This week, half the marketing world was on the French Riviera arguing about whether AI has killed creativity. The other half was at their desk quietly opening a ChatGPT Ads account. Both groups have missed something.
A new study confirms that 70% of consumers are now using AI search more than a year ago, but the share who find it genuinely helpful has collapsed from 82% to 54% in twelve months. Samsung’s CMO stood up at Cannes and told a room full of people clutching AI tools that emotional intelligence is the only competitive advantage that cannot be replicated. Meanwhile, Adobe launched a GEO measurement tool built on nearly 300 million real-world AI search prompts, revealing that AI traffic to retail sites has surged 1,324% since October 2024.
The tool is growing. The trust is not. That gap is exactly where smart marketing lives right now.
Big News: New Adobe Tool Shows Where Brands Win and Lose in AI Search
Search Engine Land, 18 June 2026
Adobe launched Adobe Brand Visibility this week, combining its LLM Optimizer with Semrush’s AI Optimisation tool into the first enterprise-grade GEO measurement platform. Built on nearly 300 million real-world AI search prompts, the tool tracks brand performance across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity, revealing where your brand is being recommended and where a competitor is taking your place instead.
Why this matters for UK marketers
- AI traffic to US retail sites surged 1,324% between October 2024 and May 2026, with the travel sector up 2,215% in the same period. This is not a future channel. It is already a commercial one, and most UK brands have no visibility into how they perform within it.
- The tool benchmarks your share of voice against competitors in AI-generated responses, giving marketing directors the same competitive lens on GEO that Semrush built for traditional SEO. If your competitors are already using it, they are learning things about your brand’s AI visibility that you do not know yet.
- With nearly 300 million real-world prompts underpinning the data, this is the first GEO measurement solution with meaningful statistical reliability. It moves the conversation from “we think we appear in AI answers” to “we can prove it, measure it, and improve it.”
Read more: searchengineland.com/adobe-brand-visibility-geo-cx-enterprise-480561
Search & Intelligence: AI Search Is Growing. Consumer Trust Is Not.
Search Engine Land, 17 June 2026
Fractl surveyed 1,008 consumers and 150 marketers for this annual study, and the results reveal a sharp divergence from last year. 70% of consumers say they are using AI search tools more than they were twelve months ago. Yet the share who find AI search more helpful than traditional search dropped from 82% to 54% in the same period, a 28-point collapse in a single year.
Why this matters
- The AI sceptic camp grew from 3% to 17% in one year, almost six times larger. The early-adopter goodwill window is closing. Brands not yet visible and trustworthy in AI answers will find it harder to earn that position as consumer confidence continues to fall.
- 39% of consumers now say heavy AI use by a brand would reduce their trust in it, up from 20% in 2025. Scaling content or ads with AI without the quality control to match is actively harming brand perception.
- Adoption is still rising despite the trust decline, which means the volume of AI-mediated brand decisions is growing even as the bar for what earns a recommendation gets higher. Brands that get GEO right now build a compounding advantage.
Read more: searchengineland.com/ai-search-adoption-rises-consumer-trust-declines-study-480338
Also worth reading this week:
Paid Media & Performance: ChatGPT Just Opened Its UK Advertising Doors
Search Engine Land, 19 June 2026
OpenAI has rolled out Ads Manager Beta to UK businesses, offering a self-serve interface for campaign creation and management. The dashboard is structured around campaigns, tools, billing, and settings, and is designed to feel familiar to anyone already using Google or Meta Ads. Agencies cannot currently manage campaigns on behalf of clients without client-authorised account access.
Why this matters
- UK advertisers are among the first in the world to access ChatGPT’s self-serve ad platform. This is a genuine early-mover window. The brands that understand the platform’s audience, bidding logic, and creative expectations now will be considerably ahead when competition intensifies.
- The platform has evolved quickly: product feed ads and conversion-focused placements have already been added since the beta launched. The advertiser experience gained today compounds in commercial value as the platform matures.
- The lack of a manager account structure means agencies need to build new operational workflows now. Clients must establish their own accounts and invite agency partners, which is a different model to what teams are used to managing at scale.
Read more: searchengineland.com/openai-opens-chatgpt-ads-manager-beta-to-uk-advertisers-480679
Also worth reading this week:
Web Development & Design: Your Website’s Relationship With AI Crawlers Just Got Manageable
Search Engine Land, 23 June 2026
Cloudflare and beehiiv have integrated AI crawl controls into beehiiv’s newsletter platform, giving publishers a dashboard to see, allow, or block specific AI bots without touching robots.txt files or writing firewall rules. The feature is rolling out to all beehiiv users now, with full blocking capability available to Max plan subscribers.
Why this matters
- Publishers can now choose between two deliberate strategies rather than leaving AI access to chance: permit maximum AI discovery for distribution, or block AI scrapers to protect content archives for future licensing opportunities. This is the first widely accessible tool that makes the choice explicit.
