
Episode #70
The Varosity AI GTM Report β Aug 18: The IAB Draws the AI Disclosure Line
Episode 70. Tuesday, August 18, 2026. The ad industry wrote its own rulebook for AI disclosure β and the important part is what you don't have to label. Jack King covers the IAB's risk-based Framework V2 and the audit-trail problem it hands to every brand running five models; Google paying ten million dollars for a bankrupt airline's email archive; ByteDance signing an IP truce with Hollywood over Seedance and Seedream; Alipay shipping the first complete agentic commerce stack; new research showing SEO authority and AI recall have quietly decoupled; and nine months of data proving you're misattributing about a fifth of your AI Overview traffic to Direct. Today's stories: IAB publishes AI Transparency & Disclosure Framework V2 β risk-based and materiality-driven, with no blanket labeling; C2PA metadata paired with consumer-facing labels. Arrives 16 days after EU AI Act Article 50 and California SB 942 took effect. β IAB release Β· MarTech Google pays $10M for Spirit Airlines' internal corporate data β ~100M emails, 500M Teams messages, 516 code repos, sold out of bankruptcy after outbidding Mercor. β Forbes Β· Quartz ByteDance and the MPA sign an AI IP memorandum of understanding β covering Seedance and Seedream across TikTok, CapCut and Dreamina, months after February's cease-and-desist. β Variety Β· NBC News Alipay launches China's first full-stack agentic commerce platform β merchants connect to the Ah Bao consumer agent with payment, identity, risk and fulfillment bundled in. β TNGlobal Β· Finextra Fractl's AI visibility index β 471 brands rank well on Google and are invisible in AI answers; only 11% of brands appear across ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, while 77% appear in just one. β MarTech Nine months of AI Overview data β 51,200 tracked events show AI Overviews driving 7.53% of organic sessions, with ~22.4% of that traffic misattributed to Direct. β Search Engine Land Sponsored by Varosity.ai β the compliance + provenance layer for AI-generated media, across every model. Check any image free: https://varosity.ai/verify

