Digital Digest
Marketing Intelligence Weekly
Weekly updates on the digital marketing news you need to know, including data reform, AI, cookie deprecation and platform updates.
AI in digital
Marketing by numbers
Platforms
We’ve updated our Future of Search white paper (Aug 2026)
- Search hasn’t disappeared, it’s fragmented across social, AI, marketplaces, maps, forums and more. For marketers, ranking on Google alone no longer equals visibility, brands need to be discoverable across multiple surfaces.
- Social is becoming a serious discovery channel, especially for younger audiences. Social ads are now the leading source of brand discovery for under-35s, while TikTok and Instagram play a growing role in commercial and transactional searches.
- Google is increasingly becoming an answer engine rather than a click generator, with 68% of searches ending without a click and AI Overviews appearing on more than 20% of searches. That means marketers need to optimise for visibility, citations and influence, not just website traffic.
- AI is changing how people research products, particularly for comparisons and recommendations, but it hasn’t replaced traditional search. Google still dominates overall search activity, while consumers increasingly move between search, social and AI throughout the buying journey.
- Traditional keyword research is becoming less representative of how people search in AI. Between 65% and 85% of ChatGPT prompts reportedly have no matching keyword in existing databases, pushing marketers towards persona-led content, fresher information and stronger topical authority.
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AI in digital
Platforms
ChatGPT’s citations collapse, but brand recommendations hold
- ChatGPT dramatically cut citations from major social platforms, with YouTube down 88%, Reddit 81%, TikTok 72%, Facebook 38% and LinkedIn 36%. Petra Labs says the shift appeared specific to ChatGPT, highlighting just how quickly AI search sources can change.
- Strangely, the brands ChatGPT recommended barely changed. Petra Labs says users were largely seeing the same recommendations, just backed by different cited sources, suggesting the links an AI displays may not fully reveal what shaped its answer.
- Company-owned websites picked up much of the lost citation share, particularly “non-competitive owned media”, such as businesses publishing useful content about adjacent products or services. That could create another relatively low-cost route for brands to influence AI visibility beyond PR, social and their own websites.
- Don’t overhaul your AI search strategy based on a sudden algorithm shift. Reddit citations had already begun rebounding, and the broader lesson is to build authority across multiple crawlable owned and third-party sources rather than chasing whichever platform ChatGPT currently favours.
- AI search is challenging traditional marketing measurement. A creator with fewer views could potentially have greater value if an AI system uses their content to inform recommendations, meaning marketers may increasingly need to measure AI influence alongside reach, clicks and engagement.
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AI in digital
Platforms
Google Brings Interactive AI Tools Into Search
- Google is rolling out generative UI directly into AI Overviews, allowing Search to create custom visual layouts, interactive tools and simulations on the fly.
- The feature can dynamically respond to queries and follow-ups. For example, an AI Overview can generate an interactive pH scale, then adapt it to plot specific citrus fruits when the user asks a follow-up question.
- This could create more competition for websites built around utility content, including calculators, converters and comparison tools, as users may increasingly get these experiences without leaving Google.
- Generative UI is already available globally in English within AI Mode and is rolling into AI Overviews, with Google expecting full availability there within the coming weeks. Google hasn't yet revealed which types of searches will trigger it.
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AI in digital
Marketing by numbers
Google Finds AI’s Biggest Problem Isn’t Knowledge
- Google research found frontier LLMs encode 95–98% of tested facts, yet fail to directly recall 26–34% of them. The issue is increasingly about accessing knowledge already learned, rather than lacking the information in the first place.
- Entity order can significantly affect AI answers. If an LLM learns a relationship in a subject-to-object order, reversing those entities in a question can make the same fact harder for the model to retrieve.
- Simply rephrasing a question had little impact on recall, while reversing subject and object order did. This suggests the underlying structure of how entities are presented may matter more than variations in wording.
- Rare or long-tail facts are particularly vulnerable to recall problems, even when the model has successfully encoded them. More reasoning can recover some missing facts, but it comes with higher computational costs.
- For marketers and SEOs, there’s an interesting potential implication: structuring entity relationships in content to mirror how people commonly query them could possibly improve AI recall.
