business type
B2B
Industry
Digital Marketing
employees
20 - 25
headquarters
United Kingdom
Challenges
GA4 Hides Most AI Traffic
On one SOZO client, GA4 credits AI assistants with 0.5% of users. Those users convert at 1.88%, almost three times the 0.64% site average. Meanwhile 28% of revenue sits in Direct and 11.55% in Unassigned, which is where AI visits land when they arrive without a referrer.
Analytics can’t size the channel properly, so SOZO measures AI visibility directly in AWR instead of relying on referral data.
Rankings Miss the Answer Box
Advanced Web Ranking’s AI Overview tracker showed AI Overviews on over 62% of ecommerce results in September 2026. In the UK, 69.5% of Google searches end without a click, according to SparkToro and Similarweb, the highest of the six countries they studied.
On most commercial queries there’s now an answer above the results. A rank on its own doesn’t tell you what the searcher sees.
First on Google, Fifth in ChatGPT
Smart Home Sounds ranked first for a Sonos Black Friday query, was cited in the AI Overview and ran paid shopping ads. Ask ChatGPT for the best Sonos Black Friday deals, though, and they came fifth, behind John Lewis, Amazon, Richer Sounds and AV.com.
Fifth on a list of five is visible. It isn’t a recommendation.
Annual Averages Hide November
Search volume is reported as a yearly average. “sonos black friday” averages 720 searches a month but hit 8,100 last November, and “sonos era 100 black friday” went from 90 to 880. Almost the whole year’s demand lands in one month.
Plan peak from the average and your most valuable terms look marginal.
AWR’s AI Overview tracker, September 2026.
Google: organically, in the AIO and in shopping ads.
ChatGPT: the same retailer, fifth on the list.
Solutions
The six things SOZO sets up in Advanced Web Ranking before peak, shown on Smart Home Sounds’ Black Friday project.
STEP 1
Give Peak Keywords Their Own Group
SOZO tracks Black Friday terms as a separate keyword group, set up well before demand arrives and split the same way as the deal pages. For Smart Home Sounds, that’s 68 keywords, with Sonos and Marshall as subgroups.
Across the whole project, visibility was 74.5% and the AI visibility score was 21. Filtered to the Black Friday group: 92.2% and 51. Here the blended number undersold them. On another account, it could hide a problem.
STEP 2
Plan From November, Not the Average
Hover over the search trend in AWR and you get each month on its own, with last year next to it. “black friday tv deals” averages 9,900 searches a month, hit 110,000 last November, and 135,000 the November before.
If you set a peak target from last year’s traffic, that drop matters.
STEP 3
Watch SERP Features, Especially AI Overviews
For “sonos black friday”, the ranking moved up just one place, to first. The bigger change showed up in the SERP Features columns: three Smart Home Sounds pages had newly appeared in the AI Overview.
Those were the main Sonos deals page, its second page and a Black Friday FAQ. If you only looked at Position, you’d have missed it.
STEP 4
Check Pixel Position Next to Position
Position says where you rank. Pixel Position says how far down the page you actually sit once ads, shopping units and the AI Overview are counted.
“black friday sonos” and “sonos arc ultra black friday” both rank second, but sit at 517 and 705 pixels. “jbl black friday” ranks sixth at 2,200 pixels, well out of view on a phone. When a keyword holds its position but sends less traffic, this is the first thing Christian checks.
STEP 5
Find the Sites AI Already Cites
Across 28 brands SOZO analysed, 82% of AI citations came from outside the brand’s own site: reviews, YouTube, forums and trade press.
AWR’s Citations report shows which domains an assistant relies on for a topic. For Sonos prompts in ChatGPT, What Hi-Fi? came out on top. That’s a sharper brief for digital PR than a generic list of high-authority sites.
STEP 6
Track Real Competitors and the Right URLs
Add the brands that actually show up on your revenue queries, not the ones from the strategy deck. The two lists are rarely the same. Share of voice against the real set is a fairer read during peak, when everyone’s rankings move.
AWR also flags when the ranking URL isn’t the target page you set. Once there’s a deal page for every brand, that’s the check you want.
92.2%
Visibility for the BF group, against 74.5% for the whole project.
51
AI visibility score for the same group, against 21 blended.
3
URLs newly inside the AI Overview for “sonos black friday”.
11x
November searches vs the monthly average for “sonos black friday”.
SOZO have tracked client rankings in AWR for over 18 years, back when it was still a desktop application. I first started using it myself at 15, and introduced it to the agency, so a fair bit of how I think about measuring search has been shaped by watching the same data over a long period. That length of view is the point, because most of what’s useful about rank tracking only shows up over months, and peak is the clearest example of it.
Head of Organic Search at SOZO
THE FULL GUIDE
Black Friday: How to Spot Your SEO and AI Search Gaps
Before Peak
Christian Goodrich’s article walks through how SOZO tracks Black Friday in Advanced Web Ranking, step by step, plus why November is too late to start, what he watches once peak arrives, and six things worth starting on Monday.
By Christian Goodrich · Sep 25, 2026 · 16 min read
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