million answer changes. Nine times out of ten, a brand only entered because another one dropped out. The shelf is a fixed size, so winning isn’t about being good in the abstract, it’s about taking a named competitor’s seat. And more than a quarter of those swaps? A brand quietly displacing its own alias or parent company. Read the study → |
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 7 leads a month became 23, from a channel they weren’t even watching.Phillips did everything right by the old rulebook: a strong site and years of solid SEO. What no dashboard was telling them was that their buyers had already moved on. Engineers and procurement leads were asking ChatGPT and Perplexity who to trust long before they ever opened Google. So they found out what the AIs were actually saying about them, then set about changing it. Four months on GEO, Action Center, and Bot Analytics, the numbers below are the result, and every lead is tracked from the first bot crawl to the signed deal. |
3x Leads from AI
7 → 23 / month |
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2x AI bot visits
12.7k → 24.1k |
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Top 3 In their category
for AI visibility |
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AI has a product shelf now. See if you’re on it.Ask ChatGPT for the best running shoes under $150 and it hands back four products, with photos, prices, and buy buttons. Four. Everyone else may as well not exist. The AI Shopping Tracker tells you every morning whether you’re one of the four: how often you show up, how you rank against rivals, and whether AI sends the buyer to your site or straight to Amazon. Down to the single product.
Also worth a look See every AI ad your rivals are running Sponsored answers are here too. The Ads Tracker watches the prompts you already track and shows exactly who’s paying to appear in your category, and what they’re saying to win the click. Explore the Ads Tracker → |
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I’ve started writing a personal newsletter.Separate from this one, and more personal. It’s the log of me running Writesonic with AI in real time: the experiments that worked, the numbers behind them, and the ones that fell flat. No polishing losses into wins. Two issues are out so far. The latest one is about a bet that paid off: we left no-code behind and rebuilt our site in Next.js with Claude Code. I wrote up the actual workflow, the one that now takes a page from a Linear ticket to production. The first issue is still there too, on the “inherited answer” problem, when AI keeps describing the company you used to be.
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On-demand An agency’s real AI search playbook, on the record SOZO runs AI search measurement across 60+ client accounts. Christian Goodrich, their Head of SEO & AI Search, walks through exactly how, no theory, just what they actually do. |
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New here? A 15-minute tour of the dashboard How to read your visibility score, find the prompts you’re quietly losing, and the first moves that get you into more AI answers. Watch the tour → |
Affiliate Program Earn 20% on every payment for 12 months. Plans start at $79/mo. Start earning → |
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CITED Playbook 7 channels. 2B+ AI conversations. The full playbook for citations. Get it free → |
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Four editions in, and I keep noticing every story here is really the same story. AI decides who gets found now, and the brands treating that as something they can actually measure and move are the ones pulling ahead. Phillips did it. The research shows why it works. See you in two weeks. Sam PS: If someone you know still thinks AI search is a someday problem, forward this. They can subscribe on our blog. |
Reply if you’re working on AI search visibility. We read every reply. |
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