The AI Search Brief: August 2026

The fight over AI search is turning into a fight over who owns the sources that AI answers cite. This month a federal judge weighed whether Reddit can sue to protect the conversations that feed engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT, OpenAI pushed its agents deeper into the work people used to do by searching, and the largest study yet of AI search put numbers on which brands get surfaced and which get left out.