Here’s what changed this week in AI tools: pricing shifts, new features, and platform updates worth knowing about if you use AI in your marketing or content workflow.
Google: AI Overviews Now Generates Its Own Images
Google began rolling out AI-generated images inside AI Overviews this month, using its Nano Banana model to invent visuals at the top of the results page. Those images carry no source link and no credit, so a search that used to send traffic to your product photos or infographics can now resolve without a click. If visual search is a traffic channel for you, start tracking impressions against clicks separately, because the gap is about to widen.
Source: Search Engine Land
Mod Op: Free AI Search Visibility Audit and the GEO 50 Benchmark
Mod Op launched geo.modop.ai on August 13, a no-cost audit that scores how your brand shows up across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other answer engines, plus a citation report on which sites those engines lean on when describing you. It also published The GEO 50, ranking major brands on AI answer presence, and the headline finding is that big name recognition does not translate into AI recommendations. Worth running once as a baseline, though treat the score as diagnostic, not as a number you report to a client.
Source: GlobeNewswire
OtterlyAI: Agent Analytics Shows Which AI Bots Crawl Your Site
OtterlyAI shipped Agent Analytics on August 13, a feature that reads server logs to report every AI crawler hitting your site and which pages each one reached, covering ChatGPT-User, Claude-Bot, Perplexity-User, and Google-Agent. This matters because standard analytics run on JavaScript and AI agents pull pages straight from the server, so none of this traffic has been showing up in your dashboards. One caution: user agent strings are self-declared and can be spoofed, so read crawler volume as an infrastructure signal rather than as demand.
Source: GlobeNewswire
Dash Social: MCP Integration Pipes Brand Data Into ChatGPT and Claude
Dash Social launched a Model Context Protocol integration on August 13 that routes your brand performance, audience, and competitive data directly into AI assistants. The practical effect is that when someone asks ChatGPT or Claude about your category, the assistant can draw on what you know about yourself instead of scraping whatever it finds. Before you turn this on, decide which data categories you are willing to expose to a third-party model and write down who approves each one.
Source: GlobeNewswire
DeepLumen: 1,000 Merchants Live and a Pay-Per-Sale Model for AI Orders
DeepLumen announced on August 13 that more than 1,000 merchants now run its Agentic Page product, with measured cases showing AI crawler traffic up as much as 659% and some merchants logging a first attributable AI-driven order within two days. It is also moving to a cost-per-sale model where you pay only when DeepLumen attributes a sale to AI discovery. If you evaluate this, get in writing how an attributable AI order is defined, because the vendor performing the attribution is also the one collecting on it.
Source: PR Newswire
Rival Technologies: 72% of Gen Z Have Punished a Brand Over AI Marketing
A Rival Technologies study of 901 Gen Z consumers found that 72% took action against a brand after spotting AI-generated marketing, including 50% who unfollowed, 48% who unsubscribed, and 43% who stopped buying entirely. Seventy-four percent said they react negatively when they realize AI made the creative, and only 8% react positively. The takeaway is not to stop using AI, it is to keep the human fingerprints on anything customer-facing and be careful with obviously synthetic visuals and voice.
Source: PR Newswire
OpenAI: The Sora API Shuts Down September 24
The Sora web and app products already went dark in April, and the Sora API follows on September 24, 2026, with no published successor from OpenAI for video generation at the API level. If any part of your content pipeline calls sora-2 or the Videos API, you have about five weeks to move to Veo, Runway, Kling, or an avatar-based tool like HeyGen. Export anything you want to keep from sora.chatgpt.com before the cutoff.
Source: OpenAI Help Center