Someone is buying your brand name in ChatGPT 💸
Welcome to this week's AI + Marketing Weekly! Plus: OpenAI is building video ads, agencies are lapping clients on AI, and Pinterest bet $4B on AI visual search.
~The AI + Marketing Weekly~
what you need to know in ai + marketing (15-second version):
Competitors are buying ads on your brand name in ChatGPT. When users compare two specific brands, an ad from a third brand appears 86% of the time. Adobe’s branded queries triggered ads from Docusign and WooCommerce. (Ad Age)
OpenAI is building image, video, and conversational ad formats. Three new “ad formats software engineer” job listings describe text, image, video, native, conversational, and interactive ad experiences. Current ads are just a headline, description, image, and link. (Digiday)
The AI gap between agencies and brands is widening. At Cannes, agency execs split clients into four buckets: 25% building with AI, 25% wanting to, 25% frozen, 25% dismissing it as a fad. (Digiday)
Cloudflare will block AI crawlers by default starting September 15. The company is also building a pay-per-use model so publishers get compensated when their content feeds AI answers. New analytics show publishers which AI companies are scraping them. (MarTech)
Paid media is becoming an SEO investment in AI search. Reviews, creator partnerships, and sponsored content now shape how AI systems understand and recommend brands. YouTube sponsorships and UGC are the new high-authority backlinks. (Search Engine Land)
Pinterest committed $4 billion to AWS through 2031 for AI visual search. The deal supports model training for 600M+ users, migration to Kubernetes, and expanded use of AWS Trainium chips. Pinterest recently launched an AI-powered conversational search assistant. (Pinterest)
🗞️ top ai + marketing news
chatgpt ads get aggressive
How ChatGPT ads are forcing brands to rethink GEO and paid strategy
Ad Age | ~4-min read
When users compare two brands in ChatGPT, an ad from a third brand shows up 86% of the time. Adobe’s branded queries triggered ads from Docusign (”The Acrobat Sign Alternative”) and WooCommerce (”Leave Adobe Commerce”). Brands need both organic GEO and paid defense to protect high-intent moments.
Why it matters: If you are not defending your brand name in AI search then competitors are buying the space you left empty.
OpenAI looks beyond a single ad format with image, video and conversational ads in the works
Digiday | ~4-min read
Three new job listings for “ad formats software engineer” describe building text, image, video, native, conversational, and interactive experiences. Today’s format is just a headline, short description, image, and link at 440px.
Why it matters: OpenAI is not stopping at text links. Conversational ads inside ChatGPT would be a new format category entirely.
agencies are lapping their clients on AI
Agency bosses say the AI gap with clients is only getting wider
Digiday | ~5-min read
At Cannes, agency execs broke their client base into four buckets: 25% actively building with AI, 25% wanting to but unsure how, 25% frozen, 25% dismissing it as a fad. Governance and cybersecurity approvals are stalling even willing brands. Budgets are flat while ROI timelines stretch to 3-6 months.
Why it matters: If you are in the frozen 50%, your agency is running circles around ya. The uncomfortable question is whether you are paying them to do work you should own.
amazon’s AI video ads already work
Why Conair is moving fast to adopt AI-driven video ads
Marketing Dive | ~4-min read
Conair tested Amazon’s Creative Agent AI tool for Cuisinart’s food processor. A 15-second AI-generated video got 18% higher detail page views and 14% lower cost per view versus a brand-produced video.
Why it matters: The AI-generated ad outperformed the one humans made. The gap between “good enough” and “expensive production” just got a lot smaller for retail media.
paid media is now an AI search play
Paid media is becoming an SEO investment in AI search
Search Engine Land | ~4-min read
YouTube sponsorships, native UGC, and third-party review incentives are the modern equivalent of buying high-authority backlinks. These investments shape how AI systems understand and recommend brands. The lines between paid media, PR, and SEO are officially gone.
Why it matters: Your paid media budget is training the AI that answers your customers’ questions. If your brand shows up in reviews and creator content, it shows up in AI answers. If it does not, it does not.
cloudflare will block AI crawlers by default
Cloudflare makes AI crawler blocking the default for websites
MarTech | ~3-min read
Starting September 15, Cloudflare will block AI crawlers by default for many sites. New analytics show publishers exactly which AI companies are scraping their content. Cloudflare is also building a pay-per-use model so publishers get compensated when their content feeds AI-generated answers.
