Alessandro Morelli oggi all’Adnkronos per AdnTalks, diretta dalle 11

(Adnkronos) – Il senatore della Lega Alessandro Morelli, sottosegretario di Stato alla Presidenza del Consiglio dei ministri con delega alla programmazione e al coordinamento della politica economica nel governo Meloni, oggi, 31 luglio, sarà al Palazzo dell’Informazione di piazza Mastai a Roma, ospite di ‘AdnTalks’, il format in diretta sul sito internet e sul canale YouTube dell’Adnkronos. A intervistarlo sarà il direttore Davide Desario. La diretta avrà inizio alle 11.

—

politica

webinfo@adnkronos.com (Web Info)

Novità su Google, per aggiungere Key4Biz tra le tue fonti preferite, clicca qui

Leggi le altre notizie sull’home page di Key4biz

https://www.key4biz.it/alessandro-morelli-oggi-alladnkronos-per-adntalks-diretta-dalle-11/583467/

Xbox CEO lays out priorities in memo after major ‘reset’

After a massive Xbox “reset” that laid off thousands of employees and spun off four studios, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wants to get Xbox back to growth. In a memo obtained by The Verge, Sharma told staff by the end of fiscal year 2027 (which runs through next June), “we will return XBOX to player and revenue growth.” Xbox will also “improve profits back in line with industry averages,” Sharma said. “Every function and studio will own part of that outcome.”

Since taking over Xbox in February, Sharma has made sweeping changes to attempt to turn things around. Previously, she has cited challenges like a low accountability margin, increasing component costs for hardware, an “over extended” slate of studios, and platform infrastructure that’s “not built for the battle ahead.” In addition to the major structural changes, Xbox made Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution Xbox console exclusives and is planning to do more. Sharma has also set an ambitious and nearly impossible goal to make Xbox “one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day.”

In Thursday’s memo, Sharma laid out four Xbox priorities for fiscal year 2027:

CORE: Strengthen our platform, led by console

CONTENT: Grow great games into global franchises

CREATION: Make Minecraft the world’s creator platform

CONNECTION: Extend the worlds that fans love

Xbox will measure progress toward its goals in three “stages,” Sharma said. The first is to return to growth by the end of fiscal year 2027. The second is to turn its bets into growth; “In FY28 and FY29, our Four C’s and roadmap must move into businesses producing meaningful player value and revenue acceleration.” The third is to “scale what works,” and by fiscal year 2030, “our ambition is to be halfway to our long-term daily-player goal with sustained double-digit growth in players and engagement and industry leading margins.”

Sharma shared some vague numbers about Xbox’s current playerbase. “XBOX is one of the largest stadiums in the world, bringing together more than 100 million people every day, more than 500 million each month, and nearly one billion each year,” she wrote. She also noted that console “generates the majority of XBOX revenue and remains the foundation of our fandom” and that it is still Xbox’s “flagship experience.” Xbox’s OS, Game Pass, Windows, and streaming “become our platform for new players and developers.”

The company is also shifting its studio system from a decentralized model to one that’s “more focused around our strongest franchises and biggest new ideas,” Sharma said — something that’s already become evident with changes like the big new Fallout push. Xbox will build “long-term plans” for its biggest franchises “across film, television, consumer products, sponsorship, live experiences, and form new partnerships globally, including China.” Three Xbox franchises “already generate more than $1 billion annually,” though Sharma doesn’t specify which those are.

