IAB Australia today published the recording of a panel held on 7 July 2026 at its Commerce and Retail Media Summit in Sydney, in which executives from News Australia, Medium Rare and Suddenly set out what large language model discovery has done to retail content strategy, disclosing a 220% quarterly increase in Google AI Overviews appearances for one pharmacy chain and a 46% rise in brand mentions for an unnamed Australian retailer.

The session, titled "Content to Commerce: Discoverability in 2026 and Beyond", ran during the afternoon programme at the NSW Teachers Federation Conference Centre in Surry Hills. It featured Sophie Miura, General Manager eCommerce at News Australia; Andrew Robertson, Head of Sales at CommBank Connect, Medium Rare; and Jennifer Stokes, Head of Retail Media at Suddenly, the content agency inside News Corp. The full recording runs for roughly 22 minutes and was posted to the IAB Australia YouTube channel today, three weeks after the event itself.

That gap between the event and the publication of the material matters less than what was said in it. The panel is one of the few occasions on which Australian publishers and commerce media operators have put figures against generative engine optimization work rather than describing it in the abstract.

Discovery has fragmented, and the numbers are now being counted

Miura opened by describing what her team has observed across News Australia's shopping content, which spans news.com.au, Vogue and Body and Soul. Her team both produces that content and commercialises it with retailers and brands.

"We've seen such a shift really in the last 12 months when it comes to consumers moving from a very linear, easy to comprehend purchase journey that has a relatively clear playbook to one that is very fragmented," Miura said. That fragmented journey, in her account, now runs from large language models such as ChatGPT to social platforms including YouTube and TikTok, through publisher content, before a transaction finally lands.

The mechanism her team has been unpicking is how models decide which brands to surface. According to Miura, large language models learn about a brand and decide when to serve it as an answer in a few identifiable ways: what a company says on its own site, what trusted third-party sources such as publishers say about its brand and products, and what consumers say on platforms including Reddit and YouTube.

News Australia has concentrated on the middle of those three. "What we've been doing is focusing on the publisher piece and seeing how our content drives citations for our clients and helps them achieve greater visibility across large language models for key categories that they want to focus on," Miura said.

Five months, 46%

The measurable output of that work, as described on the panel, involves a leading Australian retailer that Miura did not name. Her team has been measuring how the retailer appears across various models for its core categories, then featuring it in content where ChatGPT can be observed citing News Australia titles.

"So we're five months in," Miura said. "Five months in, we've driven a 46% increase in brand mentions across ChatGPT and Google AI Mode."

The conversion side of that equation was described as unresolved. Miura was explicit about the gap: "There is no clear framework at this stage for tying that piece together. Like I'll be completely transparent." She pointed to vendor activity as the reason for cautious optimism, citing Partnerize releasing technology intended to trace citation through to conversion, alongside work from Semrush and Adobe. "We're getting there. We're making strides, but we're not there yet," she said.

That candour lines up with the wider evidence base. Adobe research published earlier this month found that 81% of brands running a unified AI and search optimization strategy report traffic gains, while 45% still cannot fully measure their visibility. A critical academic survey of 45 generative engine optimization studies concluded last week that claims about return on investment clearly outstrip the academic evidence, and that some rewriting techniques can reduce a page's retrieval rate rather than improve it. Marketers themselves remain unconvinced by the vocabulary: a survey of 343 United States decision-makers released on 21 July found 81% reject the generative engine optimization label entirely.

Chemist Warehouse, the House of Wellness, and a 220% quarter

Stokes used the panel to walk through Suddenly's work with Chemist Warehouse, a client relationship built around a multi-channel content property called the House of Wellness. Suddenly also produces content for The Good Guys, Westpac and other clients, and handles non-endemic retail media sales for BWS, part of Endeavour Group.

The House of Wellness assets described on the panel include a quarterly magazine, a monthly newspaper-inserted magazine, a website vertical produced in partnership with Body and Soul from News Corp, a television programme and a radio station. The print publication distributes 5.3 million copies a month across newspaper insertion and in-store pickup, a distribution channel Chemist Warehouse owns outright.

