Hey friends,
Welcome back to cmd+growth.
This week felt like the internet’s middlemen got a lot more ambitious.
OpenAI is building the bones of an ad platform. Google wants Search to do more of the work for users. Reddit keeps turning community conversations into search visibility. And AI shopping agents may not care about sponsored listings nearly as much as retailers would like.
Very normal. Very calm. Nothing to see here.
Let’s get into it.
Today’s topics
- OpenAI opens ChatGPT ads to more advertisers
- Google pushes Search further toward AI agents
- AI shopping agents penalize sponsored products
- Reddit becomes a bigger search and research layer
- Brand mentions keep looking more important
- LinkedIn keeps rewarding deeper engagement
OpenAI Looks More Like an Ad Platform Every Week
The biggest OpenAI story this week was not a new model.
It was the ad business.
OpenAI has started opening ChatGPT ads to more U.S. advertisers through a self-serve Ads Manager. Advertisers can create campaigns, manage budgets and access performance tracking directly inside the platform.
That is a pretty familiar playbook.
Google monetized intent. Meta monetized attention. OpenAI is now trying to monetize something in between: conversations that often happen right before a decision.
The upside for marketers is obvious. ChatGPT sits close to research, comparison and buying intent.
The risk is also obvious. Ads inside a feed are annoying. Ads inside something that feels like advice can damage trust very quickly.
Read more:
- OpenAI: New ways to buy ChatGPT ads
- OpenAI Ads Manager
- Digiday: OpenAI opens ChatGPT Ads Manager to the U.S.
- Search Engine Land: ChatGPT ads expand with self-serve buying
- Search Engine Journal: OpenAI launches self-serve Ads Manager
Google Keeps Pushing Search Toward Agents
Google’s direction for Search is getting clearer.
Less searching.
More doing.
AI Mode is becoming a bigger part of the Search experience, and Google is increasingly showing agentic features that help users compare, decide and act without clicking through a long list of links.
For marketers, that is the uncomfortable part.
If Google completes more of the journey inside Search, visibility before the click becomes more important. Ranking is still useful, but being selected by the AI layer may matter more in some journeys.
Read more:
- Google: A new era for AI Search
- Google: 5 marketing takeaways on the future of Search
- Google: AI Max for Search campaigns
- Google Ads Help: How AI Max for Search campaigns works
- Search Engine Land: Google I/O and the agentic future of Search
AI Shopping Agents Have a Sponsored Product Problem
This might be the most interesting ecommerce story of the week.
Research on AI shopping agents found that they can penalize sponsored tags and rely more heavily on signals such as reviews, ratings, product attributes and platform endorsements.
That is awkward for retail media.
The whole sponsored listing model assumes paid placement can influence shoppers. But if AI agents act as the buyer’s representative and treat sponsored labels as a negative signal, the economics get weird fast.
The practical takeaway is simple: product data, reviews and trust signals may matter more in agent-driven shopping than ad placement alone.
So yes, your product feed may become more important than your banner creative. Exciting stuff. Please try to contain yourself.
Read more:
- Research paper: What Is Your AI Agent Buying?
- Columbia Business School: AI shopping agents
- California Management Review: Competing when AI agents become your customer
- The Query Post: When AI does the shopping
Reddit Keeps Turning Into a Search Layer
Reddit is no longer just a place where people argue about niche hobbies and kitchen appliances with suspicious intensity.
It is becoming a serious search and research layer.
Reddit says 80 million people use Reddit search every week. The platform has also launched Reddit Pro Trends, giving businesses a way to track topics, keywords and conversations across communities.
That matters because Reddit now sits in several discovery paths at once.
Google surfaces Reddit threads. AI systems cite Reddit discussions. Users search Reddit directly when they want real opinions.
For marketers, Reddit is becoming part market research tool, part search surface and part reputation layer.
Read more:
- Reddit: Pro Trends launch
- Search Engine Land: Reddit says 80 million people use its search weekly
- MediaPost: Reddit search and authenticity
- The Query Post: A Reddit thread is ranking where startup websites can’t
Brand Mentions Keep Looking More Important
One theme keeps showing up across AI search conversations: links are not the whole story anymore.
AI systems consume information from articles, forums, reviews, directories, Reddit threads, comparison pages and product documentation.
That means visibility increasingly depends on whether your brand is mentioned across sources the systems trust, not only whether your site has backlinks.
This does not mean backlinks are dead.
Nothing is ever dead in marketing. It just becomes less fun to explain.
But the playbook is clearly expanding. If AI systems are forming recommendations from the broader web, then reputation, consistency and third-party mentions become harder to ignore.
Read more:
- Ahrefs: Brand correlations in AI Overviews
- The Query Post: Brand mentions may matter more than backlinks in AI Search
LinkedIn Keeps Rewarding Depth Over Reach
LinkedIn is still moving away from simple vanity metrics.
Likes and comments matter, but the platform increasingly appears to care about deeper engagement signals like clicks, dwell time, carousel swipes and meaningful interactions.
That is good news if your content actually helps people.
Less good if your strategy is posting “Agree?” under a paragraph that says marketing should be customer-centric.
For B2B marketers, the point is pretty clear: LinkedIn is still valuable, but lazy engagement farming is getting weaker.
Read more:
- Metricool: LinkedIn Trends Study
- Metricool: LinkedIn trends and content formats
- Hootsuite: How the LinkedIn algorithm works
Quick Hits
- ChatGPT ads are getting more structured. OpenAI now has a public Ads Manager flow for campaign setup and advertiser onboarding. Read more.
- AI Max keeps expanding inside Google Ads. The shift from keyword control to intent matching is becoming harder to ignore. Read more.
- Reddit is leaning into search. Reddit Pro Trends gives businesses more visibility into community conversations. Read more.
- AI shopping may reward clean product data. The more agents compare products, the more machine-readable information matters. Read more.
My Take
The biggest change happening right now is not AI itself.
It is delegation.
Users are delegating research to AI.
Google wants users to delegate tasks.
Shopping agents want users to delegate buying decisions.
Reddit is where users delegate trust to communities.
Marketers spent twenty years optimizing for human attention.
The next decade may involve optimizing for systems that make recommendations before humans ever see the options.
That is a very different game.
And honestly, most of us are still figuring out the rules.
See you next week.
Diana Yefremova is an independent SEO consultant and the creator of Cmd+Growth. She writes about SEO, AI search, PPC and digital marketing, with a focus on the updates and changes marketers actually need to know.
Each week, she curates the most useful stories, platform updates and industry conversations so readers can keep up without spending hours digging through everything themselves.
