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Google Ads can now automatically extract active promotions from landing pages and attach them to eligible Search and Performance Max ads. The account-level feature can surface offers such as “20% off” or “buy one get one free” without advertisers manually uploading each promotion. It applies only to eligible campaigns using location assets that do not already have manual promotions.
Google's Disavow tool is now mainly a recovery tool for sites hit with a manual action for unnatural links. Most sites don't need it after Penguin shifted spammy backlinks toward page-level devaluation. SEO efforts are better spent on useful content, UX, and earning credible links. Treat disavow as a targeted response to a confirmed manual action, not routine backlink cleanup.
Netflix uses geographic holdouts to measure channels that can't be A/B tested at the user level, including TV, OOH, and sponsorships. The approach measures incremental impact but requires careful decisions around test size, timing, media spillover, and carryover. Repeating tests builds stronger evidence, while campaigns without historical data require different methodologies. The challenge is getting leadership to protect test windows and accept the tradeoff between media delivery and measurement certainty.
Every AI workflow becomes a small maintenance job once it ships. Models change, connected tools get updated, and new edge cases surface. The person who built it is often the only one who knows how to fix it, so the workflow can quickly revert to manual when they're unavailable. Teams rarely plan for this upkeep, leaving it to compete with slower, harder-to-measure work like building visibility and trust.
8 tips to tailor your marketing resume to the job you want.
AI chatbots now influence purchases in both directions, persuading 57.5% of AI users to buy and 57.5% to walk away.
Nvidia plans to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B to strengthen the open-source AI ecosystem around its chips.
Content was never the real value of SEO agencies. Growth was. Agencies made content the deliverable because it was easy to scope, and rankings made progress easy to measure. AI is now exposing the weakness of that model by making content cheap and easy to produce. Agencies need to shift from content production to strategic work that drives growth, rather than simply rebranding old SEO services as AEO.
64% of Gen Z say they stick with brands they like most or all of the time, but only 11% feel brands understand them really well. Feeling understood is strongly linked to loyalty, with 45% of those who feel truly understood saying they are always loyal. Price and value (82%) and product quality (80%) matter most, while influencer recommendations rank last at 9%. Relevance starts with understanding customers, but loyalty still depends on delivering a product worth coming back to.
Treat negative Reddit posts as a community management issue, since high-ranking criticism can shape search results and AI answers. Respond selectively as a named, disclosed person by correcting misinformation or adding useful product context. Positive and negative threads receive similar upvote weight, so helpful brand contributions can reach audiences at a similar scale. Build credibility early by listening and using REACT to decide when to engage or step back.
Public forms can attract spam bots as soon as a product launches, especially without login requirements. The author recommends a two-layer system. Use Cloudflare Turnstile on every public form and verify its token server-side before storing submissions. A database trigger adds another safeguard by rejecting invalid submissions that bypass the application. Turnstile is free for up to 1M monthly requests, making it a low-cost way to protect public forms from spam.
Tim Keen will walk through when and how to use GitHub and Terminal, the new surfaces that marketers live in. Learn how to build a machine that builds marketing assets for you and manage Meta, Google, and LinkedIn ads from the terminal. This will take place on September 10 at 12 PM ET.
TikTok's new agentic AI tools can automate paid social execution, but the bigger shift is teaching AI how your team works. TikTok Ads MCP connects AI to campaign data and workflows, while Agentic Hub and Skills can package processes like creative fatigue analysis, budget optimization, reporting, and QA. Automate repeatable work, but keep humans involved in strategic decisions.
Reddit is making Max campaigns available to all advertisers, alongside 3 updates designed to expand their value. Max campaigns automate targeting, creative selection, placements, and budget allocation, with early tests showing 17% lower CPA and 27% more conversions. New asset groups let advertisers organize and measure different products or use cases within one campaign, while API and Smartly support make campaigns easier to manage at scale.
Glossier used direct customer feedback to shape products, then expanded that customer-first approach into its brand positioning. Dishoom takes a similar approach to scaling, focusing on preserving the core experience rather than optimizing for growth alone. For new brand ideas, Roya recommends testing scrappy versions instead of waiting for a perfect strategy. She also uses data to pitch new ideas, pairing consumer insights with a clear business case.
Getting recalled correctly by AI models does not require more content - it requires making existing content easier to retrieve. Advanced models store 95% to 98% of the facts they are trained on but reliably recall only 26% to 34% of them. Recall breaks down most on facts asked backward from how they were learned, or on facts that are simply rare. Auditing where AI tools already mention or skip a brand's key facts shows exactly which messages need restating in both directions.
