Good morning.
Did you know that they discovered an orange shark a few years ago? Neon orange, white eyes, cruising around off the coast of Costa Rica.
Whoever’s running this simulation added a rare skin and forgot to patch it out. Two meters of nurse shark, glowing like a traffic cone, thriving.
Legendary drop. No notes.
The agent is now the customer, and search is keeping the conversation
Turns out the shopper you’ve been optimizing for has a VM, a wallet, and no impulse control problems… Unlike some of our Crew.
Meta just gave a billion people a buyer’s agent, Muse. And Muse doesn’t answer questions, it does the work: opens a browser, fills forms, negotiates, then checks out with Stripe’s Link.
Cha-ching?
It’s the first agent covered by Link’s purchase protections, using one-time-use cards. Shop Pay comes next.
And the traffic is already here: Bots and agents now make up over half of all web requests, Digiday reports via Cloudflare.
DTC brand Mellow Sleep says AI-assistant traffic converts several times better than site average. Meanwhile, one agency’s clients saw bot traffic up 80% YoY, poisoning retargeting pools until CPMs rose 20%.
So classify your traffic. Don’t block it.
That’s not the only way AI is reshaping the web.
Search wants the follow-up, not the click: Bing is testing an “Ask follow-up” box in Copilot results that keeps users in the Bing tab.
Google’s AI Mode is going further, testing table-format follow-up questions and paginated answers with a skip button. It’s running the qualifying interview your landing page used to.
Meanwhile, credit gets thinner: Google is testing smaller link cards in AI Overviews and AI Mode, with the site description removed entirely. More citations, less context each.
The buyer is changing, and the way humans see your website recommended is changing too. A marketer’s work never ends, does it?
Microsoft and Google spent some time deleting manual controls… again
Autopilot used to be a feature you switched on.
This week both platforms made it the standard trim. And it’s not necessarily great for marketers.
Microsoft is dropping Max CPC. From October 1, new campaigns on Maximize Conversions, Conversion Value, Clicks, tCPA and tROAS can’t set one.
Existing campaigns keep theirs. Remove it after that date, though, and you can’t add it back. Just in time for Q4, eh? Make sure you run an optimization experiment before.
Google’s AI Max upgrade needs no signature, landing whether you read the email or not.
Every Search campaign still running campaign-level broad match or automatically created assets gets upgraded. Switching those features off is the only exit.
Gemini has moved into your reporting. AI Dashboards build charts from text prompts and attach a live summary of what changed in performance.
Fast, and worth checking against your own read of the numbers.
Shopping CTR looks great for an awkward reason. It’s up 17–20% year over year while clicks stayed flat and impressions dropped.
Google appears to be serving your ads on fewer, higher-intent queries. Judge Shopping on clicks and impression volume.
One control did arrive: Meridian GeoX, a free open-source geo-experiment library that measures incrementality on any platform and calibrates your MMM.
So as platforms take away controls, third parties try to bring them back.
Have we seen this movie before?
Save 40+ hrs/month on creator operations
Your team already runs on Slack and AI agents. Your creator marketing should too.
Insense now plugs into the stack you already use, so you brief, approve, and track creator work without living in yet another dashboard.
Route campaigns and updates through Slack, put your AI agents (ChatGPT, Claude) to work on briefs and shortlists, and keep everything connected to your Ads Manager and analytics.
Underneath, the creator layer runs itself:
- Vetted creators apply to you within 48 hours – from a vetted marketplace of 115K+ creators across 57+ countries
- Run diverse campaign types – from UGC to seeding, influencer posting, and Meta Partnership Ads and TikTok Spark Ads
- Get creator performance insights – connect your Ads Manager and view which creators perform best – not only which ads
Book a free strategy call by Sept 18th and get $200 towards your first campaign.
How to prep your website for AI agents with WebMCP
Ai agents used to just read websites. Now, they’ve started using them. At the moment, they’re doing it by taking screenshots and guessing which dropdown is the filter.
WebMCP, a proposed standard co-authored by Google and Microsoft, fixes that by letting your site hand agents a defined set of tools.
Search products, book a table, start checkout. All via a few HTML attributes on the forms you already have.
Matt Hollingshead walked through the whole thing over at Moz, and here’s how you ship it.
1) Find the actions worth handing over: List the top three to five things people come to your site to do. Booking, buying, searching a catalogue, subscribing.
Then pick the boring one. A newsletter signup or search widget, not checkout.
Save the high-risk flows until you’ve got something simpler working.
2) Write your first tool: Existing HTML forms are the easiest entry point.
Add toolname (short, no spaces), tooldescription (plain-language, tells the agent when to use it), and toolparamdescription on each input.
Then test it. Flip on the WebMCP flag in Chrome, install the Model Context Tool Inspector, and prompt it.
Our take: When the agent fumbles, it’s almost always your description, not the agent.
Copy the trace, adjust, retest.
3) Don’t hand over the keys entirely: Agents can’t reliably tell your content from an instruction, which makes prompt injection a real concern.
Flag read-only tools with readOnlyHint, and tag anything returning reviews or comments with untrustedContentHint.
Leave toolautosubmit off for bookings, purchases, and account changes. A human confirming before submitting is a feature.
4) Ship it while nobody’s looking: Chrome runs a time-limited trial you can opt into, so your tools go live on your real site.
Barely any agents can use them yet. That’s rather the point.
Remember how optional mobile-friendly felt, right up until it wasn’t? This is looking to be the next such shift.
Matt’s full walkthrough, screenshots and all, is here.
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 still lacks street cred in some areas
AI might be sweeping search, but when it comes to spending hard-earned cash, shoppers still trust random forum posters more.
According to IAB data on consumer trust:
- A massive 83% of shoppers trust community forums more than AI, while 78% favor user reviews.
- Search engines (65%), retail marketplaces (63%), and social media (62%) all beat AI on credibility.
- News sites (43%) are the only channel shoppers trust less than AI recommendations.
What we think: Shoppers view AI as an efficient aggregator, but it’s not an unbiased advisor yet.
They know algorithms lack lived experience, driving them straight to peer-to-peer discussions for authentic, unfiltered validation before reaching for their wallets.
What we’d do: Double down on community-led SEO and user-generated content.
Build an active presence on Reddit or niche subforums, and highlight unedited customer reviews prominently on key landing pages.
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.*
GOOGLE: Compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act has, in Google’s words, caused the worst drop in search quality in its 29-year history. European results now push comparison sites up top and strip real-time pricing from hotel, flight, and restaurant carousels. Big ouch.
CHATGPT: Images 2.5 is live, generating up to 50% faster, with templates for posters, merch, and product photos, plus sketch-to-image and comment-based edits. While speed sounds great, quality also matters, and it’s one where ChatGPT hasn’t gotten close to taking the crown.
SOCIAL MEDIA: Australia wants to force Meta, Google, and TikTok to let users switch off recommendation algorithms, with substantial penalties for platforms that don’t comply. It’s only a proposal for now, but we already foresee an issue if a chronological feed becomes the only option. And that is, high-frequency posts, aka spam.
GOOGLE: Old low-value pages can drag down how Google’s systems judge your whole site, says John Mueller, and cleaning them up won’t flip a switch. Recovery takes time and real effort to prove value, so audit those programmatic archives before they cost you.
*This is a sponsored post.
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