#BlinkTank: Gemini builds up momentum
In 2025 there were plenty of shouts that "Google is dead". Last year, the consensus was that it had been caught sleeping by OpenAI and that the search giant’s days were numbered.
Now there's some interesting data suggesting otherwise. It turns out that a massive, installed user base and a mature ad engine are quite difficult to unseat. While one side of the market is burning cash to build a product, the other is integrating it into the tools we already use every day.
The Gemini market share story
This is a story we missed last week, but it is incredibly interesting. Gemini’s global market share has reached 21.5% - a massive jump from where it sat just twelve months ago. It's also a reminder of Google’s ability to distribute its way out of a crisis.
Anecdotally, this is a pattern we recognise. As an agency, we've largely shifted to using Gemini over ChatGPT, along with Claude. This seems to be the same for lots of businesses that we speak to too.
📎 Gen AI world: Gemini takes a lead
Open AI's $60 CPM (!) ad pilot
OpenAI is moving fast to address its financial position - reportedly burning through $400 million a month. They are now asking for a minimum $200,000 (roughly £150k) commitment for their beta ads program at a $60 CPM.
One read on this is that OpenAI is simply testing the water to see what the market will bear. Given their current burn rate, it isn't massively surprising that they are going in hard, but it is a difficult position to backtrack from. For that premium price, advertisers are currently getting very little in the way of granular data or attribution. It will be interesting to see how many brands are willing to commit six figures to such an untested, high-cost channel.
📎 OpenAI asks ChatGPT advertisers for $200k in commitments
AI Overviews and the "AI mode" jump
There is a small but important change in how Google is handling AI Overviews. New updates mean that follow-up questions now jump users directly into "AI Mode" within Gemini.
This keeps users inside Google’s ecosystem for a much longer duration. For publishers, the concern is obvious: the more time a user spends refining their search within a chat interface, the less likely they are to click through to a traditional website. It is a move that prioritises user journey speed over external traffic.
📎 Google AI Overviews: Follow-up questions jump to AI mode
GSC: A directional signal, not a truth
We have talked about reporting data challenges with Search Console for a long time, and recent analysis from Kevin Indig backs up exactly what we are seeing internally.
The data suggests that GSC is filtering out roughly 75% of impressions for privacy reasons and missing up to 38% of actual clicks.
This adds up to a massive challenge for SEO reporting. We know the impact of the work is often much higher than we can demonstrate from the data available, but proving that when the data is so fractured and incomplete is incredibly hard.
In fact, this lack of clear attribution is a primary reason why many projects lose momentum - a subject we recently put an article together about to explain the mechanics behind it.
📎 Kevin Indig: GSC as a directional signal
📎 Blink: Why do Shopify SEO projects fail?
The UK’s AI "bill of rights"
The CMA is currently consulting on new requirements that would let UK sites opt out of AI Overviews and AI training while still demanding fair attribution.
Google is already exploring how to use the existing robots.txt framework to give sites this control. It is a complex decision for any brand - do you protect your content from being used to train the models, or do you opt-in for the visibility and hope the "fair attribution" actually leads to a click?
📎 Google exploring ways to allow sites to opt out of AI Overviews & AI Mode
From the blog: Managing third-party audits
Here is a subject that has popped up quite a bit recently as we start the new year. Third-party audits can be a particular challenge, especially for PPC projects for brands doing less than £5 million.
At this size, brands are often targeted by "free" audits from agencies looking to win the business. These almost always follow a specific template: find a few technical red flags, exaggerate their impact, and suggest the current team is asleep at the wheel. We’ve put together some notes on how we approach these - helping you distinguish between a genuine performance review and a sales pitch designed to create friction.
📎 How we approach third-party audits
GROW 25: The future forward edition
I was recently asked to contribute to the GROW 25 report by the team at Athos Commerce. The report features insight from leading voices across commerce and SEO on what is actually driving performance now and what will define the winners in 2026. It is a fantastic, practical read.
📎 Download GROW 25: The future forward edition
Shopify Flow: A fix for sender trust
Shopify has updated the "Send internal email" action in Shopify Flow. Until now, these emails came from [email protected]. They will now display your store’s actual sender email address. It sounds minor, but it is a big win for deliverability and brand consistency.
📎 Shopify Flow: Custom sender email update
Partner shout-outs
It has become a tradition to highlight partners in our network who help solve the most difficult problems for Shopify brands. This week we've got two of our favourites
Heur: Heur is an award-winning eCommerce agency built to run, fix, and grow complex DTC businesses. We have worked with Chris Raven , Chris Nawrocki and the team on multiple projects over the years. They specialise in senior-led, hands-on eCommerce management with clear ownership of trading, performance, and the P&L. They are the people to speak to if you need rigour and momentum without building a bloated internal team.
📎 Visit Heur
ITQ Commerce: We have also worked with the team at ITQ Commerce for a long time - they are wonderful people and absolute specialists in Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento projects. Somewhat uniquely, they also have a particular focus on smaller platforms like PrestaShop.
If you are unlucky enough to still be on PrestaShop (or something similar), you are likely feeling the "growth ceiling" of slow loads and clunky UX. ITQ are the people we recommend for getting brands off restrictive platforms like this and onto scalable infrastructure (i.e, Shopify). They also recently published a great piece on AI-driven discovery for the Iberia market, for which we were very pleased to contribute.
📎 AI-driven discovery on Shopify Iberia |
And that's it for this week!
As ever, thanks for reading.
All the best,
Sam
