AI Marketing Weekly: SEO Budgets Split, Agent Traffic Jumps
Typeface finds 49% of marketers plan to cut SEO spend as AEO takes the budget. Plus agent traffic up 4.7x, Peec AI's ARR jump, and TELUS-Parloa.
Alex Carter
Alex Carter is a digital marketing expert. With years of experience helping developers and businesses optimize their digital marketing, Alex shares practical insights and best practices on this blog. For inquiries or consulting, contact: [email protected]
Semantic Caching: Cut LLM Costs Without Losing Quality
Prompt-prefix caching is now automatic at the model API. The savings left sit in semantic caching: matching the same question asked a different way. How to size it, pick the threshold, and dodge the failure modes.
Dead Air Is the Voice AI Benchmark That Matters in 2026
Voice quality is table stakes now. The week Decagon, Amazon and Microsoft all shipped the fix for dead air mid-call, and the acceptance tests agencies should run before promising a resolution rate.
Google Shipped AI Spend Caps. Your Agency Needs Them Too.
Last week Google did for enterprise AI budgeting what most agencies still have not done for themselves: it installed a meter. At Gemini at Work 2026 on October 8, Google Cloud introduced a single “universal” Gemini agent that plans work,…
Google Now Edits Your Ad Creative: The 2026 Agency Audit
On October 9, Google shipped two changes that look unrelated and are actually the same story. Demand Gen picked up a new “Overlay on videos” setting that lets Google write text onto your video creative — and it arrived switched…
AI Marketing Weekly: Agents Ship, Oversight Becomes the Job
This was the week agentic AI stopped being a conference talking point and started turning up in product documentation, media plans and client conversations. Google shipped a universal work agent and put a preview button on its automated ad copy.…
Local Embeddings in Production: What On-Device Retrieval Changes
Google's EmbeddingGemma 2 puts embeddings on the device. How to decide what runs in production: local vs hosted models, pgvector storage, and why retrieval quality is still an architecture problem.
Voice AI Cost Per Call: Where the Money Actually Goes
Text-to-speech stopped being the expensive part of a voice agent this year. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash TTS bills $10 per million audio output tokens, which converts to roughly $0.015 a minute of finished audio — about 90 cents per audio…
When Clients Get Their Own AI Agent: Agency Ops in 2026
Two platform moves in the last week point in the same direction, and agency operators should read them together. Meta expanded its Muse AI agent to small businesses, wiring it into the software those businesses already run on. TikTok split…
AI Metadata Fact-Checking: The 2026 Agency Workflow
On October 1, 2026, Google quietly revised its guidance on generative AI content. The edit added three sentences, but one of them lands squarely on agency workflows: the instruction to manually fact-check AI output now “also applies to metadata.” Titles,…