OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate and is expanding the product globally. Ad placements inside ChatGPT are now a real channel for reaching people during AI-assisted research.
Google DeepMind researchers tested Autoregressive Ranking, a unified model that could replace current retrieval and ranking methods, Search Engine Journal reports. If Google adopts it, the signals that decide which pages and brands appear in AI answers could change, so marketers should watch ranking behavior rather than assume current AEO tactics hold.
Anthropic released blueprints for Claude-based shopping and merchant agents that can search products, compare options, add items to carts, and connect to checkout, with guardrails that tie product and pricing data to catalog data, MarTech reports. A Gartner survey cited in the piece says only 11% of consumers are willing to let AI make buying decisions for them. Merchants should start making product feeds, pricing, and inventory machine-readable for agent checkout while expecting slow consumer trust.
Instacart launched Clementine, an AI assistant that builds grocery carts from what is in stock at the customer's chosen store, and added partners to its enterprise Cart Assistant. Grocery brands that want to appear in those carts need accurate, real-time product and availability data that Instacart's agent can read.
Rugs Direct rolled out an on-site AI assistant called Ask Cleo that lets shoppers search conversationally, and the company says add-to-cart rates for users of the tool are 8x to 9x higher than for other users on a smaller base. Retailers should treat on-site shopping agents as a product-data problem as well as a UX feature.
Lowe's added AI to its CIO's title and says the conversion rate for online customers who use its Mylow assistant is triple that of customers who do not. Retailers should expect on-site assistants to become a measurable conversion channel and prepare product data for them.
An IAB survey of 211 US ad investment decision-makers found 44% cite adapting to AI-driven search as a top media investment challenge, and 76% will focus most on optimizing content for AI-generated answers. Advertisers should expect measurement to lag their AI-discovery spending and budget for AEO work.
A Semrush survey of 2,338 US consumers found 65% of AI users have replaced some product-related Google searches with chatbots, and the study says chatbots talked 57.5% of AI users out of a purchase. Brands should monitor what assistants say about their products and fix the gaps that cause assistants to recommend against a purchase.