In 2026, it’s easier than ever to start a newsletter about a topic you love, grow your audience, and increase revenue.

Whether you’re in B2B SaaS, FinTech or want a side hustle, consider starting a newsletter today and beehiiv is the perfect partner for this.

Use my link here and start your 14-day trial today. If you sign up, you get 20% off your subscription fee for 3-months!

Welcome to Franc Talking.

Your weekly digest covering everything happening in AI search.

ICYMI last week, check out my discussion with Christian from Yext on memory, ads and what the future holds in AI Search.

Users have started seeing ads in the wild as OpenAI rolls out its advertising proposition and looks to capitalise on more than 900 million weekly active users, with an estimated 855 million on the free tier.

With trust concerns, high CPMs, limited audience insight, and immature bidding tools, Sam Altman still needs to invest significantly more to rival platforms like Facebook in social or Google in search.

Cloudflare, which has positioned itself as a defender of publisher rights against AI training practices, announced markdown for agents.

This enables website owners to automatically deliver ‘AI-friendly’ markdown versions of a page rather than raw HTML. The goal is to reduce token usage by around 80% while making content easier for AI crawlers and agents to parse.

This is an interesting development but as both Google and Bing have recommended not to do this, I’d tread with caution and test before enabling it.

Hollywood reacted strongly after a viral clip showed Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise on top of a building - entirely generated using AI.

Seedance, launched by TikTok owner ByteDance, has pushed AI content creation to a new level.

Concerns around copyright and intellectual property remain, with Deadpool writer Rhett Reese suggesting that “it is over.”

Alongside other viral AI clips, this signals a potential disruption to the film industry - although creativity and original ideas remain essential (we’ve all seen big-budget films that still disappoint).

Marketers will be watching closely as production costs fall, posing a warning sign for traditional ad agencies.

Have feedback on the stories above? I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me on [email protected].

Your takes might also feature in future newsletters. 👀

During the week, I received one of the best endorsements I’ve ever had from an early customer.

This wasn’t requested by Obsero - it was an unprompted endorsement and exactly why we started the business: to empower best-in-class marketers with AI search analytics that drive growth.

This made my day and we value customers like Kassandra and her team.

🚢 We also ship quickly and following customer feedback and accelerating our roadmap, we’ve launched page level citation analysis, where you can see - with ease - which individual pages are being used in AI Search as citations to help generate the answers.

You can see my LinkedIn post on it here.

The most important AI search stories shaping business, marketing, and technology this week.