What has changed that makes these interviews timely?

First-party reporting now deserves a more prominent place in the procurement conversation. Google’s current documentation says its dedicated generative AI performance insights reached websites worldwide on 31 August 2026, subject to sufficient impressions for the report to appear. The report covers link impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. An interview based on the older premise that Google offers no dedicated report would therefore be out of date. (support.google.com)

Bing added Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare in preview on 16 June 2026, followed by Topics Portfolio beta on 13 October 2026. Microsoft explicitly describes the latter’s approximate aggregates and classifications as directional planning signals. (blogs.bing.com)

Buyer implication: ask what paid monitoring adds to available first-party evidence. Do not assume that first-party impressions, platform citation share and a supplier’s synthetic-prompt score measure the same thing.

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