Anthropic has now put the model behind our Claude column on a retirement clock: deprecated 30 September, switched off 30 November.

The status table now reads `claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929`, "Deprecated", "September 30, 2026", retirement "November 30, 2026". The history section says, verbatim: "On September 30, 2026, Anthropic notified developers using Claude Sonnet 4.5 of its upcoming retirement on the Claude API." The recommended replacement is `claude-sonnet-5-5`. The page also warns that "Deprecated models are likely to be less reliable than active models" and that "Requests to models past the retirement date will fail." The engine's `main` is still `06233ce` and `src/adapters.ts` line 15 still names `claude-sonnet-4-5`.

Cloudflare restates that in July it replaced its single AI-bot switch with "separate Search, Agent, and Training controls, available on every plan, including Free", and gives the reason: "Fewer than 1% of sites on Cloudflare block search crawlers, while 17% block training." It also says new domains "now see recommended configurations based on how the site makes money rather than what piece of software is visiting." Two beta products launched alongside: Pay Per Use, where an AI company offers a price for a use of a publisher's content and the publisher chooses whether to accept, and a Monetization Gateway that charges agents per request (closed beta, US only). Both are opt-in. Search Engine Journal notes neither announcement reports any transaction counts or payouts.

No change to either. Perplexity's page still names no model for re-routed Sonar requests. Google's incident still carries only the 24 September launch post, which said the rollout "may take up to two weeks".

Sample: 883,000 pages across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Copilot, from 8 September 2025 to 8 September 2026, giving 1.19 million page-and-engine histories. Findings, verbatim: "The median page loses half its citation share within 11 days of peaking" and "78% of cited pages fall to half their peak share within two weeks". Pages cited by five or more engines were 5.5 times more likely to still be cited at 56 days. Claude citations were 2.8 times more likely than ChatGPT's to last eight weeks. Engines decide almost independently: "Cross-engine correlations run between 0.03 and 0.09". Profound sells the tool that measures this, and the unit is a cited page, not a named business.

Zen Media ran 1,000 consumer legal prompts through Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok (4,000 responses). Verbatim: "No individual law firm reached the 20 highest-visibility names". Avvo led at 45% visibility, then Martindale-Hubbell at 32% and Super Lawyers at 24%. "Legal directories and rating platforms accounted for 45% of all company mentions." Gemini named 38 distinct companies and ChatGPT 22. The release says the study did not test whether a firm's profile on those directories changes how often the firm itself is named. Zen Media is an agency that sells AI visibility work, and no dates for the runs are given.

"Over the past year, daily requests from AI agents on our network grew by more than 1,700%." And: "In Spring 2025, 22% of the crawler requests we saw were for AI training (according to the crawlers' stated purpose). By June 2026, it was 52%." These are Cloudflare's own network counts with no base figure given for the 1,700%.