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On Friday, Nick Tully, Head of ChatGPT, announced that the platform will start supporting ads over the next couple of weeks.

This will not be a surprise for avid readers of Franc Talking as this has been on the cards for some time. The Information has done some excellent reporting on OpenAI’s cash burn and where they are looking to grow revenue, with ads being an obvious choice given the projections reported last year (see below).

It is estimated that only 5% of the 900M WAU pay for a subscription, so there are a huge number of users that are using ChatGPT for free and costing OpenAI money. Ads will be a significant lever for Sam Altman, who ironically has always stated his disdain for ads - especially in AI, as the company looks to go public and desperately tries to claw back the AI narrative from Google.

So what do we know so far?

OpenAI also announced they will be rolling out their lower subscription plan “Go” to try and appeal to convince more users to pay for ChatGPT. The lower price point comes in at $8, whereas the Plus remains at $20 and Pro is at $200.

OpenAI has aggressive targets and it was reported in November that the company is looking to hit 2.6billion WAU by 2030, with 220million users paying for a plus plan (that might change now with the introduction of Go). So, although the launch of ads is a significant development in the world of AI Search, it feels this path was always inevitable.

It really does feel that Google is unstoppable at the moment. 🔥

At the start of the week, Google and Apple confirmed that the next generation of Siri will be powered by Gemini - a significant strategic win for the Mountain View giant.

The outcome wasn’t entirely unexpected. As early as September 2025, Apple was widely reported to be evaluating multiple AI partners, with Google, OpenAI and Anthropic all in contention. Around the same time, Alphabet emerged from Judge Mehta’s antitrust ruling without structural remedies - a decision many viewed as a ‘slap on the wrist’. I covered this dynamic at the time with Simon Thillay from AppTweak.

The result dramatically expands Gemini’s reach. With Android already dominant globally and Gemini now embedded into Siri across Apple’s ecosystem, Google sits at the centre of AI experiences on the vast majority of smartphones worldwide.

Google has launched a new feature for the Gemini app called Personal Intelligence. It’s a beta experience currently rolling out in the U.S. for Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers.

The feature allows users to connect Google apps such as Gmail, Photos, YouTube and Search, enabling Gemini to reason across those sources and deliver more personalised, context-aware responses to questions and tasks.

This is where things get really interesting. I’ve been experimenting by connecting my emails and also with Obsero’s persona explorer, and it reinforces a view I’ve held for a while: true personalisation for logged-in users is where the real value of AI chatbots lies. Generic answers are table stakes.

The advantage comes when an assistant understands who you are, what you care about, what you’ve done before, and what context actually matters to you. This means brands REALLY need to double down on understanding their ICP.

The more these systems build memory and familiarity - responsibly and with user control - the more useful they become. AI that knows you will always outperform AI that simply knows everything.

Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) underpins its AI shopping strategy by standardising how product data, availability and promotions are shared with Gemini and AI Mode. Unlike ChatGPT’s instant checkout - which focuses on completing purchases inside the chatbot and taking a cut of sales - Google isn’t positioning itself as the merchant of record.

Instead, Google is leaning on its existing strengths: a massive product database built through Shopping ads, deep merchant relationships, and established consumer behaviour across Search, YouTube and Android. By extending its cost-per-click ad model into AI-driven shopping, Google lowers friction for retailers and avoids margin concerns - putting it in a far stronger position to scale AI commerce.

Google trends has been a pivotal tool for organic growth teams and I still use it every day, it is one of the best free tools out there and it is getting a major revamp!

Powered by Gemini, you'll be able to see more top queries, more rising queries, plot more search queries and you'll be able to set a topic (i.e. Dog Breeds) that will pull in entities of that topic (i.e. Poodles, Beagles etc.). This will make the research phase far easier and you get a ton more data to work with.

The billion dollar question is "will this include Gemini prompt data?" - which I don't think it will do, at first... but this is the most likely route towards understanding what is trending in Google Gemini (not a keyword planner type tool).

Off the back of launching sentiment analysis last week, Obsero has rolled out ‘Prompts’, a feature that enables you to dive into the captures prompts for your brand. The below uses a few examples for the brand Ticketmaster.

You have the ability to deep dive into an individual prompt and see your daily visibility metrics in one view. You can also take a quick glance at which LLMs your present in or not:

Jumping into an individual day allows you to see the actual answer that was captured by platform. The below highlights what was captured in Google’s AI summary (AIO) for the prompt “What is the best website to get Real Madrid tickets?”

We always recommend plugging in your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) data, given how personalised these platforms will become.

We also do not recommend getting hung up on a single prompt, however - Obsero is built upon transparency and we want to give our customers all data so they can have 100% confidence in the quality of our data.

I’ve seen instances of (larger) competitors using API data or results that do not invoke a web search (so if you asked “Who is the President of the United States?” the answer would be “Joe Biden”, as it falls back on its training data"). We will never sacrifice data quality and be clear on what is in our platform.

Interested in seeing this in action? Mike and I would be happy to run you through it - book a demo here.

If you’re not already following us on LinkedIn, you should. I’m more vocal on my personal account, so connect there as well and add “Franc Talking reader 👋” in your note.

The best articles this week on AI Search and how it affects business, marketing and tech.

Crystal Carter is one of those people you immediately trust to talk about the future of search.

She’s been in the category for close to two decades, and it shows. Not just in the depth of her answers, but in the calm confidence with which she talks about where things are heading next. No hype. No panic. Just clarity.

Now leading AI Search and SEO communications at Wix, Crystal sits at an interesting intersection: translating fast-moving AI change into something marketers can actually use.

Wix is a NASDAQ-listed company (ticker: WIX) with a user base measured in the hundreds of millions globally, so this isn’t theory. This is happening at scale.

What stood out most was how future-facing her thinking is. Crystal was unequivocal: 2026 will be the year of the agent. Agentic systems won’t just assist search, they’ll act on behalf of users, collapsing discovery, decision-making and execution into a single flow.

What’s striking is that she was talking about this well before Google formally announced its agentic UCP direction, which tells you a lot about how closely she’s tracking the space.

She also clearly cares about her craft. Education came up repeatedly, whether that’s demystifying AI terminology for marketers, building visibility tools directly into the platform, or creating guardrails so people can move fast without breaking things.

This wasn’t a conversation about “SEO is dead”. It was about reality: users are changing, platforms are changing, and the job now is to meet people where they are, across channels, formats and systems.

Calm, pragmatic and ahead of the curve. Enjoy the conversation.

You can follow Crystal on LinkedIn and I highly recommend you check out Wix’s AI Search Lab, which has some superb content.