This week, AI advancements and shifting metrics highlight a rapidly evolving digital landscape. In today’s MadTech Daily, we cover the UK targeting Apple and Google’s mobile dominance, ITV reporting a 30% profit fall in the first half of 2025, and Google trialing shopping ads in Gmail.

The UK government is attempting to defuse a growing row with Apple over its controversial demand to bypass the company’s end-to-end encryption to access customer data. Sources have confirmed that Keir Starmer’s administration will probably have to retreat from the order.

OpenAI is also expanding the reach and revenue potential of its AI systems beyond subscriptions. The AI giant is moving to profit from product sales made through ChatGPT. Meanwhile, the company also introduced a powerful new capability to ChatGPT that allows the AI to complete complex tasks from start to finish, using its own virtual computer. 

As ChatGPT gets more autonomous, other AI players are eyeing how users access the web. Perplexity AI is in discussions with mobile manufacturers to pre-install its new AI-powered browser, Comet, on smartphones. The strategic move is aimed at taking on Google’s dominance in mobile search. 

Meanwhile, in the marketing world, creators are delivering value but brands may be measuring it all wrong. A new study from Billion Dollar Boy exposes that while brands are designing creator campaigns to build awareness and reach new audiences, they’re still measuring success through the lens of ROI and customer acquisition metrics that don’t always align with creative intent. 

Publishers, on the other hand, are battling something even harder to track visibility. The scale of web traffic hidden from publishers, “dark traffic” has surged by nearly 50% over the past three years, according to a new study by Ad-Shield.