Ahead of Times – Issue 10

ChatGPT’s ad platform arrives in the UK

OpenAI has now opened access to ChatGPT Ads in the UK through its beta Ads Manager, making the UK the first European market to gain access. The platform is available to advertisers with low minimum spend requirements, allowing businesses of all sizes to test campaigns from just £15 per day. Currently, ads are only available for approved categories, with some industries and sensitive sectors not yet eligible to advertise. While still early, the platform gives marketers a first opportunity to test advertising within ChatGPT, currently the world’s most-used consumer LLM.

One of the biggest differences compared to traditional ad platforms is the lack of audience targeting options. There are no interest-based audiences, demographic filters or custom audiences, and geographic targeting is currently limited to the UK as a whole.

Instead, advertisers provide Context Hints – descriptions of situations where their product or service is relevant. These hints help the model understand when an ad may be useful, but they don’t guarantee delivery. Rather than targeting people, ChatGPT targets the context and intent of the conversation taking place.

Why this matters:

This is the first opportunity for brands to advertise within the world’s most-used LLM, opening up a completely new high-intent media channel. Unlike traditional search, ads are served based on the context and intent of an active conversation rather than keywords, allowing brands to reach consumers at highly relevant moments.

That doesn’t mean replacing channels such as Google and Microsoft Search. ChatGPT Ads is still in beta, with limited targeting, measurement and campaign functionality. For now, brands should approach it as a testing opportunity, analysing performance and ROI before deciding whether to scale.

Before running any campaigns, advertisers should ensure conversion tracking is properly configured so performance can be measured from day one. As the platform evolves, it will be interesting to see whether advertising against conversation context and intent can deliver results comparable to traditional search advertising.

Google gives GEO more transparency

Google has launched dedicated AI performance reporting in Search Console, giving site owners visibility into how often their content appears in AI Overviews and AI Mode. The reports can be broken down by page, country, device and date, although the data is currently limited to impressions, with no click-level reporting available. The rollout is currently limited to a subset of UK site owners.

This follows Google’s introduction of the AI Assistant channel in Google Analytics in May, which allows marketers to track traffic from platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Together, these updates continue to improve visibility into how AI surfaces and assistants are driving exposure and traffic.

Why this matters

One of the biggest challenges with GEO has been proving whether optimisation efforts are actually having an impact. Google’s recent updates across both Search Console and Google Analytics are starting to close that gap, providing greater visibility into AI-driven impressions and traffic.

The reporting is still evolving, but brands now have better tools to understand where they appear within AI experiences and how users are reaching their websites from AI assistants. As AI search continues to grow, having clear measurement in place will be critical for evaluating GEO performance and demonstrating its business impact.

AI creative grows up within Meta

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity took place in June and reinforced a message that’s been building momentum for a while: effectiveness matters. The focus wasn’t just on great creative, but on creative that delivers real business results. AI was everywhere too, with reports suggesting around 40% of award submissions used AI in some form, but the conversation has shifted from AI as a gimmick to AI as infrastructure, helping teams work faster, reduce production costs and scale output, while keeping people firmly in control.

One of the biggest announcements from Cannes came from Meta, which unveiled a new suite of AI-powered creative tools designed to help marketers create, test and scale campaigns more efficiently. This includes Brand Memory, a feature that learns a brand’s tone of voice, visual identity and existing ads to generate new creative that stays aligned with brand guidelines. Meta also introduced AI-driven testing and optimisation tools that analyse what’s already driving results and turn those insights into recommendations for future creative, helping marketers refine and scale campaigns with greater confidence. These capabilities are currently being tested and are expected to roll out more broadly in the coming months.

Why this matters

If Brand Memory works as promised, it solves one of the blockers to scaling AI creative: the fear of assets drifting off-brand the moment you’re not watching. Pair that with testing tools turning performance data into creative recommendations, and you’ve got a system closing the loop between what’s working and what gets made next.

Effectiveness isn’t separate from AI anymore. Meta’s closing that loop inside its own platform, but the same principle is already playing out beyond Facebook and Instagram, tools connecting creative decisions directly to performance data. AI’s value isn’t more variations, it’s the right ones, backed by evidence.

The advantage comes from keeping humans tightly in the review loop and adapting fast once these tools roll out properly.

The dance of new models

This month showed just how unpredictable frontier AI releases have become. Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, its most capable models yet, only for the US government to order them offline days later over national security concerns tied to a reported jailbreak. Anthropic complied worldwide, taking both models down for every customer worldwide, while its other Claude models stayed unaffected. OpenAI, meanwhile, used the moment to unveil GPT-5.6 in three tiers — Sol, Terra and Luna — rolling out cautiously to select partners rather than the public

Mythos has since partially returned: limited access was restored for a defined group of American organisations working in critical infrastructure, while Fable 5 remains offline.

Why it matters

This isn’t a product story, it’s a governance story. The most advanced AI models are now powerful enough that governments will pull them from the market overnight, even after public release. For marketers and agencies building on frontier models, the practical risk is manageable, other models keep running, and agentic workflows are usually built to switch between them — but the regulatory layer around AI is now as important to track as the product roadmap itself.

Meta has its own AI Mode

Meta has launched AI Mode on Facebook, a new search experience that uses Meta AI to pull answers from public posts across the platform, including Groups and Reels, instead of returning a standard list of links. Meta describes it as giving “answers grounded in what people are saying publicly across our apps,” pulling in lived experience and recommendations rather than a generic results page. Think of it as Facebook’s answer to Google’s AI Mode — they even kept the name.

Why it matters

It’s a handy way to get quick, real-world answers instead of scrolling through links. But your opinions and posts, if public, could end up feeding someone else’s AI-generated answer without you knowing, with random opinions sometimes treated like expert advice. This isn’t a Meta-only issue — Google’s AI Mode works the same way, often leaning on places like Reddit. If you’d rather your posts not become AI training fuel, switch them from “Public” to “Friends only.”

For brands, though, it’s a positive: a strong, active organic presence on Facebook becomes another channel feeding AI Mode when people ask questions about your category or product. Genuine engagement and public posts can now directly shape how AI answers questions about your brand, making organic content strategy more important than ever.