This Week in AI + Advertising
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2,000+ Brands Are Already Buying Ads Inside ChatGPT.
OpenAI just expanded its ChatGPT ads pilot into the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea, and started testing units that bundle multiple advertisers into a single placement. Six months ago this was a punchline. Now Criteo counts 2,000+ brands running live campaigns there. The chatbot you use to write emails is quietly becoming a media channel.
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Google Just Airdropped Its Entire AI Ad Stack Into India.
At Google Marketing Live India 2026, Google rolled out AI tools spanning Search, YouTube, Shopping, creative production, and measurement, with India availability and beta access, not just a keynote promise. Next time a client asks “should we be doing the AI thing on Google yet,” the answer just got a lot more concrete.
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90% vs. 30% - The Stat That Should Worry Every SEO Deck in the Building.
A new benchmark found Google’s AI Mode and Perplexity pull roughly 90% of their citations straight from Google’s own top-10 results. ChatGPT? Only about 30%. Translation: ranking well on Google tells you almost nothing about whether you exist inside ChatGPT. That’s not a theory anymore, it’s a number.
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Amazon’s New Ads Let You Shop By Just... Talking to Them.
Unveiled at Cannes, “Alexa+ Agentic Ads” let a shopper complete a purchase inside the ad itself, through natural conversation, no click required. Papa John’s and The Orchard are already testing it. Click-through rate just met its replacement: the chat-through rate.
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Meta Quietly Rebuilt Its Entire Creative Pipeline.
A new AI image generator with reasoning-based edits, room redesigns, and in-image text rendering is rolling out across Facebook, Messenger, and Advantage+ creative. If a client runs Meta spend, their creative process is about to get faster and stranger, whether they signed up for it or not.
Sources
MediaPost · BestMediaInfo, Jul 9 · BestMediaInfo, Jul 7 · MarTech Series · Wonderful Machine · Adweek