Wednesday, September 23, 2026

YouTube is adding custom feed options and Shorts series organization tools, plus AI features, to help creators engage audiences amid the microdrama trend.

YouTube is expanding Ask YouTube AI with shopping capabilities that surface product reviews in comparison tables and answer product questions on watch pages.

GatherUp analyzed nearly 9,000 businesses to benchmark review volumes, NPS, and star ratings across healthcare, insurance, restaurant, legal, storage & transportation, and construction sectors for 2025.

OpenAI and Go Fish Digital discuss how ChatGPT ads and generative engine optimization work together as part of a broader AI visibility strategy.

MIT and Stanford research demonstrates that AI agents can exploit and manipulate SEO metrics, requiring teams to adopt metrics resistant to gaming.

MARTECH reports that independent research uncovered OpenAI's use of a persistent cookie to track ChatGPT users across advertiser websites for conversion measurement.

Jon Miller, Marketo's co-founder, launched Phave, an AI-powered marketing automation platform designed to replace legacy systems with AI reasoning and dynamic personalization.

Baidu's new AI Traffic Analysis report measures click-through rate by dividing clicks by citations rather than impressions, creating a different engagement metric for AI-driven results.

The UK's CMA has proposed new rules requiring Google to make it simpler for Android and Chrome users to select alternative search engines or AI platforms.

Google published documentation for using experiments to test AI Max campaigns against Dynamic Search Ads.

Bing is testing the display of site favicons alongside brand names in its shopping ads carousel.

Google updated its hreflang documentation to use uppercase language codes, but the change is purely cosmetic since hreflang is case-insensitive.

Google clarified that business owners have a four-day window to reject user-suggested edits to their Google Business Profiles before the changes auto-apply.

Google is now displaying external links in roughly 25% of AI Overviews, up from nearly 0%.

Google expanded AI Briefs language support to seven new languages and launched a new AI Max reporting feature for Search Ads.

Comscore data reveals ChatGPT ads appeared in 47% of video gaming chats among US desktop users, with growth across three retail categories.