Meta put a number on its new advertising model this week. It did not put a test behind it. The company says the model that now decides which ads you see lifted conversions by 18.9 percent across its apps, with click-through up 12 percent. There is no baseline in the announcement, no date range, and no account of how any of it was measured. Your Meta rep will quote that figure at you before the end of the month.
Paid media and AI
Meta says one model lifted conversions nearly 19 percent
Meta’s engineering team published a long post on 13 October about GEM, the single large model that now trains every smaller model serving ads across its apps. The headline claims are an 18.9 percent conversion improvement and a 12 percent lift in click-through rate. A second set in the same post gives 5.8 percent on Facebook and 4.1 percent on Instagram. The post never says whether those sets overlap, what period they cover, or what a targeted user is. None of it arrives as a new control in Ads Manager either.
Why this matters for your business: Treat the figure as a claim, not a result. When someone uses it to argue for more budget, ask for a holdout test on your own account instead. Keep ten percent of your audience out of the campaign for a month and compare. Meta marks its own homework, so its reporting is not that test. The model now also learns across Facebook and Instagram together, so the placement split in your reports means less than it did. Judge placements on your own revenue.
SEO and search
Gemini 4 Argon is answering in AI Mode, and the links came back
Google began rolling Gemini 4 Argon into AI Mode globally on 13 October. Nick Fox and Robby Stein of Google said on X that it is live in Search worldwide for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Google says it reads intent better and follows instructions across a conversation. The part that matters most for your website is smaller and less official. Gagan Ghotra reported that links to source websites are showing up in AI Mode answers again, which was not the case with the model it replaces. Google has not confirmed that.
Why this matters for your business: If links really are back in AI Mode, the pages that get cited are the ones that answer a specific question cleanly and early. Take your five highest value service pages and make each one answer its core question inside the first hundred words, in plain sentences, before any sales copy. That is the same work that wins a featured snippet, so none of it is wasted.
Bing will show you which topics it cites you for
Microsoft added a Topics Portfolio to the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools on 13 October. Instead of listing every query where an AI answer cited your site, it groups them into themes. For each theme you see how big the topic is, how many sites get cited in it, how many queries sit inside it, and which strong queries cite other people and not you. It is in beta, your site needs enough data to qualify, and there is no click data.
Why this matters for your business: This is the only free view of AI citation share any search engine hands you. Bing Webmaster Tools takes twenty minutes to set up and the same data feeds Copilot. Even if Bing sends you little traffic here, the opportunity query list shows which questions your competitors answer and you do not.
One small local change is worth five minutes if you have restaurant clients. Google added gluten-free, dairy-free, halal and kosher attributes to Google Business Profile menus on 13 October, alongside the vegetarian and vegan tags already there. You tag individual menu items rather than the whole business. Lisa Landsman of Google announced it on LinkedIn. In a market where halal certification already shapes a real share of restaurant choice, the business that tags its menu first shows up in those searches first.
Social media
Facebook now lets people type what they want in their feed
Meta launched a feature called Your algorithm on 13 October. People open a dedicated space from the three dot menu on any post and type the topics they want more or less of in Feed and Reels. After someone taps Interested or Not interested, Facebook may ask a follow up question and take a free text answer. Meta says large language models now sit inside its ranking pipeline, which lets the feed respond within the same session. It named no countries and no completion date, and did not say how a typed request is weighed against what someone actually clicks.
Why this matters for your business: Organic reach has been drifting toward stated preference for a while. This is the clearest version yet. The practical effect is that a page posting the same thing every day is now easier to switch off on purpose. Give people a reason to type your category in rather than out. Post the thing only you can post. Your own stock, your own prices, your own work. Generic reshared content was already weak. It now has an off switch.
Automotive
AI is already judging your dealership
This one is real automotive news. Bruce Duguay, writing in Canadian Auto Dealer on 13 October, ran a live test. He asked ChatGPT to find a used BMW 230i under fifty thousand dollars near Guelph in Ontario. It did not list the two closest matching cars first. It recommended a franchise dealer further away for its inspection and reconditioning standards, then told him to wait for a car at a second dealer that had no 230i in stock at all. Both dealers carried the same Google rating. What separated them was everything else the model could read, including a 2.6 score on Yelp, Reddit threads describing bad experiences, and much richer vehicle copy on the winner’s own website.
Why this matters for your dealership: Ask the question yourself today. Open ChatGPT, type the search your customer would type for your brand and your town, and read the answer. The model reads your reviews on every platform and not only Google, and it reads your vehicle detail pages as evidence. Thin stock descriptions lose to a dealer who writes a real paragraph about each unit. So do unanswered one star reviews on a platform your team stopped checking two years ago.
What to do this week
- Ask for a holdout test before anyone raises your Meta budget on the back of an 18.9 percent claim.
- Set up Bing Webmaster Tools, then open the AI Performance report and read the opportunity queries.
- Rewrite the first hundred words of your five best service pages so they answer the question plainly.
- Tag your menu items in Google Business Profile if you look after a restaurant.
- Search for your own business in ChatGPT and read the answer the way a customer would.
If you want a second pair of eyes on any of this, get in touch and we will go through it.
Sources
- PPC Land on Meta’s GEM ads model figures
- Search Engine Roundtable on Gemini 4 Argon in AI Mode
- Search Engine Roundtable on the Bing Topics Portfolio
- Search Engine Roundtable on the new dietary attributes
- PPC Land on Facebook’s Your algorithm feature
- Canadian Auto Dealer on how AI judges a dealership