All this and more in this week’s edition of The Hypha Wire, from Hypha HubSpot Development.
Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Hypha Wire! I hope everyone had a great holiday and is settling back into the flow of things.
I don’t know if it’s just my perception, the result of taking a week off from the newsletter, or something in the air, but it’s felt like there’s been a deluge of industry updates, releases, and acquisitions every single day.
I struggled to even pinpoint the most topical and pressing items for this edition. I guess the world doesn’t believe in slowing down for the holidays anymore!
As you wade through my selection of topics below, let me know if there were any big ones you felt I missed. What’s become most important in your day-to-day? What is your team talking about nonstop?
With The Hypha Wire, I try to combine many beats—marketing, SEO, DEI, AI, A11y, social, design, general business, etc.—but there may be some I’m entirely overlooking that you would love to read more about weekly.
Looking forward to your feedback!
-Sage Levene, VP of Marketing, Hypha HubSpot Development
Open Mic
Newsflash: AI Overviews Are Good Now?
By Phil Stott, Head of Client Success, Hypha HubSpot Development
Another week, and yet more evidence that the great AI reshuffle in marketing is not working out quite how the doomsayers predicted. The upshot: generative tools and Google’s AI surfaces are expanding search journeys rather than obliterating them.
Recent studies paint a clear picture. As Search Engine Land reported, UX analysis of 52 users across the U.S. and Canada found that 69% of Google AI Mode sessions for transactional queries—like finding dentists or dermatologists—still drove clicks to websites. Far from killing traffic, AI acted as a shortlist curator: only 27% of users decided based solely on the summary, while most built a “consideration set” by visiting sites.
AI Is Rewriting The Rules Of SEO…
The old “rank #1 or die” SEO playbook is fading. In the same study, 89% of participants clicked multiple businesses, averaging 3.7 results per session—not a single winner-take-all result. Users scrolled extensively (84% went below the fold), prioritizing reviews (74% read them) over photos (just 21% viewed galleries).
This shifts priorities for local SEO and service providers: aim for the top 3–5 in AI results, then dominate with social proof. Informational “how-to” traffic may suffer, but high-intent payers still click through.
…But SEO Isn’t Going Anywhere
A separate clickstream analysis from Semrush of 260 billion events (Jan 2024–Jun 2025) further debunks substitution fears. In fact, it shows that U.S. desktop users who adopted ChatGPT in early 2025 showed no drop in Google sessions—some even increased slightly—matching long-term users and non-adopters. Google usage stayed stable across cohorts, proving AI adds parallel paths to information-seeking.
What This Means For Your Business
The most important takeaway is that there’s no single point of truth for the customer journey any more (if, indeed, there ever was). The path from “I have a problem” to “I’m hiring company x to solve my problem” is multi-modal: Google for precision, ChatGPT for exploration.
This evolution means your customers are exploring options in more places than ever before, but they’re still actively seeking solutions and ready to engage. The goal in marketing has long been to meet customers where they are—across search engines, social media, and beyond—with clear, trustworthy information that earns their confidence. AI simply gives us one additional avenue to do that. Focusing on your presence in these expanded consideration sets, nurturing strong reviews, and continuing to optimize your website for both traditional and AI-driven search will ensure your business stays visible and competitive.
In short, AI is not replacing the need for a strong digital presence—it’s widening the opportunity. We’re here to help you adapt your strategy so that your business captures attention, builds trust, and turns more searches into real customers, no matter how they’re searching. Staying informed and proactive will keep you ahead in this dynamic landscape.
Pantone’s Color of the Year is out, and it’s left many (myself included) feeling underwhelmed. The very-light-gray-basically-white color leaves much to be desired and feels like a codification of the millennial gray that overtook interior design and architecture in the 2010s. As many are joking, is this a recession indicator? Perhaps what we deserve for a world gone topsy-turvy? Take a look at the swatch and let me know what your thoughts are.
“Pantone’s Color of the Year for 2026 has proven oddly divisive after the company picked a ‘billowy and balanced’ shade of white for the first time in its annual selection.
“The color called ‘Cloud Dancer’ — the same shade as milk, a pair of AirPods or a blank sheet of paper — is said to represent the collective sense that society is ‘craving respite, less noise, less fun, more simplicity’ and an opportunity to embrace a ‘fresh start.’”
Another devastating blow of job losses in the greater industry. Omnicom’s acquisition of IPG —often dubbed as a merger but is now being revealed as a full takeover—was finalized around Thanksgiving, and it’s been complete and total chaos at the companies since. (A big shoutout to the Instagram page Digital Chadvertising which often gets the scoop on inside details from employees on the ground.) Perks are being cut, layoffs and oustings are happening daily—all this from what is now the biggest advertising holding company in the world. I’ll be sharing a podcast with more inside details further down in the newsletter, but this will be something to follow in the coming months and years. I predict many ripple effects ahead.