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AI in digital
Platforms
ChatGPT Is Becoming Google’s Biggest Paid Destination
- ChatGPT attracts a higher proportion of paid clicks from Google than any other leading destination analysed. It ranked as the sixth-most-clicked destination overall, highlighting just how intertwined Google Search and AI discovery have become.
- Paid search is proving surprisingly resilient as zero-click behaviour grows. Across iPullRank’s 13.1 billion search-event dataset, Google’s zero-click rate rose by around 2.6 percentage points and organic clicks fell roughly 2.8 points, while paid clicks showed no meaningful change.
- Google and ChatGPT aren’t necessarily competing customer journeys. Users are actively moving from Google to ChatGPT, suggesting marketers should consider how paid search can connect traditional search with AI-led discovery rather than treating them as separate channels.
- Branded search remains valuable territory for advertisers. Paid clicks represented 4.4% of clicked branded searches versus 3.3% for non-branded searches, supporting the case for defensive brand bidding even when a brand already has strong organic visibility.
- Google is still overwhelmingly a discovery engine. Only around 14% of clicks went to a website explicitly named in the query, meaning roughly 86% were discovery clicks where marketers potentially have an opportunity to influence where users go next.
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Help desk
Platforms
Google’s August Spam Update Wraps Up
- Google’s August 2026 spam update has officially finished rolling out, running from 18 to 21 August and affecting all regions and languages globally.
- The update targets websites violating Google’s search spam policies, but does not specifically target link spam or site reputation abuse. Google hasn’t disclosed what percentage of searches were affected.
- SEO community feedback suggests the impact has been highly mixed, with some publishers reporting major traffic and Google Discover losses, while others saw previous ranking issues reversed.
- For marketers seeing visibility declines, Google recommends reviewing its spam policies and addressing any compliance issues. Recovery may take several months, as improvements can depend on future spam-system refreshes.
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AI in digital
Platforms
Microsoft Clarity Reveals AI’s Referral Payback
- Microsoft Clarity has launched an AI Scrape-to-Referral Ratio, comparing how often an AI platform scrapes a site with how much referral traffic it sends back.
- The metric gives marketers and site owners a clearer way to assess whether AI crawlers are delivering value or primarily extracting content. One example shows 6,000 scrapes for every referral, with just 41 visits generated.
- Bot Analytics also breaks performance down by AI operator, helping teams identify which platforms generate meaningful referral traffic versus those with high scraping activity and limited return.
- Marketers can jump directly from referral insights into filtered session recordings to assess whether AI-referred visitors actually engage, convert, sign up or make purchases.
- The bigger opportunity is making AI crawler access a more measurable decision. Rather than treating all AI visibility equally, brands can compare scrape volume, referral return and visitor quality when deciding which crawlers are worth allowing.
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AI in digital
Platforms
ChatGPT Ads Surge Across Australian Responses
- ChatGPT ads are rapidly becoming visible in Australia, with data stream analysis finding sponsored placements in roughly half of monitored responses, signalling that AI advertising is moving beyond experimentation and into meaningful scale.
- Telco, energy and travel brands are among the early movers, suggesting advertisers in high-consideration categories see conversational AI as a new channel for reaching consumers closer to decision-making moments.
- US analysis points to an emerging income divide in ChatGPT advertising exposure, raising questions for marketers about who AI ads actually reach and how representative that audience will be.
- For marketers, the early surge makes AI ad visibility, placement and competitive monitoring increasingly important as ChatGPT develops into a new paid media environment alongside traditional search and digital channels.
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AI in digital
Platforms
Claude Will Now Watermark AI-Generated Content
- Anthropic is rolling out machine-readable marking for Claude-generated content as part of its commitments under the EU AI Act. Claude models launched on or after 2 August 2026 will support marking from launch, with older models being updated over time.
- For text, Claude will embed an invisible watermark that doesn’t affect readability and can travel with copy when it’s pasted elsewhere. For supported files such as PNGs, JPGs and SVGs, Claude will also attach signed provenance metadata.
- Importantly for marketers, the watermark may survive some editing, but not necessarily substantial rewriting. Heavy editing, paraphrasing, translation or combining AI copy with other writing can make the mark undetectable.
- Detection isn’t definitive either. A Claude mark only indicates content may have been processed by Claude, while the absence of a mark doesn’t prove something wasn’t AI-generated.
