New advertising markets and customer journeys. Explore emerging opportunities with clear distinctions between a test, an announcement and a rollout.
ChatGPT Ads
Anthony Higman spotted a new ChatGPT Ads Manager app, followed by controls to choose whether ads are served in the iOS app, Android app, or on the web. These are account-level observations rather than a published universal rollout, so availability may differ.
OpenAI
Juozas Kaziukėnas spotted a Best Buy-controlled checkout flow that lets shoppers complete an order without leaving ChatGPT, using an MCP-powered experience rather than a generic external checkout. The observed flow indicated that some membership benefits and reward points were unavailable.
OpenAI
OpenAI introduced Private Safety Processing, a preview designed to detect risk patterns across related interactions while keeping eligible API deployments compatible with Zero Data Retention. It says customer content can remain on customer-controlled infrastructure: or be encrypted under customer-controlled keys: while automated systems return limited safety signals without exposing prompts or responses to OpenAI personnel.
Google Search Console
Barry Schwartz reported missing Crawl Stats data for 15 and 16 August and confirmed on 23 August that Google had patched the gap. The incident affected reporting rather than establishing a change in crawl behaviour.
ChatGPT Ads
ChatGPT Ads expanded to 31 European markets in August. OpenAI subsequently confirmed that self-service Ads Manager access opened across those markets on 31 August 2026.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre agency accounts can be linked to up to 1,000 Merchant Centre accounts.
OpenAI
ChatGPT now offers a native restaurant experience, returning bookable recommendations in conversation: an early glimpse of super-app behaviour.
OpenAI
A roundup of ChatGPT's ad rollout counts six formats now serving, from standard placements to the newer commerce units, though not everything announced is visible yet.
Industry
Cloudflare's new AEO tools audit how accessible your site is to AI agents and track visibility in AI answers.
Industry
Google released an official course on vibe coding: describe the app you want and build it with AI.
Industry
Days after AI Overviews launched in France, French news publishers filed suit, arguing that the value AI answers extract from their journalism must be shared and that competition be respected. This follows the France launch covered in Week 30.
Google Merchant Center
From 24 August, Merchant Centre performance reports separate YouTube affiliate results from organic traffic, revise the YouTube organic traffic definitions, expand product-level reporting for Google Ads, and add segmentation, aligning definitions across Merchant Centre, Google Ads, and YouTube. Historical data back to 1 July is also restated under the revised definitions.
Industry
SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6 reportedly matches Claude Fable 5 Max and GPT-5.6 Sol Max on frontier benchmarks while costing roughly 80% less, built on the same 1.5T foundation as Grok 4.5 with a longer post-training run.
ChatGPT Ads
OpenAI's Europe privacy policy, updated in June, sets out how personal data will be handled for advertising to users in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland: the clearest sign yet that ChatGPT Ads' EU launch is close.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity's Bot Analytics dashboard adds a Scrape-to-Referral Ratio, showing which AI crawlers extract your content and actually return traffic, and which only take.
Campaign Manager 360
A new reportData.The query endpoint returns Campaign Manager 360 performance data as structured JSON directly in the response, with a 60-second execution limit, for real-time dashboards and ad-hoc checks, while the Reports service continues to handle large or scheduled exports.
Anthropic
Compliance API coverage now spans Cowork on desktop, web, and mobile plus Claude Code in the CLI and desktop, in beta for Enterprise customers, letting security teams pull session content and metadata from both surfaces.
Google Merchant Center
Google is testing a mobile Search format that lists participating advertisers' favicons and domains above sponsored results, with quick action buttons and a "Hide sponsored results" control beneath.
Anthropic
Text generated by Claude models released from 2 August includes an embedded watermark designed to accompany the text, as part of Anthropic's commitments under the EU AI Act's Article 50(2) transparency Code of Practice. Within a day, an open-source "watermarks-remover" tool appeared claiming to strip such marks from Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI output.
Anthropic
New Claude Code sessions on Pro, Max, and Team plans will run in Auto mode from 14 August, routing every action through a safety classifier instead of asking approval per command.
Industry
Ask Maps lets users query Google Maps conversationally, described by analysts as the strongest local UI change of the AI era and a product that keeps local queries inside Google's ecosystem.
Industry
The AI Office can now levy penalties of up to 5% of average daily worldwide turnover, per day, against systemic AI providers including Google and Meta, as the AI Act's general-purpose model obligations harden. This continues the enforcement start covered in Week 31.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre product listing ads show a new experimental annotation named Deal Ends. Time-limited urgency reaches Shopping surfaces natively.
Industry
Uber's advertising business added $1bn to its annualised run-rate in about fifteen months, growing from $1.5bn in May 2025 to more than $2.5bn.
Industry
From 14 August, HubSpot lets you set a max limit on Marketing Contacts, ending the silent auto-upgrades triggered when contact counts passed your tier.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity's Citations dashboard adds segmentation and filters separating branded from non-branded queries, with branded labels in the interface.
Industry
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $567m and imposed a 90-hour monthly usage ceiling for under-18 accounts, while a California federal judge ruled minors' algorithmic feeds are not protected speech, letting a law default teen feeds to one hour of chronological content proceed, with age verification due 1 January 2027.
Industry
A solar company lost its GDPR challenge over Schufa credit checks run on prospects before any site visit, with the court holding that scoring leads through a credit bureau before first commercial contact lacked a lawful basis.
ChatGPT Ads
ChatGPT is testing a descriptive heading directly above the ad unit in results, similar to what Google's AI Mode already shows.
Industry
An analysis of 3,900 Google ads across 65 accounts found Ad Strength does not correlate with CPA. The grade reflects headline volume, keyword relevance, asset uniqueness, and pinning rather than performance.
30 of 442 updates loaded.
Load more updates
