⛓️‍💥 No breakup.

Google keeps the ad machine and rebuilds the shelf it sells from

Sundar Pichai wants Search to become your “agent manager.” Judge Brinkema just made sure Google still owns the ad ops underneath it. Convenient timing.

No breakup, just new rules. Google won’t be forced to sell AdX, despite being found to have illegally monopolized key parts of the ad-tech market.

It got six years of good behavior instead, such as real-time bids for rival ad servers and no more first look or last look.

The front end shifted, too. WeatherNext 3 brought hourly, AI-generated forecasts directly into Google Search. But it’s not about the weather. It tells us something about the future of search.

Search is moving from finding information to delivering answers you can act on immediately. Pichai calls it “agentic search”. Something to think about.

But the task-based shelf is tiny. Productrise matched two million listings and found AI Mode returns 3.9 products per response, against 27.8 in classic Search.

Smaller and pricier, too. The lead price averaged 21.6% higher, the seller changed on half of matched products, and only 1.28% of Search-ranking products surfaced at all.

Losing that slot costs more now. John Mueller says recovery takes many months, three to six for disavows alone, because Google reprocesses signals slowly.

And for the end, your one new window. Merchant Center’s AI performance insights expanded to Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand, tracking brand visibility inside AI Mode.

Google owns the plumbing and the shelf. You get a report and a longer wait.

X shrinks in the EU as Reddit, TikTok and Pinterest make their pitch

Every platform is auditioning for a new role this week, and some of these screen tests are going better than others.

X is still leaking, and not just users. Its EU audience keeps sliding, while H1 2026 ad revenue hit $710M, down 18.4% year-over-year.

That’s roughly 70% below 2022. Only about 1.9% of users pay for Premium. Ouch.

Meanwhile, Reddit wants a longer attention span. Its new 15-second Engaged Video Views goal lifted view-through rates 51% and completion rates 71% in alpha testing.

The platform says it’s best for trailers, demos and testimonials while the 6-second goal still suits quick hits. Worth trying out if you advertise on Reddit.

And TikTok moved the party to the comments. Voice notes, polls, nine-photo carousels and Live Photo replies are rolling out globally.

Engagement is migrating below the video. Your new community manager might’ve just become a creative hire, too.

Pinterest is running the brand-safety play. With 77% of active teens using search, it’s pitching itself as the anti-doomscroll platform.

Teens there adjust feed controls at nearly double the rate of other age groups. School-hour nudges expand to 30+ countries.

Landing days after the Meta and TikTok fines? Not an accident.

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.

Subscribe for free.

Ditch the keyword brief and write for situations instead

Let’s talk about all those 300-word articles you’re now stuck cleaning up.

Amanda King has a theory about those. They started their life as keywords. All of them.

Nobody hires an accountant they found via “what’s the fiscal year.” Every accountant in the US has that FAQ buried somewhere, chasing impressions.

But you’re up against the government agency that literally set the standard, and Google isn’t picking you over them.

Our advice: If a prospect doesn’t already know the basics, they’re probably not your ideal client anyway.

Humans don’t think in keywords. Nobody types “best new sweet snacks 2026” in their head. They think “my wife is pregnant and craving weird sweets she’s never tried.”

Conversational search just made that obvious again.

Say hello to the 7 W’s. Category entry points are the jump from a topic back to the situation that created it: why, when, where, while, with whom, with/for what, and how feeling.

Answer all seven before you create anything.

Your support team beats your keyword tool. The people who talk to your audience most (support, sales, in-store staff) hold the raw material.

Less measurable than volume, sure. But “here’s six months of support feedback” is far more defensible in a leadership meeting than “here’s the biggest search volume in our vertical.”

What actually goes in the brief. One line per W, plus whoever gave you the intel so it stays traceable. Then the scenario you’re solving for: the panicked owner closing their first financial year, someone taking over a new business, the apprentice learning the ropes.

After that, your usual fields: content type, outline, tone notes, existing coverage, length, and how you’ll measure success.

Not convinced? Test it.

Brief the same topic twice, once on keywords and once on the 7 W’s. Compare what your writers hand back, then A/B them on scroll depth, interaction, and impressions.

Ranking No. 1 for “what’s the fiscal year” for your entire tenure isn’t the flex it once was.

Amanda’s full breakdown is here for you to read.

The AI marketing newsletter read by marketers at Google, Klaviyo, and Morningstar

Every Saturday, the Tactics newsletter delivers one effective AI tactic, three ways to use it, and real examples that make it easy to apply.

… Because you’re more likely to succeed when you act on one clear AI strategy Monday vs. juggling five half-baked ideas and forgetting them by Friday.

And each issue takes just seven minutes to read, so you can literally go from reading to execution in minutes.

Small steps move your business forward.

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Can AI be your fashionista? Maybe. But it’s more a fact checker…

When shoppers hire AI for assistance, they want a ruthless, logic-driven comparative research engine.

According to IAB data, over half of AI shoppers rely on AI for brand/product comparisons (57%), product-specific Q&As (53%), and price tracking or deal alerts (53%).

Nearly half (49%) use it to summarize customer reviews, while subjective tasks like personalized recommendations (38%) and sizing advice (35%) trail behind.

Consumers view AI as an objective fact-checker rather than a personal shopper.

They leverage algorithms to strip away sales fluff, benchmark competitor pricing, and cross-examine brand claims before making a move.

Feed the bots. Structure your product detail pages with clear spec tables, detailed FAQs, and structured schema markup.

This will make AI engines accurately surface your brand during side-by-side shopper comparisons. And you’ll sell more. In theory.

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.*

YOUTUBE: Your phone just became the best remote. The platform now lets you comment, subscribe, search, and even watch Shorts on your handset while the big screen keeps rolling. With over a billion daily hours watched on TVs, this fixes a real friction point for engagement.

BING: Microsoft is testing search results that ditch site names entirely, showing just the raw URL under each snippet. It’s the same experiment Google ran about a year ago, and if it sticks, your carefully built brand name might matter less than your domain does on the results page.

TIKTOK: TikTok Shop and Whatnot are turning shopping into a spectator sport, and Americans are finally watching. US live-commerce sales are on track to hit nearly $20 billion this year, fueled by auctions, creator hype, and real-time video that blends entertainment with buying.

OPENAI: A major outage knocked ChatGPT and Codex offline, and the damage spread to every app running on OpenAI’s models. Degraded performance dragged on for hours. Worth asking: how much of your stack breaks when one vendor sneezes? Maybe build a backup plan.

*This is a sponsored post.

Two very short friends, John and Jack, were living together in an apartment.

Since they frequently lost their apartment key, they decided to leave it on top of the door frame whenever they left home.

In order to reach the key, John had to climb on Jack’s shoulders to take it down from the frame.

Yet John was the taller and the heavier guy of the two. Why didn’t Jack climb on his shoulders instead?

You can find the answer here.

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