Tag: search
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Etsy’s 36% Sales Boost: Insights from Google’s Holiday Guide
Etsy’s gross merchandise sales rose 36% across the 2025 holiday season, partly credited to Google’s AI Max, and it is the headline case study in the guide Google sent retailers on August 21. Independent measurement of AI Max points the other way, and Google’s own footnotes do not always match the claims.
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Perplexity Blocks Time’s Agent-Only Ads and Puts Publishers’ Trust Scores at Risk
Time built ads only AI agents can see. Perplexity has decided they will not count, calls the practice deceptive, and says publishers who run them risk a hit to their trust score. Its objection is to the ads existing, not to how they are labeled.
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Zoom Is Spending on Creators to Get Cited by AI Search
Zoom wants to be read as an AI-first work platform rather than a meetings app, and it is buying creator partnerships to get there. Its CMO acknowledges there is no measurable link between creators and AI citations yet. Brands are now picking creators by who the LLMs quote.
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Bayer’s Predictive Audience Models Are Beating Its DSP Targeting 4x in Small Tests
Bayer is testing models that spot customers before they churn and price bids by individual rather than cohort — four times standard DSP effectiveness, in small tests its media chief calls a scientific experiment. Its AI search playbook runs through medical journals, not media buys.
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Google Lets Publishers Leave AI Search
Publishers can now keep their pages out of AI Overviews and AI Mode while staying in traditional search results. The catch is arithmetic: AI Overviews claims more than 2.5 billion monthly users, and opting out means giving up every click that flows from them.
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Japan Airlines Scores Well on Gemini, Poorly on ChatGPT. It’s Buying Ads to Close the Gap.
Japan Airlines has a measurable problem: Gemini talks about it well, ChatGPT barely does, and Reddit — where travelers argue about premium seats — hardly mentions it at all. Its agency turned that into a targeting input, and the airline is buying its first ChatGPT ads in August.
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Time Is Selling Ads That Only AI Crawlers Can Read
Time is running a second version of its site that only AI crawlers see — and selling ads inside it. Ally Bank’s sponsored copy went to ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot; Google’s search crawler got the page humans get. Nobody has decided yet whether that kind of ad needs a label.
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Google Ads Using Gemini to Predict the Conversions Its Lookback Windows Miss
Google introduced Qualified Future Conversion (QFC), a Gemini-powered metric in Google Ads that predicts the long-term revenue impact of top-of-funnel campaigns by connecting early actions — like brand searches — to expected future sales. Announced at Google Marketing Live in May 2026, it supplements rather than replaces existing conversion metrics like attributed branded searches. The…
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Hilton’s Playbook for the “Irrational Affinity Business”: Give Up Control
Hilton is giving away 1 billion Hilton Honors points in a social-first sweepstakes fronted by Paris Hilton and Formula One driver Lando Norris, whose McLaren team has been a Hilton partner for more than 20 years. Global CMO Mark Weinstein frames it as a way to “be back in culture and conversation, in a way…
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Sephora Puts Checkout Inside Google’s AI Loop
Sephora expanded its partnership with Google to become the first prestige beauty retailer to enable shopping directly inside Google’s AI-powered platform through Google Agentic Checkout. In practice, this keeps shoppers on Google. They can ask beauty questions, research ingredients, compare recommendations in real time, build a routine, add products to basket, and check out without…
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L’Oréal Wants ChatGPT to Stop Learning Skincare From Reddit
L’Oréal has a new OpenAI partnership aimed at two things marketers now pretend are separate: product discovery and content production. The deal plugs OpenAI’s models into L’Oréal’s in-house generative system, CreAItech, and lets the company provide up-to-date product information to the models behind ChatGPT. OpenAI leadership has been keen to say this does not mean…
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Olly Rewrites Product Pages for the Chatbot Shopper
Supplement brand Olly says it is seeing a shift in how people arrive at its DTC site: more shoppers are asking ChatGPT-style questions (“best sleep supplement,” “best women’s multivitamin”) and landing directly on product pages instead of politely entering through the homepage like it’s 2016. Jennifer Peters, Olly’s director of DTC, marketing technology and digital…
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How Unilever is using AI to stay visible in a new era of food discovery
