November 14th-November 20th // Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
In This Edition!
Gemini 3 is everywhere!
Adobe drops $1.9B to AI-ify itself
Amazon's Rufus barks … ads
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Top Headlines🔥
Google is flexing its biggest advantage over OpenAI with Gemini 3
Source: Business insider
November 18th, 2025
Summary: Google's newest model, Gemini 3, beats GPT-5 Pro's benchmark scores and tops reasoning and user satisfaction rankings.The model has been well received by the market. Released seven months after Gemini 2.5, Google is calling Gemini 3 its most intelligent, most integrated model thus far. In a first, the company integrated Gemini 3 directly into Google Search immediately. The integrated approach shows off Google's “full stack” advantage, from AI search, to deep research, to cloud infrastructure, and distribution through its devices and properties, including the Gemini app, which already has 650M monthly users. And chips! Google is pumping out chips called TPUs, which stand for tensor processing units, putting it in competition with Nvidia. Alongside Gemini 3, Google also added its popular Nano Banana AI image generator to Google Ads to help marketers generate higher-quality ad creative.
Opinion: Remember back in 2022, when Google’s AI strategy was a confusing mess? Not anymore! Google is back, baby! And it’s using all of its monopoly power to make sure its AI sticks. OpenAI should be scared. Google is integrating AI everywhere in order to speed up its flywheel, compounding its own value. For marketers, this means Google can offer AI-specific economies of scope and scale right out of the gate. That’s exciting! But also, it’s scary. Remember, monopolies are bad. Be careful.
Adobe bolsters AI marketing tools with $1.9 billion Semrush buy
Source: Reuters
November 19th, 2025
Summary: Semrush makes generative engine optimization (GEO), SEO, social media, and digital advertising software for marketers. This deal helps Adobe evolve its search optimization product for the AI era in a big way. Semrush went public in 2021 and is used by companies like TikTok and Amazon. The acquisition, expected to close in the first half of 2026, comes as Adobe faces investor pressure to monetize AI.
Opinion: AI visibility (AIO, GEO) is the next big search frontier. Adobe wants needs to get ahead of it. Expect Adobe to bundle this into their Cloud offering, making AI search optimization as standard (and expensive) as SEO.
Amazon’s Rufus is testing ads in AI chat🔒
Source: Ad Age
November 19th, 2025
Summary: Amazon introduced sponsored prompts in Rufus, its AI shopping assistant used by 250M customers, marking one of the industry's first attempts to monetize AI chat. The ads appear as two kinds of sponsored prompts: product-specific or brand-related. For example, a TV search might surface a Samsung-specific sponsored prompt.
Amazon reports 60% higher purchase intent when shoppers search through Rufus versus traditional search. For now, sponsored prompts are free extensions of existing sponsored products and brands campaigns, though brands can opt out. Amazon will provide metrics on impressions, clicks, and orders generated from prompts.
Opinion: Amazon just made sponsored search look quaint. This is obviously a massive opportunity for brands. But it’s not necessarily about ad budgets. Amazon is training Rufus on which brands provide the best structured data and product context. Brands that win here will be the ones that Rufus learns to trust because their product information made the AI look smart. Feed Rufus bad data now, and you might be algorithmically penalized later.
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: Agent 365 is a centralized management system that lets IT teams track, approve, and govern AI agents across their organization—including agents from Adobe, ServiceNow, Workday, and those built with Microsoft tools. A single dashboard helps administrators track which agents are being used, measure how many employee hours they're saving, identify security risks, and block unauthorized agents before they can access company data.
Quick Take: Companies are deploying dozens or hundreds of AI agents. Without a management layer, businesses face potentially chaotic "agent sprawl." Microsoft is positioning Agent 365 as the solution before the problem becomes widespread. Microsoft wants to sell the ultimate agent to oversee all agents.
What It Does: AI visibility platform, Profound, launched a Shopping Analysis tool, which shows brands how their products appear when shoppers use AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude to research products. The tool tracks which products get recommended in AI conversations, how often they appear, what descriptions AI uses, and which competitors they're compared against. Unlike text-only monitoring tools, Shopping Analysis captures the visual experience, including product images, placement within conversations, and complete response details.
Quick Take: As more consumers ask AI to find products for them instead of browsing retail sites, brands risk going blind to a critical new sales channel. Profound creates visibility, which is the first step towards brands optimizing their products for AI.
What It Does: Beacons aims to help brands combine their data with their partners’ without actually moving the underlying information. Beacons are deployed directly into a brand's cloud or warehouse and use AI to find patterns and matches across different datasets in real time. Disney is one of the first companies to use Beacons.
Quick Take: Clean rooms are too complicated for most marketers to use regularly. InfoSum is betting that AI-powered automation fixes the adoption problem that's plagued data collaboration.
AI Use Case of The Week💡
The Setup: Albertsons wanted to improve the shopping experience by helping customers more easily find products, get recipe suggestions, and complete purchases across digital channels.
The AI Solution: Albertsons partnered with Google Cloud to launch Ask AI, a conversational AI agent that sits in the search bar of all store apps. Ask AI engages shoppers in multi-turn conversations to understand preferences, recommend products, suggest unexpected pairings, and answer complex questions like product comparisons.
The Results:
• Customers using Ask AI frequently add one or more additional items to their cart beyond their original query.
• 85% of conversions began with exploratory questions rather than specific product searches.
Why This Matters: The results show consumers often want guidance and are open to recommendations. Retailers who enable conversational commerce rather than forcing customers into using rigid search terms could capture more wallet share through better product discovery and basket expansion.
Your Action: Retailers, run this test: Search your site for 5 need-based queries your customers might ask ("dinner for picky kids," "easy weeknight meals under $30," "keto snacks for travel"). If your search returns zero results or generic category pages, you're losing to AI-enabled competitors. Prioritize adding conversational AI to search if: (1) your average basket size is too small, (2) customers frequently buy complementary products, and / or (3) you have high browse-to-exit rates.
Other Notable Headlines📌
Yahoo is quietly testing 6 AI agents for advertising🔒- The Yahoo DSP agents can help marketers automate their ad campaigns, improve campaign performance, and analyze performance.
Target's new partnership with OpenAI brings shopping into ChatGPT - Target is one of the first large retailers to let consumers buy products directly in ChatGPT.
2M people use Meta's Vibes AI feed each day - Vibes is Meta's new feed of AI-generated videos.
Brands could cut open web display spend 30% in response to AI search🔒- As Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode shrink traditional search, and thus search-driven traffic to websites, Forrester predicts advertisers will redirect budgets toward CTV and paid social.
Havas invests in AI research platform Vurvey Labs and uses its product - Havas helped fund Vurvey Labs' $8.5M Series A and is using Vurvey to create synthetic audiences.
Digitas and Publicis offer their own zero-click analysis tools🔒- Agencies are racing to develop even more tools to help brands understand how they're showing up in AI-powered searches.
White House prepares executive order to block state AI laws - States like New York, California, Texas, and Colorado are furthest along in regulating AI.
AppsFlyer drops 8 products, adding AI agents and cross-platform analytics - The mobile attribution platform's new Agentic AI Suite is billed as an "execution layer" with pre-built marketing agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) support to help companies build their own agents.
Perplexity's AI shopping tool is now free for all, just in time for Black Friday - The AI search startup will remove the $20-per-month paywall from its one-click buying tool.
Introducing the AI LUMAscape - We started with a ‘scape, we’re ending with a ‘scape. Industry investment bank LUMA Partners breaks down AI companies into categories like foundational LLMs, customer experience, media facilitation, data enablement, and answers economy.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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