“Omnicom said on Monday it will lay off more than 4,000 employees and fold several well-known advertising agency brands after its $13 billion acquisition of rival Interpublic Group.
“Interpublic Group laid off about 3,200 employees in the first nine months of 2025, according to a regulatory filing. Omnicom last year reduced its staff by 3,000 to about 75,000.”
Hypha Highlights
Private equity value creation increasingly depends on scale, not headcount. As portfolios grow and operator bandwidth stays fixed, firms that win are standardizing systems across portcos and using fractional CMO leadership to drive commercial impact without permanent hires.
Operators feel the pressure: more companies, more reporting, more execution—same team. The solution isn’t more effort; it’s leverage. PE leaders are building shared CRM and data layers, unified playbooks, and on-demand experts who expand capacity without expanding payroll.
If you’re exploring this model, our fractional CMO + HubSpot operating framework helps PE teams scale demand gen and visibility across the portfolio.
We took off a week for the Thanksgiving holiday, and so much has happened since then! Here are some top items from the last two weeks:
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, which the company says is their most advanced AI model, excelling at coding, running AI agents, and handling complex tasks like research and working with spreadsheets. According to Anthropic, the model scored higher than any human candidate on a difficult engineering exam, and it’s now available at reduced pricing of $5/$25 per million tokens to make advanced AI capabilities more accessible.
China has surpassed the U.S. in the global market for “open” AI models, with Chinese-made models accounting for 17% of downloads compared to 15.8% from American developers, according to a study by MIT and Hugging Face. The Financial Times reports this shift comes as Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Alibaba release models more frequently and at lower cost, while major U.S. companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic maintain “closed” strategies to protect their proprietary technology and profit through subscriptions.
Speaking of DeepSeek, the company released two new models—DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale—which the company claims match the performance of OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Google’s Gemini 3.0 Pro, respectively. According to Mashable, the open-source models are available for free, though early testing on the LMArena leaderboard shows they still lag behind GPT-5 and Gemini 3 in performance.
French AI startup Mistral launched its Mistral 3 family of open-weight models, including a large frontier model and nine smaller models that can run on a single GPU. According to TechCrunch, Mistral’s co-founder Guillaume Lample argues that while their smaller models may underperform closed-source competitors like ChatGPT in initial benchmarks, they can match or exceed those models’ performance when fine-tuned for specific enterprise use cases—while being faster, cheaper, and capable of running offline on affordable hardware.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly issued a “code red” memo to employees acknowledging that ChatGPT has fallen behind competitors like Google Gemini in benchmark tests, according to reports from The Information and The Wall Street Journal. Altman told staff the company needs to improve ChatGPT’s quality to keep pace with rivals, though he added they are “catching up fast.”
AWS announced a series of AI-focused products at re:Invent 2025, including Amazon Nova 2 models for speech-to-speech conversations and reasoning tasks, Amazon Nova Act for automating browser-based workflows, and Amazon Nova Forge, which the company says will allow organizations to build custom frontier models. According to AWS, the announcements also include expanded access to 18 open-weight models through Amazon Bedrock and new AI Factories that will deploy AWS infrastructure in customer data centers to meet data residency requirements.
Google launched Workspace Studio, a tool that allows users to create automated AI agents powered by Gemini 3 to handle tasks across Gmail, Drive, and other productivity apps without coding, according to 9to5Google. Separately, Google announced that Gemini 3 Deep Think mode is now available to Google AI Ultra subscribers, with the company claiming it achieves industry-leading performance on benchmarks by using advanced parallel reasoning to tackle complex math, science, and logic problems.
OpenAI began testing app suggestions inside ChatGPT conversations over the weekend, with the promotions appearing even for Pro subscribers who pay $200 per month, according to TechRadar. Users reported seeing unrelated app suggestions like Peloton fitness classes during their chats, sparking backlash on social media and Reddit, with some threatening to cancel their subscriptions over what they view as advertisements appearing in a premium paid service.
“Agency reporters Brian Bonilla and Ewan Larkin dig into Omnicom’s acquisition of IPG, and its impact for the advertising industry beyond just agency holding companies. They break down how independent agencies can win, what the deal means for the hold-co hierarchy and key factors to track as the industry’s future structure takes shape.”
How can we help you?
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Is your tech stack holding your team back? Contact Hypha to discover how we can unify your systems and unlock operational efficiency through strategic HubSpot implementation.
