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Adobe has closed its $1.9bn all-cash acquisition of Semrush. The pitch is no longer "SEO software" — it is a single platform for tracking and influencing brand visibility across Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot. Marketers now have a mainstream, enterprise-grade vendor for what Adobe is calling generative engine optimisation and agentic search optimisation.

Google has confirmed Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match will be auto-upgraded to AI Max by the end of September. Voluntary upgrade tools have shipped this week. The keyword-only Google Ads account is in run-off.

Shopify's Winter '26 Edition has gone live. Sidekick is now a proactive operator that can build apps, draft Flow automations and generate ShopifyQL reports from a prompt. Agentic Storefronts pushes a merchant's catalogue into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot via a single Shopify Catalog hook.

The Pentagon awarded classified AI contracts to eight firms — OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia, SpaceX, Reflection and Oracle — and conspicuously left Anthropic outside the tent over its refusal to drop warfare and mass-surveillance restrictions.

On the watchlist: Google security research showing indirect prompt injection in the wild rising 32% between November and February, and a Fortune analysis arguing that roughly half of Google's and Amazon's "blowout" AI quarter is paper gains on their Anthropic stake rather than operating revenue.

The pattern across the day is that the AI stack has finished arguing with itself about whether AI is a real channel. It is now repricing the channels we already use — search, ads, ecommerce, procurement — and forcing operators to decide whether they are upgrading on their terms or on the platform's.