The Age Of The Agent
AI startups are spawning at a record rate.
The latest spawn is Limy, a New York-based startup founded in 2024, which just raised $10 million in seed funding, Business Insider reports. More important is how Limy plans to stand out in an overly saturated space: by helping brands capitalize on agentic AI.
Limy’s tech aims to show brands how AI agents are driving sales for their businesses – and optimize AI to drive even more sales. Limy integrates directly with a brand’s content delivery software to detect when AI agents visit that advertiser’s site and which prompts led to a purchase.
Based on these insights, brands can improve how they show up in popular large language models by allocating more ad spend to specific prompts that perform better among agents.
Limy’s deck also announces its ambitions to create an “ad network for AI agents,” by helping brands figure out what prompts they should put ad dollars against. How this capability could integrate with LLMs like ChatGPT launching ads remains to be seen.
Limy says it’s different from other AI startups that do generative engine optimization because many of those services track clicks and other activity generated by actual human beings. Agents, however, are a completely different beast (or, well, robot).
So much for that good ol’ human touch.
Searching For Search Results
It’s a good day to be a publisher. Finally.
On Wednesday, The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s top competition regulator, ruled that Google must give publishers more autonomy over the use of their content.
As part of the ruling, publishers can opt out of having their content scraped for AI Overviews without decreasing their search visibility. Currently, Google indexes AIO and Gemini content with the same system as its search engine, meaning that if publishers don’t want their content to be used for AI search, they risk losing visibility within Google search, too.
Some publisher advocates have proposed that Google divide its crawler into two independent tools, so publishers can opt out of one but not the other.
The CMA’s ruling doesn’t explicitly mandate this split, but it’s definitely in the cards, as it requires Google to provide publishers with “more choice, transparency, and attribution,” Adweek reports.
And while this ruling doesn’t require Google to change its behavior in the US or EU, it’s a good omen for publishers because it may lay the groundwork for countries worldwide to follow suit.
An UpScrolled Battle
Stop if you’ve heard this one before: A once beloved, still popular social media network with an extremely lucrative ad sales business gets sold to new owners, causing a bunch of users to jump ship for an algorithm-free knockoff, all while citing frustrations with political censorship.
This time, though, it’s TikTok getting abandoned, not Twitter.
In the week since the short-form video platform officially divested its US business, it’s been plagued by criticism over recent power outages, privacy policy updates and perceived algorithm changes, which many users believe are targeting anti-ICE rhetoric.
As a result, TikTok app deletion rates are up nearly 150%, reports CNBC.
TikTok fans have experimented with surprising alternatives before. (Remember the pre-ban RedNote craze?) But one of the major frontrunners this time is particularly interesting: UpScrolled, an app that supports text posts, photos and short-form video, and which claims to have no interest in attracting advertisers.
As always, it’s unclear how UpScrolled will continue without an obvious business model. (Maybe ads will end up back on the table somewhere down the line?)
But it’s worth pointing out that, for consumers who frequently complain about social media advertising, the actual breaking points have been sketchy data practices and concerns about platform ownership – not the presence of ads on the platform.
But Wait! There’s More!
The IAB’s 2026 outlook study predicts that ad spend in the US will grow by 9.5% this year, citing agentic AI advancements and major seasonal events. [IAB]
Yahoo releases its own consumer-facing AI platform, Yahoo Scout, which is at least better at answering questions than Yahoo Answers ever was. [Search Engine Journal]
Google will pay $135 million to settle a lawsuit alleging illegal collection of Android device data. [WSJ]
Amazon announces plans to cut 16,000 jobs, citing increased AI spending as a primary reason. [NYT]
Huh! Looks like YouTube is finally taking down prominent AI slop channels. [The Verge]
Expect this year’s Super Bowl broadcast to be filled with AI company ads. [Digiday]
With its new Auto Browse AI agent, Google’s even trying to outsource internet scrolling. [Wired]
Neocities, a web hosting client modeled after the ’90s heyday of GeoCities websites, accuses Bing of blocking its domain (and 1.5 million independent subdomains created by users) from its search index. [Neocities]