Unilever Foods is treating AI-driven discovery as a parallel universe to the supermarket aisle: one where visibility happens inside voice assistants, AI search tools, and large language models, not just search blue links or endcaps. Olivia Kirby, Unilever Foods’ director of integrated demand generation, says the company is using AI across marketing and product development,…
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AI Citations, Demystified: The Robots Have Apparently Discovered SEO
Cyrus Shepard, founder of Zyppy SEO, went spelunking through 54 experiments, patents, and case studies and came back with a ranked list of 23 factors correlated with getting cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. The headline takeaway is unsexy on purpose: the top factors are URL accessibility, scoring 9.5, and plain…
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Nearly 80% Of Businesses Struggle To Measure AI Search Impact
Branch’s new enterprise benchmark data suggests AI-driven discovery is no longer a side quest: 26% of companies say AI search delivered more than half their site traffic in 2025, and 49% expect to cross that threshold by late 2026. AI search’s share of traffic is rising faster than traditional search (up from 35% to 50%),…
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Google: AI ads driving up to 80% sales lift for some brands
Google’s message is basically: AI didn’t kill search, it just made it chattier—and ads are coming along for the ride. Alphabet cleared $400B in revenue in 2025, with Q4 ad revenue at $82.28B (+13.5% YoY) and YouTube ads at $11.38B (about +9% YoY). So despite the “AI chatbots will eat search” anxiety, Google’s ad engine…
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Inside Pfizer’s plan to bring SEO and AI search in-house
Pfizer has moved its SEO and “AI discoverability” work fully in-house, building the capability in about 60 days, according to a LinkedIn post from its VP of performance media, Joshua Palau. That included new hires, among them Kinesso’s former director of SEO. The reasoning, per Palau: generative AI is reshaping how brands are “discovered, understood…
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Agentic ad buying has moved from niche topic to top-tier anxiety for media planners
Agentic ad buying has officially graduated from niche curiosity to boardroom concern. In the IAB’s January 2026 Outlook Study, 40% of US ad buyers said that getting their arms around agentic ad buying and how campaigns actually get executed is one of their top worries for 2026—ranking right up there with the usual macro and…
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Stagwell Unveils New AI-Powered Search Platform
Stagwell has a new entry in the “optimize for the machines that answer instead of the humans that search” category. Called Search+, the platform—built by its Assembly unit with AI visibility company Emberos—is aimed at helping brands show up more favorably inside large language model outputs. The pitch: not just getting clicks, but shaping how…
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YouTube Tops Reddit in AI’s New Citation Economy
Turns out LLMs don’t care if you have followers—they just want your transcripts. YouTube has leapfrogged Reddit to become the leading social source cited in AI-generated search results, according to new data from Bluefish, Emberos, Goodie AI, and Profound. That’s a sharp contrast from just months ago, when Reddit was still dominating AI responses thanks…
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How AI is Shaping Ecommerce for the Holidays
Holiday e-commerce in the U.S. is expected to climb 5.3% this year, and for the first time, retailers are writing AI into their seasonal strategies. Instead of relying solely on Google, consumers are increasingly using ChatGPT and similar platforms to research and compare products. ChatGPT’s own shopping integration, backed by Walmart, Shopify, and Etsy, signals…
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ChatGPT Sends Shoppers, But They’re Leaving Their Carts Behind
A new study from German researchers is poking a few holes in the hype around AI-powered shopping. Analyzing more than 50k ChatGPT referrals vs. 164 million traditional transactions across nearly 1,000 e-commerce sites, they found that while ChatGPT may be driving fresh traffic, it’s not delivering at checkout. Conversion rates from ChatGPT referrals lagged behind…
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Why Your SEO Strategy Needs to Embrace AI and GEO
WPP’s chief AI officer Daniel Hulme makes a compelling case: SEO may not be dead, but it’s no longer the sun around which brand visibility orbits. As chatbots and personal AIs take charge of shopping behaviors, traditional keyword-centric strategies are losing relevance. Instead, we’re stepping into the era of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), where a…
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The Impact of AI on Consumer Search Behavior
Marketers would do well to pay close attention to shifting consumer search behavior: 87% of U.S. adults now read AI-generated summaries when they search online, and more than 8 in 10 are using AI as part of their shopping decisions. These stats come from the latest Centerfield Gen-AI Consumer Survey, which paints a pretty clear…
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AI Fatigue: Insights from Consumer Preferences in Search
