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Tracking firms counted the AI answer on up to nine in ten company-name queries in September, with Wikipedia its most-cited source. Neither has Australian figures yet.

KytyPS5 now has nearly 600 GitHub forks and one indie game clone took 'roughly a day', leaving Australian studios that share prototypes publicly open to copies within days.

Lily Ray, VP of SEO and AI Search at Amsive, re-ran 100 'best B2B software' queries in September 2026 and found Google's AI Overviews cited 38% fewer self-promotional pages than in June, with rivals collecting the recommendation instead 70% of the time.

Executive chairman Bernie Brookes, the former Myer chief, says cash flow problems are now inevitable after Champ Private Equity's exit left Direct Group carrying significant debt, putting around 250 jobs and two broadcast shopping channels at risk.

The Sydney verification firm audited 40,021 ChatGPT ad clicks for 47 advertisers: 4% were invalid, under Google's 10.8%, but server and proxy clicks ran 3.6 times higher and one account's rate hit 34%, almost all from machines.

ChatGPT boss Nick Turley wrote there was "no good reason to click". Microsoft's own data shows Bing Chat sent The New York Times up to 93% fewer clicks than Bing search.

Media revenue barely moved. The drop came from creative agencies after VML lost Defence and Ogilvy lost Suncorp, while London's charge climbed to 10.7% of revenue.

The incidents happened during internal model testing in June. OpenAI told the first two agencies on 10 September and apologised publicly on 29 September.

Telstra's second space-villain ad with Steve Buscemi, via Bear Meets Eagle On Fire and +61, promotes the 24 million scam calls it says it blocks each month.

The McDonald's Media Network sells ads on its app, kiosks, menu boards and drive-thru screens in about 450 US restaurants, targeted with loyalty data. Australia is not included.

Four Seasons Naked Condoms and agency Emotive used AI to turn chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis into giant monsters for a Snapchat campaign, as diagnoses in Australia double.

Google's September 2026 spam update went live at 9:15 am PDT on 24 September and applies to every language and every location. Google expects the rollout to take up to two weeks to complete, making it the longest-running spam update the company has run all year.

Almost 20 million Australians visited a news site or app in August 2026, reaching 93.9% of online Australians aged 18 and over and averaging 3.39 hours of news reading across the month. Few advertising categories outside finance or fast-moving consumer goods can match that scale.

Nine Entertainment (ASX: NEC) closed at 73 cents on 23 September, down from 80 cents at the start of the week, a fall of 8.75% in five trading days.

Nine used generative AI across the 2026 season of The Block to produce personalised music jingles, alter contestants' outfits and generate animations, including sequences where cast members were transformed into animals and placed inside fantasy scenes.

James Chessell ran the Australian Financial Review (AFR), the country's most influential business masthead. On 23 September 2026, Joe Aston announced Chessell would take the editor-in-chief title at Rampart, the subscription outlet Aston founded roughly two years ago.

Amanda Laing has left Nine as managing director of streaming and broadcast, a week after she presented the network's 2027 programming to advertisers.

Telstra's new campaign does not mention download speeds once. 'Happy Internetting' is ten 15-second films, each built around a different type of internet user, the hypebeast, the niche hobbyist, the late-night streamer, made by Bear Meets Eagle On Fire in collaboration with illustrator Dave Arcade

Google put it plainly in a June 2026 policy statement: it is piloting a new way to partner with websites whose content meaningfully contributes to the freshness and factuality of generative AI responses through the process of grounding.

M+C Saatchi Group confirmed on 9 September 2026 that the management buyout of its Australia and New Zealand advertising agency would not proceed.

Eighty-three per cent of Australian marketing organisations sit at the early-to-mid stages of AI maturity, and none of the 126 CMOs and senior marketing leaders surveyed reached either of the benchmark's top two levels. That ceiling is worth sitting with.

Nvidia agreed to pay US$12.9 billion for the open-model hub used by 18 million developers, says its chips will not be required to use it, and expects the deal to close in the first half of 2027.

Bushletter audited 136 Australian agencies and their llms.txt files. Nearly nine in ten now sell AI search. Fewer than one in four say how they measure it.