To grow its share in casual games, Xbox plans to lean on Candy Crush-maker King as well as Microsoft Causal Games, Sharma said. And Xbox is planning to invest in Minecraft “more than ever before.”

https://www.theverge.com/games/973520/xbox-ceo-memo-one-year-growth

Dall’Iraq alla Giordania, fino ad Arabia Saudita ed Egitto: guerra Iran-Stati Uniti rischia di allargarsi

(Adnkronos) –
Dall’Iraq alla Giordania e al Libano fino all’Arabia Saudita, il Kuwait e l’Egitto dove un drone ieri ha colpito una metaniera americana nel porto di Damietta. Dopo giorni di calma apparente il conflitto contro l’Iran iniziato con gli attacchi degli Stati Uniti e di Israele dello scorso 28 febbraio si sta allargando pericolosamente con un numero crescente di Paesi coinvolti. L’Arabia Saudita – assediata su tre fronti dall’Iran, dagli Houthi yemeniti e dalle milizie filoiraniane in Iraq -, ha messo fine alle sue reticenze e lo scorso 29 luglio insieme agli Stati Uniti ha colpito obiettivi delle Forze di mobilitazione popolare in Iraq.

Nella notte tra il 28 e il 29 luglio l’Iran, dal canto suo, ha lanciato missili balistici contro una base statunitense in Giordania. La notte scorsa invece è arrivata la risposta puntuale degli Stati Uniti con raid sull’Iran in linea con le dichiarazioni del presidente degli Stati Uniti Donald Trump che aveva promesso di colpire duramente Teheran dopo l’attacco alla base Usa. Dopo un raid iraniano in Kuwait oggi è morto un dipendente di un’azienda cinese nel nord del paese.

L’escalation, osserva il ‘New York Times’, “arriva mentre i tentativi di riprendere i negoziati di pace si sono arenati e la portata del conflitto sembra essersi ampliata”. Dalla rottura del cessate il fuoco tra Stati Uniti e Iran, i gruppi legati a Teheran in tutta la regione hanno aperto nuovi fronti e ne hanno riaperti di vecchi, coinvolgendo forze in Arabia Saudita, Iraq, Libano e Giordania. “La partecipazione dell’Arabia Saudita agli attacchi di mercoledì – scrive il quotidiano Usa – ha rappresentato un’escalation. Il regno finora aveva evitato di diventare apertamente un combattente diretto nella guerra Usa-Israele contro l’Iran”. L’esercito saudita aveva lanciato alcuni attacchi di ritorsione contro l’Iran, ma erano stati compiuti in segreto, secondo alti funzionari statunitensi.

Una reazione di Riad che arriva dopo che questa settimana, l’Arabia Saudita ha dovuto affrontare decine di attacchi di droni contro le proprie strutture petrolifere. Gli attacchi alle petroliere saudite da parte dei militanti Houthi, l’alleato iraniano in Yemen che controlla ampie fasce di quel Paese lungo il Mar Rosso, hanno ulteriormente minacciato le rotte di navigazione petrolifera, con conseguenze potenzialmente disastrose per i Paesi del Golfo che fanno forte affidamento sulle forniture del Medio Oriente. “L’espansione dei combattimenti in Medio Oriente – sottolinea il New York Times’ – rischia di complicare la possibilità per l’amministrazione Trump di uscire da questa guerra impopolare” e questo mentre si stanno avvicinando le elezioni di mid term previste per quest’autunno negli Usa. La nuova escalation rischia di peggiorare la situazione economica e in particolare di provocare una nuova impennata del prezzo del petrolio spingendo di conseguenza al rialzo l’inflazione.

L’esercito statunitense ha spiegato che i raid di mercoledì in Iraq sono stati una rappresaglia per oltre 30 attacchi di droni compiuti da gruppi proxy iraniani nelle 72 ore precedenti. Un funzionario statunitense ha riferito che gli obiettivi erano membri delle Forze di Mobilitazione Popolare, una coalizione di milizie basate in Iraq con legami con l’Iran. I raid hanno ucciso circa 20 consiglieri iraniani, tra cui alti consulenti tecnici e ufficiali di collegamento del Corpo delle Guardie della Rivoluzione Islamica. Nessun gruppo di miliziani iracheni ha rivendicato la responsabilità degli attacchi con i droni. E anzi oggi, Sabah Al-Numan, il portavoce del primo ministro iracheno ha spiegato all’agenzia di stampa irachena, che non ci sono prove che il territorio iracheno sia stato utilizzato per lanciare attacchi contro l’Arabia Saudita all’inizio di questa settimana: “nessuna parte ha fornito finora alcuna prova a sostegno di queste affermazioni”.

