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Fox News host Laura Ingraham is joining a business venture that includes Donald Trump Jr – after she repeatedly criticized the business dealings of another president’s son: Hunter Biden.

Ingraham, Trump Jr and Chamath Palihapitiya, a business associate of Donald Trump’s eldest son and namesake, were all listed as board members of a new venture seeking to go public on the stock market, according to Bloomberg. It purports to “fund the next chapter of American Exceptionalism and help Make America Grow Again”.

A filing for the company, Colombier Acquisition Corp III, has designated it as a special-purpose acquisition company, or Spac, which is a shell company that raises money on the stock market before merging with an existing company that isn’t on the market yet. The company is looking to raise $260m in its initial public offering (IPO).

The announcement emphasizes the growing coziness between Fox and the Trump family. In February, Fox launched a weekend show featuring Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law who joined the network as a contributor in 2021. While the network, during Joe Biden’s Oval Office term, had appeared to grow cold toward Trump, it has fully embraced his second presidency.

Ingraham, a longtime star of the network, was a vocal critic of Hunter Biden and his business dealings while his father was vice-president under Barack Obama. She argued that Biden utilized his dad’s political influence to carry out business deals.

Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog group, estimated that Ingraham mentioned Hunter Biden in more than 150 episodes of her show in 2023 and 2024, in the second half of his father’s presidency. Last December, when Joe Biden pardoned his son, a move that was seen as controversial among liberals and conservatives, Ingraham compared the family to the Corleone mob family of the fictional Godfather movie franchise.

“Given what we’ve learned about the long-term corruption and deception of the Biden family, the Corleones have nothing on them,” Ingraham said.

Joe Biden had previously said he would not use his executive authority to pardon his son. But, upon pardoning him, the then president said his son had become a political target. In addition to controversial links to foreign companies while his father was vice-president, Hunter Biden was also found guilty of felony charges related to a handgun purchase in 2018 and federal taxes.

Last November, after his father won the election, Trump Jr announced his new role at 1789 Capital, an investment firm with close ties to conservative donors. The company’s website says that it funds “the next chapter of American exceptionalism”. So far, it has invested in companies in AI, energy, defense and three of billionaire Elon Musk’s companies. In September, the firm quietly passed $1bn in assets, according to Reuters.

The company, in a statement to Reuters, said that it “maximizes transparency and compliance, even though no one at the fund has ever worked in government”. The White House, meanwhile, has insisted that Trump and his family have never engaged in conflicts of interest.

Trump and his eldest sons were found guilty of civil fraud in 2024. In August, an appeals court threw out the $355m penalty a New York judge ordered Trump to pay after he was deemed guilty of fraud in his real estate business, though the appeals court affirmed the overall fraud verdict.

This holiday season, rather than searching on Google, more Americans will likely be turning to large language models to find gifts, deals, and sales. Retailers could see up to a 520 percent increase in traffic from chatbots and AI search engines this year compared to 2024, according to a recent shopping report from Adobe. OpenAI is already moving to capitalize on the trend: Last week, the ChatGPT maker announced a major partnership with Walmart that will allow users to buy goods directly within the chat window.

As people start relying on chatbots to discover new products, retailers are having to rethink their approach to online marketing. For decades, companies tried to game Google’s search results by using strategies known collectively as search engine optimization, or SEO. Now, in order to get noticed by AI bots, more brands are turning to “generative engine optimization,” or GEO. The cottage industry is expected to be worth nearly $850 million this year, according to one market research estimate.

GEO, in many ways, is less a new invention than the next phase of SEO. Many GEO consultants, in fact, came from the world of SEO. At least some of their old strategies likely still apply since the core goal remains the same: anticipate the questions people will ask and make sure your content appears in the answers. But there’s also growing evidence that chatbots are surfacing different kinds of information than search engines.

Imri Marcus, chief executive of the GEO firm Brandlight, estimates that there used to be about a 70 percent overlap between the top Google links and the sources cited by AI tools. Now, he says, that correlation has fallen below 20 percent.

Search engines often favor wordiness—think of the long blog posts that appear above recipes on cooking websites. But Marcus says that chatbots tend to favor information presented in simple, structured formats, like bulleted lists and FAQ pages. “An FAQ can answer a hundred different questions instead of one article that just says how great your entire brand is,” he says. “You essentially give a hundred different options for the AI engines to choose.”

The things people ask chatbots are often highly specific, so it’s helpful for companies to publish extremely granular information. “No one goes to ChatGPT and asks, ‘Is General Motors a good company?’” says Marcus. Instead, they ask if the Chevy Silverado or the Chevy Blazer has a longer driving range. “Writing more specific content actually will drive much better results because the questions are way more specific.”