All of the digital content is optimised for discovery. Stokes gave two figures for the most recent quarter: a 220% increase in Chemist Warehouse or its products being surfaced in Google AI Overviews, and a 50% increase in average organic page views. The Body and Soul partnership added exposure to a further one million audience members.

"The content earns attention because it is genuine, authentic, valuable content to the customers, but we've made it discoverable at the same time," Stokes said. She framed the outcome in positioning terms rather than traffic terms, arguing the work has moved Chemist Warehouse from being understood as a pharmacy to being part of a health and wellness journey.

The maintenance requirement was stated plainly. "It is reviewed frequently because it needs to change with the market. It needs to change with consumers. It's not a set and forget thing," Stokes said.

Miura connected the two case studies directly, arguing that message consistency across owned assets and publisher content is what determines whether a brand surfaces coherently across models. Inconsistent signals across touchpoints, on that reading, weaken the citation base a model draws on.

CommBank Connect: 1,300 screens and a buying problem

Robertson described CommBank Connect, the commerce media operation sitting between Commonwealth Bank and content agency Medium Rare, as reaching three in five Australians across its channels. The network has been publicly live for a comparatively short period, with the internal build running roughly 18 months.

His worked example involved small business customers filmed discussing a transition from petrol vehicles to electric. That content ran across CBA digital environments including the homepage, in a magazine distributed in branches, and across a small-format digital screen network of 1,300 units optimised to a small business audience. The same vehicle brand was then integrated into an activation at a Westfield centre, with click paths running through to Cars for CommBank for lead capture.

Robertson identified the resulting commercial problem without hedging. "How do you buy that? It doesn't fit in a lot of models at the moment," he said, describing budgets earmarked for digital out-of-home in a coming quarter when the proposition spans social, print, screens and owned digital simultaneously. He also reported a recurring reaction in client meetings: "We didn't expect you to show up this way."

Asked about the durable advantage in that model, Robertson named trust rather than data or reach. He described the position of a network holding significant customer information as privileged, and argued that when a highly trusted supermarket brand and a highly trusted bank appear together in a brief, content placed in those environments carries additional weight. The same argument, he said, applies to other Australian retail media networks with strong consumer trust relationships.

The non-endemic reality check

The most direct assessment of the hour came from Stokes on non-endemic demand, meaning advertisers whose products are not stocked on the retailer's shelves.

"There's a perception that non-endemic is a river of gold," she said. "It is not. It is hard and there are lots and lots of challenges."

Her diagnosis was structural. Agencies pitched on a non-endemic proposition ask where the same audience can be reached more cheaply and easily elsewhere, which places the burden on differentiation rather than volume. "You need more than scale. Scale's everywhere. Scale's cheap. You need audience. You need something special," she said, adding a blunt alternative for operators without one: "or I'd say stay home."

Measurement compounds the difficulty. Stokes noted that reporting on non-endemic campaigns is harder because return on ad spend and incremental sales cannot be calculated for products the retailer does not sell. Robertson confirmed that CommBank Connect is, for the most part, a non-endemic network, and acknowledged persistent scepticism about whether non-endemic investment in commerce media works at all.

Those constraints sit against a market that has been expanding regardless. Walmart integrated VIZIO connected television inventory into its Ad Center specifically to unlock non-endemic categories such as automotive and financial services, and OpenTable converted dinner reservations into ad inventory for advertisers with no restaurant presence. Koddi research covered in November 2025 found only 12% of commerce media organisations can activate and measure across onsite, offsite and in-store environments.

Where the panel landed on organisational structure

Both Miura and Stokes returned to internal capability as the binding constraint. Asked which client roles are engaging most productively, Miura said the question cuts across departments.

"This new space doesn't sit cleanly in anyone's lane, nor should it, to be honest," she said, describing the organisations performing well as those able to assemble people from affiliate teams, retail media, marketing and adjacent functions around a shared goal. She characterised the clients making progress as curious ones approaching the channel with an open mind rather than a fixed brief.

