Google Search Console now offers a dedicated Generative AI performance report that lets businesses measure how often their pages appear in AI-powered search experiences such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. SEO agency TechWyse outlines how marketers should interpret the new data, warning that AI impressions risk becoming a vanity metric without proper context, and noting key gaps including the absence of query-level data and the inability to separate results by individual AI product.
A September 2026 expert opinion piece in Nation's Restaurant News argues that foodservice equipment manufacturers and ingredient brands must rethink their go-to-market strategies as B2B buyers now complete approximately 70% of their purchasing journey independently and 84% have already chosen a preferred vendor before conversations begin — a shift that makes pre-sales influence the decisive battleground for suppliers.
A webinar hosted by Go Fish Digital and OpenAI outlined the distinct roles of paid ChatGPT ads and earned generative engine optimization (GEO) visibility, explaining how to measure brand presence in AI-generated answers and why website evidence must come first.
Generative and agentic AI is shifting ecommerce from self-serve search funnels to continuous, natural-language shopping conversations, with data from Adobe, Shopify, and Amazon pointing to rapid consumer adoption, according to a Martech360 analysis published 24 September 2026.
YouTube announced shopping capabilities for Ask YouTube, its experimental conversational AI search tool, at the Made On YouTube event on September 23, 2026. Users searching for product reviews may now see results organized in comparison tables, and can ask follow-up questions about products directly on video watch pages.
A Martech360 analysis published 23 September 2026 compares traditional keyword-based site search with intent-aware AI search. While exact-match retrieval retains value for precise queries, semantic and vector-based approaches better handle natural-language queries. The report cites Google's AI Mode reaching 1 billion monthly active users in May 2026 and references vendor documentation from IBM, Microsoft, OpenAI and AWS to illustrate the technical and commercial stakes.
Google has announced plans to phase out its 15-year-old Dynamic Search Ads format in favour of AI Max, with automatic migration set for February 2027, while OpenAI is simultaneously rolling out new advertising products for ChatGPT, including Sponsored Agents and direct ad purchasing in India and other markets.
A Forrester-sourced analysis published on CustomerThink argues that AI agents are triggering the most significant transformation in business software since cloud computing, introducing what researchers call an "agentic business fabric" that replaces human-navigated systems of record with AI-orchestrated workflows — while warning that back-office systems face far steeper governance hurdles before autonomous execution can be trusted.
Jaggaer has completed its acquisition of Ivoflow, a Germany-based spend and price intelligence platform for direct materials, with the transaction closing on September 11, 2026. The deal is intended to help manufacturers determine whether the prices they pay for parts reflect actual market conditions, using AI to automate the verification of supplier price-increase requests.
Pinterest introduced Visual Search Ads on September 17, 2026, allowing advertisers to bid for prominent placements in Search Results and Pin closeups. The format uses visual browsing behavior as a lower-funnel intent signal, and is set to enter beta across all Pinterest ad markets in the coming weeks.
Pinterest has unveiled a standardized multimodal AI infrastructure built with Nvidia's Blackwell B200 GPUs and open-source Dynamo framework, aiming to make visual search faster and more cost-efficient across its fleet of roughly 14,000 Nvidia GPUs. Company benchmarks claim precomputing visual representations reduced overall latency by 7.3 times and cut inference costs to less than 8% of closed proprietary models.
OpenAI updated ChatGPT's memory system in June 2026, replacing manual "remember this" commands with an automated profiling process the company calls "dreaming." The chatbot now independently decides what to retain from conversations, raising accuracy and control concerns for business professionals.
