I will go first.

"Just launch. The market will tell you what it wants."

A senior founder told me that. He meant it as encouragement. Do not overthink. Ship. Learn from real users.

Six months ago, I launched a product.

Beautiful landing page. Great onboarding. Real customers. Solid retention.

One problem: AI never mentioned it.

Not in ChatGPT. Not in Perplexity. Not in Gemini.

For months, the narrative has been that AI search is a single channel. You optimize for ChatGPT. You win everywhere. The data says otherwise.

A 7-month analysis of citation behavior across ChatGPT, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Claude found that every major AI engine has a persistent source preference .
Not just a trend. A consistent editorial identity that holds month after month.

The breakdown of editorial identities :

• ChatGPT Search is encyclopedic. It favors Wikipedia for Education, Recommendations, Comparison, and Purchase queries. If your content reads like a reference section, it surfaces here.

• Perplexity is video-anchored. It leads with YouTube for Education and Recommendations. Written content alone leaves citations on the table.

• Google AI Overviews is video-biased across six of seven intents. The one exception is Navigational queries, where brand-owned domains take the top slot.

• Google AI Mode is the most exploratory engine. It routes users back to Google properties for Purchase queries and cites LinkedIn for Education intent a signal none of the other engines produced .

• Gemini is YouTube-anchored across every single intent in the dataset. It is the most consistent YouTube-first engine.

• Claude bypasses the social and encyclopedic layers entirely. In early 2026 data, it never surfaced YouTube, Wikipedia, or Reddit. It goes straight to primary sources. Brand domains, institutional sources, and compliance-grade content .

A CMO at a midsize enterprise software company had a moment recently.
Her team spent three years building top-of-page-one SEO dominance. Then someone ran a simple test: typed the company's core use case into ChatGPT and asked for vendor recommendations.
The company didn't appear. Not once. "We thought we had search figured out," she said. "Turns out we optimized for the wrong engine"

That scenario is playing out across industries. Most organizations haven't caught up.

The numbers that explain the shift

Generative AI has moved from novelty to primary research channel faster than almost any technology before it. ChatGPT alone has over 900 million weekly active users. Google AI Overviews now appear in more than 25% of all searches, up from 13% just a year ago .

AI writes faster. AI analyzes data. AI can even mimic your brand voice.

But AI also makes everything sound the same. It pulls from the same top 10 results. It rephrases the same arguments. It optimizes for similarity, not distinctiveness.

Here is what the research says.

The similarity crisis is real

"Just launch. The market will tell you what it wants."

That advice sounds brave. It sounds like action. It is wrong.

The market does tell you what it wants. It tells you by ignoring you. By not buying. By churning. By the time you hear that feedback, you have already spent months building, thousands of dollars, and a lot of goodwill with your team.

I will go first.

Page views.

For months, we reported page views to our investors. The number went up every month. It looked like progress. It looked like growth. Everyone was happy.

Then we looked at what was actually happening. People were landing on the blog, reading one post, and leaving. They were not clicking on the call to action. They were not signing up for the trial. They were not coming back.

We pulled 18 months of churn data from 1,247 B2B SaaS accounts. We interviewed 100 of them. We looked for patterns.

The common assumption is that people leave because of price or missing features. That is not what we found.

Here is what the data said.

I will go first.

Here are five trends that I think are overrated, based on watching hundreds of startups build, scale, and sometimes fail.

1. AI replacing all customer support.

The hype says AI agents will handle 90% of tickets. The reality is different.

I'll take the hit.

AI has no idea when someone is politely furious.

You know the email. "Hi team, just circling back on this again as I haven't heard anything. Thanks for your attention to this matter." Reads like a sweet grandma wrote it.

A human reads that and thinks "oh no, they are about to burn the building down." AI reads it and thinks "great sentiment, very positive, 98% satisfaction score."