It feels like a new trend that the AI-related news footnotes carry more weight than the headline.
Here’s what we mean.
Small pond, big splash: Demandbase says monthly ChatGPT referrals to B2B sites climbed from 645,000 to 2.6M year over year.
Impressive, until you notice that’s roughly a third of one percent of the 11B visits it measured.
Perplexity referrals fell. Gemini and Claude stayed flat. So “AI traffic” currently means one company’s product decisions. Mostly.
Ask nicely, get ignored: OpenAI’s documentation says robots.txt may not apply to ChatGPT-User, because a person triggered the fetch.
TollBit found it reached disallowed pages on more sites than any other bot of its kind. Your server logs show what arrived. Your robots.txt only shows what you asked for.
On Google’s end, the sparkle is now optional: It’s adding a toggle to remove visible watermarks from Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria output.
Invisible SynthID and C2PA metadata stay on, and the EU keeps its mandatory labels. Everyone else gets cleaner creative.
Workhorse upgrade: Gemini 3.7 Flash is now in AI Mode, globally, for Pro and Ultra subscribers searching in English.
The quality of output between AI Mode and the Gemini app still has us sceptical about Google’s way of implementing AI, so this is a welcome upgrade.
Enough about AI though. Let’s change gears and look at a real challenge humans in marketing have…