- Our recommendation hasn’t changed: AI is a useful tool for creating copy, but marketers should still have human oversight and editors reviewing AI-generated content before it goes live. Watermarking adds transparency, not a substitute for editorial judgement.
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AI in digital
Platforms
Google brings agentic AI deeper into Ads and Analytics
- Google is expanding Ask Advisor, its Gemini-powered AI agent across Google Ads and Google Analytics, with new capabilities designed to move marketers from performance insights to action faster.
- Google Analytics is adding AI Overviews to its homepage, automatically summarising important changes such as sales peaks and traffic shifts since your last visit. Marketers can click an insight to investigate it further with Ask Advisor, or receive summaries via phone and email notifications.
- Google Ads is getting personalised AI insight cards, plus a prompt box that lets marketers ask questions about areas such as competitor impact on impression share or trends that could improve campaign performance.
- AI-powered Dashboards turn text prompts into visual reports, with automatically generated real-time summaries explaining the reasons behind performance. The feature is available in Google Ads and is coming soon to Google Analytics.
- New benchmarking in Google Analytics lets marketers compare campaign performance against anonymised averages from similar businesses, giving teams additional context for identifying opportunities and refining strategy. The new Ask Advisor capabilities are currently in beta for English-language accounts.
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AI in digital
Marketing by numbers
Platforms
ChatGPT Ads Reach One in Four Commercial Queries
- ChatGPT showed ads on 25.94% of commercial prompts in SE Ranking’s study of 50,006 US queries, putting its ad frequency close to Google AI Mode’s 29.45%. Each ChatGPT answer currently featured just one sponsored placement below the response.
- Ad relevance still has some serious gaps, with 14.35% of placements effectively unrelated to the prompt. The mismatch rate climbed above 50% for Relationships and News & Politics, highlighting the challenges of ChatGPT’s context-based targeting rather than traditional keyword targeting.
- Paid and organic ChatGPT visibility are largely separate games. Advertisers appeared among the answer’s cited sources in just 3.63% of placements, meaning marketers shouldn’t expect ad spend to improve their organic AI visibility.
- Audience fit could be a major limitation, particularly for B2B. SE Ranking generated 97,000+ impressions and 1,263 clicks at a 1.30% average CTR, but very few sign-ups, with the company pointing to ads only reaching Free and Go users as a likely factor.
- The early ad market is highly concentrated, with BestMoney accounting for at least 13.56% of all ads observed and individual brands taking more than half the placements in several niches. For marketers, the takeaway is to test budgets and context targeting carefully before scaling.
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AI in digital
Platforms
Google Expands AI Performance Reporting in Search Console
- Google’s generative AI performance report has expanded to significantly more Search Console profiles, giving marketers greater visibility into how their sites appear across Google’s AI-powered Search features.
- The report tracks impressions, pages, countries, devices and performance over time, helping marketers understand which content is gaining visibility within generative AI experiences.
- There’s still a major measurement gap: click and search query data aren’t included, limiting marketers’ ability to connect AI visibility with traffic and specific search intent.
- Despite the wider rollout, the report isn’t available for every site yet. Google’s John Mueller confirmed it only appears when a domain has sufficient generative AI data to display.
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AI in digital
Platforms
Google Search Console Reveals Hidden AI Mode Queries
- Google Search Console’s main Performance report includes query data generated through AI Mode and AI Overviews, even though its dedicated generative AI reports don’t show individual queries.
- Marketers may be able to identify AI Mode activity by spotting unusual conversational queries such as “yes”, “yes go on” and “yes, pricing”, alongside longer, more conversational searches.
- Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Search Console includes AI Mode and AI Overview activity in the general Performance report, rather than separating it into its own query dataset.
- Importantly, every follow-up question someone asks within AI Mode is treated as a new query, with its own impressions, position and click data. That gives SEOs another potential signal for understanding how users interact with brands and content through AI-powered search.
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Help desk
Platforms
Google Ads bidding changes land August 17
- From 17 August 2026, Google Ads will change how budget-limited campaigns using Target CPA and Target ROAS optimise, aiming to deliver more consistently towards the targets advertisers actually set.
- Campaigns currently outperforming their targets could see efficiency decline. For example, a campaign with a $10 Target CPA currently achieving $5 CPA may begin delivering closer to $10 unless its target is updated.
