A sweeping online seal-off

The UK's Online Safety Act (effective July 25, 2025) forces platforms to block or age-verify access to a wide range of content- from pornography to self-harm, eating disorder information, bullying, dangerous challenges, and more.

Platforms choose or collapse

Services hosting such content face three bleak choices: implement robust (and potentially invasive) age checks, block UK users entirely, or sanitize content so broadly it's effectively wiped. Smaller forums, lacking verification budgets, are simply locking out UK visitors.

Verification tech under fire

Platforms like Reddit and Discord use face‑scan tools from Persona and k‑ID, which gamers quickly defeat using Death Stranding’s photo mode. In contrast, age-estimation tech like Yoti (used by Bluesky) has been more resistant.

UK users flee via VPN

Almost immediately, VPN sign‑ups shot up Proton VPN saw a 1,400% increase within hours of the law taking effect. Simple workarounds like VPNs, ad‑blockers and third-party apps let people sidestep age checks entirely.

Privacy advocates and petitioners push back

Civil rights groups including Open Rights Group and Article 19 call the law overbroad and chilling to free speech, while a UK petition arguing it’s far too restrictive has gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures and triggered parliamentary debate.

Collateral damage: supportive communities blocked

Even Reddit subreddits that offer adult support periods, recovery groups, sexual assault forums are now behind verification walls, cutting off access for legitimate adult users and minors who rely on these networks

A new AI-powered tab on Search

Starting July 28, 2025 in the UK, Google’s AI Mode appears as a distinct tab in Search results or through the Google app on iOS and Android- no more opt-in needed.

Built for complex, multi-part queries

AI Mode handles longer, exploratory questions, often two to three times longer than typical searches by decomposing questions into subtopics and combining answers from multiple live queries via a “query fan‑out” method.

Truly multimodal search inputs

You can ask questions using text, voice, or even photos via image upload. AI Mode adapts across all input types, offering more intuitive ways to search.

Integration with web links for discovery

While the answers are AI-generated, the results include highlighted links to relevant web content- making discovery central rather than being fully zero-click.

What’s at stake for publishers and regulators

As AI Mode joins AI Overview, traffic to publishers may continue to decline, prompting regulator scrutiny. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority is reviewing Google for “strategic market status” and may impose measures to protect fair competition.

Teachermatic is like a teacher’s quiet sidekick with a laptop and way too much coffee. It uses AI to whip up lesson plans, assignments, quizzes, rubrics, and even personalised student feedback in just a few clicks. Designed specifically for educators drowning in prep work, it takes the repetitive load off without dumbing anything down. What makes it quirky? You can generate content for an entire term, adjust the tone, and even add a bit of humour or personality, something most traditional educational tools can’t handle without breaking.

Folk is a sleek, people-first CRM that feels more like a shared Google Doc than a sales dashboard. It’s built for teams that need to manage relationships, track interactions, send follow-ups, and basically keep their networking chaos in order. You can group contacts however you want clients, leads, collaborators, or even "folks I met at awkward Zoom events." It syncs emails, tags conversations, and reminds you to follow up before things go cold. The interface is refreshingly uncluttered, and the quirky charm lies in how personal and adaptable it feels, especially compared to the usual CRM suspects.

FullStory is for people who want to know exactly how users behave on their site without the guesswork. It records entire user sessions so you can watch them like a highlight reel, spotting every click, scroll, hesitation, and even frustration-induced “rage click.” It doesn’t just hand you numbers, it tells you a story: why someone left the checkout page or how a button confused half your traffic. And yes, filtering by “rage clicks” is an actual thing. It’s weirdly satisfying to watch your site through someone else’s frustrated eyes and fix what’s broken without relying on blind heatmaps.

Browse AI is your no-code data-scraping robot with a surprisingly polite attitude. You just show it what to track like price changes on a competitor’s site, new job listings, or hotel availability and it builds a bot to monitor it for you. It updates in real time and can export everything neatly into Google Sheets. The quirky bit? You can clone your bots and share them with teammates like reusable templates. It’s web automation that feels personal, useful, and somehow doesn’t require you to wrestle with APIs or scraping scripts.

iGenie is like having a full-time digital assistant that actually gets things done without asking 12 follow-up questions. It helps teams automate the boring, repetitive stuff like task management, data entry, meeting summaries, document drafting, and even follow-ups all through a chat-style interface. You just ask, and it handles the rest. What makes iGenie stand out is how it blends with your workflow Slack, email, CRMs without making you learn another clunky dashboard. It's built for people who want the perks of AI without having to “train” yet another tool. Think of it as the team member who never forgets, never misses a task, and doesn’t need coffee breaks.

ChipStack- AI-Generated Image of the Day is on a mission to make financial operations suck less. It uses AI to handle accounts payable, invoice processing, transaction matching, and spend analysis all the stuff finance teams dread. The real charm lies in its precision and context awareness: it doesn't just extract numbers, it understands what they mean and where they go. You plug it into your existing systems, and it starts reducing human errors, speeding up approvals, and keeping cash flow visible in real time. For a startup, it's unusually polished and practical, one of those tools where finance people go, “Wait, where has this been all my life?”

Avoma is an AI meeting assistant with actual business IQ. It doesn’t just transcribe Zoom calls, it listens for intent, tracks action items, summarises customer pain points, and even offers sales coaching. It integrates with your CRM to fill in notes, update pipelines, and make post-call follow-up less painful. You can search across every conversation, analyse patterns, and coach your team without digging through recordings. What makes it click is the balance; it feels smart enough to automate the admin work, but not so bloated that it needs its own training manual.

Ntelcare is AI for healthcare, but not the generic kind. It’s built to assist clinical teams with patient engagement, appointment management, medical data extraction, and administrative workflows. Think of it as a digital front desk that also reads between the lines of lab reports. The tool can handle multilingual patient queries, summarise clinical notes, and even follow up with appointment reminders without burning out staff. It’s still early-stage but already solving real problems for hospitals and practices that are short on time, people, and clarity. In a space full of hype, Ntelcare feels like one of the few AI health tools that’s actually grounded.