Good morning.
Why is the weather always perfect when you’re stuck in bed? It’s an unwritten rule at this point. Sniffling under a blanket? Sunshine. Sprained ankle? Blue skies and a light breeze.
Meanwhile, every day you’re healthy and free, the sky opens up like it owes someone money. Ah, well… At least the news is packed.
Product reviews are turning into YouTube’s biggest storefront
Remember when QVC needed a studio, a host, and a toll-free number? Now a creator, a ring light and a well-placed tag will do.
Ask before you add to cart with new shopping features in Ask YouTube. Product review searches can now return a comparison table of videos matched to your preferences.
Follow-up questions continue on the watch page, where the buying decision now happens.
Tags are packing a passport, with the affiliate program expanding to 35 countries by year-end:
- Over 1.3M creators enrolled, with GMV up 13x in two years.
- Tags drive more than 2x the clicks of description links.
- Amazon tagging heads to India and Brazil next.
- New affiliate campaigns let brands offer bonus commissions on featured products.
Shy shoppers get fewer pop-ups in a dynamic tags test. Interested viewers see tags on the video itself, while everyone else only finds them in the description.
Reach and recommendations stay untouched.
The chatbots are watching, too, since YouTube is now the most-cited platform across eight AI systems. Its citations in Google AI Mode quadrupled from January to April.
Long-form does the heavy lifting with 94% of those citations. Videos running 10–20 minutes take 32.1% alone.
Caveat: sponsored-video citations fell about 43% in one month.
So maybe your YouTube strategy should be scripting 15-minute deep dives for shoppers and for the bots briefing them.
40% less search traffic, a slow-burn spam update, and AI Overviews that link out
If this week were a Netflix series, it’d be all cliffhangers and no finale.
Two weeks of suspense: Google’s September 2026 spam update started rolling out on September 24. It’s the fourth this year, and Google says it could take up to two weeks.
The previous three wrapped up in a few days, so don’t judge any traffic dip before October.
The tremors came first: Ranking trackers spiked around September 23, a day before Google confirmed anything. Some publishers report Discover traffic vanishing within hours and ad revenue cut in half.
Meanwhile, the bigger trend: Chartbeat data shows Google Search referrals to publishers fell 40% year-over-year, nearly double the previous year’s drop. Discover fell 34%.
What grew? Direct traffic, dark social, and loyal readers. Basically, the audiences you own.
A glimmer of good news: Over 25% of AI Overviews now include external links, up from almost none, per Peec AI. Even Barry Schwartz is skeptical, though.
Picture this: Search Console now reports multimodal search performance, covering:
- Google Lens and Circle to Search
- Image uploads
- Chrome’s “Search this image”
Time to see what your product photos are actually doing.
And one more for the road: If AI agents run your SEO, they’ll game whatever metric you reward. Sounds like AI is a 3-month-old puppy still in training.
Make sure you pair every proxy with an outcome a human owns, like leads or pipeline.
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.
Things to know before you run your first ChatGPT ad
Ah, ChatGPT Ads. They’re new, they are shiny, and can cost you $150 to land a $60 customer.
At least that’s what Radu Tyrsina says in her full walkthrough of OpenAI’s Ads Manager. Yes, she demonstrated it through a fictional retailer selling $200 desks, but the point stands.
Here’s what’s good to keep in your head before you open an account.
1) Your audience is smaller than the headline number: Ads appear on Free and Go plans only. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu are ad-free.
Accounts identified as under 18 are excluded too. Self-service access is live in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, India and much of Europe. It’s tied to where your legal entity is based.
Our take: ChatGPT’s user count is a vanity metric for advertisers. Price the reachable slice.
2) Do the CPC math before you touch the bid field: OpenAI suggests a starting maximum CPC of $3–$5.
The example retailer has $100 contribution per sale, targets $60 per customer, and converts 2% of clicks. That caps affordable CPC at $1.20. At $3, acquisition costs $150.
A suggested bid is the platform’s opening offer, not your ceiling. Your margin sets that.
3) Budgets flex more than you’d like: Minimums start at $25 daily in USD, €15, £15.
The daily budget is a seven-day average. OpenAI can spend twice the daily amount on a given day, up to seven times across the week.
4) Context hints are not keywords: Ad-group descriptions explain when your offer is useful. They don’t reserve conversations or match exactly.
Custom audience inclusion needs 25,000 matched users, which rules out most SMB lists.
5) Measure the thing that actually pays you: Install the Pixel or Conversions API, then fire order_created on confirmed orders. Values go in cents so $200 is 20000.
Preserve the oppref click reference through redirects, and dedupe browser and server events. Attributed conversions can lag 24–48 hours.
The Crew’s take: A working Pixel isn’t a working setup. Source, event setting and campaign all have to connect.
One last thing: OpenAI says ad spend doesn’t influence ChatGPT’s answers. You’re buying inventory but you won’t buy a recommendation.
That covers the thinking. The mechanics like verification, feeds, creative specs, troubleshooting are all in the source. We recommend reading it in full before you launch.
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.
Millennials buy into AI shopping, boomers prefer a human cashier
If you thought Gen Z was driving AI commerce, think again.
Millennials are actually leading the charge and leaving older cohorts in the digital dust.
Millennials dominate and 59% have tried AI shopping, while 56% would use ChatGPT Instant Checkout, and 60% say AI assistants make buying easier.
On the other hand, Gen Z (52%) approaches it with caution. They use AI tools to shop, but only 47% trust Instant Checkout.
The silver divide: Adoption plummets after age 45. A mere 13% of consumers aged 55+ have tried AI shopping.
Millennials balance tech-savviness with real spending power, making them AI commerce’s prime demographic.
Older buyers still suffer from a trust gap, meaning forced AI checkouts will only spark friction and cart abandonment.
A tip: Segment your UX. Target under-40 buyers with AI-driven discovery and automated checkouts, but keep familiar, traditional payment and support flows prominent for older demographics.
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GOOGLE: AI Mode is slipping Sponsored product carousels in as “next step” advice after informational answers. Ask about index funds, get sponsored investing books. Ask about brewing methods, get coffee pods. Labeled “Sponsored,” sure, but it barely feels like one.
GOOGLE ADS: New Demand Gen campaigns now switch on view-through conversion optimization by default, so bidding counts people who saw your video ad, and converted, typically in 24 hours. Only care about clicks? Uncheck the box in campaign settings.
CHATGPT: Sponsored ads showed up in 47% of tracked US desktop ChatGPT chats about video games and consoles in June. Up from 3% in March, per Comscore. Toys and hobbies hit 24%; books, music, and video reached 22%. That new ad channel is filling up fast.
ADVERTISING: Scam ads might finally cost platforms something. The FTC opened an advance notice of proposed rulemaking that could force search, social, and marketplace platforms to verify advertisers’ identities before offering optimization tools, and to screen for impersonation ads.
AMAZON: Sellers can now run their business from inside Claude with a new Seller Assistant plugin. Check inventory, adjust prices, update listings, and manage your Amazon Ads campaigns without opening the dashboard. Fewer tabs, more prompts. Nice.
MICROSOFT ADS: Optimization experiments are now generally available for Shopping, Audience, and Performance Max campaigns, not just Search. You clone a campaign, change one variable, split budget and traffic, then apply the winner. Proper A/B tests for PMax? About time.
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