Why it matters: If your site runs behind Cloudflare (and a huge portion of the web does), your content may stop training AI models unless you explicitly opt in. Good for publishers, potentially disruptive for brands that rely on AI surfacing their pages.
pinterest bets $4 billion on AI visual search
Pinterest works with AWS to power next chapter of AI-driven visual search discovery
Pinterest | ~3-min read
Pinterest committed $4 billion to AWS through 2031, its largest infrastructure deal ever. The investment supports AI model training for 600M+ users, migration to Kubernetes, and expanded use of AWS Trainium chips. Pinterest recently launched a conversational visual search assistant powered by transformer-based generative models.
Why it matters: Pinterest is going all in on AI-powered discovery. For brands with strong visual content, this is the platform making the biggest bet on surfacing products through AI instead of feeds.
👩💻 thought-leader highlights
Greg Isenberg - “Build startups for agents, not people”
Greg laid out 19 startup ideas built for AI agents instead of humans. The highlights: spend controls (Ramp for agents), sandboxed environments, escrow that releases when a job is verified done, and virtual cards spun up per task. His thesis: the internet got built for people, mobile got built for people, this wave gets built for machines.
Marvin Chow - “The marketing engineer doesn’t exist on most org charts yet”
Marvin argues the work that justified most marketing headcount (briefing agencies, running calendars, managing production) is exactly what AI handles now. What it cannot do is design the system: which agents own which parts of the journey, where humans stay in the loop. His question: do you hire marketers and teach them systems thinking, or hire systems thinkers and teach them marketing?
Charlie Hills - “You are prompting Claude Fable 5 like it is Claude 4”
Charlie pulled 12 prompting rules from Anthropic’s official guide. Best ones: “When you have enough information to act, act. Give a recommendation, not a survey.” And: “Before ending your turn, check your last paragraph. If it’s a promise, do it now.” Bonus tip: paste all 12 into your CLAUDE.md file so every session follows them automatically.
Carmen Vicente - “Five emerging stories on my radar right now”
Carmen flagged Cloudflare confirming bots now generate more web traffic than people, TikTok’s “not interested” button reportedly never working, and Instagram expanding “Your Algorithm” so users can dial in topic preferences. Her read on algorithmic tuning: “dialogical algorithms have landed. Get ready to gab to your feeds.”
Hassan El Mghari - “Interactive 3D map of every AI startup in NYC”
Hassan is building an interactive 3D map of NYC’s AI startup ecosystem, powered by Lux Capital’s public database. He plans to open-source it so anyone can add their own startup. Collaborating with Grace Isford to update the directory before launch.
🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools
Klaviyo Composer
AI agent that builds full marketing campaigns from a single prompt. Public beta launched June 30. Generates audience segments, messaging, and channel optimization from 14+ years of Klaviyo marketing data. Works alongside Customer Agent on a shared real-time profile.
Profound Index
Daily benchmark tracking how brands appear in AI-generated answers. Launched June 29 at Zero Click New York. Built on 1.5 billion real-user prompts across 50+ industries. Tracks visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Early data: Travelocity, Orbitz, and Priceline dropped 35-56% on ChatGPT after a single model update.
Attentive Brand Voice 2.0
Text generation system that enforces brand guidelines across SMS, email, and RCS. Launched July 2. Remembers corporate voice, colors, logos, and strategic priorities across sessions. Designed for brands managing messaging at scale across multiple channels.
CiteLens
Generative Engine Optimization platform for tracking brand visibility in AI search. Launched July 2. Monitors how brands are cited across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. Helps marketers understand and improve their share of AI-generated answers.
Alli AI WordPress Plugin
Enables AI crawler visibility for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude through server-side rendering. Launched July 2. WordPress plugin that makes your site readable by AI crawlers that cannot execute JavaScript. Relevant now that Cloudflare is making crawler blocking the default.
💼 cool ai + marketing jobs
Cohere - Marketing Chief of Staff
Higgsfield AI - Head of B2B Marketing
Notion - Revenue Marketer
NVIDIA - Director, Agent Marketing
ElevenLabs - Consumer Music Marketing Lead
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Love y’all,
Carley