Model Wars, AI Ads, and Adobe's $2 Billion Bet on Search

Explicit

Three major model releases in a single week, ads arriving in AI search results, and a landmark acquisition that signals where SEO is heading. Paul and Martin cut through the noise.

This week saw an unprecedented flurry of model releases: Google's Gemini 3 Pro stormed the benchmarks, only for Anthropic's Opus 4.5 to arrive days later with superior coding performance. We unpack what these advances mean for marketers, from Nano Banana Pro's near-production-ready image generation to Opus's orchestration capabilities for multi-agent workflows. Beyond the model wars, we examine Gartner's 2026 predictions—including a warning about critical thinking atrophy—and debate the implications of ads appearing in AI overviews. Adobe's $1.9 billion acquisition of SEMrush closes the episode, raising questions about the future of generative engine opt ...