Bill Hunt's audit of 122 top Shopify storefronts found checkout tools work (74 of 74 live carts created and canceled cleanly) while the policy tool blanks on real buyer questions: shipping cost to Boston came back usable on 0 of 88 stores, cancellation on 2 of 88. Only five merchants wrote their own agents.md.
Why it matters: Treat the MCP checkout as a cart builder, not a decision engine. Ask the store's own policy tool the cancel/ship questions before calling anything agent-ready.
H/L's buyer agent sat on Magnite's ClearLine MCP with Magnite's seller agent to activate a Northern California Toyota Dealers campaign on LG home screens, then LG and H/L signed off before it went live. Primary KPI is cost per reach, not a demo.
Why it matters: Agentic CTV is no longer a single-agency experiment. If you want home-screen inventory, the brief-to-activation loop can already run MCP-to-MCP with a human gate.
Channel Prioritization and Budget Allocation are rolling across Search, Shopping, PMax, and Demand Gen. Every channel starts High; PMax still lumps Search/YouTube/Discover/Gmail/Maps together; 0% is allowed. In February 2027 the old Search-over-Display bias dies, and Google's own advice is Display at Low + 50% if you want today's mix.
Why it matters: Set Display and Search Partners before BFCM, not after the Feb 2027 default-all-high flip starts moving spend.
Fender's interim CMO is rebuilding the site as a storytelling front door; Marshall's brand VP is running the Dead Venues YouTube series specifically to show up in AI Overviews. The Shipyard is testing whether boosting brand YouTube helps LLM intake.
Why it matters: After Anthropic's citation-farm ban, the GEO brief that still ships is original owned content with a right to win, not a network of "independent" pages.
CTC flags Google's Demand Gen lookalikes now default to suggestion mode: Narrow/Balanced/Broad are starting points, and a "signal" tag in Audience Reporting means the AI already expanded past your 2.5-10% band. Opt-out finally sits in the UI as of October.
Why it matters: Before you scale Demand Gen for BFCM, check the signal label and disable Optimized Targeting too if you actually wanted a hard list.