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Industry

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

The EU fines Google €890m in its first DMA penalties

The European Commission fined Google €890m on 23 July across two Digital Markets Act decisions: €460m for self-preferencing its shopping, hotels, transport, and sports services in Search, and €430m for blocking Play developers from steering users to cheaper channels. Google has 60 days to comply or faces periodic penalties of up to 5% of worldwide turnover, and is weighing an appeal, while the US President criticised the decision as unjustified.

SourceLinkedIn
First ContributorThomas Höppner

Anthropic

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5

Claude Opus 5 approaches Fable 5's frontier intelligence at half the price, with state-of-the-art results on several coding and knowledge-work evaluations. It is positioned as thoughtful, proactive, and efficient.

SourceLinkedIn
Official SourceLinkedIn

OpenAI

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

OpenAI rolls out automated bidding

A new bid strategy removes manual bid prices entirely. OpenAI's algorithms decide which auctions to enter to get the most results from your budget.

SourceLinkedIn
First ContributorJuozas Kaziukėnas

Anthropic

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Claude Cowork learns skills from screen recordings

Record your screen while doing a task, talking through it, and Claude turns the recording into a reusable skill. Next time, you run the skill instead of repeating the steps.

SourceLinkedIn
Official SourceLinkedIn

Microsoft Clarity

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Microsoft Clarity groups AI citation queries into topics

Clarity's AI Citations dashboard now clusters citation queries into automatically generated topics. As AI search cites more sites, the grouping shows which themes drive citations.

SourceLinkedIn
Official SourceLinkedIn

Industry

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Top Stories appear in Google AI Overviews

Google has begun showing news updates and Top Stories inside AI Overviews for mobile users in the United States. The stories appear in a carousel that also highlights a user's Preferred Sources, with further expansion expected.

SourceSearch Engine Land
First ContributorYoann Ferrand

ChatGPT Ads

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Feed-based product ads appear, and answers show multiple ads.

ChatGPT has begun showing product ads generated from retailer feeds, displaying a title, price, and star rating in a format resembling sponsored products, with responses now carrying up to two ad units at the bottom. The feed method follows OpenAI's addition of product-feed support in its Ads Manager, and continues the shopping-format iteration covered in Week 27.

SourceLinkedIn
Official SourceSERP Alert +1

Google Merchant Center

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Merchant Centre pilots a Business Agent in early access.

Merchant Centre has introduced rolling out Business Agent in early access, an AI agent that helps your business on Google by answering shopper questions and recommending products customised to match your brand and is rolling out to select accounts.

SourceLinkedIn
First ContributorVIVEK GUPTA

Industry

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

A High Engagement Ads setting appears for App campaigns

Google Ads now offers a High Engagement Ads setting for App campaigns, enabling ad formats that focus on attributed conversions and stronger user engagement. The setting is optional and is at the account level, alongside a new Click to Call Terms item that shows whether communication terms were accepted.

SourceLinkedIn
First ContributorNatasha Kaurra

Industry

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

AI Max shows how it rewrites your headlines

Shubham Soni has flagged a refreshed AI Max text customisation interface in Search campaign creation. Instead of describing the feature, Google now visually shows how AI rewrites headlines based on the user's query.

SourceShubham Soni, account observation
First ContributorShubham Soni

Industry

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Copilot Cowork adds event triggers and browser automation.

Microsoft Copilot Cowork can now run tasks triggered by events across Teams, Outlook, and meetings, described in plain language, such as a specific sender, an @mention, or a keyword. Everything runs on a draft-and-approve model under the user's own permissions, and browser automation is now generally available, building on the general availability of Cowork covered in Week 27.

SourceLinkedIn
First ContributorJack Rowbotham

YouTube

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

WARC charts YouTube's slowing ad growth

WARC Media's latest Platform Insights report shows YouTube's ad revenue growth decelerating from 14.7% in 2024 to 11.7% in 2025, with a forecast of 7.9% by 2027, putting TikTok on track to overtake it in 2028. Fospha data cited in the report suggests that last-click attribution underreports YouTube's revenue contribution by 15.9x.

SourceLinkedIn
First ContributorAlex Brownsell

Industry

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

France's competition authority weighs in on agentic commerce.

