Agent Beat for October 28, 2026

Welcome to Agent Beat. It's Wednesday, October 28, 2026, and this is your daily briefing on how AI finds brands and how agents choose what to buy.

Google is testing ads in AI Mode that use data from connected Gmail and Photos accounts. Its privacy policy now carries an exception for ad personalization. The connected-app data can shape which ads a signed-in user sees in AI Mode.

According to Digiday Japan, brands do not expect ChatGPT ads to deliver much in holiday sales, and the cost per click runs about six times Google's. Sensor Tower counted more than 1,400 companies advertising on ChatGPT in August, up 8% from July. Capital One, Expedia and Cloudflare were the biggest spenders. Sensor Tower's September data showed those three accounted for 4%, 3% and 2% of ChatGPT ad spend, respectively. Most ChatGPT ad campaigns came from large companies.

SISTRIX analysed 10,826 daily measurement series across four AI models and eight countries. It found that asking the same prompt on different days returns different brand names. The company recommends querying many different prompts instead. In its daily ChatGPT question about the best robot vacuum, Ecovacs appeared on 12 of 28 days, Mova on 11 and Xiaomi on 3, with no visible pattern. SISTRIX says a single day reveals almost nothing about those brands. Across all brands appearing in a prompt's answers, 70% appeared on fewer than one in five days, and only 6% appeared on at least four of five days. Assuming a brand truly appears in 25% of answers, querying one prompt over 20 days yields measurements from 0% to 59%, while 20 different prompts in one day yield 16% to 35%.

About one in five consumer messages in ChatGPT now ask for information, roughly the same share as writing, according to OpenAI data reported by Search Engine Journal. The increase is smaller than in earlier periods.

Vercel Observability now reports how AI bots use a site. The metrics include requests by verified bot, the pages crawlers fetch most for indexing or training, pages assistants retrieve in response to queries, Markdown requests and errors. The metrics can be queried from the dashboard or the CLI with vercel metrics, which requires Observability Plus.

Rajan Patel of Google wrote on X that source links going unclickable in Google Discover came from a bug in an experiment. He wrote that the experiment has been turned off.

Ahrefs added an AI Discoverability issue category to Site Audit and Page types to Site Explorer. Both shipped in a release of five updates.

Amazon Business added tools to its Business Assistant, which the company says now answers questions about a customer's orders, spend and activity. It also introduced Amazon Business Value Intelligence. Both were announced at the Amazon Business Reshape event in Nashville on Oct. 27. Digital Commerce 360 reports that the new Business Assistant features are available to Amazon Business customers in the U.S. through their account pages, and that Value Intelligence will offer U.S.-based buyers views of savings, operational efficiency and purchase compliance based on their own Amazon Business data alongside third-party benchmarks Amazon Business tracks.

Shopify retired its knowledge base app and moved its AI agent knowledge base into the store admin. Policies and contact details now publish by default. Some merchants who used the retired knowledge base app need to re-add their facts.

Ahrefs released a beta of Traffic Analysis, which estimates a competing domain's traffic across more than ten channels, including AI, advertising and social. A user enters a domain name and needs no measurement tag on the target site. Web担当者Forum reported the release on October 28, 2026.

Google updated its guidance on preventing user-generated spam to cover tools that let users publish shared pages, generated content or web apps. The change extends the advice beyond site owners to the platforms and tools that host what their users publish.

Discord says messages in its public discoverable servers will begin appearing in search engine results from December. Some users of those communities have objected to the plan.

AI科技评论, or Leiphone, reported that Ant Group released Lingguang 2.0 on October 27, and that users can view, adjust or revoke authorization at any time. The personal assistant keeps working after the user authorizes it. It tracks flight and hotel prices, checks Alipay bills for forgotten subscriptions, and pulls to-dos from DingTalk class groups. It runs on its own cloud host. It can call MCP and CLI tools outside Ant's apps. It handles permissions through Ant's APASS system so the agent never holds the authorization keys.

Thanks for listening. For the full written brief, go to agent-beat.com.