As we made headway through the first month of Q4 2025, AI giants, industry leaders and notable brands are leaning more into AI. Here are a few stand-out AI marketing moments from October:
OpenAI’s Recent Restructure
Recently, OpenAI announced plans to restructure. As the organization continues to grow, Sam Altman is transforming its current research-lab model toward a large-scale corporate entity designed to raise enormous sums of capital, eventually from a stock market listing. Altman stated that OpenAI is aiming for 30 gigawatts of compute capacity, equal to about ~$1.4 trillion in infrastructure development.
Fully Automated Influencer Marketing En Route?
Consider this statement: “I am in favor of fully automating influencer marketing with AI.”
When CreatorIQ presented brands and industry leaders with the sentiment, a vast majority of industry leaders (51% and 36%) and brand marketers (35% and 34%) said they either strongly agree or somewhat agree.
While most are in favor of AI taking over in the influencer marketing department, they still have reservations about what they don’t want AI to replace, including managing relationships, creator discovery, generating video content and more.
This encapsulates marketers’ mood toward AI as a whole — they want automation at scale, but without stripping tasks of their connection, creativity and control. It’s a delicate balance, but one that more and more marketers are trying to achieve.
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Google Unveiled Its First-Ever AI-Generated Ad — to Mixed Feelings
On the last day of October 2025 — 27 days ahead of U.S. Thanksgiving — Google released an on-theme, entirely AI-generated ad using Veo 3 in AI Mode:
In a Wall Street Journal article, Robert Wong, co-founder and vice president of Google Creative Lab, told Reporter Patrick Coffee that he has concerns about “the race to the bottom, the AI slop stuff.” But he also noted that “there were bad ads before AI and there’ll be bad ads after AI” and “[c]onsumers don’t care whether an ad was made with AI or not.”
In just 3 days, the ad has amassed nearly one million views on YouTube. The comment section seems split on whether they like the ad or not. While many are praising it, an equal number are sharing their concern and distaste about the video having “no soul,” it being “AI slop” and that “There is something horribly off with the feel of this. Yet this is presented as if it is some great revolutionary breakthrough.”
This ad is evidently the first in an ongoing series of Google AI ads, the next slated to unveil this holiday season.
Interestingly, Google chose not to prominently label the ad as “made by AI.” Unless you have a discerning eye for increasingly convincing AI-generated videos, you may not even be able to tell. Perhaps this is an indicator that disclosing AI use in certain situations will become less important for some brands as they focus on how well the outcome resonates instead of how it was created.
New Data Around ChatGPT Search and What it Means for SEO
ChatGPT triggers external web searches in about 31% of user prompts, according to new data from Nectiv Digital, meaning models are increasingly retrieving and summarizing rather than just generating from internal training data. When it does search, ChatGPT averages 2.17 separate queries per prompt (some prompts generate up to 4 searches).
These findings highlight a few things about AI and SEO:
First, the longer and more specific nature of ChatGPT queries (5.5 words long compared to 3.4 for typical search queries) implies that content targeting phrases like “best X in 2025”, “X vs Y comparison” and “X features review” may be more effectively discovered and sourced by ChatGPT.
Second, because the model often does more than one search per prompt, content that covers adjacent angles (overview + comparison + review) may have better chances of being captured in ChatGPT’s “chain” of lookups.
Third, ChatGPT performs searches most often for local-intent prompts (59%), suggesting it relies heavily on web searches when it needs context and geography.
We knew that SEO was moving away from a Google-dominant practice, and these findings suggest that local SEO, at least for now, may be the most important optimization step for brands that do it. If that’s you, make sure to:
- Keep Google Business Profiles complete and consistent.
- Use a schema with address, coordinates and review data.
- Maintain and update your local content (“Best cafés in Boston 2025”).
If you’ve been wondering where to spend your SEO budget, local is the way to go if you’re concerned about AI discovery. If that doesn’t fit into your strategy, these generative engine optimization best practices help algorithms notice your content in lieu of local language:
- Write for AI retrieval and summarization, not just traditional search ranking.
- Use metadata, schema and ensure topical coherence.
- Publish distinctive insights that make your brand cite-worthy by AI’s standards.
Wrapping Up
There is a lot underway in the AI and marketing worlds as we get closer to closing out the final quarter of the year. The next couple of months will denote whether we can rely on these October happenings to set the tone for 2026, or if more big shifts and revelations are still on the way.
