Hi tech & AI enthusiasts, this week's highlights:
A Mystery Model Landed on OpenRouter and Nobody Knows Who Built It
ChatGPT Just Stopped Citing Reddit Almost Entirely
More of Your Traffic Is Now Bots Than People
Learn in The Lab: Build a Free Bot That Tracks Whether AI Recommends You
AI Image of the Week: A carousel cover you can actually use
Let's get into it.
▲ AI MODELS
An anonymous model called Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter on 20 August. Even though it’s completely free to use, nobody has claimed. The internet has spent the week trying to work out who made it.
What you need to know
Completely free: The provider is running a near-unlimited free window with massive daily capacity. But only for a limited time.
It reads a whole codebase at once: You can use it to built automation jobs that run for hours. Not just like a chat bot.
Early hype vs reality: There’s reports it’s beating top models on coding work. This may or not be true. But it is at least close leading paid models, getting there in fewer steps and it free.
Who owns it?: Some reports point to Chinese models others to, Google’s Gemini or Microsoft's in-house family is the other name in the frame. All 4 anonymous drops on OpenRouter in six months turned out to be Chinese labs.
Key Idea
▲ Why it matters: Last week we talked about the importance of open models and software. This week shows why it’s important not be locked in to a provider. A free top tier model drops you are ready to take advantage of using it with your business. Treat the free window as a free trial to test our your automations and build. The tutorial below puts it to work on something useful today.
▲ AI SEARCH
Reddit has been a big share of the sources ChatGPT cites. But on 14 August that share fell off a cliff, dropping around 86% in a single day. OpenAI has not said why.
What you need to know
1 day drop: Reddit sat near 4% of all sources ChatGPT cited from mid-July to early August. Since 14 August it has averaged around 0.5%.
Google has not done the same: Reddit is drifting down in Google's AI answers too, but gradually over weeks. Nothing like the overnight drop in ChatGPT.
The researchers are keeping eyes on it: Promptwatch says a change in how ChatGPT picks sources is the obvious explanation, but a data collection fault cannot be ruled out yet.
Something changed a week earlier too: On 8 August ChatGPT changed how it fans out searches, and Reddit's share started slipping from that day.
Key Idea
▲ Why it matters: If your marketing strategy leaned on Reddit threads ranking inside AI answers, that channel may have closed overnight. This is what platform risk looks like now. A single unannounced change wiped out one of the most cited sources on the internet in a day. If you are not tracking where AI answers actually source from, you will find out about the next one months late. The tutorial below fixes that.
▲ THE AGENTIC WEB
Automated bots passed human ones as a share of web traffic this year. It is now more important than ever to make sure your website is set up for this new source of traffic.
Vercel launched a new free tool called Is Agentic which scores how ready your site is for the machines now doing the reading.
What you need to know
Bots overtook people: Cloudflare put automated requests at around 57% of web traffic in June, with humans at roughly 43%. The crossover already happened.
Most of them take without giving back: Roughly 9/10 AI crawler visits are pure extraction rather than the kind that can send a reader your way.
You can score your site in a minute: Paste a URL into Is Agentic and it checks what an agent can actually find, read and use. It scores the basics heavily: pages that load without needing to run scripts, clean structure, sensible errors, working controls.
The scores are humbling: WordPress.com scored 37 out of 100 in recent scans. Netflix's Taiwan page scored 49. This shows that even the biggest companies haven’t started and the opportunity to get ahead is now.
Key Idea
▲ Why it matters: We’ve spent years making pages readable for humans and for Google. But neither guarantees an AI agent can reliably read it. This is about making sure your service page, finding your prices, or complete a booking as findable with AI. To get started just run your site through the scanner, fix the failures it flags as essential, and rescan. It is an hour of work which could start giving you more traffic.
▲ EVEN MORE NEWS
Other big ideas from the past week.
▲ Anthropic Put All Its Training in One Place: Claude Academy tutorials, courses and worked examples in a single free hub. It covers the chat app, Cowork, Code, the Slack integration and the developer platform.
▲ Firefox Is Building an AI Browser That Lets You Pick the Model: Smart Window groups your tabs, summarises long pages and compares options. You choose which model runs it, what it sees is stored on your device, and Mozilla says it does not keep your chats or train on them. Waitlist only for now.
▲ OpenAI Launched a Teen Version of ChatGPT: ChatGPT for Teens is now the default for anyone estimated to be under 18. It leans on step-by-step study help rather than answers, adds homework nudges and scheduled study hours, and turns stronger protections on by default with parental controls attached.
The Lab
▲ AI EDUCATION
2 stories this week said the same thing. It’s important to understand where AI answers get their information from. A changes without warning and you could lose a massive portion of your traffic.
So this week tutorial teaches how build something that watches it for you.
You’ll learn how to set up a bot that runs your buyer questions through AI search on a schedule, logs whether you get mentioned, and tells you who got recommended instead. It even runs on the free mystery model we talked about earlier.
What you'll learn:
How to get Ox Alpha running for free in 10 minutes
How to write the 20 questions your buyers actually ask
How to set the bot to run itself every Monday without you touching it
How to read the output so it tells you what to publish next
What to switch to when the free window closes
🔬 Interested in learning about AI for business? Join The Lab waitlist.
▲ AI IMAGE SHOWCASE
Create this type of image with ChatGPT Images 2
Something different this week. I just launched cover designs in SlideDrift, so instead of a stock-style photo, this is a prompt built to produce a carousel cover: a person with graphic overlays around them, headline space left clear, sized for social. Swap the subject to suit your own posts.
A vertical 4:5 portrait photograph for a social media carousel cover. A woman in her thirties wearing a rust-orange knit sweater sits in a pale boucle armchair, laptop on her knees, glancing up and slightly off camera with a calm, amused expression. Around her, floating flat-design interface cards hover at varying depths: a small line chart trending upward, a checklist with three ticked items, a message bubble, a circular avatar. The cards are clean vector-style graphics with soft drop shadows, in muted lilac, warm cream and deep navy. Background is a flat warm cream wall with a subtle paper grain. She is positioned in the lower two thirds of the frame, leaving clear uncluttered space across the top third for a headline. Soft even daylight from the left, gentle shadows, no harsh highlights. Photorealistic subject, graphic overlays, sharp focus throughout.Image Usage Suggestion: LinkedIn carousel covers, lead magnet landing pages, webinar and workshop promos, course module headers, client onboarding decks, or any post where you want a face plus a hint of the process rather than another stock photo of a handshake.
💌 Reply to this email with your AI image generation or suggestion of what you'd like to see and I'll feature it in a future newsletter.
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Thanks for reading, until next time.
Stay curious,
Matt Lok, Editor
Brought to you by Metalabs. Digital marketing consulting specialising in AI. Carousels made with SlideDrift.