- Marketers should review affected “Limited by budget” campaigns before 17 August, particularly those outperforming their targets. Google will not automatically adjust targets or budgets on advertisers’ behalf.
- Google’s Bid Target Adjustment Tool is available from 6 July, allowing advertisers to compare targets against recent performance and quickly adjust them to maintain current efficiency or align with business goals.
- The upside is more predictable scaling. After the change, Google says advertisers should be able to increase budgets on affected campaigns while maintaining performance closer to their stated CPA or ROAS targets.
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AI in digital
Platforms
Cloudflare gives marketers AEO visibility dashboard
- Cloudflare has launched its AEO Visibility Dashboard, giving brands visibility into whether AI assistants are recommending, mentioning or citing them.
- The dashboard uses Cloudflare’s network-level data, including real AI crawl activity and referral signals across millions of sites, alongside testing AI responses. Cloudflare argues this provides deeper insight than tools that rely primarily on sending sample prompts to AI assistants.
- Marketers get four key AEO metrics: Citation Rate shows which AI platforms use the brand as a source, Mention Rate tracks whether the brand appears without being cited, Prominence measures how strongly and where it features in answers, and Share of Voice benchmarks visibility against competitors.
- The metrics could help marketers diagnose why their AI visibility is weak before investing in content. For example, Cloudflare says, “A brand that gets mentioned but not cited has an authority problem, not an awareness problem”, potentially pointing marketers towards a very different optimisation strategy.
- Cloudflare sees AI recommendations as the new battleground for discoverability. As Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen puts it, “Being discoverable used to mean ranking on a page. That’s not enough anymore.” The dashboard is available in early access, alongside Cloudflare’s Agent Readiness tool, which checks whether AI systems can access and understand a brand’s site.
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AI in digital
Platforms
Microsoft Clarity Sharpens AI Visibility With Brand Query Insights
- Microsoft Clarity now separates branded and non-branded queries across its AI Citations dashboard and AI reports, helping marketers see whether AI systems are finding their content through direct brand searches or broader topic discovery.
- Share of Authority can now be analysed by query type, giving marketers a clearer picture of where their brand has authority compared with more generic, category-level queries.
- New filters make AI visibility easier to diagnose, allowing teams to compare performance for branded versus non-branded queries and identify where discovery and consideration opportunities exist.
- The update makes citation analysis more actionable, helping marketers distinguish existing brand strength from organic AI discovery and interpret changes in AI citation performance with greater confidence.
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AI in digital
Platforms
ChatGPT 5.6 Is Getting Smarter About Sources
- ChatGPT 5.6 is using domain-specific searches far more aggressively. The site: operator appeared in around 43% of analysed query fan-outs, compared with just 0.004% in ChatGPT 5.5, suggesting a major shift towards deliberately selecting sources.
- First-party brand websites are the big winners. 84% of domains targeted with the site: operator were branded domains, indicating ChatGPT often goes directly to the company or product website when looking for relevant information.
- Reddit dominates when ChatGPT wants external perspectives. Of the non-branded domains targeted, 71% were Reddit, rising to 93% within the Social & Forums category. Trustpilot similarly captured 54% of Review & Comparison mentions.
- ChatGPT appears to match its search depth to user intent. Root-domain searches most commonly appear alongside terms like “review”, “official”, “service” and “comparison”, while searches targeting specific URL paths are more strongly associated with product-specific queries and pricing information.
- For marketers, owned content and third-party reputation both matter. The findings suggest AI visibility increasingly depends on having authoritative first-party information alongside credible external validation from sources such as communities and review platforms.
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AI in digital
Marketing by numbers
AI Is Reshaping the B2B Buying Journey
- AI is already a major B2B research channel. 66% of AI-using professionals regularly use it to research vendors and solutions, while 92% say AI has shaped their vendor shortlist.
- AI visibility can directly influence pipeline and revenue. 97% say AI has helped them discover new vendors, while 83% say it has influenced their final vendor decision.
- Use-case relevance beats brand recognition. 53% notice vendors that closely match their specific needs, while just 7% say brand recognition makes a vendor stand out in AI responses, creating an opportunity for smaller brands.
- AI recommendations still need validation. While 75% trust AI vendor recommendations, buyers typically follow up through vendor websites, Google, competitor comparisons and review platforms, meaning strong AI and traditional search visibility need to work together.
