AI Mode dispatches to apps; publisher supply drops 40%; MMM picks sides

Rebuild your zero-click model against the Ozone 40% ceiling, not Google's PR number. If your organic revenue forecast still assumes 2024 CTR curves, it's already wrong — reforecast H2 before anyone above you does the math.

Audit Google-Extended, Google-CloudVertexBot, and NotebookLM-related user agents in your robots.txt and CDN rules this week. For accessibility- and compliance-driven sites, document the decision either way — regulated buyers will ask.

If your product has an API and a consumer use case, the AI Mode connector list is the new distribution shelf — start tracking who's on it and how selection happens before your category gets defined without you.

If you run call tracking, add an AI-referral segment now — the lead-quality signal is real and worth reporting even if close rates don't yet justify budget shifts. For regulated buyers (healthcare, legal, financial services), this is your first defensible ROI story for AEO work.

Pull your WAF and Cloudflare bot-management logs against verified Googlebot IPs this week. This is the single most common cause of the 'we lost rankings and don't know why' ticket for enterprise sites — especially airports and government portals with strict security postures.

Turn the report on, but export the underlying data to your own warehouse weekly. Aggregated dashboards from the party losing the clicks are not a measurement strategy.

If you're evaluating MMM this quarter, require the vendor to demonstrate how they handle the parent platform's own channel in the priors. 'Neutral' MMM from a platform owner is a marketing claim, not a technical one.

If you buy local for HVAC, plumbing, roofing, or bail — Apple Maps is off the table. Reprioritize your Apple Search Ads and Local Services Ads work instead.

Enterprise buyers considering in-housing: the Georgia-Pacific model is closer to a hybrid — internal programmatic team with agency remaining on strategy and creative. Copy that structure before you copy the pitch deck.

If you're running three-plus concurrent video campaigns, restructure into a group before your Q4 flight — the frequency capping was doing nothing useful at the campaign level.

Update your creative QA checklist and asset metadata now — labels will apply whether or not you self-declare, and government/regulated advertisers should get ahead of procurement's inevitable question.

Robots.txt is a request; Cloudflare's AI bot rules are a decision. If your content strategy depends on being scraped selectively — cited by ChatGPT, not by no-name model trainers — the CDN is now where that policy lives.