Brands can face penalties for undisclosed paid partnerships or free products.
A guide to the many hats product marketers wear.
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Google's ad tech dominance will largely remain intact despite the DOJ proving that it illegally restricted competition in parts of the online ad market. The court rejected the government's push to force Google to sell its ad exchange, avoiding a remedy that could have disrupted its broader advertising business. Google will likely face fines and business practice changes, but the exact penalties remain sealed for now. The outcome shows that even after three major antitrust losses, Google retains substantial control over digital advertising and can continue investing aggressively in emerging markets such as AI.
Positive coverage in food influencing is less a preference than an economic default, since restaurants that stop offering free meals or payment quickly see coverage dry up. That system still drives real reach, with Instagram Reels revenue growing from about $2 billion in 2022 to a projected $50 billion and roughly half of Instagram's time now spent on them. Most restaurant influencers still don't get paid well, with typical per-post rates staying in the low hundreds to low thousands and Instagram not paying for views at all. Viewers have noticed the pattern, and experts predict today's relentlessly positive accounts will lose ground to more critical voices.
Supply-side CRO can unlock major marketplace growth by optimizing for the actual intent of people who provide capacity, not just the customers who buy. A tutoring marketplace found that many tutor recruitment visitors came from job search sites, so it replaced a generic registration form with a real student job request, clear job details, pay information, and “apply” language. The change increased tutor applications by 15%, or about 20,000 additional tutors in the first year. Supply-side improvements may not show immediate revenue, but they can strengthen marketplace capacity and create an overlooked source of high-impact conversion gains.
Content cited by AI assistants runs 25.7% fresher than what ranks organically on Google, with roughly half of all citations tracing to material updated in the last 13 weeks. That edge decays fast, with a median citation half-life of about 4.5 weeks across platforms. Retrieval systems re-rank the entire candidate pool on every query rather than relying on a persistent ranking, so recency becomes an early filter for weeding out sources that might already be wrong. Perplexity and Grok weigh it most heavily, while Google's AI Overviews stay tied to core search and actually skew slightly older.
Reddit launched a 15-second Engaged Video Views goal that optimizes video ads toward users likely to watch for at least 15 seconds or to completion. It's designed for longer-form creative such as product demos and testimonials, with advertisers paying only for qualifying views. Alpha testers saw average gains of 51% in 15-second view-through rate and 71% in completion rate. The feature is now available globally in public beta, with split testing available to compare it against 6-second views.
AI is changing how marketing teams should think about build vs. buy. Teams should build when customization or proprietary data creates an advantage, and buy when vendors handle complex infrastructure that's expensive to maintain. They also warn against letting vibe-coded tools become one-off projects that only one person uses. When evaluating software, ask what would break if you canceled it and whether you're buying the product or simply a way to organize data you already own.
China is showing how creators are becoming part of the sales infrastructure, not just a communications channel. On platforms like Rednote, creator content can intercept search, shape product research, trigger retargeting, and drive purchases through livestreams and in-platform ecommerce. The result is a more connected customer journey where content, search, community, and commerce work together rather than as separate channels. As platforms like TikTok expand into commerce, this model offers a preview of how social could take on more of the customer journey in Western markets.
Sticki Rolls turns stickers into social currency by designing the product around sharing and self-expression. It has expanded into bracelets, sticker books, pendants, and bag charms that fans can collect and show off. The brand also works with creators who shaped its original collections and uses unexpected spaces like nail salons to bring the product into beauty and fashion. Its pop-ups further turn fans into participants, with activities like sticker manicures and BFF bracelet-making.
Behind SKIMS' celebrity headlines is a disciplined owned-channel operation, with the brand sending roughly five emails a week announcing drops, restocks, and retail collaborations. Before a major collection ships, SKIMS also seeds unboxing packages to thousands of micro-influencers across a range of body types and skin tones, producing unedited fit videos that build trust faster than a polished ad could. Both tactics are cheap, repeatable, and aimed at an audience that already opted in, the opposite of the celebrity-cash-grab reputation the brand is often given credit for.
The goal is comments people linger in and interact with, not just scroll past.
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A free collection of AI agent skills covering ICP, positioning, ad copy, PPC, LinkedIn ads, and campaign optimization.
Affiliate marketing is undergoing four major shifts: it must influence customers before they are ready to buy, trust matters more than traffic alone, creator and affiliate strategies need to operate as one partnership strategy, and measurement must extend beyond last click. Brands should expand partner programs beyond coupon and cashback sites to include publishers, comparison sites, reviewers, and creators that shape discovery and consideration. They also need broader measurement and shared data to value influence across the full customer journey. These changes position affiliate as a growth strategy that helps create demand, not just capture existing demand.
