OpenAI launched GPT-5, its most advanced AI model, improving accuracy, reasoning, and speed. It enhances ChatGPT with better task completion and a real-time router for responses. GPT-5 excels in coding, health accuracy, and safety, reducing hallucinations. Available to free users, developers, and enterprises, it offers new user personalities and API controls, marking progress toward AI outperforming humans in key tasks.
Effortlessly audit your Google Ads account with Marketing Auditor. Perform 200+ automated checks to uncover optimization opportunities and save over 10 hours per audit. Generate white-label reports in minutes with 50+ pages of actionable insights. Customize your reports with professional themes or your own branding, and export them in editable formats like PowerPoint or Google Slides. This tool is the ultimate solution for efficient and impactful Google Ads audits.
Google added conditional formatting to Looker Studio Query Result Variables, enabling dynamic text to change colors based on data thresholds like scorecards. Users can apply single color or color scale formatting by setting rules and colors. Multiple rules can be created, edited, deleted, or reordered, with higher-priority rules overriding lower ones, improving data visualization and interpretation in reports.
OpenAI launched two open-weight AI reasoning models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, available on Hugging Face. These models, the first open ones since GPT-2, can run on a single GPU or a laptop and connect to more capable closed models for complex tasks. OpenAI aims to support developers and counter rising Chinese open AI labs by offering free, US-based AI aligned with democratic values, reflecting CEO Sam Altman's shift toward openness.
Perplexity uses stealth crawlers that change user agents and IPs to bypass no-crawl directives and ignore robots.txt files. Cloudflare blocked these undeclared crawlers after tests showed Perplexity accessed restricted content despite blocks. Unlike OpenAI, Perplexity evades detection and violates crawling norms. Cloudflare added rules to block such AI crawling, protecting customers and promoting transparent, respectful bot behavior.
Google is preparing to widely launch AI Mode ads, offering advertisers text and shopping ads on Google Search, Shopping, and Performance Max Campaigns. This experimental feature is available in the US, in English, on mobile and desktop. Ads require AI-powered targeting like broad match and AI Max for Search. Brands must keep product catalogs updated for effective AI Mode ads.
The readAnalyticsStorage sandbox API lets developers safely read Google Analytics client and session IDs in custom templates, replacing unreliable reverse-engineering methods. This prevents issues from cookie format changes. It is part of Google Tag Manager's custom template APIs, which use sandboxed JavaScript with require() statements. Another API, addConsentListener, registers functions to track consent state changes.
Microsoft Clarity and UserFeedback combine quantitative and qualitative data to improve website user experience. Clarity offers free behavior analytics like heatmaps and session recordings, while UserFeedback provides on-site surveys for direct user input. Together, they help identify and understand user frustrations, diagnose issues, and optimize sites effectively. Integration enables faster, smarter UX decisions for WordPress users.
Google has stopped conversion tracking for EU traffic without Consent Mode v2 since July 21. Without it, conversions and remarketing audiences are lost, leading to declining Google Ads performance due to fewer signals, less targeting, and weaker optimization. This change is already affecting campaigns across the EU. Those who haven't implemented Consent Mode v2 are losing performance daily and should fix it immediately.
Google has launched the Google Trends API, providing enhanced access to search trends data. Initially available to a limited number of alpha testers, the API allows scalable data usage for research, publishing, and business strategies. It offers consistently scaled search interest data for the past 1800 days, with daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly aggregations, as well as geographical breakdowns. Developers interested in testing can apply for early access.