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At DevDay, OpenAI dropped 20+ announcements for its 1.2 billion weekly users — and most of them could touch your distribution strategy.
ChatGPT now suggests apps mid-conversation. When an app fits the task, ChatGPT recommends it right in the chat. Users connect and use them without leaving the conversation. Plugins also got app-like upgrades: a dedicated home in the sidebar, interactive panels and file viewers, and better ranking with in-chat recommendations. If your customers discover tools through AI chat, your product needs a presence there. No revenue share has been announced yet, so enjoy the free shelf space while it lasts.
Meet Dots, your new gatekeeper. OpenAI launched always-on agents that connect to 4,000+ apps and run “proactive research” in the background. In practice, an agent might pick your tool before a human does. OpenAI even tested Dots internally on email marketing.
ChatGPT is starting to look like an office suite. New features — Space, Pages, and collaborative Slides — have it overlapping with Microsoft’s territory.
The first ChatGPT ad benchmarks are in. ChatGPT ads average a 0.73% CTR in the US, while Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and South Korea hit 1.21% to 1.91%. Advertisers are still experimenting: only Jotform and Resume.io stayed in the top 10 for all 20 weeks tracked. Benchmark against these numbers before judging your first campaign.
And in AI drama: Anthropic’s IPO prospectus spends 80 pages on risk factors and only 48 on the actual business — a bold way to ask for a $2 trillion valuation.
At unBoxed, Amazon merged its ad formats into one AI-run machine, fresh off nearly $20B in Q2 ad revenue.
One console to rule them all. The new Amazon Ads Agent folds the DSP and ad console together. Inside it, DVA+ bundles Sponsored Display, Sponsored TV, and programmatic display, video, and audio into a single format. It rolls out from late October through year end, with Brand+ and Performance+ driving — but advanced settings still hold the manual controls.
The numbers Amazon is selling: +25% unique customers and −10% CPM from chat-based targeting, plus 41% new-to-brand sales for Canine Naturals over 206 days.
Alexa’s script is now for sale. From January 2027, Branded Conversations will let US brands brief Alexa on their differentiators, comparisons, and bundles. Reporting covers prompt-level clicks, conversions, and ROAS. The catch: over half of US adults say they’d trust AI picks less if advertisers shaped them — though CEO Andy Jassy counters that shoppers who click sponsored prompts convert 48% more and spend 21% more.
Your faucet order might book a plumber next. Sponsored Services puts Yelp pros on product, order confirmation, and tracking pages with “Call” and “Quote” buttons. It starts in US home and auto categories, and it spots the need before the customer even searches.
Bottom line: check your Q4 settings now and start drafting that Alexa brief before January.
For years, “site:” and a quoted snippet told us whether Google held our page. In the AI-search era, that toolkit doesn’t exist — but there’s a free fix that needs no tooling.
Make the chatbot do the searching. Grab a meaningful 20–30 word passage from your page, then prompt: Search for “your snippet here” and return any results that contain that exact text only.
Pick passages loaded with names, numbers, and uncommon phrasing — generic marketing copy won’t isolate your URL. A hit proves three things at once: the search source behind the chatbot holds your content, the content is correctly attributed to your URL, and the page is technically search-friendly.
If it’s a miss, you get a checklist: orphaned pages nothing links to, WAF or robots.txt blocks, rendering and text-extraction failures, noindex directives, stray canonicals, and content too thin to be worth indexing. None of this is new tech SEO — it’s the same audit we’ve always run, triggered by a new symptom.
Run it five times before panicking. Chatbots pull from different sources on different runs, and freshly published pages sometimes just need time. And remember: being retrievable and being cited are separate problems — this method only clears the first hurdle. Still worth doing. Nobody wins a ranking fight they were never entered into.
Are you writing for a person with a coffee in their hand or a robot in a server farm? Your answer likely depends on the size of your company.
Small businesses are leaning into their advantage: human-to-human connection and personality. If you’re an SMB, double down on opinionated content — AI and search engines favor generic “correctness,” but people buy from humans with unique perspectives and shared values.