Agentic commerce is reorganizing retail around five ecosystem layers. As AI agents gain influence, retailers and brands must decide where to compete, where to partner, and who controls the customer relationship.

What Q2 earnings say about the future of advertising

YouTube’s ad business stays resilient: Revenues may cool as video budgets fragment, but strong marketer and user demand keep it ahead in creator content.

Google beats Q2 expectations as AI spend accelerates: Marketers should expect Google's ad products to become more automated as AI spending continues.

GenAI user penetration is high across Asia-Pacific, but every country has its nuances. Government policy, local AI ecosystems, demographics, and digital infrastructure are creating distinct paths to adoption in China, India, Japan, and South Korea.

AI shopping lifts retail media clicks: Marketers may have opportunities to influence shoppers as purchase decisions take shape via retailers’ AI features.

YouTube has evolved into a sprawling advertising ecosystem that spans premium video, social, commerce, and AI. Its scale creates new opportunities, but marketers must navigate growing complexity to unlock better business outcomes.

OpenAI's ad target is not realistic: A 90% shortfall points to ad infrastructure that still isn't ready to attract major marketing budgets.

US programmatic advertising is consolidating around video, CTV, walled gardens, retail media, and agentic AI. Marketers need to balance signal, scale, transparency, and control as automated buying enters its next phase.

AI research has moved from novelty to habit in the shopping journey, and it's changing more than where consumers start looking. It's changing who wins.

The race to build AI infrastructure has triggered an unprecedented rush for capital and spending, reshaping capital markets and creating new pricing, platform, and vendor risks for marketers.

A successful takeover could reorder the balance of power for digital wallets and agentic commerce.

Google expands YouTube ad frequency controls: Advertisers can manage exposure across campaign groups, reducing repetitive ads while preserving scale.

In June 2026, we analyzed 4,010 ChatGPT recommendations across 13 categories in the tech hardware and devices industry to compile the AI Visibility Index.

Apple is positioning its redesigned Siri to compete directly with ChatGPT and other AI assistants with what competitors can't match: billions of active devices already in users' hands and deep integration with personal data stored on those devices. "It's less of a takeover, but more like a fork in the road," said our analyst Gadjo Sevilla, on a recent episode of "Behind the Numbers." "Apple is not competing in that space. It's not a general free-for-all model. What it is doing, however, is infusing its own brand of safe, and as we're seeing, highly personalized AI features designed around its users."

Commerce media has planted deep roots in Spanish-speaking Latin America (SPLA). Between 87% and 94% of marketers in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Peru surveyed plan to increase their commerce media investment over the next 12 months, according to new research conducted by EMARKETER for Google.

Smart home devices have started to reach the mainstream. While security remains the core, categories like lighting and utility are bringing device interoperability to a growing number of households.

Reddit gains ad dollars: Agencies are gradually shifting more social budgets to Reddit as its high-intent audiences and AI tools attract marketers.

Cloudflare challenges Google: New crawler defaults give publishers more control over AI scraping and could prompt Google to split search and AI crawling.

Google's AI Mode healthcare ad test signals expanding AI ad inventory, though disclosure-heavy healthcare ads remain excluded for now.