Daily Marketing News, September 16, 2026: ChatGPT ads now open a chat with the brand's bot

Search Engine Roundtable is Barry Schwartz's industry blog, which collects webmaster complaints and rank tracker readings every day. The post went up at 7:52 a.m. New York time and gathered 16 comments during the day: Schwartz logged a sharp spike in chatter and the start of heating in the tools that watch search results. There is no official confirmation from Google. This is separate from the September volatility that started around 4 September 2026 and partly rolled back on 13 September 2026. If your rankings moved on 15 and 16 September, it is probably not because of your edits: save traffic and positions by day, and put off rewriting pages or removing links until there is confirmation.

AI Mode is the Google Search mode where instead of a list of links you get an answer assembled by AI and can ask a follow up question. In the test the ad looks like an ordinary fragment of that answer: text with links and anchors inside it, while the "Sponsored" label sits above the whole AI answer rather than next to each link. Previously Google ads sat in a separate block and every ad carried its own label. For anyone doing SEO this means space inside the AI answer is now sold for money, and the reader may not understand which link is paid and which one the AI chose itself. The source gives no test countries, share of impressions or click charging details.

Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type where the system spreads ads across Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and the networks on its own, while the advertiser sets goals and supplies creatives. A new question appeared in the settings, "Where should people go after clicking your ads?", with two options: your website or an ad optimised Google Business Profile. Google Business Profile is the free business listing in Search and Maps with address, phone, reviews and photos. Until now the default landing page in Performance Max was the site. A local business without a decent site can now send people straight to the listing, but the enquiries and the data about them stay inside Google's ecosystem rather than in your analytics.

This is about the bidding modes with target metrics, where the advertiser sets a target cost per conversion or a target return and the system holds that number itself. The rollout took 10 days and finished worldwide on 27 August. Before that, Google representatives assured the market that almost nothing would change, but the volume of questions in the community got so large that Search Engine Roundtable published the first advertiser data on how spend and results shifted. The practical takeaway for anyone going through September reports: treat 17 to 27 August 2026 as a transitional period and do not compare it directly with other weeks, or you will conclude that the campaign broke exactly during the rollout days.

The reason is the Digital Markets Act, the European law on digital markets, which obliges Google to promote third party vertical search services in its own results: price comparison, hotels, flights, weather. Some of those blocks have been running in Europe for a while, and now the Ecosystem carousel itself has switched on, covering informational queries as well. For site owners collecting traffic in Europe this is one more block of competitors above the regular results and less room for organic listings. The report gives no list of countries and no rules for how a service gets into this carousel.

The Google Business Profile API is the programmatic interface agencies and tools use to update business listings in Search and Maps at scale, collect reviews and reply to them. The notice was published by Victoria Kroll in several languages in the official Google Business Profile support forum, and it does not say how far the timelines have slipped. For anyone running a local business or a chain of locations this changes the order of work: if you planned to automate updates of addresses, opening hours and review replies before the autumn season, file the request now and keep the manual process and the person doing it until access actually arrives.

The widget is switched on in the app settings and is described as daily numbers that tell a story. Tapping it leads not to a list of links but into AI Mode, the search mode with an AI answer, with the query already filled in: in the example it was a question about a film's box office with a figure of $30 million. The widget was spotted by Damien Andelle, who also published screenshots. The source gives no display conditions, countries or list of topics. For anyone promoting sites the meaning is in the direction of travel: Google is moving entry points from familiar search straight into an AI chat, where there are no ten links and no position you can measure with the usual tools.

The logic goes like this: in a chronological feed the top goes to whoever posts most often, and the ones posting most often are brands, so people would see more promotional content, open the app less, overall reach would drop and complaints about reach would only grow. Mosseri admitted that Instagram's ranking system looks like a black box to users, and said the company is giving people more recommendation controls. The trigger for the conversation is external: Australia is debating a requirement to let people switch algorithms off. For creators this says one thing: the order of the feed will keep being set by recommendations, not by publishing time, and no "turn it off" button is coming to Instagram.

Microsoft Advertising is the ad system of the Bing search engine and Microsoft partner properties, and the change was reported by Search Engine Land. Advertisers are required to disclose AI use where the law demands it, keep watermarks, metadata and other provenance information in the file, put the disclosure next to the content itself rather than off to the side, and preferably bake it right into the image or video; supported formats have a built in disclaimer feature. A label does not save the ad either: it will be removed or rejected for deepfakes, impersonating people and organisations, using someone's face or voice without permission, missing mandatory disclosures, and tampering with machine readable provenance data. Images from Microsoft's own AI tools already carry hidden watermarks and metadata, but people cannot see them, so the visible label is added by the advertiser.