Gartner’s latest consumer data puts a damper on generative AI’s hype in search. According to a survey of 377 consumers, 61% said they’d prefer the ability to switch off AI-generated summaries in their search results. Skepticism runs deep—53% don’t trust AI’s ability to provide accurate or unbiased information, and 41% say they find AI-generated overviews…
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AI accounts for a third of brand search traffic
AI engines like ChatGPT now drive a significant portion of search traffic, prompting brands to adapt their SEO strategies to focus on generative and answer engine optimization instead of traditional methods. Marketers must refine content based on user intent as AI systems become new gatekeepers of brand discovery. However, risks like transparency gaps exist, emphasizing…
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Google Says AI Isn’t Eating the Internet
Google asserts that its AI-driven search results do not cause significant drops in website traffic, despite concerns in the publishing industry. Search chief Liz Reid claims traffic remains steady overall, but unevenly distributed. While AI Overviews may reduce clicks, intentional user engagement could be increasing. The media landscape faces pressure from algorithm changes and competing…
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Google’s AI Answers Are Leaving Websites in the Dust
A Pew Research Center study reveals a significant decline in web traffic due to Google’s AI Overviews, which reduce click-through rates from 15% to 8%. With AI summaries, only 1% of users click through to sources, favoring platforms like Wikipedia. Google disputes the findings, claiming AI promotes user curiosity.
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Move Over Google—Brands Are Now Courtin’ the Bots
As generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews muscle into search territory, ad agencies are scrambling to make sure brands don’t get buried in digital obscurity. Shops like Jellyfish, Wpromote, and Kepler are spinning up dedicated AI search teams to help clients get a leg up with language models (LLMs), measuring how brands…
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📈 AI Search Ads Are Gaining Ground
AI-driven search advertising may still be in its early innings, but it’s already warming up for a big game. According to Emarketer, ad spend in this category is projected to soar from just over $1 billion in 2025 to a hefty $26 billion by 2029. That’s a jump from accounting for 0.7% of total search…
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Examining AI Citation Bias
Turns out not all AIs source their answers from the same places. New research from Profound looked at 30 million citations and found that platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity play favorites when it comes to where they get their info. ChatGPT’s top source? Wikipedia—by a landslide, clocking in at nearly 48% of…
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Perks, Promos, and Pro Users: Perplexity’s Take on Search Monetization
Perplexity’s paid users are getting more than just AI-powered answers—they’re now seeing brand promos slipped alongside search results, thanks to a new strategy called Pro Perks. With 650 million monthly search queries flowing through its platform, the company is using its growing traffic to surface discount deals from launch brands like Visa, TurboTax, and Farmers…
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Are AI Overviews Eating Your Clicks?
Ahrefs released some interesting analysis for the SEO community: Google’s AI Overviews, far from boosting site visits, are slashing clickthrough rates by an average of 34.5% for top-ranking keywords. The analysis, based on 300,000 keywords, compared informational queries with and without AI Overviews in search results. Despite Google’s claims that AI-linked content gets more clicks,…
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Brands See Anecdotal Evidence that AI Search Drives Clicks
Brands are noticing increased user engagement from AI-powered search platforms like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, as users are clicking embedded links and driving both traffic and sales. Viv, a period care brand, reported a 400% surge in web traffic, which they linked to these AI-generated search results. Educational and informative content appears to rank better…
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4A’s Noteworthy News – 22nd Edition
THE BIG STORY As AI-enhanced search engines become more prominent, tech giants and upstarts alike are racing to define sustainable advertising models that are effective, non intrusive, and rewarding for publishers. Earlier this month, Google began rolling out ads to its AI-generated search overviews, marking a key step in monetizing AI search. This shift suggests…
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Walmart continues innovation with GenAI enhancements and more drone delivery
Walmart continues to expand what it has described as a “retail renaissance,” announcing expanded offerings across several areas it has been investing in already: Drone delivery – now available in the Walmart app InHome Delivery and replenishment A Gen-AI Powered Shopping assistant, building on the GenAI search feature it announced at CES in January. At…