Good Monday morning.
One of us took his dog into the forest yesterday for a calm, restorative walk. Very peaceful. Very green.
Then the pup found the tall grass, and the tall grass found his tail.
One hour later, our Crew member had become an emergency dog groomer, the thistles were out, and the tail was noticeably thinner.
Nobody’s relaxed. Except the dog. How did your weekend go?
Google just opened three new places to spend your ad budget
Every Google surface eventually gets ads. Maps did it. Gmail did it.
On Friday, Waze, YouTube, and AI Mode all took another step in that direction in the same 24 hours.
Your GPS just became a billboard outside of the US, with Waze Ads expanding to 42 countries, including all 27 EU states.
The catch? Access runs only through Performance Max store goals campaigns bidding to Store Visits, Store Sales, or Local Actions Directions.
So it’s a local-intent play. Physical locations only, and barely anyone in Europe has touched it yet.
Last call for untargeted booze ads: From October 30, alcohol brands can run personalized campaigns across YouTube inventory.
That covers alcohol, alcohol-related products and alcohol alternatives, so non-alcoholic beer and spirits brands get in too. Egypt, India, Indonesia and Poland stay excluded.
Age gates stay. Health-based targeting stays banned. Google says more surfaces are coming.
The AI Mode velvet rope loosened, with Google confirming a small experiment serving exact and phrase match keywords inside AI Mode.
Until now, that inventory required AI Max, PMax, or broad match plus Smart Bidding. Eligibility is limited to explicit, direct intent.
Translation: you may already be buying AI Mode traffic. And you still can’t segment it in reporting.
Speaking of AI…
ChatGPT is building its own search index while your clicks disappear
Netflix started by mailing out other studios’ DVDs. Then it made its own shows. OpenAI is running roughly the same play on search.
The tell is in the experiment name. Research published by Peec AI found an OpenAI test called “prefer-index-over-serp-v3”, pitting its own index against third-party SERP results.
They also mapped separate indexes for news, shopping, PDFs, YouTube, and academic papers, plus a reported crawl experiment of up to a billion pages.
Meanwhile, the front door keeps getting busier. ChatGPT.com is now the ninth-biggest website in the US, up 48% year over year to 1.09 billion monthly visits.
Bing fell 50% over the same stretch. DuckDuckGo lost 16%.
But traffic to them is not traffic to you. 95% of ChatGPT users still use Google. They’re just clicking less.
Forcing users into AI Mode drops external click-through by 18.8 points. News links fall by 12.5. Reddit by 21.2.
The uncomfortable part is measurement. GA4 files most AI referrals under direct, with one publisher’s direct traffic now accounting for 78% of its total.
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.
Is your favorite creator double-dipping?
Adam Riemer has a word for review content that keeps earning commissions from customers who already knew you: parasitic. Harsh, but fair.
One creator, three budgets, and where the problems start. PR pays a media fee and ships the product. The affiliate manager adds them to the program. The AEO/GEO team spots the citations and chases more coverage. Social sees momentum and amplifies it.
Nobody’s talking to each other. You’ve now paid for the same relationship three times, then mistaken your own momentum for organic third-party validation.
Attribution tells you a publisher was in the transaction. It won’t tell you they caused it.
A $100K publisher isn’t $100K of revenue: If they vanished tomorrow, you wouldn’t necessarily lose the sales. So before you renew, ask if the customer was new to the brand.
Had they already searched your name, visited your site, or joined your list? Was the review the first meaningful touchpoint, or the last one before checkout?
If customer reviews and non-affiliate creators rank for the same searches with the same credibility, you keep the margin.
Reviews decide which version of you people meet: Sell an undershirt and parents care that it’s tagless, budget shoppers care about durability, fashion buyers care about the drape. Same product, three different arguments.
Niche reviews build explicit third-party links between your product and specific needs, which matters more as search gets personalized.
Getting cited isn’t “training the LLM”: Third-party reviews and listicles do seem to correlate with brands appearing more in AI answers, likely through retrieval.
But retrieval, grounding, citations, and training are four different things. A crawler reading your coverage guarantees nothing.
Where the real money is: Embed reviews on product and landing pages. With permission, run them as ads. Negotiate paid media usage rights up front and you cut production costs too.
Review content changes jobs over its lifecycle: acquisition early, social proof and objection handling later. Both create value. Just stop measuring them the same way.
Smart marketers read smarter news
Understanding the economy sharpens your marketing instincts—no doubt about it.
But let’s be honest: most business news feels like a chore to read. (Think: filing taxes, but with more jargon.)
That’s where The Daily Upside stands out. It’s sharp, insightful, and yes—actually enjoyable.
The Daily Upside delivers sharp, market-moving stories with clarity, wit, and zero filler.
It’s the kind of intel that helps you make faster, smarter marketing and business decisions.
Where in the customer journey can AI help the most?
The days of the funnel might be over.
The buyer’s journey is now an AI-assisted flight and tools are becoming a pervasive guide from the first “I wonder” to the final “buy.”
AI is most powerful when the user is just starting to poke around or is ready to pull the trigger:
- A massive 73% of users find AI most helpful for learning broadly about a category or brand.
- In the decision stages, 61% use it to compare specific products and 60% use it to summarize reviews, effectively cutting out hours of manual research.
- 60% use AI during the consideration phase to explain features or technical specs.
AI is shortening the consideration phase. It’s taking the “messy middle” of the customer journey and tidying it up into a neat, AI-generated comparison table.
Create “Comparison Hubs” on your site. Use structured data to clearly define your specs versus competitors.
If you make it easy for the AI to compare you, you’ll win the “decision” stage.
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: Max campaigns just opened to every advertiser, with AI handling targeting, creative, placements, and budget. Beta testers saw 17% lower CPAs and 27% more conversions on average. API support, a Smartly integration, and asset groups landed too.
YOUTUBE: Forget to tag a sponsorship, and YouTube will now stamp a disclosure label on your upload automatically. Creators also get age and location controls to satisfy local rules, so fewer deals die over geography. Separately, it’s testing whether swapping affiliate tags to a local retailer sells more.
MICROSOFT ADS: Average target metrics now sit in the campaign overview, campaign grid and portfolio bid strategies, so you can finally judge automated bidding against targets that shifted mid-flight. Handy when someone keeps nudging your tCPA and blaming the algorithm.
GOOGLE: Profiles appears to be testing a fifth verification method: submitting a photo of your location. Requirements so far are your business name on a permanent sign, plus the whole storefront in one frame. Documentation hasn’t caught up yet, though.
GOOGLE: Publishers report fresh articles getting crawled, indexed, and ranked in web search while skipping the News tab, sometimes reappearing hours later. Barry Schwartz replicated it across large and small sites and found no pattern. Google hasn’t responded.
*This is a sponsored post.
You have a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a book of matches. You have to fix the lit candle to the wall so that it will not drip wax onto the floor below. How do you do it?
You can find the answer here.
Interested in advertising in one of our newsletters?
Connect with over 100,000 of the world’s best marketers who read a newsletter by Stacked Marketer.
