Agent Beat for October 31, 2026

Welcome to Agent Beat, the daily podcast briefing on how AI finds brands and how agents choose what to buy. It's Saturday, October 31, 2026.

Google appears to have stopped appending UTM parameters to the links Gemini cites in its answers. Google began adding them in early September and stopped around September 28.

OpenAI said it will honor a shared robots.txt signal that lets website operators communicate their AI training preferences to participating providers.

Reddit's chief executive says Google's AI Mode does not drive traffic to the site, as search referrals fall. Reddit is testing a login-only mode, which it says protects its audience and its business.

Shopify's product catalog now returns a commission next to each promoted product's price and reviews, so a store can pay the company that operates an AI shopping agent. How an agent uses that commission depends on the developer who built it.

DoorDash said it has received only several hundred orders placed by AI agents. The company said it is open to working with third-party agent makers.

A small study puts the click-through rate on Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode at about 0.9 percent. The study also found that sites opting out of Google's generative search results saw clicks from the regular web results fall.

Google plans to support a shared AI training control in robots.txt, letting a site state its AI training preferences to several providers in one step. The signal comes from the AIPREF working group at the Internet Engineering Task Force and extends the Google-Extended control Google has offered since 2023.

Five French organizations representing press, online publishers and digital marketing filed a complaint with the European Commission against Google over the conditions for deploying AI Overviews and AI Mode in France.

Creative enhancements are now on by default in ChatGPT Ads, and advertisers can opt out. The change lets the system adjust ad creative without a separate request from the advertiser.

OpenAI told advertisers that ChatGPT Ads are now live in 26 more countries, in the weekly update email Search Engine Roundtable reviewed. A wider standard ad unit has launched, multi-image ads are in open beta for all advertisers, and the Shopify integration is now available internationally.

Large brands dominate AI search, according to new research reported by Search Engine Journal. The same research identifies gaps in big-brand visibility that smaller publishers may be able to use.

Vercel's firewall now lets a site log or block AI crawlers and AI assistants separately under its AI Bots managed ruleset. A site can block crawlers that collect content for indexing and training while still letting assistants fetch pages to answer user queries, and Vercel adds new bots to the rules as they appear. Vercel Blog reports the ruleset is available on all plans and that rule settings can also be modified using the Vercel CLI.

Microsoft announced new Bing controls that let a site choose separately whether its content is used for AI training, for grounding AI answers, or both, while staying eligible for Bing search results. Krishna Madhavan, a principal product manager for Microsoft Bing, described the choices as simpler and clearer.

Ads have started appearing inside Bing's Copilot-powered AI Overviews, according to a screenshot shared by Khushal Bherwani. Ads had not previously been reported inside Bing's AI answers.

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