Here's What We Got Right
Anybody can publish a prediction. Almost nobody goes back and checks it. We're going back and checking.
Five claims, five original verdicts, and what's happened since.
CLAIM ONE — "AI Overview citations and top-10 Google rankings are pulling apart from each other."
ORIGINAL VERDICT: VERIFIED, sourced to Ahrefs' 76%-to-38% study.
WHAT'S HAPPENED SINCE: The split kept widening. By July 2026, a separate industry report found AI Overview appearance on commercial-intent searches had grown another 71% in six months, and over half of all Google searches now end without a click at all. We didn't just call the trend — it accelerated exactly the direction we said it would.
Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-ai-overview-citations-from-top-ranking-pages-drop-sharply/568637/
Ranking #1 stopped being the finish line a long time before most agencies noticed.
CLAIM TWO — "A 2023 Google patent shows AI building a full profile of your business from reviews, directories, and third-party mentions — not just your website."
ORIGINAL VERDICT: VERIFIED, sourced directly to the patent language.
WHAT'S HAPPENED SINCE: Search Engine Land independently covered the exact same patent, using the exact same phrase — "deep, holistic characterization" — and it's now treated as standard vocabulary in how the industry talks about AI entity recognition.
Source: https://searchengineland.com/google-llm-patent-seo-teaching-ai-480625
CLAIM THREE — "Most local SEO stats trace back to one vendor's data, get repeated by trade press, and end up quoted as fact with the source stripped away."
ORIGINAL VERDICT: VERIFIED, as a structural pattern, not a single number.
WHAT'S HAPPENED SINCE: We've caught this exact loop happening in real time on this desk — a real revenue stat from an AI company used as evidence for an unrelated claim, a real failure-rate stat wrapped in an unsupported narrative. The pattern kept happening in front of us.
CLAIM FOUR — "Reddit is what AI actually cites most — but that's B2B software advice being force-fed to home services businesses who don't need it."
ORIGINAL VERDICT: VERIFIED (the Reddit citation share), with a correct call that it's the wrong lever for this industry.
WHAT'S HAPPENED SINCE: Independently reconfirmed by five separate 2026 studies — Profound, Ahrefs, Semrush, Tinuiti, and 5WPR — all putting Reddit at roughly 20-47% of AI citation share depending on platform, consistently the top single source. Nobody's data has moved this off the #1 spot since.
Source: https://everything-pr.com/ai-platform-citation-source-index-2026
CLAIM FIVE — "Agencies are renaming unchanged services 'AI-powered' and charging 20-50% more with no different deliverable."
ORIGINAL VERDICT: VERIFIED, sourced to Digital Agency Network's own 2026 pricing data.
WHAT'S HAPPENED SINCE: Reinforced directly by the AI-deployment failure data we've already verified elsewhere on this desk — if most AI projects aren't producing measurable value, a price premium for unchanged output isn't a coincidence. It's the same gap, priced.
We don't get to grade our own homework in this business without showing our work. Five calls, five sources, five verdicts that held.