Anche il cessate il fuoco in Libano sta reggendo a fatica mentre Israele e Beirut stanno cercando di attuare l’accordo per porre fine a mesi di combattimenti che è stato respinto da Hezbollah. Ieri l’esercito israeliano ha accusato Hezbollah di una “palese violazione del cessate il fuoco”, affermando che il gruppo militante sostenuto dall’Iran ha lanciato un drone contro un veicolo israeliano nella zona del Libano meridionale attualmente controllata dall’esercito israeliano.

Secondo Dana Stroul, alta funzionaria del Pentagono durante l’amministrazione Biden, citata dal ‘Washington Post’, sia Trump che Teheran sembrano essere in una situazione di stallo, poiché nessuna delle due parti vede vantaggi nel proseguire il conflitto o ritiene che i negoziati possano portare a un esito decisivo. “C’è un crescente pessimismo in entrambe le capitali riguardo all’incapacità delle parti di impegnarsi in un accordo diplomatico”, ha osservato. Stroul, oggi direttrice della ricerca presso il Washington Institute for Near East Policy, ha aggiunto che “sembra quasi che entrambe le parti continuino a lanciare attacchi militari da una posizione di debolezza”. Secondo la sua analisi, Trump appare riluttante ad avviare operazioni militari su larga scala che potrebbero compromettere il sostegno della sua base elettorale in vista delle elezioni di mid term mentre l’Iran sembra ritenere di trovarsi in “un momento unico di massima leva strategica” Finora, secondo il Pentagono, nel conflitto sono morti 18 militari statunitensi e oltre 600 sono rimasti feriti. Il ministero della Salute iraniano invece parla di oltre 3.500 morti iraniani.

—

internazionale/esteri

webinfo@adnkronos.com (Web Info)

Novità su Google, per aggiungere Key4Biz tra le tue fonti preferite, clicca qui

Leggi le altre notizie sull’home page di Key4biz

https://www.key4biz.it/dalliraq-alla-giordania-fino-ad-arabia-saudita-ed-egitto-guerra-iran-stati-uniti-rischia-di-allargarsi/583473/

Bank of America to Acquire Cybersecurity Firm MDSec

Bank of America announced on Thursday that it plans to acquire UK-based information security consultancy MDSec Consulting Limited.

Headquartered in Macclesfield, England, MDSec provides technical information security consulting services and employs approximately 65 cybersecurity professionals.

The acquisition will expand Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America’s existing presence in northern England. The financial institution has more than 1,400 employees in nearby Chester, where it also operates a cyber threat operations center.

“We have long admired the exceptional ability of the MDSec team and are delighted that Bank of America and its clients will now further benefit from their work,” said Bank of America chief information security officer Kris Fador.

MDSec co-founder Dominic Chell said joining Bank of America would allow the company to further its efforts to develop security capabilities and advance technical innovation.

“Joining one of the world’s leading financial institutions, one that reflects our culture of innovation and technical excellence, gives us an incredible opportunity to take that ambition to the next level,” Chell said.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

The transaction is expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. Financial terms were not disclosed.

https://www.securityweek.com/bank-of-america-to-acquire-cybersecurity-firm-mdsec/

Apple’s iPhone and Mac sales keep growing despite RAM shortages

Apple’s iPhone and Mac sales are on the rise even as a global memory shortage squeezes device makers. In its third-quarter earnings report released on Thursday, Apple revealed that iPhone sales jumped 22 percent to $54.25 billion and Mac sales increased 29 percent to $10.35 billion, driving the company’s overall revenue to $109.4 billion.

The company expects supply chain constraints to worsen in the coming months. During an earnings call, Apple chief financial officer Kevan Parekh said Apple expects “supply constraints to increase significantly” in the next quarter, adding the shortage will impact the iPhone, Mac, and iPad. Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook warned that the company predicts it will “pay even higher memory costs” in the coming months.

