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Amazon cashes in on gray-area labels while TikTok Shop surges
Turns out “all or virtually all” is doing a lot of heavy lifting these days.
Amazon is having a moment: Its Q2 2026 ad revenue climbed 26% to $19.8 billion, part of the first-ever $200 billion quarter. Business is very good.
But here’s the gray area: A new study found Amazon’s and Walmart’s AI assistants can spot fake “Made in USA” labels, and stay quiet, since flagging them is, per one bot, “a business calculation.”
Why we care: The marketplace polices what pays. Trust the listing less, verify origin claims yourself, and know the same loopholes shaping shopper trust apply to your own product pages.
Meanwhile, beauty found its channel: TikTok Shop notched nearly $1 billion in beauty sales last quarter, up 82% YoY, rewarding brands that treat it as retail, not a billboard.
But the playing field isn’t level. Five brands take roughly half of all indie revenue on the platform. Scaling there takes budget.
And skip the teen-targeting instinct: TikTok’s biggest US audience is millennials, not Gen Z. 36.5 million visitors aged 25–34, and its most active buyers.
Bottom line: Ecommerce is having a genuinely good moment. To prosper in it, watch the gray areas and be certain you’re hitting the right demographic.
AI is answering half your searches and rewriting your ads while you watch
Somewhere between “assistant” and “landlord,” AI quietly took the keys.
Half the room is already gone: AI Overviews now appear on 43% to 48% of Google queries, up from 13–20% a year ago.
The search engine is changing super fast. Our advice? Forget about clicks and plan for the answer instead.
The guest list is rigged, too: Models search for brands they already know 3.2 times more often than unfamiliar ones, making familiarity a ranking factor that compounds.
Get noticeable, or AI may never discover you. Which is easier said than done.
You can also just pay for eyeballs: Especially at Meta, where AI-tuned recommendations lifted Instagram time spent by double digits YoY. More attention to buy against.
Meta can also now swap headline text inside your ad images, keeping fonts, colors, and layout intact. Creative diversification, designer-free.
And AI-first advertising goes further: Google is testing AI-generated descriptions on Shopping ads.
Copy you don’t control on listings you optimized for months. Watch your CTR closely.
It’s here to stay, regardless: OpenAI is staffing 32 advertising roles plus reseller channels, aiming to cement the chatbot among the biggest ad platforms around.
Meanwhile, the backlash has a button: LinkedIn added a “Seems like AI slop” option, privately nudging posters it flags. Reach is expanding; patience isn’t.
This tells us that AI is buying you reach and spending your brand voice. Make sure you guard the second.
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.
Google is hunting AI content networks now
Blame the algorithm all you want, but Google just published exactly how it catches AI spam at scale. Thanks to Foundation for surfacing the research.
Spoiler: it’s smart! Here’s what you need to know.
It stopped grading pages and started hunting packs. Google’s Scalable Cluster Termination System (S-CTS) doesn’t judge content one piece at a time.
It looks for coordinated networks, accounts publishing on the same cadence, from the same templates, sharing the same infrastructure.
Over six months, it killed 50,000 clusters spanning 130,000 channels.
“Just make it a bit different” is officially dead. The old game was making each page look good enough to slip through.
But when the unit of judgment becomes the network, the similarity itself is the signal. Slightly-unique variations don’t hide you anymore. In fact, they can out you.
AI text leaves fingerprints. The paper points to Sentence-BERT, which turns sentences into embeddings and measures how alike they are.
Scripted, templated writing clusters together mathematically. Google doesn’t need to read your slop line by line to spot it.
The data backs the theory. Lily Ray tracked 220+ sites running scaled AI content.
- 54% lost 30% or more of their peak organic traffic
- 39% lost 50% or more
- and 22% lost 75% or more.
Glenn Gabe calls the shape “Mount AI:” sharp climb, matching collapse.
The caveat: AI isn’t the villain here. Used for research, briefs, and synthesis with a human expert in the loop, these tools are genuinely useful.
The trouble starts when nobody reviews what you publish.
The moat is the stuff you can’t mass-produce: original research, named experts, first-party data, a real point of view. Google even has a name for it: non-commodity content.
Run the test yourself: could a competitor publish a near-identical page tomorrow using the same prompt? If yes, it’s a liability waiting to happen.
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Marketplaces are search engines too, just for products
The search begins before the credit card comes out.
But where do people actually start? Well, the Googles of the world have some very stiff competition in the form of massive digital bazaars.
- 37% of shoppers start their journey on online marketplaces like Amazon, making them the top starting point.
- Search engines follow at 23%, showing that while intent starts with a query, it often skips the general web for a direct product shelf.
- Social & Brand: Brand websites (11%) and social media (9%) lag behind, showing that these are better for discovery than for direct, high-intent searches.
Marketplaces are like sear Consumers crave the convenience of reviews, shipping, and variety in one place.
Focus on marketplace optimization besides Google so you don’t miss the front door.
Better said, prioritize marketplace SEO. Ensure your product titles and descriptions on sites like Amazon are optimized for the specific way users search within those ecosystems.
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.*
REDDIT: Ad revenue jumped 64% to $762 million last quarter, with international sales up 84% against 56% in the US. Search referrals wobbled, though, so Huffman’s leaning on direct app users. Our read? The ad engine is sharpening and getting pricier.
BING: Microsoft Search ad revenue grew 10% year-over-year in Q2, down from 12% the quarter before, yet it was the only thing propping up a More Personal Computing segment that slid 4%. Cheaper clicks than Google? Maybe. Just don’t expect fireworks.
GOOGLE: Search Console platform properties are now live worldwide, so you can link Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube accounts and see which Google queries push people toward your posts. There’s a new guide, too. Query-level data for content off your own site — finally.
GOOGLE ADS: Drag-and-drop your way to a full customer journey map inside the platform. Lead gen advertisers can chart online and offline touchpoints, spot tracking gaps, and prep for Journey Aware Bidding. No instant performance lift, but it’s cleaner conversion hygiene.
SNAPCHAT: Agencies get some love: new Business Manager controls let brands grant account-level access without handing over the whole org, plus redesigned partner badges. The Indy Agency Partner Program now reaches France and the UK, with a Creator Agency program landing later this year.
EMAIL MARKETING: Chrome is testing an Email Verification Protocol that confirms someone owns an address without a one-time code or magic link. It’s an origin trial for now, but fewer steps in your signup flow means cleaner first-party data and stronger conversions.
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