Welcome to our weekly briefing on AI Search. The Prompt Marketing industry (aka AI Search / GEO / AEO / LLM SEO) is filled with developments and news. Every week we track the latest developments on how AI systems find, cite and recommend brands. Our News section is designed to filter the noise and pick out the developments that actually change something. This week: advertising inside ChatGPT stops being a US experiment, Google publishes striking adoption numbers, France gets its first full week of AI Overviews, and Anthropic hands every SEO a free lesson in crawl directives.
ChatGPT Ads leave the United States
OpenAI is expanding its ChatGPT ads pilot to the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Brazil and Mexico over the coming weeks. Those markets join the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. OpenAI says the ads business has already passed 100 million dollars in revenue, and in the US the self-serve Ads Manager is now open to advertisers of all sizes, not just the big agency groups that ran the first tests.
Two details stand out. First, OpenAI frames the rollout around what it calls answer independence: ads sit in labelled slots and do not influence the organic answer. That separation is exactly why organic AI visibility work keeps its value even as paid arrives. Second, the Ads Manager is testing "Agent" campaign types, an early signal that OpenAI is preparing ad formats for a world where agents, not people, do the browsing.
For European brands the practical takeaway is simple: the UK is first in Europe, and the rest of the EU will follow. The window to learn conversational ad formats while your competitors ignore them is open now.
AI Overviews now appear on 43% of US searches
Similarweb data reported this week shows AI Overviews appearing on 43% of US searches, up from 15% a year ago. Almost tripled in a year. The same report notes that average query length keeps rising, which means people are learning to talk to search rather than type keywords at it.
Read those two numbers together and the direction is unambiguous: the AI answer is becoming the default search result, and the queries feeding it are becoming prompts. Rankings tell you less and less about visibility. What matters is whether the models select and cite you when they compose the answer.
France, one week in
Google switched on AI Overviews and AI Mode in France on July 22, two years later than neighbouring markets because of the standoff over press neighbouring rights. The rollout runs gradually until September 23.
We have been watching the French reaction closely, and it is unlike anything we saw in markets where the feature crept in slowly. French site owners are posting before and after traffic dashboards, business subforums are debating whether GEO is real or agency hype, and companies are actively asking for help with AI visibility. France is compressing two years of adjustment into a few months, and it is the most instructive market in Europe right now.
Disallow is not noindex
Shared Claude conversations briefly showed up in Google and Bing results this week. The cause was not a leak. Anthropic blocked the share pages in robots.txt but did not add a noindex tag, and once share links appeared on public sites, Google indexed the URLs it was forbidden to crawl. Blocked from crawling also means blocked from seeing the noindex instruction.
Anthropic fixed it quickly, but the mechanism is worth pinning above your desk: robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. If you have pages that must stay out of search results, they need a noindex tag the crawler is allowed to read. We see this misconfiguration in audits constantly, and this week it happened to one of the most technically capable companies in the world.
Also noted
• Google says blocking internal search result pages is no longer a requirement, though letting them all in can create other problems.
• Google's Top Stories carousel is now live inside AI Overviews, giving news publishers a visible slot inside the AI answer.
That is the week. If you want to know what any of this means for your own AI visibility, our door is open.