I look after or own 12 UK small business sites. With Grok 4.7 supposedly landing  
around 12 Sept, I pulled 15 months of AI-assistant referrals out of GA4 before  
writing anything. Sharing the numbers because I couldn't find anyone else who had.  
  
\*\*The AI channel is real but small\*\*  
  
| Month | AI sessions | All sessions | Share |  
|---|---|---|---|  
| Jun 2025 | 35 | 12,262 | 0.29% |  
| Aug 2025 | 90 | 17,854 | 0.50% |  
| Jan 2026 | 197 | 19,608 | 1.00% |  
| Aug 2026 | 207 | 16,077 | 1.29% |  
  
Last 30 days: 274 AI sessions out of 18,309 (1.5%). Over 90 days: 483 sessions,  
roughly 420 of them ChatGPT.  
  
Grok's contribution across all 15 months: one single visit, in August 2025.  
  
\*\*But Grok is already a search engine\*\*  
  
It has two retrieval tools, open web and live X posts, and decides itself when a  
question needs one. You can't reliably block it with robots.txt. SpaceX's Q1 2026  
filing put it at 117m monthly actives, up from \~35m in Dec 2025.  
  
The only public citation study I could find (Presenc AI, 4,400 prompts sampled  
March/April 2026) reports roughly 45% of Grok citations are X posts and 55% are  
web pages, split across news, high-authority domains, brand pages and blogs. It  
averages 4.7 sources per answer vs 5.8 for Perplexity, so each slot is worth more.  
Verified accounts were cited 2.8x as often as equally engaged unverified ones.  
  
Big caveat: that's one study, and it contains zero local-business findings. Nobody  
seems to know what Grok does with "barber in Tunbridge Wells". I'm starting to log  
my own prompts monthly to find out.  
  
\*\*What I'm actually doing about it\*\*  
  
Nothing exotic. The web half of Grok's citations is just competent local SEO:  
fast pages, FAQPage and business schema, a page per service and per town, plain  
first-line answers. That work already pays off in ChatGPT, which sends real  
traffic (43 sessions in 90 days to one barbers, 34 straight to the homepage).  
  
The X half is the part nearly every local business ignores. One factual post a  
week from a business account. Opening hours, prices, a finished job. Not slogans.  
  
\*\*What you can do this week, for free\*\*  
  
1. Ask Grok what a customer would ask about your trade. Screenshot it, date it.  
   That's your baseline.  
2. GA4 > Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition, switch dimension to Session  
   source, search grok.com. Then chatgpt.com. A zero today makes next month mean  
   something.  
3. Make your homepage answer the question in its first line.  
4. Post one factual update from your business X account.  
5. Add an FAQ block for the five questions you get on the phone.  
6. Match NAP across Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect,  
   Yelp, Foursquare.  
  
Honest summary: Grok sends nothing right now. The cost of being early is an X post  
and an FAQ block. The cost of being late is a competitor's name in the answer.  
  
Happy to share the full GA4 pull if anyone wants to sanity-check the method.

Grok 4.7 Is Days Away. Do THIS Before It Drops (Grok SEO)