Jim frets as his birthday comes up for renewal again next week. Meanwhile, Google's head of search, Elizabeth Reid was featured on an Economic Times podcast last week talking about the future of search, the effects LLMs have had on both search and user behaviors, the expanding roles of Agentic AI, and how important India and its extraordinary wealth of tech talent will be to Google's future. OpenAI announced its new Agentic Commerce Protocol which gives merchants a way to build agentic commerce experiences with ChatGPT users effectively bringing instant checkout to ChatGPT. Bots might be represented as traffic but a TollBit study shows Google sends 831 times the number of actual visitors to webites than AIs do. Video search is high in AI searches with YouTube being, by far, the dominant channel. Perplexity's AI search driven Comet Browser is now free and available to all users. Disney characters are being removed from sometimes sexually charged chatbots just as Tilly Norwood makes an appearance as a AI character created by production studio Particle6. Meta is going to sell targeted ads based on users' AI chats. Google is introducing a Gemini powered Google Home speaker/vocal interface in spring 2026. Google AI mode is getting better at analysing images and has introduced agentic features to US based users. Google Ads Reporting might have been affected by the num=100 change including possible issues with keyword recommendations. All this and far more on a preparty edition of Webcology.
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