Apple hasn’t raised the prices of its iPhones yet, but analysts predict that the iPhone 18 could cost up to $200 more when the lineup launches this fall. Apple is planning to widely release its more personalized Siri AI alongside the iPhone 18, allowing its assistant to answer questions about what’s on your screen, search across apps, and perform tasks, like adding events to your calendar.

This week, Apple also announced a new Upgrade program that will let you lease an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or Mac for a set monthly price.

Additionally, Apple reported $30.74 billion in services revenue, which incorporates subscriptions like Apple One and Apple TV. Parekh added during the earnings call that the company now has more than 1.5 billion subscribers across its services. Apple also reported $7.88 billion in revenue for wearables and a lower-than-expected $6.2 billion in iPad revenue.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/973430/apple-q3-2026-earnings

The loss of Situational Awareness

I am not by any means an expert at finance but I think I do now have some advice for people who are: Do not name your hedge fund anything that will be hilarious if it blows up. Don’t use a name like “Long-Term Capital Management” or “Amaranth Advisors” (named for the floral symbol for immortality). Certainly do not call yourself “Situational Awareness,” which might as well just be “Hubris, Inc.”

Anyway, Situational Awareness, the hedge fund started by a 24-year-old former OpenAI employee that focuses on artificial intelligence bets, has sold most or all, depending on who’s reporting, of its entire public stock portfolio to Ken Griffin’s Citadel after several bad weeks for AI stocks, and that’s the situation we are all now aware of. You may recall earlier this week I noted the market had gotten particularly nervous about AI risk; as it turns out, we have discovered one firm that was swimming without a bathing suit.

How bad is it? Well, according to CNBC, the fund was worth $45 billion at the start of July. It is now worth $10 billion, after the sale of assets to Griffin. The previous record holder on all-time trading losses was Archegos Capital Management, which lost $8 billion in 10 days in 2021, according to The Wall Street Journal. If these numbers hold, Situational Awareness’ AI bets lost three times as much.

Every detail of this disaster is funnier than the last. Situational Awareness had a staff of eight, of whom four were investment professionals. “The fund’s largest holdings at the end of the first quarter included Nebius Group, Sandisk, Micron and CoreWeave, according to filings,” CNBC wrote. “All four of those stocks are down more than 35 percent this month.” I expect we will hear more in the coming days, especially from the Wall Street professionals who were on the other side of these jokers’ trades.

“Basically, this investment firm will be kind of like a brain trust on AI.”

How did we get here? Situational Awareness LP was named for a series of facile essays about machine intelligence published by the improbably named Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24-year-old mastermind of the hedge fund. “We are building machines that can think and reason,” he writes, betraying that he has no idea what thinking could possibly mean. “By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war.”

There is a part of me that wants to go line by line to dunk on every claim here, beginning with the very first sentence, “You can see the future first in San Francisco,” but I am going to stifle the impulse. The essays are the theoretical underpinnings of the hedge fund. The upshot is that artificial general intelligence is real (lol) and will arrive in 2027 (lmao). So the entire point of the hedge fund was to dump as much money as possible into AI stocks and then get very, very rich.

“Basically, this investment firm will be kind of like a brain trust on AI,” Aschenbrenner told Dwarkesh Patel in a four-hour podcast interview, the preferred intellectual medium of the Silicon Valley elite. “We’re going to have way more situational awareness than any of the people who manage money in New York. We’re definitely going to do great on investing, but it’s the same sort of situational awareness that is going to be important for understanding what’s happening, being a voice of reason publicly, and being able to be in a position to advise.”

