Google is solving the context problem for AI agents, Bing is winning AI performance reporting and more.

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22 ChatGPT Agents Built for Every Marketing Job

Most marketers use ChatGPT to do general research and then call it an AI strategy. The ones outperforming them are deploying specialized agents built for specific jobs.

We put together 22 plug-and-play ChatGPT marketing agents that handle the work eating your week, each with built-in instructions and structured outputs ready to go in under 5 minutes.

Subscribe to Marketing Against the Grain and get all 22 free.

Inside you'll find:

• Competitive intelligence agent that visits competitor websites and builds detailed comparison matrices automatically

• Customer feedback analyzer that ranks improvement opportunities by business impact

• Social listening specialist that monitors brand mentions and flags reputation risks before they escalate

• Campaign optimization agents that handle attribution analysis and surface what is actually driving results

Your competitors are already running agents like these.

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Bing Is Quietly Building the Best AI Search Reporting Dashboard

While everyone's watching Google, Microsoft just dropped a genuinely useful update to Bing Webmaster Tools, and SEOs should be paying attention.

The new AI Performance Report now comes with four fresh features: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare.

Together, they start to answer the question every content team has been asking since AI search exploded: why is my content being cited, and how much of that space am I actually owning?

Here's the quick breakdown:

• Intents tells you whether your citations are coming from informational, commercial, research, or shopping-type queries. Basically, the vibe of the prompt that surfaced your content.

• Topics groups related queries into thematic clusters (so "solar panels," "solar efficiency," and "residential solar install" all roll up into Solar Energy). Finally, reporting that thinks the way content teams actually think.

• Citation Share shows your slice of the citation pie for any given query. Not clicks. Not yet. But directional visibility data that tells you if you're dominating a topic or getting lost in the crowd.

• Compare lets you overlay time periods to track how your presence is shifting.

Why it matters: Google rolled out its own AI reporting in Search Console last month, and by most accounts it felt rushed. Bing's version has been iterating since February and is shaping up to be the more thoughtful product. For SEOs, this is the earliest real infrastructure for understanding GEO (generative engine optimization) performance, and Bing is giving it to you before Google has figured out its own story.

Still no click data though. Don't hold your breath.

97% of llms.txt Files Have Never Been Read by Anything

Ahrefs just analyzed 137,000 websites and delivered the most politely devastating finding in recent SEO history: 97% of llms.txt files received zero traffic in May 2026. No bots. No AI. No humans. Nothing. Just a little markdown file, sitting at the root directory, waiting for a robot that never came.

But wait, it gets better.

Of the 3% of files that did get traffic, the biggest readers were SEO audit tools, bots checking whether the file exists, not consuming it. Slackbot fetched more llms.txt files than PerplexityBot. A chat app's link preview beat the AI search engine the whole exercise was designed for.

The second biggest "reader"? Security researchers probing llms.txt for prompt injection vulnerabilities. So the main audience for your carefully crafted AI context file is, apparently, people looking to hack it.

Meanwhile, 28% of sites have published one anyway, driven entirely by vibes and the quiet hope that an AI somewhere would notice and reward them.

No major AI platform has ever committed to reading it. Adoption preceded confirmation by years.

John Mueller called it a "temporary crutch" for coding agents parsing developer docs.

The Chrome team shipped a Lighthouse audit for it.

Google's own documentation said you don't need it, in a section literally titled "mythbusting."

To be fair, Claude Code is reading these files. So if your customers are developers using AI coding agents, there's a genuine use case here. Truly. A real one.

For everyone else: your llms.txt is out there. Brave. Lonely. Unbothered by visitors. A digital lighthouse on an island no ship has ever passed.

Google Just Open-Sourced a Knowledge Format for AI Agents

AI agents are only as useful as the information you give them. The problem? That information lives everywhere, in wikis, spreadsheets, code comments, someone's head, and every team building agents has to figure out how to wrangle it themselves, from scratch, every time.

Google's proposed fix is the Open Knowledge Format (OKF): a simple standard for organizing that knowledge as plain text files that both humans and AI agents can read. Think of it as a shared filing system your agents can actually navigate.

No new tools required. No proprietary platform. Just files.

Why it matters: If it gets adopted, teams stop reinventing the same wheel every time they build a new agent. That's a big if, but the spec is open, the repo is live, and the idea is sound.

The spec, repo, and samples are available on GitHub.

Paid and Organic SEO Are Merging, And Gemini Is the Reason

Here's a sentence that would've sounded insane in 2020: the AI optimizing your Google Ads is the same AI ranking your organic content. Welcome to 2026.

Jason Barnard's latest piece makes a compelling case that the paid vs. organic divide, two separate teams, two separate budgets, two people who never eat lunch together, is becoming a relic.

Gemini now powers PMax, AI Max, AI Overviews, and AI Mode simultaneously. It reads the same user, at the same moment, with the same intent. The wall was always a bit fictional. Now it's rubble.

The most useful idea in the piece: train Gemini once, win on both sides. If the engine understands and trusts your brand organically, your paid campaigns get cheaper and cleaner. If it doesn't, you're paying a "doubt tax" on both channels at the same time. Fun!

The other thing worth sitting with: ad density per AI session is dropping, but Google keeps expanding the number of surfaces Gemini lives on - Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android, your fridge probably. Fewer ads per experience, but many more experiences. The goose isn't dying. It's multiplying.

The takeaway for SEOs: Stop thinking of paid data as the other team's problem. The cohorts and intent signals your paid campaigns surface are a roadmap for which organic pages to build next.