- Marketers should expect AI's influence to keep growing. 89% expect to rely more on AI for work-related decisions, making visibility across tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini an increasingly important part of B2B marketing strategy.
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AI in digital
Platforms
State of Search Q2 2026: AI Grows, Search Holds Strong
- Traditional search continues to dominate. Despite steady AI adoption throughout Q2, desktop search remained resilient across the US, EU and UK, showing AI is complementing rather than replacing traditional search.
- The AI race is heating up. ChatGPT maintained its lead, while Gemini and Claude continued gaining ground. Google AI Mode also expanded, with adoption accelerating in the EU and UK and stabilising in the US.
- Search behaviour is becoming more sophisticated. Users are making more informational and commercial searches, fewer navigational queries, and increasingly using longer, more detailed prompts.
- Digital ecosystems are becoming more interconnected. Google kept more users within its own ecosystem after search, while AI assistants increasingly referred users between platforms. User journeys across search, AI, e-commerce and content continue to diversify without significantly disrupting market leaders.
- Engagement is becoming just as important as reach. Growth across leading platforms was driven not only by attracting more users but also by deeper engagement from existing audiences, highlighting the need to measure both audience size and user behaviour.
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AI in digital
Marketing by numbers
AI Search Visitors Are More Likely to Buy
- HubSpot analysed nearly 300,000 businesses and found organic website traffic is declining as buyers increasingly use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to research products before visiting websites.
- A survey of more than 3,000 CRM purchase decision-makers found AI search was the strongest predictor of purchase intent. Buyers who used AI search during evaluation were 36% more likely to purchase than those who didn't.
- HubSpot says businesses actively investing in Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) are seeing stronger results, including 20% more AI-referred traffic, 170% more marketing qualified leads and 82% more deals than comparable businesses not optimising for AI search.
- The article argues AEO goes beyond traditional SEO because AI platforms draw on social media, reviews, third-party websites and owned content when deciding which brands to recommend. Marketers need to understand where they're being cited and where they're missing visibility.
- The key takeaway is that buyer behaviour has already shifted. Brands that adapt their marketing for AI discovery now are more likely to be surfaced during the research phase, while those that don't risk becoming less visible as AI search adoption grows.
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AI in digital
Marketing by numbers
Platforms
1,500 ChatGPT Prompts Reveal SEO Patterns
- A study analysing 1,500 ChatGPT prompts found the model is more selective with web searches than many assume, averaging 4.29 search queries when search is triggered rather than exploring a huge search tree.
- Brand-owned websites and retailer pages dominated citations, making up 59.3% of cited sources. Around 76.7% of searches reportedly used the site: operator to retrieve information directly from brand websites, reinforcing the value of accurate, comprehensive owned content.
- ChatGPT responses averaged 433 words (3,161 characters), suggesting the model consistently expands beyond direct answers by adding context, caveats and supporting information.
- Citations were heavily concentrated across a relatively small group of domains. The top 10 domains accounted for 30.5% of all citation appearances, while the top 50 represented 52.5%, indicating AI recommendations tend to converge on a limited set of trusted sources rather than constantly discovering new ones.
- The findings suggest brands looking to improve visibility in ChatGPT should prioritise strong, authoritative content on their own websites and track which prompts are most likely to surface their content, rather than focusing solely on traditional search rankings.
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AI in digital
Google Topical Authority Doesn’t Guarantee AI Visibility
- Organic Labs analysed 134 B2B software categories and found that Google topical authority only carried across to AI search in 35.1% of cases. In 35.8% of categories, AI models either ranked the topical authority brand much lower than Google or didn't mention it at all.
- The correlation between Google rankings and AI rankings was weak and not statistically significant. On average, AI ranked Google's topical authority leaders 3.65 positions lower, suggesting AI values overall brand familiarity more than content depth alone.
- Perplexity was the AI model most closely aligned with Google's rankings, while Gemini diverged the most. ChatGPT and Gemini showed almost no correlation with Google's topical authority signals, reinforcing that each AI platform behaves differently.
- Well-known brands like Adobe, Zoom, HubSpot and LastPass consistently outperformed their Google rankings in AI results, while niche SaaS brands with strong SEO but limited brand recognition were often overlooked. The study suggests AI rewards brands with broad web presence, reviews, press coverage and industry mentions.
