What changed in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI search, with the source for every item.
OpenAI will show labeled display ads next to images that ChatGPT generates, starting later in October with a small test group of U.S. advertisers. It's also piloting brand-suitability checks with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, the verification vendors advertisers already use on the open web. TechCrunch puts ChatGPT at 1.2 billion weekly users.
Cloudflare's new beta charges AI companies each time they use a publisher's content, rather than each time they crawl it. The buyer offers a price for a specific use, the publisher accepts or declines in the dashboard, and the buyer reports every use (time, source URL, event ID) through one API. Cloudflare bills monthly and pays out. The weak point is in that description: usage is self-reported. Pay Per Crawl, launched in 2025, charged for requests that pass through Cloudflare's own network. This model depends on AI companies accurately reporting what ended up in their answers.
Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round, which came less than seven months after Profound's $96M Series C. The company says more than 1,000 enterprise brands use it, including 16% of the Fortune 500. Put it next to Peec AI's revenue jump in May and Sitecore buying Scrunch in June (both below) and AI visibility tracking now looks like a standing budget line at large companies.
Every site now has the generative AI reports in Search Console, after a phased rollout that began in June. They count impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's generative AI features, split by page, country and date (and device, for Search). There are no clicks. You can see that a page appeared in an AI answer, but not whether anyone visited because of it, and that's the number most teams get asked for.
Ads reach ChatGPT Free and Go users in India, starting with 50 brands buying through WPP and Omnicom. A self-serve ad manager was planned for September with a daily minimum of ₹725, about $7.60, low enough for a small local business to test. OpenAI has said India has more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users.
Claude Cowork now opens web pages in its own side-panel browser instead of driving Chrome through the Claude in Chrome extension. It's the default for Enterprise and rolling out to Pro, Max and Team; users can switch back in settings. For site owners the practical test is simple: try completing your demo form or reading your pricing table through an agent, because more of those visits won't involve a person clicking.
Google says the Gemini app has more than 1 billion monthly users, over 100 million of them active on iOS, generating more than 150 million images a day. That's a separate product from AI Mode, which Google said passed 1 billion monthly users at I/O in May.
Askedabout ran 12 buyer questions through four engines three times each in an August 3 run, 144 answers in all, and counted citations. Perplexity returned exactly 20 in 34 of 36 answers. ChatGPT averaged 7 (range 4 to 11) and Gemini 12. Claude cited nothing in 16 of 36 answers, 44%. The sample is small, but it shows why a single blended citation rate misleads: a Perplexity citation is one slot in 20, a ChatGPT citation one in about 7, and in Claude there's often no slot to win.
The Ninth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction Amazon won on March 10, holding that when Comet's assistant acts for a logged-in user, it's the user who accesses Amazon's computers, not Perplexity. The case goes back to the district court and the underlying dispute is undecided. If the reasoning holds, sites will find it harder to treat user-directed agents as unauthorized bots, and robots.txt won't settle it either: Perplexity already says its user-request agent generally ignores the file.
Atlas was deprecated on August 9, less than a year after its October 2025 launch. Its agent browsing moves into a new ChatGPT desktop app that combines chat, Codex and a built-in browser, plus a cloud browser that runs agent tasks on OpenAI's servers. Those cloud tasks reach your site from OpenAI's infrastructure, not the user's machine, which matters if you rate-limit or block by IP range.
Semrush ran 126 million U.S. prompts from January to April 2026 across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews in 22 industries. ChatGPT averaged 15 sources per response and Gemini 3. Only 36 global brands held a top-100 spot on all four platforms in every month. Note the ChatGPT figure: Askedabout's August test (above) counted about 7. Different prompts, months and methods produce different answers, so never quote a sources-per-answer number without its methodology.
Sitecore didn't disclose terms. Scrunch's insights, recommendations and Agent Experience Platform will be built into SitecoreAI's content management, content marketing and digital asset management products, which puts the tool that finds a visibility gap next to the editor that fixes it.
The suit, filed in New York federal court, alleges Perplexity copied thousands of CNN's stories, videos and images without permission and distributes content that is "identical or substantially similar" to CNN's. Perplexity's spokesperson said facts can't be copyrighted. The company already faces suits from The New York Times, Reddit and Dow Jones.
The Berlin startup more than doubled its run rate in a few months, after reaching $4M within ten months of launch, TechCrunch reports, citing sources. Peec raised a $21M Series A about six months earlier.
Goodie compared AI referral traffic for a panel of 41 brands (2.8 million sessions, May to August 2025) with March to April 2026. ChatGPT fell from 89.1% to 62.6% of AI referrals. Claude rose from 1.4% to 18.5%, Gemini from 2.4% to 10.6% and Perplexity from 3.1% to 7.3%.
Two caveats before you quote it. The panel is mostly B2B sites, which may favor Claude, and the 2026 figures are averaged per brand, so a few Claude-heavy brands can lift the number. Even with both, a B2B team reporting only on ChatGPT is now missing more than a third of its AI referrals.
Digital Applied reports that only about 11% of domains are cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity for similar prompts, attributing the figure to Profound's analysis of 680 million citations (August 2024 to June 2025). We couldn't find the 11% in Profound's original post, so treat it as secondhand. What that post does show points the same way: Wikipedia makes up 47.9% of ChatGPT's top 10 sources and Reddit 46.7% of Perplexity's (7.8% and 6.6% of all citations).
Google said AI Mode has more than 1 billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch, and made Gemini 3.5 Flash its default model worldwide. The structural news was the merger: AI Overviews and AI Mode now form one AI Search experience on desktop and mobile. Background information agents go first to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.
Two formats are in testing. Conversational Discovery ads use creative that Gemini writes around the user's specific question. Highlighted Answers put ads inside AI Mode's recommendation lists, the same lists organic AI visibility work tries to get into. Both carry a "Sponsored" label and an AI-written explainer, and Google is steering advertisers to them through Performance Max and AI Max.
AI Overviews and AI Mode get more inline links beside the text they support, site-name previews on hover (desktop), a "Subscribed" label on links from a user's news subscriptions, previews of forum and social posts, and suggested next reads at the end of many answers. Google credits query fan-out with finding these sites. If buyers in your category argue on Reddit, those threads now get a preview of their own inside the answer.
Advertisers can now buy ChatGPT ads in a self-serve Ads Manager beta as well as through partners, with cost-per-click bidding and expanded measurement. Ads first appeared for U.S. Free and Go users in a February pilot, so this went from pilot to self-serve in about three months.
Ahrefs compared 540,000 query pairs from its September 2025 U.S. Brand Radar data. AI Mode and AI Overviews cited the same URLs 13.7% of the time, and 16.3% among each feature's top 3 citations, even when they reached similar conclusions. Same company, same index, mostly different sources. One combined Google AI number averages two different results.
The numbers behind these stories live in AI search statistics. For why ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google cite such different sources, read how AI engines choose sources. The crawler and licensing fights above show up in our own study of 261 sites' robots.txt files: 65% block no AI crawler at all, while 88% of news sites block at least one training bot.
With Profound raising $180M, Peec AI passing $10M in annualized revenue and Sitecore buying Scrunch, the tracking market is busy. Our roundups of the best AI visibility tools and Profound alternatives compare them, and the free Arobis AI visibility checker shows whether ChatGPT names your brand today. To see which AI bots can reach your own site, use the robots.txt AI checker.