Welcome to Franc Talking.

🏥 OpenAI is planning a Personal Health layer inside ChatGPT, likely as a dedicated tab. The ambition is clear: personalised health insights spanning workouts, sleep optimisation and behaviour change, powered by user data.

This isn’t new territory. Amazon, Google and Apple have all pushed into health, with Apple arguably executing best through Apple Health and its ecosystem lock-in. What’s different here is distribution. OpenAI says over 200 million users already ask health-related questions on ChatGPT - demand is baked in.

Health also opens the door to obvious monetisation: premium subscriptions, enterprise health tooling, and partnerships with wearables like Whoop or Oura. Less about novelty, more about turning existing behaviour into a business line.

📹 Google’s VP of Search Product, Robbie Stein, gave an insightful, pragmatic interview with CNN on how AI is actually changing Search.

The key point: AI Overviews only survive if users engage with them. Clicks and interaction are the gating signals. If an overview underperforms, Google dials back similar AI results. Visibility follows utility, not experimentation.

He also framed AI Mode as an exploratory research layer rather than a replacement for classic search, confirmed that ads will appear inside AI surfaces (with clear labelling), and openly discussed Google’s query fan-out approach - multiple searches run in parallel to assemble a single AI response.

Launching Obsero has been the most enjoyable, rewarding, and challenging thing I’ve done professionally - and we’re only just getting started.

The best part of being a founder is simple: identify a real customer problem, build something to solve it, ship it, then watch customers actually use it. I never tire of this feedback loop.

We’ve shipped several new features recently, including advanced citation analytics. This week, we’ve added sentiment analysis - giving brands a clear view of how they’re perceived in AI-generated answers, broken down into positive, neutral, and negative signals.

I stopped drinking alcohol on 31 March 2024, and one of my favourite brands since then has been Lucky Saint. So naturally, I pulled their sentiment data to see what surfaced.

The first view shows a weekly sentiment trend over time, switchable between a stacked chart or line graph. In this case, sentiment skews strongly positive - a result that’s notably different to some other brands I’ve analysed!

Scrolling down, you’re presented with an AI-generated summary of how the brand is perceived, highlighting the dominant themes, content trends, and the categories they sit within.

The breakdown of positive, neutral and negative sentiment is especially useful, as it quickly signals whether attention is needed around customer service, pricing, or product quality.

In Lucky Saint’s case, AI consistently associates the brand with authentic taste and quality. The main point of friction is confusion around whether it’s truly alcohol-free - it sits at 0.5%, roughly equivalent to a ripe banana.

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.

If you work in marketing, product, or tech - and want to keep pace with the shifts AI is driving across search, software and strategy - here’s what you need to know this week.

Google has moved quickly to recover lost ground after ChatGPT’s breakout, consolidating its AI teams and pushing Gemini deeply into Search and everyday products. Performance gains and tighter integration have narrowed - and in some cases reversed - OpenAI’s early lead.

This momentum has triggered internal urgency at OpenAI, signalling that scale, distribution and reliability now matter more than novelty. The competitive advantage is no longer just about model quality, but about who can embed AI most effectively into daily user behaviour at global scale.

Reference: WSJ

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