- The key takeaway for marketers is that content-led SEO remains valuable but isn't enough for AI search. Building brand awareness through PR, third-party reviews, community engagement and broader online visibility is becoming just as important as owning a topic in Google.
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Platforms
Google Ads Adds Product and Non-Product Click Metrics
- Google Ads has introduced two new reporting metrics, Product clicks and Non-product clicks, giving advertisers a clearer view of how users interact with Shopping and Performance Max ads. Product clicks track clicks on individual products, while non-product clicks capture clicks on elements like headlines, store names and CTA buttons.
- The update helps advertisers distinguish between shoppers with direct product intent and users who are engaging with the brand more broadly. This makes it easier to understand whether products are driving immediate purchase interest or supporting upper-funnel discovery.
- One important nuance is that a non-product click is attributed to every product shown in the ad, meaning these numbers can appear higher than expected when multiple products are displayed together. Advertisers should interpret this metric carefully.
- The new metrics build on Google's expanded product reporting, which now includes Performance Max across all networks, plus Video, App and Demand Gen campaigns. Retailers can use the richer reporting to better evaluate product-level performance and optimise campaign strategy.
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AI in digital
Platforms
Google Boosts OKF With AI Trust Signals
- Google has released Open Knowledge Format (OKF) v0.2, an open standard for packaging structured business knowledge so AI agents can reliably understand and use it, adding optional trust signals that help AI agents judge whether knowledge is reliable before using it. The update focuses on five areas: provenance, trust, freshness, lifecycle and attestation.
- New metadata fields let developers record where information came from, who generated it, who verified it, and whether it's still current, making it easier for AI systems to prioritise trusted, human-reviewed knowledge over unverified content.
- A new Attested Computation concept allows AI-generated metrics to be checked against approved calculations. This helps ensure reported figures are produced using sanctioned methods rather than AI-generated SQL or improvised logic.
- Google has also updated its reference tools and sample bundles to support the new trust features, while keeping OKF v0.2 backwards compatible so existing v0.1 bundles continue to work unchanged.
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AI in digital
Marketing by numbers
Platforms
The AI Mention Effect: AI Visibility Drives Real Website Traffic
- AI brand mentions lead to more website visits. Profound's analysis of more than 2 million AI conversations found that when an AI assistant introduces a brand, users are 1.5 to 2.5 times more likely to visit that brand's website over the following seven days compared with their expected baseline behaviour.
- Not all AI platforms deliver the same impact. Gemini generated the strongest relative uplift, Google AI Overviews drove the largest overall traffic volume, while ChatGPT produced the most consistent uplift across industries. The effect also varied by sector, suggesting marketers should prioritise platforms based on where their category performs best.
- Most AI influence happens after the initial interaction. While 20.5% of visits occurred within an hour and 42% within 24 hours, most brand visits happened after the first day. This suggests AI acts more like a brand awareness channel than a direct click driver.
- Traditional attribution misses almost all AI-driven traffic. Even after ChatGPT introduced more clickable links in May 2026, only around 2.5% of downstream visits contained trackable AI referral parameters. The research argues that relying on click-through data alone significantly underestimates AI's influence on website traffic.
- The takeaway for marketers is to measure AI visibility, not just referrals. As AI increasingly shapes brand discovery, the authors recommend tracking brand mentions across AI platforms alongside website behaviour, rather than relying solely on conventional attribution models.
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AI in digital
Platforms
Yelp Reviews Come to ChatGPT Local Search
- OpenAI has partnered with Yelp to bring Yelp reviews, ratings, photos and business information directly into ChatGPT responses for local search queries. Users will also see Yelp branding and links alongside this content.
- The deal reflects a broader shift in consumer behaviour, with AI chatbots increasingly becoming the starting point for local discovery instead of traditional search engines. For marketers, this makes third-party review platforms even more important for AI visibility.
- Yelp's "Request a Quote" feature will soon be integrated into ChatGPT, allowing users to contact local service providers without leaving the chat. This could create a new lead generation channel for businesses that rely on local enquiries.
- Yelp sees the partnership as a way to extend the reach of its trusted local content, while OpenAI gains access to a large source of human-generated reviews and business data. The agreement is non-exclusive, leaving Yelp free to license its content to other AI platforms in future.