I really cannot begin to explain how much this essay’s bad graphs impressed A Certain Kind of Silicon Valley Guy. Axios wrote breathlessly about the essay that “his opus is a useful, eye-opening synthesis of high-level Silicon Valley conversations.” Aschenbrenner’s insights “expanded my perspective as an AI practitioner beyond just the technical aspects,” wrote Shav Vimalendiran, a cofounder of SAMMY Labs, an AI company that is meant to simplify legal statutes. You know who else liked it? Ivanka Trump, who called it “an excellent and important read.”

Why would these purportedly serious people buy in on a 24-year-old’s very first hedge fund?

Situational Awareness’ backers included Patrick and John Collison, who cofounded Stripe, and two Meta AI leaders, Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. The fund’s director of research was Carl Shulman, who’d worked at Peter Thiel’s Clarium Capital. Eventually, Jane Street — the Wall Street firm budding young Effective Altruists, including Sam Bankman-Fried, join — bought in too. “Jane Street’s investment in Situational Awareness is particularly notable because the firm rarely allocates capital to outside money managers,” The Wall Street Journal wrote in June.

Why would these purportedly serious people buy in on a 24-year-old’s very first hedge fund? My best guess is that Aschenbrenner’s investors were relying on the social bona fides he had cultivated. Social proof is the laziest and most disastrous way to vet people — ask any Theranos investor, or for that matter, anyone who had Bernie Madoff managing their money — but I suppose it’s good enough for Silicon Valley.

At age 17, Aschenbrenner was called “an economics prodigy” by Tyler Cowen, a libertarian economist famous in certain Silicon Valley circles. Cowen’s Emergent Ventures even gave him a grant, according to Fortune. Aschenbrenner published essays in Works in Progress, a publication funded by Stripe. During his time at Columbia University, Aschenbrenner cofounded the college’s Effective Altruism chapter. After graduating in 2021 as Columbia University’s valedictorian at age 19, Aschenbrenner went on to work at the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which collapsed after Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud was revealed. Among his coworkers at the fund were William MacAskill, the philosopher-king of the Effective Altruism movement, and Avital Balwit, who would later become the chief of staff at Anthropic.

From there, he immediately got a job on OpenAI’s superalignment team. Fortune quotes several former coworkers who describe him as being “politically clumsy,” arrogant, and abrasive. “Multiple researchers also described a holiday party where, in a casual group discussion, Aschenbrenner told then Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang how many GPUs OpenAI had—‘just straight out in the open,’ as one put it,” wrote Fortune’s Sharon Goldman in her profile. (Both Wang and Aschenbrenner deny this occurred.) Aschenbrenner was later fired from OpenAI for leaking internal information in an incident unrelated to the Scale AI thing. Two months after that, Aschenbrenner published Situational Awareness, his essays.

“Obviously, not blowing up is task number one and two.”

Now astute readers may notice that Aschenbrenner had no previous money management experience on his resume when he launched his hedge fund. They may also notice that the sum total of Aschenbrenner’s work experience was a few months at FTX and about a year at OpenAI. They may wonder if this means that the Collisons, Gross, and Friedman have too much money to burn if they are funding this little shit. (Yes, obviously. Tax the rich!)

Here’s how Aschenbrenner described the fund’s strategy back in the halcyon days of 2024: “Obviously, not blowing up is task number one and two,” he told Patel. “You have to get the timing right. The sequence of bets on the way to AGI is actually pretty critical. People underrate it.”

We’ll get a more complete picture of how Situational Awareness crashed and burned in the coming days, but right now it looks like this. Hedge funds often borrow money to maximize their bets. So if you really believe AI is the future, “you won’t put 100% of your money (and your investors’ money) into the AI boom,” writes Bloomberg’s Matt Levine. “You’ll put, like, 300% of your money into the AI boom.” At one point, the hedge fund claimed to be up 439 percent.

The same borrowing that magnifies your wins also magnifies your losses. If you have borrowed money to bet on AI stocks, and those stocks go down — as they have done recently — the people you borrowed from will do what’s called a “margin call” and ask you to top up your loan collateral. First, Situational Awareness held calls with its investors and lenders to raise more capital, The Financial Times reported yesterday. It even offered some investors the opportunity to buy parts of its portfolio. This morning, Situational Awareness sold what the FT said was “a large portion of its $16bn public equity” to Citadel, Griffin’s hedge fund.