Miura also declined to treat referral traffic and AI visibility as competing objectives. Driving referrals and sales for retail and brand clients remains the core measure for her team, she said, while partners are simultaneously expanding the key performance indicators they apply.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Three points carry beyond the room.

First, the figures cited are visibility figures, not revenue figures, and both speakers said so. A 46% lift in brand mentions and a 220% lift in AI Overviews appearances describe presence in an answer, not a transaction. Independent research has repeatedly found the mention-to-citation-to-conversion chain to be broken at the first link: Semrush found the overlap between mentioned brands and cited domains falls as low as 30% on Gemini, meaning a brand can appear in answers while other domains supply the evidence. A generative engine optimization vendor shut down in October 2025 after concluding its visibility data changed no customer behaviour.

Second, the publisher incentive here is not decorative. Australian publishers are pursuing citation-driven commerce content at the same moment that search referrals are contracting. A randomised field experiment involving 1,065 Chrome users found AI Overviews cut outbound organic clicks 39.8% and raised zero-click searches 34.5%, with no measurable improvement in user satisfaction. Ahrefs data cited last week put the click-through decline for top-ranked pages at 58%. British publisher Reach reported on 22 July that Google referral volumes fell 55% year on year. Selling AI visibility as a service to retailers is one of the few responses available to a publisher whose search-derived audience is shrinking.

Third, the buying-model problem Robertson raised is now common to the category rather than specific to a bank. Australian retail media has been projected to grow from 650 million US dollars in 2025 to three billion by 2027, and measurement has been the recurring unresolved item at this summit since at least July 2025. A proposition spanning print, screens, owned digital and publisher content does not map onto channel-specific budget lines, and no panellist claimed a solution.

The wider context is a discovery layer still moving. IAB Australia's own agentic AI report, published on 18 June 2026, argued that discovery, consideration and purchase can compress into a single sequence of seconds once an agent acts on a consumer's behalf, leaving brands that agents cannot parse effectively absent from the transaction. The same organisation documented in 2025 that social platforms had already become search destinations for younger Australian shoppers. The panel published today describes the intermediate stage: publishers and commerce networks measuring what they can, on a chain that does not yet reach the till.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Sophie Miura, General Manager eCommerce at News Australia; Andrew Robertson, Head of Sales at CommBank Connect, Medium Rare; and Jennifer Stokes, Head of Retail Media at Suddenly, speaking on an IAB Australia panel. The wider summit programme included Natalie Stanbury and Gai Le Roy of IAB Australia, retailers TerryWhite Chemmart, MixIn and Metcash, and sessions featuring Microsoft, Galderma, Arnott's, Amazon, Criteo, Vudoo, Uber and Epsilon.

What: A panel titled "Content to Commerce: Discoverability in 2026 and Beyond" in which publishers and commerce media operators disclosed measured results from large language model visibility work, including a 46% increase in brand mentions across ChatGPT and Google AI Mode over five months for one Australian retailer, and a 220% quarterly increase in Google AI Overviews appearances plus a 50% rise in organic page views for Chemist Warehouse. Panellists stated that no framework yet connects those citations to conversions, and that non-endemic retail media cannot be reported through return on ad spend or incremental sales.

When: The panel took place on Tuesday 7 July 2026 during a summit running from 12.30pm to 5.00pm. IAB Australia published the recording today, 28 July 2026.

Where: The NSW Teachers Federation Conference Centre in Surry Hills, Sydney. The distribution channels discussed span Australian print, in-store, digital screens, radio, television and publisher web properties, while the discovery platforms discussed are global.

Why: Australian publishers and commerce media networks are quantifying visibility inside AI answers at the same time that search referral traffic is falling, giving retailers a measurable presence metric without a proven revenue link. The buying models used by agencies do not yet accommodate propositions that span print, screens, owned digital and publisher content simultaneously, and non-endemic demand remains harder to sell and harder to report than the category's growth figures suggest.