Updates by Brett Woodward
At the end of July, Google rolled out an exciting feature to all users of Google Search Console: Platform Properties. This feature allows you to track how Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube results appear on Google Search.
This is a welcome update to Search Console that will help us better understand the cross platform reach of these types of accounts. Once you connect those properties to GSC to start seeing data, you’ll be able to view all the usual metrics you’re used to seeing, like which Instagram/TikTok/X/YouTube posts received clicks and impressions as well as what queries those posts ranked for.
Google has been integrating different types of content into its results for a long time. Sometimes the best answer to a user’s search query is a written post on a website, but sometimes it’s a video or an infographic or a thread. Businesses who are still stuck on the idea that blog posts are the primary way to get visibility on search are quickly becoming irrelevant.
For companies that have made the investment in diversifying their strategies, we’ll soon have source data to explore the impact their efforts on these platforms have made outside of the platforms themselves. That data will help marketers show the value in their work in new ways and ensure those efforts continue to be supported.
I also see this update as a great time to make the case for multi-modal marketing with companies that haven’t yet been convinced of the need to invest in other platforms. With this update Google is explicitly saying that these other types of content should be prioritized if you want your brand to have better visibility in this era of search. And I think that will make it easier to steer the conversation away from “we can’t afford to” and more towards “you can’t afford not to”.
A report from Axios states that OpenAI has agreed to a deal with Yelp in order to use the site’s aggregation of reviews, photos and business information in ChatGPT’s local recommendation responses.
For Yelp, this is an opportunity to gain relevance and distribution in the AI era, and OpenAI obviously needs to keep its own product competitive and able to deliver high quality results since Google Gemini have their own treasure trove of proprietary business information to pipe into Gemini.
This partnership has similarities to Google’s recent one with Reddit as well as many others, and this trend underlines a question that the Axios report points out plainly:
“Is it better to get inside ChatGPT or compete against it?”
The Yelp CEO obviously believes in the former, and was quoted in the report saying “Ultimately, we believe that if we allow our content outside the walls of just Yelp, and we provide it in useful ways to consumers…value does accrue back to Yelp.”
It certainly feels to me that more companies are taking that stance instead of holding out against AI.
Updates by Casey Anderson
OpenAI is advancing ads on two fronts at once: shoring up the conventional performance-marketing toolkit that advertisers already know how to use, while also quietly testing a genuinely new ad format that replaces the click-to-website model with a click-to-conversation one. The former makes ChatGPT Ads easier to adopt today; the latter hints at where OpenAI thinks advertising on a conversational platform should eventually go.
In late July, OpenAI rolled out a batch of advertiser tools aimed at bringing the platform’s feature set closer to what marketers expect from Google Ads or Meta: conversion-optimized (oCPC) bidding tied to a “Conversions” campaign objective, an average daily budget model spread over a rolling seven-day window, automatic budget pacing, geographic exclusions, and bulk campaign management through the Ads API.
New measurement integrations and “Automatic Advanced Matching” features were added to improve conversion attribution on websites. Product feed ads also picked up refreshed cards with pricing and star ratings.
On top of that, they are experimenting with ads that don’t lead to a website at all. A new format spotted in ChatGPT Ads Manager would have a clicked ad open a business-specific ChatGPT conversation instead of a landing page. This “Agent” campaign makes it possible for advertisers to use their business website and data for agent-powered campaigns.
Now that we’ve had the opportunity to test ChatGPT ads, we recognize the simplicity of the platform in its current state does not necessarily match the complexity of the strategy that should go into running ads there. The basic formulaic approach that advertisers have become accustomed to has officially been flipped on its head, for a new model and infrastructure.
Business Agents in ad platforms are on the rise. Now we have Meta entering the chat (literally) with a new chatbot that engages directly with customers and prospects. The newly launched Meta Business Agent was recently announced at its London Conversations event and deployed inside of WhatsApp.
Unlike old rule-based bots, these agents hold real multi-turn conversations, stay on-brand, and can do the heavy lifting: answer support questions, check live inventory, qualify leads, even walk someone through checkout. Meta’s also adding WhatsApp search discovery, so people can find businesses without ever leaving the app.
Again, the idea here is that customers may never hit your website again. They can chat with a business, browse products, and check out entirely within Meta platforms. It works for ecommerce, but also lead gen and appointment booking.
You feed the agent your own data (pricing, inventory, tone), and there’s a dashboard to monitor chats, hand off to a human, and fine-tune it over time.
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