Meta's revised Commercial Terms, effective October 30, 2026, let it use automated software to access, index, cache and re-crawl websites linked to advertisers' products and to train its products on that content. Acceptance is passive; there is no partial opt-out.
On October 21, 2026 Google updated its "Control what you share with Google Search" page to list seven methods, up from five. The two new rows, robots meta and snippet controls and the Search generative AI control, describe existing options.
A MarTech contributed column by Becky Simms of Reflect Digital, published October 20, 2026, argues AI search lets users express full context and that prompt tracking shows only one version of possible answers. It cites no data.
PPC Land reported on October 18, 2026 that DeepSeek opened Search and Fetch APIs on October 17 at $0.75 per 1,000 successful calls from October 31, while Cloudflare said it will grade verified bots on robots.txt compliance and slowing after 429 responses.
DaVinci Commerce, formerly Jivox, announced DaVinci Brand Agent on October 5, 2026, built on a patent-pending Product Context Memory. A blog post claims "over 30%" higher product discoverability across many LLMs; no baseline or prompts are given.
A MarTech contributed column by Greg Kihlstrom, published October 13, 2026, cites surveys on consumer willingness to let AI agents shop. It is opinion; most survey methods are missing and one example rests on a single reporter's test.
Semrush's H2 2026 AI Visibility Index, published October 13, adds a UK benchmark. In July Tesco ranked 25th among ChatGPT's cited UK domains and Asda 606th, though both were top-100 mentions on all four platforms.
On October 15, 2026 Google said AI Overviews and AI Mode will show more inline links, a section highlighting the one or two most useful links, and news carousels with Preferred Sources. Google did not say click data will appear in reports.
DataDome's Q3 2026 AI Traffic Report, published October 15, counted about 25 billion AI agent requests, up 41.5% on Q2. Meta's Muse made 19.5 million September requests, 33% of agentic browser traffic, measured over only nine days.
On October 13, 2026 Microsoft Bing added a beta Topics Portfolio tab to the AI Performance report. It groups a site's grounding queries into AI-classified topics and lists opportunity queries where other sites are cited. Numbers are approximate.
