Brands want to make sure their content is findable in AI searches. AirOps uses brands’ target personas and proprietary knowledge to refine content that AI will see. They just raised a $40 million Series B, having grown from 20 employees to almost 100 this year.
LiveRamp has donated the User Context Protocol (UCP) to IAB Tech Lab, which is incorporating it into the Open Source Initiative. UCP defines how AI agents exchange real-time intent and response signals in advertising. It uses embeddings to preserve privacy when encoding the signals.
In a global survey from MiQ and Censuswide of 3,169 agency and brand marketers, 66% report using AI tools on most or all of their projects, but only 49% call themselves “fully confident” in their knowledge of the tech. The most common reasons for the lack of confidence are brands/clients that don’t allow data sharing with AI tools (42%) and users not having proper training (38%). More senior marketers (49%) than junior marketers (36%) feel confident in their teams’ ability to optimize performance.
Meta has announced agreements with USA Today, People Inc., and other news publishers to pay for access to their content and link to their articles in its AI chatbot. It’s a sharp contrast to Perplexity, which the Chicago Tribune and New York Times are separately suing for allegedly scraping content and bypassing paywalls. Despite this deal, Meta apparently still opposes compensating publishers for news links in social media posts.