The feed
Martech news and analysis. Every story says what changed, why it matters and what marketers should do next.
On October 2, 2026 Cloudflare released a Web Search API inside AI Gateway with three providers at list prices from $0.25 to $7.00 per 1,000 requests, and said providers must identify their crawlers and link results to the original content.
Why it matters
It links the price of agent search to a publisher-friendly rule set: identified crawlers, robots.txt and a link back to the source.
Microsoft Advertising's October 2026 newsletter says retailers should upload their full sellable catalog to Merchant Center, refresh feeds daily and add Universal Commerce Protocol fields such as return policy and a unique merchant item ID.
Why it matters
Agentic shopping depends on clean, complete product data, not just ad-ready SKUs.
A Merchant Center help page revised September 27, 2026 says products with frequent price or availability changes may be disapproved if a mismatch is detected, and that automations may not work for products that change more than once a day.
Why it matters
Retailers with dynamic pricing or fast-moving stock can see products dropped from Shopping surfaces.
In an October 8, 2026 CX Today interview, Acoustic CEO Jon Ziglar warns traffic will become less reliable as AI agents shop for consumers, and recommends tracking behavioural signals such as repeat visits instead of raw traffic.
Why it matters
If agents browse and buy for people, conversion funnels, retargeting and attribution built on human traffic need review.
At Advertising Week New York on October 7, 2026 Revlon and Amazon Ads said a June campaign with Interactive Video Ads and Dynamic TV Creative had a 9.8x higher click-through rate than non-interactive ads and 2.6x category ROAS, per Amazon data.
Why it matters
It addresses the gap between upper-funnel video and lower-funnel conversion on Amazon.
CX Today's October 10, 2026 security roundup: ASOS confirmed a breach affecting basic customer details, IBM and Red Hat remediated 400+ vulnerabilities in Java libraries, and Microsoft made Execution Containers for AI agents generally available.
Why it matters
Customer-facing agents that can read data and act need boundaries and audit trails, and a breach shows what is at stake.
CX Today's October 7, 2026 report on Opsgenie's end of life: access ends April 5, 2027, unmigrated data is deleted, and moving to Jira Service Management leaves gaps in integrations, retention and incident handling.
Why it matters
On-call alerting affects how fast customers hear about and recover from incidents.
In an October 9, 2026 CX Today interview, Infobip's Kim Johal says generic WhatsApp offers are losing impact, consent should drive personalisation, and retailers should not build a WhatsApp-only strategy.
Why it matters
Opt-outs and blocks on a personal messaging app are costly to reverse.
An NTT DATA contact-centre study of 2,160 people in the UK and Ireland, discussed on October 8, 2026, says consumers are pragmatic about AI, prefer phone, email and chat over chatbots, and that 52% of businesses cite legacy integration as a top-three challenge.
Why it matters
If customers accept AI when it is useful, the blocker is often internal systems and handoff design.
CX Today's October 2026 report on online community platforms: Khoros is offering free migration to Aurora AI through the end of 2026, Atlassian moved its forums to Higher Logic Vanilla on September 22 and PTC moved to Gainsight.
Why it matters
A forum migration has real costs in downtime, SEO and member loyalty, and vendors are competing on migration help.
