OpenAI cuts AI costs with Sol

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.

In today's MarketingShot:

🤖 OpenAI's cheaper GPT-6 Sol and Luna cut your AI costs

✅ LinkedIn's new verification tools fight fake profiles you connect with

📍 Google gives you 4 days to reject edits to your Business Profile

🛒 Report reveals AI adoption hasn't reached online shopping

🔗 Your creator links convert worse than brand links, Bitly finds

Plus: 💡 4 strategies & tactics, 🎁 6 other news you might like, and 🧰 6 tools.

🤖 OpenAI's cheaper GPT-6 Sol and Luna cut your AI costs LINK

OpenAI released two cheaper models, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, on September 22, with API prices set 50% below GPT-5.6 promotional rates, lowering operating costs for marketing teams running AI work at scale.

GPT-6 Sol costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens for prompts up to 272K, while Luna charges just $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens.

Both models list cached input pricing, $0.20 per million tokens for Sol and $0.01 for Luna, so teams sending the same brand guidelines or product catalog repeatedly can face a different cost profile.

✅ LinkedIn's new verification tools fight fake profiles you connect with LINK

LinkedIn has rolled out new verification tools to fight fake profiles and AI slop, letting members confirm connections and giving businesses controls to block people who falsely claim to work for them.

Users can now ask their network to verify people they worked or studied with, and once enough confirmations arrive, LinkedIn adds a verification badge to the profile, with an option to opt out.

More than 115 million members have verified their identity or workplace for free, and verified members can now display that status on partner platforms including Truecaller, Peerspot, and Adobe.

📍 Google gives you 4 days to reject edits to your Business Profile LINK

Google updated its help document to explain that business owners have four days to reject a user suggested edit to their Google Business Profile before it may be applied to the local listing.

When a suggested edit needs review, owners get an email or in-product notification, and if they don't respond in four days, Google may publish the update if other public information, like the business website, supports it.

In some cases Google may apply user edits without any prior review or notification, which happens when the edits must meet policy guidelines set for business information.

🛒 Report reveals AI adoption hasn't reached online shopping LINK

A report from VML shows that AI adoption keeps climbing, with 82% of global consumers using it in 2026, but the technology has yet to make its way into the online shopping journey.

AI engines account for just 3.7% of the inspiration stage for consumers, 3.6% during the search stage, and only 2.7% at the purchase stage, while search engines still dominate throughout.

VML surveyed 28,000 consumers across 17 countries between May 22 and June 9, 2026, finding ChatGPT the most popular platform at 48%, followed by Google Gemini at 37%, with Gen Z the largest adopter at 54%.

🔗 Your creator links convert worse than brand links, Bitly finds LINK

A survey from link-management company Bitly found that links shared by independent creators send people to product pages less often than brand links, earn less consumer trust, and face different tracking problems.

Creators route traffic directly to a product page just 40% of the time versus 66% for marketers, and brands outrank creators on trust for nearly every transaction, with an 88%-to-12% split on app or software downloads.

Creators struggle more with in-app browsers stripping tracking parameters or cookies, a problem for 27% of them versus 18% of marketers, while both groups expect social links to bring 39% of revenue over the next 12 months.

💡 Strategies & Tactics

> How ChatGPT Sponsored Agents work—and what brands can and can’t control: ChatGPT's new Sponsored Agents let a brand's AI hold sales conversations with shoppers, shifting brand safety from approving each answer to approving the rules generating them.

> The Hybrid Advantage: Getting Value Out Of Agentic AI Means Knowing When Not To Use It: Route predictable, rules-based work to conventional software and reserve agentic AI for ambiguous tasks, cutting costs and scaling only after a pilot proves the return.

> How to Label AI-Generated Content on Social Media: Label any AI content that could pass as a real person or event, defaulting to the strictest platform's rules, since 2026 laws now carry fines.

> AI search is changing ecommerce forever: Shoppers now ask AI search engines detailed 24-word questions, so retailers must feed structured product data and conversational descriptions to stay discoverable.

Other news you might like

• In Graphic Detail: LLMs keep citing YouTube in search resultsLINK

• Google switched on AI Mode checkout for Shopify stores without askingLINK

• Meta adds Threads-specific permissions for businessesLINK

• Test Google Ads AI Max Against Dynamic Search AdsLINK

• Taboola Launches Realize IDLINK

• Meta drops 250-ad Page cap in some accounts as 286 ads keep runningLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Prelint: reviews AI-generated pull requests against your ADRs, docs, and past decisions, catching product drift before it hits productionLINK

CREEM 2.0: a payments platform for selling software and digital products globally, handling checkout, tax, billing, affiliates, and payouts in one place.LINK

Switch: open-source workspace uniting people and AI agents in one room across Slack, Teams, Discord, or Mattermost, preserving context through handoffs.LINK

Soloop: an agentic system playing AI CEO, CTO, and CMO roles, helping solo founders plan, build, and sell without hiring a teamLINK

Clara AI SDR: engages and qualifies website visitors in real time, handles objections, books meetings, and syncs with your CRM around the clockLINK

claude-ops: a business operating system for Claude Code that unifies messaging, payments, e-commerce, marketing, monitoring, and voice tools through skills and autonomous agents.LINK

See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ MarketingShot!