WP Engine drops hosting requirement for Smart Search AI plugin
Once locked to WP Engine's own paying customers only, Smart Search AI now runs on any WordPress site as agencies weigh search tools against AI answer engines.
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Stay informed with the latest AI industry news impacting digital advertising and marketing. PPC Land covers breaking developments from Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and emerging AI platforms. Get expert analysis on how artificial intelligence transforms programmatic advertising, search marketing, and ad tech. From AI-generated content and brand safety to AI Overview ads and traffic impacts, we deliver actionable insights for advertising professionals navigating the AI revolution.
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Intentsify adds QuantumDemand to score B2B buying groups over leads
The Westwood, Massachusetts vendor pairs it with the Quantum Index, a purchase-readiness score replacing marketing qualified leads for enterprise sales teams.
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AI agents buy like TV buyers: 86% fewer auctions, DataBeat finds
Agentic demand cleared $6.13 against $6.95 for conventional buyers, thinning yield. Rivals now wrap fixed-price deals at 1% fees. Is per-impression buying over?
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ChatGPT referrals to B2B sites gain 303% in a year, Demandbase finds
Monthly visits rose from 645,000 to 2.6 million across 1,584 Demandbase tenants, inflecting in May 2026. CTV spend doubled. What are marketers hedging against?
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Cloudflare Gateway blocks MCP calls that bypass approved portals
Gateway now flags any TLS-inspected request carrying an MCP-Protocol-Version header, though local stdio servers and off-network calls stay outside the new view.
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ChatGPT gains Yelp table booking as 65% want action in AI local search
Reservations and waitlist joins now close inside the chat for Yelp Guest Manager restaurants, 17 days after Yelp licensed reviews to OpenAI. Who counts them?
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Google Ads gains AI dashboards built from text prompts
Analytics now compares campaigns to anonymized averages from similar businesses, and Ads cards answer typed prompts. No rollout dates or language scope given.
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ChatGPT ads reach Europe as its own crawler ignores publisher blocks
ChatGPT ads reach Europe on the Free and Go plans this month, while TollBit finds 15% of AI page fetchers reached URLs that European publishers had blocked.
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15% of AI page fetchers in Europe reached disallowed URLs, TollBit finds
ChatGPT-User hit blocked pages on nearly half the European sites naming it, while 9% of those sites disallow Claude-User. Cloudflare's defaults shift Sept 15.
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Jane Street loses $15bn as leveraged AI bets collapse in July
Situational Awareness holdings fell from a peak near $45bn to about $10bn, and trading revenue still cleared $40bn. What breaks if AI capex financing tightens?
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ChatGPT Free and Go users in Europe face ads from later this month
Selection starts with the current chat topic, general location and device type only. Plus and Pro stay ad-free. An opt-in prompt for personalised ads follows.
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Ad tech repriced everything this week except the thing doing the counting
Ad tech's week in numbers: AI Max carries 72% more invalid traffic, The Trade Desk falls 22%, Comscore cuts $25 million and Perplexity blocks Time's agent ads.
