Friday, September 25, 2026
10 stories · 3 topics · 6 outlets
Search & Platforms
1Agent-to-Agent Marketing
3Google tests letting Gemini call businesses for you
Google is testing a feature that lets its Gemini assistant place phone calls to businesses on a user's behalf, and says it will first be available to Pixel 11 owners in the U.S. who pay for a Gemini subscription. Calls a person would normally make to a business would instead come from the assistant. Marketers whose sales or support runs on the phone should expect some inbound calls to come from a buyer's agent, and should check that staff, scripts, and call systems can handle a caller that is not a human.
IAB sets new standards for agentic buying and measurement
IAB Tech Lab released AAMP 3.0, the latest version of its Agentic Advertising Management Protocols framework, adding OpenProposal, a machine-readable format sellers use to describe ad products and answer briefs so buyer agents can compare proposals, check availability, negotiate terms and pass the deal to existing standards for execution and reporting. The release also covers safeguards around pricing, orders, agent identity and duplicate transactions. Marketers should expect media plans assembled by agents reading standardized proposals, which means their inventory and product descriptions have to be machine-readable.
JD Sports deploys Algolia for agentic commerce strategy
JD Sports has made Algolia the intelligence layer under its agentic commerce plan, so shoppers can discover and buy products through AI assistants as well as the retailer's own storefronts, the two companies say. JD Sports says search revenue has risen 22% and product listing page click-throughs 73% since it first installed Algolia in 2024. Marketers should treat the search layer that feeds AI assistants as a channel to plan for, because retailer traffic increasingly starts in an assistant rather than a search box.
Answer Engines
6OpenAI testing third-party-style tracking in ChatGPT ads
A researcher who posts as Buchodi found that a cookie called __obi can be set by ChatGPT in a browser and reappears when that browser later visits sites running OpenAI's advertising pixel, and that requests back to OpenAI can carry the same identifier with page and conversion data, MarTech reports. The researcher did not observe the server-side step that would join activity on an advertiser's site to a named ChatGPT account. Advertisers buying ChatGPT Ads should expect off-platform conversion measurement closer to third-party cookies and check what attribution they actually receive.
ChatGPT Ads And GEO: Where Paid And Earned AI Visibility Fit Together
OpenAI and the agency Go Fish Digital talked through how paid ChatGPT ads and earned AI visibility fit together, including practical GEO measurement and what marketers can test next, in a Search Engine Journal piece. The discussion covers both paid placements and citations inside assistant answers. Marketers should plan ChatGPT ad spend and citation work as one program, testing both against the same prompts and measuring them the same way.
Google expands pay-per-value AI licensing that pays publishers through Search Console
Digiday Japan reports that Google is quietly expanding a program that pays publishers when their content contributes to AI answers across Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode, with participants getting an extra AI revenue widget in the Search Console dashboard. People familiar with the program tell the outlet it is a pay-per-value arrangement, and critics describe it as a shield against legal liability rather than a licensing deal. Marketers should expect payment to publishers to hinge on how much their content shapes an AI answer, not on citations or links shown inside it.
Cloudflare's AI training block now spares Googlebot
A Semrush post says Cloudflare's Disallow AI Training setting blocks AI training crawlers but does not block Googlebot, and that Bing will not honor the setting until early 2027. Turning the setting on is an opt-out from AI training, not from Google's index or the AI answers built on it. Check what your content delivery network setting actually blocks before assuming you have kept your product pages away from AI systems.
Search Console Uses Block Flattening For AIOs, Forget Position & Focus On Outcomes
Search Console reporting for AI Overviews uses block flattening, which can make weak AI Overview visibility look like a top ranking, according to Search Engine Journal. The column argues position is a misleading measure and says teams should judge AI Overview performance by visits and conversions. Marketers should re-check how they read AI Overview data in Search Console and stop reporting AI Overview position as a win.
AI search is changing ecommerce forever
In an episode of Conversations with MarTech, Lucas Tieleman, CEO and co-founder of Opiversal, says shoppers now type long, context-heavy questions instead of short keyword queries, and that bots rather than people drive a large share of the traffic increase. He says retailers need to adapt product feeds and use AI-native technology to connect natural-language questions to retail catalogs. Marketers should check whether their feeds and catalog data answer the way shoppers actually phrase questions.