Daily Marketing News, September 20, 2026: Infillion buys location data platform Foursquare

Taboola is a platform for recommendation and performance units on publisher sites, those link roundups under the article. Dianomi is a London based ad network working with more than 600 advertisers, among them Charles Schwab, Invesco and Bank of America, placing their ads with publishers such as Reuters, CNN Business, The Times and The Wall Street Journal. After the deal Dianomi will run through Realize, Taboola's performance platform, which the company says reaches more than 600 million daily active users. BusinessCloud put the deal at up to 27 million pounds, with Dianomi revenue for the first half of 2026 at 13.4 million pounds, up 2% year on year, while Taboola itself named no price. The offer was made under Rule 2.7 of the UK Takeover Code, with closing expected by the end of 2026 subject to regulatory approval and a Dianomi shareholder vote. If you buy traffic in finance, ask your rep for the site list and rate card covering the transition period now: when networks merge, inventory and pricing usually get rebuilt.

Fingerprint is a Chicago company that identifies devices and separates live visitors from automation; by its own numbers it sees more than 1 billion unique devices a month and works with more than 6,000 customers, among them Plaid, Booking.com, Dropbox, Trustpilot and Checkout.com. Bot Directory is a continuously updated, searchable reference where every bot is described across three fields: name, owner and purpose. Anyone running software that crawls sites can check it against the Web Bot Auth standard and apply to be listed. Until now, working out who exactly was hitting your site meant googling each user agent string across forums. Why this matters if you do marketing: the same allow list decides two things at once, whether an AI search crawler reads your products and articles, and whether robots land in the denominator of your conversion rate. The claim in the release that bots make up most web traffic comes with no source, so for your own bot share you still have to read your own logs.

Agentic AI is software you hand an entire action to: it answers the customer itself, changes data in your systems itself, files the request itself. Handvantage is a small security and AI governance consultancy from Surrey, British Columbia, the document is called the Agentic AI Procurement Handbook, it is vendor neutral and opens with no form and no email required. Inside are the questions security architects used to ask and that now land on whoever signs the invoice: where does company data go, who approves an agent's action before it executes, and what record is left after the agent acts. Marketing signs more AI software contracts than many other departments, so those three questions are worth keeping in your own vendor agreement template. There are no customer numbers, prices or case studies in the release, this is a list of questions rather than research.

Siri AI is a new version of the voice assistant that behaves like a chatbot and lives in its own app: Siri used to answer in short replies on command, now you hold a conversation with it the way you would with ChatGPT. For marketing this is one more surface where a person asks about a product or service and gets an answer without going through regular search. Access is granted by waitlist, you join from settings, and the wait ranges from a few minutes to several hours or days. iOS 27 itself installs on iPhone 11 and newer, but Siri AI only runs on iPhone 15 Pro and newer and is entirely unavailable in the European Union because of Apple's dispute with the European Commission over Digital Markets Act requirements. On 17 September 2026 the first beta of iOS 27.2 arrived with a rebuilt Health app, which is not going to public release yet, while iOS 27.1 ships alongside the iPhone Duo next month.

Until now the chat version of the assistant and visual search were a phone story, and now they come to computers. Three notable things in the update: Siri AI, meaning the assistant with its own app and a conversation instead of short commands, Visual Intelligence, appearing on the Mac for the first time and reading images from the screen or the camera, and a revised look for the Liquid Glass interface introduced a year earlier. Apple also cites easier creation of Shortcuts, meaning automated scripts, and of Safari extensions, plus general speed improvements. The practical takeaway if you sell products: some questions about price, ingredients and availability will go to an assistant and to image recognition rather than into the browser bar, so text in your listings and product photos needs to be machine readable, not buried inside an image.

iCloud+ is Apple's paid storage, Apple TV is its video service, Apple Arcade is its games subscription. The three used to be sold separately, and now in the selected countries every paid iCloud+ tier, including the cheapest 50 GB plan, includes Apple TV and Apple Arcade at no extra cost, with Family Sharing extending storage, video and games to 5 people. The US, Canada, Australia, the UK and European markets are not part of the programme. Where the bundle has launched, Apple TV and Apple Arcade stop being sold as standalone subscriptions. For the industry this is a clean example of a platform collapsing several paid products into one payment: the media services gain viewers, while the standalone subscription as a product you can advertise simply disappears in those countries, together with its landing page and funnel.

Bing is Microsoft's search engine, the second largest in the western web and a data source for some rank tracking tools. On Google such checks appear often and in various forms, and now the same has been spotted on Bing: instead of results, the user first sees a confirmation screen. Microsoft has not described what triggers it and there is no company comment in the report, so for now this is a publication's observation rather than an announced policy. The context matters more than the item itself: since roughly 13 September 2026, by the same publication's assessment, Google has become noticeably better at blocking AI scrapers, results parsers and third party rank tracking tools. If your visibility reporting runs on automated scraping, expect gaps in data across both engines, cross check against Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and when your tracker shows a drop, verify it by hand before you explain an update to the client.