Google announced that its Ask Advisor AI agent, which launched at Google Marketing Live in May, will now let you benchmark your campaign performance directly against anonymised averages from similar businesses.
You can ask plain-language questions about how you’re doing and receive a contextualised response comparing your numbers against industry peers across acquisition, engagement, monetisation and retention metrics.
It’s worth checking which peer group your Analytics property is currently assigned to before the feature rolls out more broadly, since the comparison is only useful if the businesses in it actually resemble yours.
Google appears to be testing a new homepage for signed-out users that replaces the classic “Google Search” button with three AI shortcuts: Create images, Ask about files, and Brainstorm. An AI Mode button also appears inside the search field.
In testing, both Ask about files and Brainstorm worked without a Google account, while image creation required sign-in.
For 25 years, the Google homepage has been defined by two buttons. Replacing one of them with generative AI shortcuts signals how Google wants new and casual users to think about the product: less as a search engine, more as an AI assistant you happen to be able to search with.
Google’s John Mueller confirmed on LinkedIn this week that AI Mode follow-up queries are recorded in the main Search Console Performance report, not the separate Generative AI report. The catch is that follow-up responses within AI Mode are logged as entirely new queries. SEOs have started surfacing exactly these kinds of responses in their query data and struggling to make sense of them.
It’s a useful reminder that the boundary between “AI Mode impression” and “organic query” in Search Console is not clean. If you’re seeing unusual conversational fragments or single-word queries appearing in your data, AI Mode follow-ups are the most likely explanation, and they’re worth filtering for before drawing conclusions about search behaviour.
A new Reddit study found that 50% of US shoppers use the platform to cross-check AI-generated product recommendations before completing a purchase.
Over one in five shoppers now deliberately add the word “Reddit” to their search queries when looking for honest human perspectives, and Reddit ranked above all other social platforms for helping people make faster purchase decisions in both markets.
Want to understand Reddit's growing role in search, AI visibility and purchase decisions? Our Reddit Statistics 2026 guide breaks down the numbers brands need to know.
Meta has expanded its new Creator Studio app to all iOS users in the US and Canada, following an initial test with a small group of Facebook creators.
The app gives creators a dedicated workspace outside the main Facebook app, with AI-powered content recommendations, a unified inbox, and automated comment replies drafted in your voice.
Early testers reported a creator gaining 4,000 followers from a single video influenced by Creator Studio insights, and another increasing earnings by 144% in their first week.
Instagram updated its wordmark for the first time in a decade on 13th August, with a new typeface described by head Adam Mosseri as “cleaner and more modern.” The refresh keeps the script character of the original but tightens the lettering and rounds out the strokes, particularly on the “s”, “g” and “r”.
Within an hour of launch, “Instagzam” was trending, with users struggling to parse the new “r” which, under the new design, reads more like a “z” at a glance.
Despite the confusion, the wordmark shift has made people look at the Instagram logo for the first time in years, which may itself be the point.
With Meta’s AI glasses facing a growing public backlash over their ability to covertly record people in public, DuckDuckGo partnered with eyewear brand Knockaround to launch the Paso Robles. The $35 pair of sunglasses feature polarised UV400 lenses, a matte black frame, a glossy DuckDuckGo logo, and absolutely zero cameras, microphones, AI, or electronics of any kind.
DuckDuckGo@DuckDuckGo
No camera. No AI. Just Normal Sunglasses. From DuckDuckGo x @Knockaround. (Yes, these are actually real. Get a pair here: knockaround.com/products/duckd…)
3:26 PM · Jul 30, 2026 · 1.68M Views
122 Replies · 476 Reposts · 3.14K Likes
According to the launch video: “When Big Tech started putting cameras in smart glasses, we asked ourselves a radical question: what if we just didn’t do that?”
The product sold out within a week. For a brand whose entire proposition is privacy, it’s an impressive piece of satire that doubles as a functional product.
Anthropic has confirmed it will add invisible watermarks to text generated by Claude models, in compliance with recent EU AI Act transparency rules. All new models will watermark text and files automatically, with the C2PA open standard used for files.
Critically, the watermark travels with the text when it’s copied and pasted, and may persist through some editing. Human-written text that has only been proofread or edited by AI may also carry the watermark.
Some Claude users expressed frustration that the watermarks could expose them for using AI at work or in academic settings. Anthropic has not yet clarified how much editing is required to remove a watermark.
xAI has released Grok 4.6, an update to Grok 4.5 focused on sustained agentic work such as research tasks, complex codebases, and turning broad product ideas into working first versions across many steps. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a composite of nine benchmarks, Grok 4.6 matches GPT-5.6 Sol and sits within a point of Fable 5.
It’s available in Cursor and Grok Build from today, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on 11th August that Gemini has crossed 1 billion monthly active users, making it the fastest product in Google’s history to reach the milestone. The app went from around 750 million users earlier this year to 950 million in July, and 1 billion in August.
Google noted that voice mode is the dominant usage pattern, with live camera feeds and screen sharing also growing rapidly.
ChatGPT already passed 1 billion monthly active users in May, and reported 1 billion weekly active users in July, which is a considerably higher bar. However, as Gemini launched four months after ChatGPT and became a standalone app in 2024, it beats ChatGPT as the quickest AI app to reach 1 billion users.
That’s a wrap for this week! See you next Wednesday for another round-up of the best and biggest stories from across the Search-Verse™.
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