SERP Sitrep: H1 July recap
1. Fake DMCA Takedowns in Google Search
Google's feature to request takedown of content that infringes copyright was heavily abused and turned into a negative SEO nightmare. https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/fraudulent-dmca-takedowns-in-google-search-a-negative-seo-nightmare.1829348/ are weaponised by many people to get rid of competition.
2. The AI Referral Shakeup: ChatGPT Takes 92%, Claude Beats Perplexity
A massive data study https://previsible.com/seo-strategy/ai-traffic-report-july-2026/ (analyzing 6.77 million LLM sessions across 166 sites) revealed that ChatGPT now commands 92.4% of all AI referral traffic. Claude quietly overtook Perplexity in AI referral traffic, growing 64x over the past year, while Perplexity referrals dropped 61% from their peak and Microsoft Copilot collapsed by 96%.
ChatGPT sends 28.8% of its referral clicks to a domain's internal site search page rather than the specific deep link answering the query. Make sure your internal search results page is optimized for conversions, loads quickly, and doesn't return "0 results found" for common AI-queried terms.
3. AI Performance Insights in Google Merchant Center
Google officially rolled out https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/17200695?hl=en, allowing e-commerce owners to see impressions and clicks specifically from AI Mode and AI Overviews. E-commerce affiliates and drop-shippers can finally see if AI Overviews are stealing or driving product clicks.
4. Bing AI Performance Reports
Bing Webmaster Tools https://www.seroundtable.com/bing-webmaster-tools-ai-reports-backfill-41606.html into its new AI Performance Reports, giving SEOs clearer attribution on where Copilot and Bing chat pull citations.
5. Google Search Console Shows Performance Reports for Social Media Properties
GSC added a new feature called https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/google-search-console-shows-content-search-performance-for-instagram-tiktok-x-and-youtube.1830976/ that allows users to add their Instagram, Tiktok, X, and YouTube properties and track their impressions & clicks on Google search.
6. Cloudflare Introduced New Rule to Block Googlebot from Scraping Content for AI Training
Cloudflare introduced https://www.searchenginejournal.com/cloudflares-ai-crawler-rules-can-block-googlebot/581385/ that now allow webmasters to block Googlebot specifically from scraping content for AI training, while still allowing indexing.
7. Google Ignores Cloudflare’s New Directive
Google's John Mueller https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/1uo1rpb/testing_whether_contentsignal_headers_and_llmstxt/ that Google ignores Cloudflare’s new "Content Signals" robots.txt directive. If you want to control Google's AI crawling, you must use standard Google-specific user-agent blocks. If you are running PBNs and using Cloudflare's one-click "block AI" switches, Google is ignoring your signals unless you manually configure your 'robots.txt' for 'Google-Extended'.
8. OpenAI User-Agent Can Now Update Dynamically to Bypass Blocklists
OpenAI updated its crawler protocols, noting its user-agent strings can now https://x.com/rustybrick/status/2076992982092235085 to bypass legacy static IP/user-agent blocklists. OpenAI scraping bots are getting harder to block with static rules. If you are scraping or protecting content from AI bots, you need dynamic behavioral bot protection, not just user-agent filtering.
9. Google Kills Cached AMP Pages
Google Search https://developers.google.com/search/updates#updating-amp-documentation serving Google-hosted/cached AMP pages to users. All mobile searchers clicking an AMP result are now sent directly to the publisher's domain-hosted AMP URL.
10. ChatGPT Ads Manager Rapid Expansion
Throughout the second week of July, OpenAI https://www.seroundtable.com/chatgpt-ads-attributed-sales-value-and-sales-roas-41674.html to ChatGPT Ads, introducing custom audience lists, attributed sales value, ROAS tracking, and suggested ad drafts. Google Ads countered by expanding mandatory AI ad disclosures across Search, YouTube, and Discover.
