OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft all shipped AI ad news in the last 48 hours.
Click to chat, not to site: OpenAI is piloting Sponsored Agents, which are ads with a “Chat with us” button that opens a branded conversation inside ChatGPT.
Wayfair is testing at a limited scale. Your landing page stops being the destination, and OpenAI owns the middle of the funnel. More natural for the user flow perhaps, less control for you.
Worth caring about because ChatGPT just entered Brand Keys’ loyalty ranking at No. 5, ahead of Netflix and Coca-Cola.
An outstanding ranking for such a new brand, and a sign of things to come?
Google pays some publishers when its AI uses their content, but it tried to keep it secret.
An “AI contribution” pilot in Search Console pays out when your content significantly feeds AI Mode, AI Overviews, or Gemini.
Dozens of sites approached so far, mostly small and mid-sized. Hopefully, this can be more than a pilot and publishers get rewarded for their contributions regularly.
And monetizing those same answers: Google is testing plain text-link ads in AI Mode. Anchor text that reads like the answer, one “Sponsored” label above the whole response.
Finally, Microsoft brought the rulebook for AI ads. New guidance on AI-generated ads, pretty clear: disclose synthetic creative, preserve watermarks and provenance metadata, place disclosures near the content.
Strip that metadata and your ad gets rejected. A label alone won’t rescue deceptive creative either.
An AI tool ranking high in brand loyalty, and all these steps forward for the ads served by AI… Yeah, AI is “here to stay.”
But there’s news for the more classic Google Ads too, which we’ll dive into next.