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Platforms
Google Clarifies Crawl Budget For Large Sites
- Google has refreshed its crawl budget documentation with clearer guidance, stressing that it only matters for very large sites with millions of pages or sites with tens of thousands of rapidly changing pages. For most websites, keeping XML sitemaps up to date and monitoring indexing in Search Console is enough.
- One of the biggest updates is that every site starts with the same conservative crawl capacity limit. Google automatically increases that limit over time if it sees demand to crawl more pages and the site remains healthy.
- Google also clarified that crawl capacity is shared across all of its crawlers, not just Google Search. That means crawling for products, images and other Google services all draw from the same overall limit.
- The updated guidance recommends improving crawl efficiency through practical measures like supporting HTTP 304 responses, maintaining server reliability and removing unnecessary crawling barriers, rather than trying to manipulate crawl budget directly.
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AI in digital
Platforms
ChatGPT Still Leads, But the AI Race Is Tightening
- ChatGPT remains the world's leading AI assistant and became the fastest mobile app to reach one billion monthly active users in May 2026. However, its share of unique AI assistant users fell below 50% for the first time in March, signalling growing competition from rivals.
- Google's Gemini is gaining ground thanks to deep Android integration, while Anthropic's Claude has emerged as one of the fastest-growing AI assistants across key global markets. The AI landscape is becoming increasingly multi-platform rather than dominated by a single player.
- AI is becoming a bigger part of online shopping. Retailers integrating AI assistants, including Walmart and Target, are seeing stronger GenAI referral traffic, while AI-powered shopping tools are helping improve product discovery and driving higher conversion rates.
- AI assistants are also emerging as a new advertising channel. ChatGPT began testing ads in early 2026, with ad impressions increasing sevenfold by May, while more than 200,000 apps now reference AI in their descriptions and AI-related advertising generated over US$1.3 billion in global spend during Q1 2026.
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Marketing by numbers
APAC’s Commerce Playbook Is Going Global
- APAC continues to set the pace for retail innovation, with live shopping, social commerce and quick commerce now mainstream across the region. Brands treating these formats as experimental risk falling behind as they become standard consumer behaviours.
- Social commerce is already deeply embedded in APAC, with 59% of consumers purchasing through social platforms. This compares with around two-thirds of consumers in North America and Europe who have never shopped via social media, highlighting APAC's lead in commerce innovation.
- China remains the benchmark, with its live commerce market reaching an estimated US$900 billion in 2025, approaching the scale of the entire US e-commerce market. APAC now accounts for nearly 55% of global e-commerce revenue, reinforcing the region's influence on where retail is heading.
- “What's happening in Asia isn't a threat to Western retail, it's a preview," said Emilie Darolles, president Western Europe, NIQ. "Live shopping, social commerce and instant delivery aren't 'emerging' channels; in Asia they're simply how people shop, and European consumers are already moving the same way. The brands that lead the next decade will read the East as a roadmap and act on it now, while the opportunity is still wide open."
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AI in digital
Platforms
Google Unveils Faster, Cheaper Gemini Models
- Google has launched three new Gemini models focused on helping developers build AI agents more efficiently: Gemini 3.6 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber. The update is centred on reducing latency, improving token efficiency and lowering operating costs at scale.
- Gemini 3.6 Flash is Google's new workhorse model, delivering stronger coding, knowledge work and multimodal performance while using 17% fewer output tokens than Gemini 3.5 Flash. Google says some coding benchmarks show up to 65% fewer output tokens, reducing both inference costs and unnecessary verbosity.
- Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is positioned as Google's fastest and most affordable 3.5-class model, designed for high-volume tasks such as agentic search and document processing. It delivers significantly better quality than previous Flash-Lite models while prioritising throughput and low latency.
- Google also introduced Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, a specialised cybersecurity model integrated with its CodeMender security agent. It's designed to rapidly find, validate and patch software vulnerabilities, giving security teams a lower cost option for large-scale automated code defence. Initial access is limited to trusted partners.
- Looking ahead, Google confirmed Gemini 3.5 Pro remains in partner testing ahead of a broader release, while development is already underway on Gemini 4, which the company says has entered its largest pre-training run to date.
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