“You’ve got to be really, really careful about your overall risk positioning.”

Public equity is the most liquid part of anyone’s portfolio. Situational Awareness still has private holdings, including $5 billion in Anthropic, the FT reported. According to CNBC, Situational Awareness was also negotiating to sell that stake, “but it wasn’t clear if that deal was done.”

“You’ve got to be really, really careful about your overall risk positioning,” Aschenbrenner said in 2024. “If you expect these crazy events to play out, there’s going to be crazy things you didn’t foresee.” One of those things, perhaps, is that artificial general intelligence isn’t coming — or at least, not by 2027. “A friend joked that the investment firm is perfectly hedged for me,” Aschenbrenner said. “Either AGI happens this decade and my human capital depreciates, but I turn it into financial capital, or no AGI happens and the firm doesn’t do well, but I’m still in my twenties and smart.”

Yes, Aschenbrenner is certainly in his 20s!

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

Elizabeth Lopatto

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/973467/ai-bet-situational-awareness-oops-stonks

Okta to Acquire Identity Threat Detection Firm Permiso

Okta on Thursday said it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Permiso Security, a cloud-native identity security platform that specializes in detecting and mitigating threats across human, non-human, and agentic identities in multi-cloud environments. The deal extends Okta’s reach beyond identity management and into the realm of security operations, positioning the company to compete more directly on identity threat detection and response (ITDR).

Once folded into Okta’s identity security fabric, Permiso’s technology is expected to help organizations close operational blind spots and extend runtime detection and response across every type of identity in their environment.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Permiso to Okta as we help companies secure their agentic enterprises where humans, applications, service accounts, and AI agents work together,” said Ely Kahn, Chief Product Officer at Okta. He added that Permiso brings “proven identity threat detection and response capabilities, and an incredible threat research and security team that will advance Okta’s threat detection and prevention capabilities.”

Following the close of the transaction, Okta plans to unify identity threat detection and identity posture management into a single security offering, built around several capabilities inherited from Permiso.

Expanding Into the Security Operations Center

Beyond product features, the acquisition is expected to expand Okta’s footprint into the core Security Operations Center (SOC), giving the company a stronger foothold to partner with enterprise CISOs on evolving SecOps challenges. Permiso’s threat research arm, P0 Labs, will be folded into Okta’s research capabilities, adding post-authentication insight into suspicious behavior across cloud and AI environments. Combined with Okta’s existing threat intelligence operation, the company says this will strengthen detections, threat hunting, and its product roadmap across the identity lifecycle.

Deal Terms

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of Okta’s fiscal year 2027, subject to customary closing conditions. Okta said the deal is not expected to affect the financial guidance it issued on May 27, 2026. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

https://www.securityweek.com/okta-to-acquire-identity-threat-detection-firm-permiso/

AI Search Isn’t Replacing Google, It’s Layering On Top – Similarweb Data via @sejournal, @gregjarboe

Rand Fishkin, the co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, posted on LinkedIn on July 24, 2026, to say that Similarweb’s newest report would “probably infuriate” two groups at once. The AI zealots who are certain every marketing dollar should already be chasing chatbot visibility. And the AI skeptics who’ve suspected the hype was overblown but never had the receipts to prove it to a boss suffering from what Rand calls AI derangement syndrome.

Most industry reports comfort one camp and annoy the other. This one, Similarweb’s “2026 Generative AI Landscape: The Evolution of AI Search,” manages to hand both sides a data point that undercuts their certainty. I read all 38 pages because I’m into ground-truthing, and I want to walk through why Rand is right, what the report actually shows, and what you should do differently tomorrow morning because of it.

