Daily Marketing News, September 23, 2026: Meta's AI agent will shop in Shopify stores

Threads is Meta's text social network, and until now its profile was tied to an Instagram account: staff rights were granted through Instagram tools, and managing access to Threads separately was impossible. Per Meta's help pages, a Threads profile now gets its own set of task based access levels inside the company's business portfolio and no longer depends on the linked Instagram profile. Existing profiles first keep the settings inherited from Instagram, after which the owner changes access levels manually. The rollout is gradual and global, and not available in every country. Threads has 500 million monthly active users. For agencies and teams this gives the obvious win: you can let someone post in Threads without opening up Instagram to them. Worth going in and reviewing the list of people who got access by inheritance.

XChat is the direct messaging system inside X. Previously, privacy settings and message requests got in the way of writing to a stranger. Now a user shows or hands over their numeric code, and anyone who has it can send a message or start a voice or video call, even if you do not follow each other. X stresses that this is not a phone number and not a chat security code. The help pages say that people you have already messaged can see your code and pass it on to others. The code can be hidden, switched off at any moment or regenerated. The feature partly opened up in early September 2026, and now it is a full launch. For business this is a way to collect enquiries at events and from clients without a mutual follow: the code on a business card, at a booth, in a deck.

Video messages are short clips from the camera that Telegram has for years shown only as a circle with its signature crop. In the Round Video (Experimental) section you can pick a square format with no graphic elements, raise the resolution to 480p, the frame rate from 30 to 60 FPS, the bitrate from 750 Kbps to 2 Mbps, and on Android switch on recording through the Camera2 API for more clarity. The messenger remembers which camera you recorded with last time. Recording at 60 FPS will only work if both cameras on the phone support it, otherwise Telegram falls back to 30 FPS. All of this is still a test in Telegram beta 12.10.4 for Android, with no date for the general release. For anyone running a channel and shooting circles, the square will show what used to get cropped off at the edges.

AI Overviews is the AI generated summary above the normal results, AI Mode is a separate Google mode where instead of a list of sites you get a conversation with the AI. Previously links in that summary led to source pages. Now links appear at the bottom of the block that look like normal ones, along with follow up questions, and clicking them opens AI Mode rather than a site. For site owners this is one more scenario where the click stays inside Google: the person reads the summary, then asks the AI a question, and never visits the site. The practical takeaway is simple: look not only at positions, but at the share of queries where this block appears in the results, and at traffic from those queries separately from the rest.

Gemini Notebook is the public version of the NotebookLM service: a user collects notes and materials there, the AI makes summaries from them, and the page is available to everyone on the internet. Those pages are exactly what started being used as a site for junk content: the results turn up material on sex toys, porn, peptides and promo codes. The service belongs to Google, meaning the spam ends up in the results on the search engine's own domain, which by definition earns the algorithm's trust. For anyone promoting sites in competitive niches this is a familiar story: parasite pages on a trusted domain climb into the top, and positions for such queries jump around. Right now it makes sense to save screenshots of the results for your own queries, so that later you understand what caused the drop.

Merchant Center is the account through which an online store sends Google its product data, and Google Store ratings are the store's stars shown next to ads and product listings. Previously the conditions for a rating to appear were scattered across the help pages, and sellers guessed why the stars were missing. Now the account has a dedicated section for sellers with concrete numbers: you need at least 100 reviews, an average score from 3,5 to 5 stars, the data is counted in a daily window, and the rating is calculated separately by country and region. The section appeared roughly a week before publication. The bar is clear: until you have 100 reviews there will be no stars in ads, and with a score below 3,5 they will not appear afterwards either. Count how many reviews you are short of 100, and that becomes the task for the month.

Google Business Profile is the free business listing in Search and Maps that the owner manages themselves. The "Permanently closed" option, the marker saying a business has shut for good, disappeared from the settings, and along with it the temporary closure option is no longer visible either. Owners noticed it missing a few days before publication, and Google gave no official comment. The second change: Google started sending emails about a spike in spam reviews, saying the system found and removed such reviews itself so they would not affect the rating. For local business these are two different consequences. Review cleanups are now something you learn about by email rather than from a drop in your score. And closing a location temporarily is currently not possible in the interface, so if you are renovating or on a seasonal pause, write about it in the description and in posts on the listing.

Google Ads is Google's advertising system, where firearms and components are traditionally banned outright. As part of a limited pilot, from October 2026 and for 6 months, ads for some accessories will be allowed in the US: bipods, scopes, slings, mounts and rests. Firearms and ammunition themselves are not covered by the relaxation. The pilot is limited to one country and to a term, after which Google will decide whether to extend the rule. For advertisers in adjacent niches, what is interesting here is not the gun market so much as the principle: Google's prohibited lists get revised selectively, for specific product groups, in a limited territory and with an end date. If your category is banned outright, it is worth watching the help pages for your niche rather than treating the rules as permanent.

Lantern is a system launched in 2023 by the Tech Coalition through which platforms share signals about child abuse material: by the end of 2025 its participants had passed on more than 2 million such signals. CyberTipline is the mandatory channel through which companies in the US report the material they find. TikTok's money goes towards modernising that channel: search, automation and analysis, which should halve the manual processing of reports. The project is planned for 3 years and 10 million dollars, with AWS, Microsoft and Palantir taking part. The separate TikTok USDS Joint Venture entity doing all of this was carved out in January 2026. For anyone running accounts, one thing follows: moderation of child related content on TikTok will be stricter and faster, and questionable videos with children are better not posted at all.

Micro dramas are series made of very short vertical episodes with sharp plot twists, a format that grew in China and moved to the US, and which Snap itself calls Short Dramas. The study was done by Ipsos on Snap's commission: 3,000 people surveyed in the US, the UK and Saudi Arabia. Per the report, the share of daily viewing is growing, and micro drama viewers are more willing than others to pay for content from creators in the format. Brands are already shooting their own mini series, with examples including the shoe brand Crocs, the clothing rental service Nuuly and the Native deodorants from Procter and Gamble, while marketers admit they do not yet see a clear return in money. If you are thinking of trying the format, treat it as a brand awareness test rather than a sales channel: viewers are willing to pay for what they watch, but nobody has numbers on brand revenue.