The growing backlash against AI is prompting brands to make humanity itself a central theme in advertising, either through explicit messaging or more tactile, imperfect creative. Tech brands such as Anthropic and Meta are using optimistic narratives to address concerns about AI, while brands such as Polaroid, Pinterest, and Heineken are encouraging consumers to reconnect with the physical world. Brands can reinforce this positioning through film, handmade aesthetics, natural elements, and behind-the-scenes content that shows real people creating the work. The strategy works best when humanity reflects a genuine point of view rather than becoming another empty brand buzzword.
A creator with 10K email subscribers and a paid community had a solid foundation, but an audit uncovered 4 ways to grow revenue. First, fix leaks in the opt-in flow with a thank-you page and by removing double opt-in. Then, encourage monthly members to switch to annual plans for more upfront revenue and stronger retention. From there, build evergreen onboarding and cancellation sequences, and add monthly promotions to drive more signups without relying solely on regular emails.
Competitor XML sitemaps can act as a weekly SEO change log. Save a snapshot of a competitor's sitemap, then compare it each week to spot new pages, removals, and emerging content clusters. This tactic can reveal what competitors are building before those changes show up in rankings. A Google Sheet tracker and Apps Script is provided in the comment thread.
YouTube now draws roughly 200x more AI citations than any other platform, and its share of social citations 4x in four months to overtake Reddit as the top-cited social source in Q1 2026. Automatic transcripts are the core driver, turning every explainer video into a searchable text document AI models can parse directly instead of relying on tags or descriptions alone. That citation strength concentrates almost entirely in long-form video, since AI models weight depth and comprehensive topic coverage that Shorts aren't built to carry.
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This free webinar will break down how to create LinkedIn carousels that keep people reading. Amy Watts will share what's working on LinkedIn now and the framework she uses to create 10 carousels a week. She'll also roast a few carousels live. It's happening on September 8 at 9 AM EDT.
Google Pics is an AI image creation and editing tool powered by Google's Nano Banana model. It can generate graphics, edit specific objects, and change text within images. It also creates multiple versions from one prompt. Pics is rolling out to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers and most Workspace business customers. It will also integrate with Docs, Slides, and Drive.
Case studies are becoming a critical part of digital PR because journalists need real people who can make data credible, relevant, and harder to replicate with AI. PR teams should start with their own networks, then verify each person through signals such as LinkedIn, business listings, websites, and direct calls before pitching. Strong case studies offer a genuinely new insight, connect directly to the campaign data, and give journalists an exclusive human angle they cannot simply find through Google.
E.l.f. Beauty's AI reply tool, E.l.f.luencer, is trained on the brand's own stylebook and years of past community-manager responses to answer social comments automatically, with every reply still reviewed by a human before it posts. The tool now generates 90% of the brand's TikTok and Instagram replies in E.l.f.'s specific tone, language, and emoji use, pushing the response rate from 30-40% before launch to more than 80% now. That volume would be impossible for a manual team to match, and the same AI investment underpins a broader program of 85 agentic pilots the company is moving toward full production.
Audit these 15 CRO checkpoints to remove friction from your mobile site's UX.
Look for a creator who feels like a customer, a clear problem, and visible value.
Astra scored a perfect score on ExploitBench, an evaluation of an LLM's ability to hack into known system vulnerabilities.
Google is expanding AI Overviews for some queries, showing a fuller AI answer and the “Ask anything” box by default instead of requiring users to click “Show more”. This pushes traditional organic results further down the page, giving publishers and SEOs less visibility while Google steers more searches toward AI Mode.
The FTC and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon on Monday, alleging it secretly overcharged advertisers by more than $20 billion through hidden auction surcharges dating back to a 2019 rule change. Amazon had told advertisers its second-price auction system only charged the minimum bid needed to win, but the FTC says Amazon quietly added an undisclosed "soft reserve price" that pushed costs higher. Amazon calls the lawsuit misguided and says its auction system saved advertisers $8 billion between 2021 and 2025, with a trial set to test which version holds up.
Black Friday marketing starts well before the sale for high-consideration products. SparkToro's research found LED skincare shoppers spend months comparing products, reading reviews, and researching results. They use search, AI tools, YouTube, Reddit, and beauty publications. Brands can use this research phase to answer key questions and influence buying decisions early. That way, BFCM campaigns can focus on converting shoppers instead of introducing the product.