Good morning.
When’s the last time you sent an actual postcard? Not a DM or a text. But a rectangle of cardboard that travels through three countries to tell someone the weather was nice.
We can’t remember either, which feels like a shame. There’s something to a message that takes eleven days to arrive and still gets read twice, don’t you think?
ChatGPT Ads underdeliver, OpenAI’s ad revenue doesn’t, and Claude has a twin
Great ad business. Shame about the ads.
Impressions without intentions: Agencies testing ChatGPT Ads are getting clicks that go nowhere. One reported a 0.6% CTR against a usual 2%, at roughly $7 per click.
Worse, platform click counts aren’t matching Google Analytics. Add UTMs, and treat any spend as research budget.
Fair warning: geotargeting, custom audiences, and conversion optimization only landed in August 2026. So you can expect it to get better soon.
Meanwhile, the money prints itself: OpenAI’s ad business just hit a $1B annualized run rate in about 200 days.
Self-service access is rolling out across India, Europe, and MENA, with ads now available in 40+ countries.
Brussels noticed: The EU has designated ChatGPT a Very Large Online Search Engine, citing roughly 159.1M monthly EU recipients.
Within four months, that means a public ad repository. Translation: free competitor research.
Speaking of searching the web, Claude and Claude Code act like two separate engines. Claude searched in 93% of responses. Claude Code? 13%.
Their brand mentions overlapped by only 20%. Claude Code’s agent hits docs and pricing pages; Claude’s crawls sitemaps and homepages.
Same name, different playbooks.
Google Pics lands in Workspace, and Search Console finally reports AI visibility
Google’s release schedule now has more entries than the Fast & Furious franchise.
Say cheese: Google Pics, Google’s powerful new image creation and editing tool, is rolling out to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Plus most Workspace business customers.
It works inside Docs and Slides now, with Drive coming. And it looks like there will be no more tab switching for mock-ups and social posts.
Your reviews are writing ads without you: Google Ads is now labeling a “What customers love” section as AI-generated from store rating reviews.
This means that your review corpus is becoming ad copy you never approved. Go read what it’s saying about you.
Receipts, at last: Search Console’s generative AI performance reports rolled out worldwide on August 31. You get impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Finally, numbers.
Skip the shortcut: John Mueller tested Markdown files for AI crawlers and found only SEO tools requesting them.
His advice: log your accept headers first, before building files for bots that may never ask.
Brussels is watching Google too, not just ChatGPT: EU regulators are surveying publishers on Google’s AI search opt-out.
Publishers’ answers could decide whether Google adds to its €10 billion antitrust tab. Let’s wait.
What if doing nothing beat 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
The data tells a different story. Over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals. Most investors who try to beat the market end up paying more in fees to underperform it.
The edge isn’t intelligence. It’s patience.
But patience is hard when your portfolio feels abstract. A passive fund is just a ticker on a screen. The thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.
90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.
- The Brazilian company that makes the electric motors inside almost everything that spins.
- The Florida company that sells your airline its spare parts at half the price.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
Your content metrics probably aren’t telling you anything. Here’s how to fix that
Traffic’s up. Engagement’s up. Revenue’s… the same as last quarter.
Shopify laid out which content metrics earn their spot in a report, and it’s a useful gut check.
1) Six buckets, one funnel: SEO, traffic, engagement, conversion, revenue, and distribution metrics each cover a different stretch of the journey from first click to checkout.
SEO tells you whether you’re visible. Traffic tells you whether that visibility turned into visits. The rest tell you whether any of it mattered.
What we think: Pick the metric that matches the job. An awareness piece gets judged on traffic and shares. A product page gets judged on purchases. Don’t hand both the same scorecard.
2) Not every engagement weighs the same: Andy Pearson, VP of creative at Liquid Death, says his team runs an in-house formula that ranks post metrics against each other.
Shares carry far more weight than a like or a comment, because someone actively passed your content along.
3) The 5% rule for the fuzzy stuff: Elaine Choi, CEO of Crown Affair, caps spending on anything her team can’t measure at 5% of budget.
She also separates content virality from product loyalty: going viral buys awareness, but not that much repeat buyers. That’s a tidy guardrail.
Enough room to experiment, not enough rope to hang your quarter on.
4) Measurement is useless without the follow-up: The payoff is in the changes you make after.
Sharpening CTAs on high-traffic, low-conversion pages, adding internal links to your winners, and rewriting headlines and metadata on pages pulling impressions but no clicks.
This might help you stop chasing vanity metrics. Let us know how it went.
How to prime your customers’ minds to see your product as the obvious choice
You don’t need pressure tactics to convert customers.
Most people rely on mental shortcuts to make decisions. Like defaulting to the “most popular” option without even reading the fine print.
When you understand how people make decisions, you can position your products and offers more naturally.
… And make your messaging more relevant, sticky, and persuasive.
Psychology of Marketing shows you how to do this with one powerful insight each week, plus real-world ways to apply it.
AI is the ultimate wingman for shopping research
…but it still gets cold feet at the digital cash register.
According to IAB data, consumers lean on AI heavily during the middle of the consideration stage:
- The mid-funnel sweet spot: A massive 83% of AI shoppers find AI most effective for researching and comparing products, while 73% use it to explore new categories and 71% to narrow down choices.
- The checkout drop-off: Only 21% say AI is effective at the final purchase stage.
In short, shoppers treat AI like a hyper-fast librarian to curate options, but prefer keeping human hands on the credit card.
The Crew’s Take: Shoppers trust AI to eliminate research overwhelm. They want algorithms to simplify choice paralysis, but still insist on total agency when pulling the trigger.
Actionable tip: Optimize your product data for AI search.
Ensure clear specifications, structured data, and customer comparisons are easily crawlable so AI tools surface your brand during that critical 83% research phase.
AI MARKETING: This daily newsletter condenses the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. They read the noise, pull out the signal, and explain what actually matters for work, strategy, and the tools your team is already using. Trusted by 700k+ readers. Subscribe right here.*
AMAZON: The FTC is suing over claims it raised minimum ad prices, overcharging more than a million advertisers and pocketing billions. Amazon disagrees, saying regulators misread its ad process. We’ll let you know the outcome when it comes.
TIKTOK: …is now sitting at 189 million monthly users in the EU after adding 9 million in the first half of 2026. Meanwhile, its EU moderation team shrank from 6,354 people in 2024 to 3,738, with 94% of takedowns automated. Automated takedowns… social marketer’s worst nightmare.
SNAPCHAT: Unified Attribution just went global, pulling AppsFlyer and Adjust data into Snap Ads Manager so you can optimize against MMP conversions instead of two arguing dashboards. Beta numbers look strong and more MMP partners are coming. Cool stuff.
INSTAGRAM: The AI creator label is now the AI-generated profile label, and skipping it can bite you. Unlabelled synthetic personas lose recommendation reach until they toggle it on or win an appeal. If you’re just using AI tools in your workflow? You’re fine, no label needed.
MOBILE: Over half of US adults think they spend too much time on their phone, per Pew. And that jumps to seven-in-ten under 30. Meanwhile, 45% tried cutting back this past year. Your always-on audience is actively trying to be less on. But it’s not looking like they’re succeeding.
*This is a sponsored post.
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