The Number That Should Worry The AI Zealots

Similarweb tracked audience overlap between ChatGPT and Google between March and May 2026, and 461 million of ChatGPT’s 494 million users (95%) also use Google in the same window. Almost nobody has left Google for ChatGPT. They’ve added ChatGPT to a Google habit that hasn’t budged.

Zoom out further, and the gap gets starker. Search still pulls 3.3 billion average monthly unique visitors worldwide. AI chatbots, even after growing 57% year over year, sit at 655 million. So, search is still roughly five times the size of the entire AI chatbot category combined. If your 2026 budget deck assumes AI search has already eclipsed traditional search, the math in this report says otherwise.

Citations tell the same story from a different angle. Only 6.8% of ChatGPT answers in the U.S. included a link to an external source as of May 2026. That’s up more than fivefold from around 1% a year earlier, which is genuinely fast growth, but it also means 93 out of every 100 ChatGPT answers still send nobody anywhere. Ethan Smith of Graphite makes a sharper point in the report about how users are folding those same prompting habits back into Google itself, with average search length climbing steadily since AI Mode launched. People aren’t abandoning search boxes. They’re just typing longer sentences into them.

The Number That Should Worry The AI Skeptics

Now for the half of the report that punctures the other side’s confidence. Average monthly web visits across generative AI platforms hit 9.5 billion between June 2025 and May 2026, up 70% year over year. App downloads worldwide climbed to 2.7 billion, up 134%. Half of all generative AI users are now 35 or older, compared to 61% under 34 just two years ago, which is the clearest signal I’ve seen that this isn’t a Gen Z fad running out its trend cycle. Michael Horrocks of Miro puts it plainly in the report: “Growth concentrated in younger demographics can fade with trends; growth spreading into older generations is often what durable, mainstream adoption looks like.”

Meta AI’s own disclosed numbers back that up from a completely different angle. Publicly reported monthly active users went from 384 million in September 2024 to 1.2 billion by March 2026, more than tripling in 18 months, entirely by riding inside Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger rather than as a standalone destination anyone had to seek out. And ChatGPT ad penetration in the U.S. jumped from 14% of desktop chats in May 2026 to 26% just one month later. Whatever you think about the maturity of AI search, advertisers clearly don’t think it’s a toy.

My read is that both camps are pattern-matching off the piece of the data that confirms what they already believed, and both are ignoring the half that complicates it. AI search hasn’t replaced anything. It has stacked a new, fast-growing, unevenly distributed layer on top of a search ecosystem that was already there, and the practitioners who will win the next two years are the ones measuring the stack instead of arguing about which layer matters more.

Why The Disconnect Between Citations And Clicks Matters More Than Either Camp Realizes

The most useful chart in the whole deck, and the one I think gets underappreciated in the LinkedIn debate, comes from Aleyda Solis of Orainti. She points out that 65% of the URLs ChatGPT cites sit two or three folders deep, the pages doing the actual evidentiary work behind an AI answer. But 58.8% of the referral traffic that AI sends back to sites lands on the homepage, not the cited page at all. Cited pages and clicked pages are almost entirely different populations of URLs.

That single data point should reorganize how agencies report AI performance to clients. If you’re only tracking whether your deep product or blog content gets cited, you’re missing the fact that the humans who actually click through are landing somewhere else entirely and need their own conversion path. Rand makes a related point in the report itself, comparing this to how 20th-century advertisers proved billboard and radio spend worked by measuring lift in store visits rather than counting who glanced at the sign. The mechanism has changed. The discipline of measuring downstream behavior instead of surface impressions hasn’t.

3 Things To Change In Your Strategy This Week

1. Split your reporting into two separate metrics. Track citation rate and citation folder depth as one key performance indicator that measures whether AI trusts your content enough to use it as evidence. Track referral landing pages and downstream conversion as a completely separate KPI that measures what actually happens once a human clicks through. Conflating the two in a single dashboard is how brands miss both problems at once.

