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A Fortune 500 client of mine fired their agency two weeks ago. Not because organic traffic dropped. Traffic was actually up 4% quarter-over-quarter. The problem? Their brand had vanished from every AI-generated answer in their vertical. ChatGPT recommended three competitors by name.
On April 14, 2026, advertisers across the platform reported mass ad disapprovals triggered by phantom DNS failures and HTTP 500 errors. Ryan Berry, Managing Director at Cornerhouse Media, reported over 1,500 ads disapproved in a single account around 1:30 p.m. UTC. The sites were live.
A client called me in February, panicking. Their organic traffic had dropped 41% over six months despite their SEO agency reporting "strong keyword rankings" and "healthy backlink growth." The rankings were real. The backlinks were legitimate.
A client I worked with in 2024 was paying $8,500/month to a mid-tier agency in Chicago. Their organic traffic had flatlined for eleven months. The agency kept sending glossy decks full of keyword rankings that didn't move the revenue needle.
$238 per month versus $8 per month. Same data. Same keyword metrics, SERP results, and backlink intelligence. The only difference is how you access it.
Your number one ranking might be worthless now. Not in some hypothetical future where AI takes over search, but right now, two days after Google confirmed its March 2026 broad core update finished rolling out on April 8th.
I fired our SEO agency after discovering they'd been submitting AI-generated blog posts with fabricated statistics to our client's site for three months straight. Nobody on their team had read a single piece before hitting publish. The kicker?
Seventy-four percent of all new web content published today includes AI-generated elements, yet purely AI-written content lands in top search positions only 13.5% of the time. That gap tells you everything about where this industry actually stands.