The Autorité de la concurrence has published an opinion on the competition implications of AI agents and agentic commerce, warning that agents could become the next major gateway to the digital economy. It recommends enforcing existing rules, including the AI Act, keeping AI distribution open, and promoting interoperability and data portability rather than drafting regulations.

SourceLinkedIn
First ContributorThomas Höppner

Industry

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

The EU tells Google how to open Android and share search data.

The European Commission has adopted two DMA specification decisions covering Google. The first sets out how Android must open functionality to third-party AI assistants under Article 6(7), noting that alternatives currently cannot compete equally with Google's own AI services, and the second, which anonymises click and query data Google must share, with whom, and at what price under Article 6(11).

SourceEU Competition
First ContributorThomas Höppner

Google Merchant Center

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Promotions add Google Wallet and physical-store placements.

Merchant Centre Promotions now lets you choose placements across Shopping ads, free listings, Chrome, and, newly, Google Wallet in the Physical Stores. Businesses with physical stores can also run promotions through Local Inventory Ads, free local listings, and Wallet.

Sourcevideo
First ContributorVIVEK GUPTA

Google Merchant Center

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Merchant Centre rolls out an AI performance report.

Select Merchant Centre accounts now show an AI performance report inside Analytics, surfacing AI Mode and AI Overviews data for your products. Metrics include query groups users type into AI search, share of voice for those terms, term popularity, and popular product attributes, following help documentation first spotted by Hana Kobzová and interface digging by Brodie Clark.

SourceLinkedIn
First ContributorHana Kobzová +1

OpenAI

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

The OpenAI Partner Network goes live

OpenAI's Partner Network is now officially live, with applications open, a Partner Locator for finding partners by expertise, and training and enablement on a Partner Hub with badges and tiers, formalising the ecosystem announced last month.

SourceLinkedIn
Official SourceLinkedIn

Industry

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Moonshot releases Kimi K3 as the largest open-weight model yet

Moonshot AI has released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model with a one-million-token context window and native visual understanding. Moonshot says it trails Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on overall performance but consistently beats Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 on coding, visual understanding, and long-horizon tasks, and it led Arena's front-end programming leaderboard within a day of launch.

SourceVentureBeat
First ContributorYoann Ferrand

Microsoft Clarity

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Microsoft Clarity launches Topic Insights

Microsoft Clarity has launched Topic Insights, a topic-level view in its AI Visibility dashboard that shows how your content shapes AI answers, covering visibility, influence, competition, and opportunities. Announced on 9 July, it runs on prompts you define per topic, with a weekly report cap per project.

SourceMicrosoft Clarity
First ContributorMatteo Zambon

ChatGPT Ads

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

ChatGPT Ads adds audiences and launches in Japan and South Korea

ChatGPT Ads has added audience targeting with advanced bid adjustments, plus custom audiences that let you upload lists of 25,000 or more users to target or exclude, with ad-group-level bid multipliers. OpenAI also added an Overview dashboard, suggested ad drafts built from your site's metadata, a smaller ad-card format, and availability in Japan and South Korea.

SourceLinkedIn
First ContributorAnthony Higman +1

Industry

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

The EU advances its "Chat Control" message-scanning rules

The European Parliament has passed a version of the "Chat Control" regulation that allows platforms to scan private messages, images, and files, with the regime set to run until at least April 2028. End-to-end encrypted services such as WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram are exempt from the scanning.

SourceEuronews
First ContributorYoann Ferrand

Google Merchant Center

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Ads start rolling out inside AI Mode

Google has begun serving ads in AI Mode, with five formats now appearing: standard text ads, Shopping ads placed inline with organic results, and a product grid format. The rollout follows the formats Google previewed at Google Marketing Live.

SourceLinkedIn
First ContributorBrodie Clark

Industry

StrategyNewsletter archive1 min

Search campaigns for Travel open a beta for things to do and events

Google is expanding Search campaigns for Travel to an open beta covering the things-to-do and events verticals. The beta adds AI Max features such as search-term matching and item groups, central buying across feed formats and text ads, and unified search-term reporting.

SourceGoogle Ads
Official SourceLinkedIn

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