2. Stop treating “AI visibility” as a single category. Similarweb’s brand visibility index shows how category-specific this already is. CeraVe leads beauty at an index of 100 while NYX Cosmetics sits at 19 in the same category. Kevin Indig of Growth Memo argues in the report that share of voice is the metric that matters here because it’s a relative comparison in a stochastic system, not an absolute score. Pull your own category’s leaderboard before you assume you’re winning or losing.

3. Match your content to the platform’s actual audience, not the platform’s overall size. The affinity data shows ChatGPT skews toward everyday consumers researching restaurants, health, and fashion; Claude users are 25 times more likely than the average searcher to visit university sites and skew heavily toward professionals and students, and Gemini users over-index on graphics, security, and hardware content. A single piece of “AI-optimized” content aimed at all three is aimed at none of them.

The Bottom Line

I don’t think the AI zealots are wrong that something structural is shifting. Nine and a half billion monthly visits and a fivefold jump in citation rates in under a year are not a rounding error. But I also don’t think the skeptics are wrong that most of the industry’s AI panic is running well ahead of the actual traffic numbers, given that Google still commands five times the audience of every AI chatbot combined and 95 out of every 100 ChatGPT users never left Google in the first place. Rand’s post nailed the discomfort because the data refuses to let either side keep its story simple. The brands that will actually benefit from this report aren’t the ones picking a side. They’re the ones pulling the citation and referral numbers for their own category this quarter and building a strategy around what the data says rather than what the argument on LinkedIn says.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-search-isnt-replacing-google-its-layering-on-top-similarweb-data/583378/

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 9 is $40 off at Costco and comes with over $50 in freebies

The Galaxy Watch 9 launches on August 7th, and not only does Costco have the best preorder incentives we’ve seen so far, the watch is also discounted. The deal includes the 40mm Watch 9 in cream or graphite, two wireless fast chargers for the watch, and a $50 Costco gift card, all for $339.99 — $40 less than the list price for the watch on its own directly from Samsung. The discounted price erases the $30 gen-to-gen price bump, and the extra chargers and gift card further sweeten the deal. If you aren’t a Costco member, a year of membership is only $65, which is less than the value of the free items in this purchase.

There are some changes to the new watches from the Watch 8. The brand says the new chip, a Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear Elite, is built specifically for AI performance, and there are new health tracking features, plus better battery life, to boot. We got to spend some time with the Watch 9 and Watch 2 Ultra at Samsung’s July 2026 Unpacked event, so make sure to read our initial impressions of both watches if you’re curious about how the upgrades feel ahead of their early August launch.

https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/973211/costco-galaxy-watch-9-preorder-costco-deal-sale

LinkedIn actually adds a ‘seems like AI slop’ button

A lot of content on LinkedIn might seem like AI slop, and now, you’ll be able to report those posts. As part of a series of updates to reduce the volume of AI slop on the platform, LinkedIn is introducing an actual button that lets you flag a post as something that “Seems like AI slop.”

The new feature is part of a broader push to reduce the volume of apparent AI slop on the platform. AI detector Pangram recently found that 41 percent of longform LinkedIn posts were flagged as being completely generated by AI, as reported by 404Media.

“AI slop is a top priority for all of us,” chief product officer Hari Srinivasan says in a post. “We really care about this.” In addition to the button to report a post as seemingly being AI-generated, LinkedIn is also ramping up new classifiers to identify “if a post is AI-slop or generally low-quality content,” which will “reduce the amount of AI slop you might see in suggested content and content from outside your network.”

I’m currently seeing the new report button in the three-dots menu on posts. When I click it, LinkedIn hides the post and shows a message thanking me for my feedback.

The new button will help LinkedIn “tune our models and make better feeds,” Srinivasan says. The company is also testing a way to show people that other users feel their posts come across as inauthentic or that they include heavy use of AI.

In addition, LinkedIn is removing a feature that used AI to “enhance” a post and will replace it with a “feature that proofreads your words, but does not change your voice,” according to Srinivasan.

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/973384/linkedin-seems-like-ai-slop-button