Two things happened in the last seven days that change what a marketing team should be doing, rather than just what it should be reading about. Both are about the same underlying question: who is allowed to speak on your behalf, and who gets credit when they do.
1. The AI label became a legal requirement in the EU
On 2 August the transparency provisions of the EU AI Act became enforceable. AI-generated or manipulated content now has to be clearly labelled and carry machine-readable marking, and chatbots have to tell people they are not human. Penalties reach 15 million euro or 3% of global turnover.
The marketing read is narrower than the headlines suggest. This is not a ban on AI content and it does not require you to disclose that a human edited an AI first draft. It targets synthetic media and systems that could be mistaken for a person. If you run a chatbot, publish AI-generated images or video, or use a synthetic voice, you have work to do. If you use AI to help write blog posts that a person then edits and publishes under a byline, you mostly do not.
One detail is worth checking today, because it catches people out: content generated before 2 August but published on or after it does have to be labelled. A queue of scheduled posts made in July is not automatically safe. Our breakdown of the Article 50 disclosure rules has the practical checklist, and it has been updated for what landed on Sunday.
2. Google’s answers kept expanding, and the citations favour names
Similarweb put AI Overviews on 43% of US searches in May, up from around 15% in early 2025, though other measurement firms report figures less than half that. What the sources agree on is the direction, and on which sites get named in those answers: recognisable brands, disproportionately.
Reddit gave the week its financial punctuation. It beat its Q2 estimates with revenue up 61%, then lost up to 23% of its value after its chief executive called Google search referrals choppy. That is the first time this problem has been priced in public rather than argued about in SEO forums.
The uncomfortable conclusion, and the one we would push back on if somebody else wrote it, is that the response is not more content. It is being mentioned in more places you do not own. We set out why ranking and being cited have become separate jobs earlier today.
What to actually do this week
Two tasks, both short. Audit anything scheduled to publish that was generated by AI, because the labelling rule applies from the publish date rather than the creation date. Then pull first-touch attribution for new customers and find out what share arrives through a channel you do not control.
Neither is exciting. Both are the kind of thing that is cheap in August and expensive in November.
Editor’s note: This area changes quickly, so check the latest platform policy before making compliance decisions.