- The dashboard shows which bots tried to access your content, which were blocked, and how much referral traffic came back from AI services. Most businesses have never had this visibility. Understanding it is the first step to optimising for it.
- Cloudflare updates the bot list automatically as new AI crawlers emerge, removing the ongoing technical overhead of tracking and responding to new AI bot activity manually.
Read more: searchengineland.com/cloudflare-beehiiv-ai-crawler-controls-480924
Also worth reading this week:
Brand & Connection: Cannes Chose Emotion Over Algorithms
The Drum, 22 June 2026
Samsung’s CMO Benjamin Braun used his Cannes platform to challenge the industry’s AI fixation directly, arguing that emotional intelligence, not AI capability, is the advantage that cannot be commoditised. As AI tools become universally available, Braun’s position is that the CMO’s job is to do what machines cannot: understand people.
Why this matters
- “Everyone is talking about AI. I speak a lot about EI.” This is not a philosophical stance. It is a practical competitive positioning framework. When every brand has access to the same AI tools, the differentiation lives entirely in how those tools are directed and what they are asked to produce.
- “AI slop needs to stop” captures the risk most brands are already running: using AI to scale output without applying emotional intelligence to ensure that output is worth receiving. Volume without quality is now visible and punishable.
- Braun’s framing of the CMO role as “custodian of emotional clarity in an AI-saturated organisation” has direct implications for how marketing teams are structured and how briefs are written. The skill that needs to scale is judgement, not generation.
Read more: thedrum.com – Samsung CMO on emotional intelligence at Cannes
Also worth reading this week:
AI & Automation: Brands Are Not Testing AI Marketing Anymore. They Are Rebuilding Around It.
Marketing Dive, 23 June 2026
Gap Inc. has partnered with Google Cloud, Zeta Global, and Publicis Sapient to deploy AI across its marketing operations for all four brands, starting with owned channels for personalisation and campaign optimisation. The announcement follows nine consecutive quarters of positive comparable sales. SVP for Marketing Shared Services Damon Berger described it as “removing silos, unlocking better data, and building a marketing model that learns, adapts and improves with every customer interaction.”
Why this matters
- Gap’s framing is “brand-led and intelligence powered.” AI enables the decisions but does not replace the brand identity. This is the model that works at scale, and it applies regardless of business size.
- The deployment connects creative, data, and execution in one AI-enabled system across all four brands. This is how AI delivers the efficiency gains that single-channel pilots cannot replicate. Testing AI in one channel is not the same as building AI into the marketing infrastructure.
- Gap is investing in this during a positive performance run, not as a rescue plan. Building AI marketing infrastructure when you have the data, budget, and confidence to do it properly produces better outcomes than deploying it reactively under pressure.
Read more: marketingdive.com – Gap brings AI to owned marketing channels
Also worth reading this week:
From The Digital Maze: Google AI Max for Search – We Have Been Putting It to the Test
Google has been pushing AI Max for Search hard. We have been running it across real client accounts for months to find out whether the results match the pitch. The findings are mixed, and the conditions under which it works are specific.
Read the full test results and our recommendations →
Case Study: +403% Organic Revenue for Boston Seeds
Boston Seeds came to The Digital Maze after pausing SEO, with rankings declining and organic performance falling away. We rebuilt the strategy from the ground up: comprehensive keyword research, on-page optimisation, high-quality link building, and ongoing conversion rate testing.
The result: a 403% increase in organic revenue and a 350% increase in organic traffic, year on year.
“Our rankings are the highest they’ve ever been, against the backdrop of ever-increasing competition.” – George Wallis, Boston Seeds
Read the full case study →
Three Takeaways For The Week Ahead
1. Audit your AI search presence this week.
Consumer trust in AI search is falling, but 70% of people are still using it more. Brands absent from AI answers are being disqualified before they even enter a Google search. Use Google Search Console’s new AI performance report or the Adobe Brand Visibility tool to understand where you stand right now.
2. Open a ChatGPT Ads account before your competitors do.
Even if you are not ready to run campaigns immediately, familiarising yourself with the interface and the audience while the platform is new gives your team an advantage that is hard to replicate later. The early-mover window for ChatGPT advertising in the UK is open now.
3. Run an emotional intelligence check on your AI output.
Samsung’s CMO called it clearly: AI slop needs to stop. Before any AI-generated content or campaign goes live, apply a simple test: does it sound like your brand? Does it contain something a machine alone could not deliver? If the answer is no, it is not ready.
Want help putting any of this into action?
Whether it is AI search visibility, PPC performance, brand positioning for tougher trading conditions, or making sense of what these platform changes mean for your specific strategy, we can help.
Get in touch with The Digital Maze.
