🏪 Shelves.

Amazon rents a shelf inside ChatGPT while everyone else builds walls

The AI ad economy is speedrunning the entire history of the open web. Land grab first, bouncers second.

Amazon brought its DSP to the party. As of today, advertisers can buy conversational ads inside ChatGPT, with Delta Vacations testing early.

The pitch: Amazon’s shopping data plus near-zero DSP fees against The Trade Desk’s 15-20%.

The catch: OpenAI’s measurement is barely there.

But your shelf space now depends on a feed. ChatGPT Shopping’s feed-sourced picks jumped from 8.26% to 61.54% after July 10. Of 687 tracked merchants, 450 lost visibility.

Of 687 merchants tracked, 450 lost visibility and only 67 gained. Without a connected feed, you end up on the wrong side of that split.

Then the bouncers showed up. Amazon tried to keep Perplexity’s Comet agent off its store and lost again, with the 9th Circuit declining a rehearing.

Its reasoning: the user accesses Amazon, the agent merely helps.

OpenAI plays doorman too. It reportedly stopped approving ads from rival image and audio tools, Adobe included. Video generators still get in.

And Cloudflare’s block lands September 15. Googlebot, Bingbot, and Applebot get judged by their strictest classified use, so “block AI bots” can kill your indexing.

Doing nothing is still a choice here.

So you have two action items, potentially:

• Get your product feed connected.
• Open your Cloudflare settings before Tuesday if you don’t want the defaults.

Google hands advertisers new data tools, then takes back their credits

Google appears to be a generous benefactor in the morning and debt collector by lunch.

The first-party data push got real. Data Manager is now built into Google Analytics and DV360, alongside a new Data Strength Uplift metric.

Google’s figures say 26% average lift in incremental ROAS from connecting offline and app data, 14% conversion uplift with the tag gateway, 20%+ on Demand Gen.

Bricks-and-mortar gets a holiday gift. Performance Max store-goal campaigns now have a Local Customer Optimization toggle, pushing budget toward nearby shoppers.

That means Maps, Waze, and local Search. Store Sales moves into Data Manager in the coming weeks so you can connect CRM or Sheets, skip the upload gymnastics.

It’s not all good news, though.

Your developer token is on death row. API access now hangs off your Google Cloud project instead. Two jobs for you:

• Reapply if your Basic access application was pending because those got closed
• Update your Cloud IAM contacts, since that’s where Google’s mandatory notices land now

And then the other hand. Google invalidated promo credits after advertisers spent against them, including one consultant’s $3,200, with no appeal route. Ouch!

Timely, then, that law firms are recruiting advertisers to claw back up to 30% of spend since August 2016, riding two DOJ antitrust rulings.

Better data, thinner trust. And the warning that now you have to also audit your credits, not just your ROAS. Ooof!

Are you growing your email list, or your email bill?

The mechanism is the pricing model. Nearly every platform charges per contact.

The $1,000-LTV superfan you email every week costs the same as the $100-LTV deal hunter you email twice a year on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Well, on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Worse, a good popup month raises your bill by itself. Klaviyo auto-upgrades your tier when signups cross a threshold. The official fix is pruning your list.

Brevo prices on sends. You pay for what you use, which is what actually drives return so inactive and less active contacts stop costing you.

A 25,000-contact store sending 40,000 emails a month saves $4,248 a year. Moving is as simple as an API key and a list import.

How much could you cut your email invoice by?

Price it against your own list and sends here.

Your Performance Max ROAS is probably lying to you

Performance Max is usually the star of the account.

But Joshua Uebergang reckons that’s less a result and more a reporting artifact.

The culprit? Brand leak. Google quietly buying clicks on your own name, then taking credit for orders that were already on their way. Be careful.

Google isn’t cheating. It’s just lazy in exactly the way you told it to be. Performance Max chases the target you set via the cheapest available route.

Brand queries convert better and cost less, so your own name becomes the most efficient inventory it can find.

What we think: Your reported return is a blend of demand you created and demand you already had. You can’t set a target against a blend.

First steps: Pull the search terms and start sorting. Performance Max now publishes individual search terms, with history reaching back to March 2023.

Segment by ad format, export, and classify using regex on your brand token. Five buckets do the job: pure brand, brand + product, brand + qualifier, brand + competitor, and nonbrand.

One number isn’t enough. You need two. Brand share of cost tells you what you’re spending. Brand share of conversion value tells you what your “success” is actually made of.

Then rebuild the campaign with the brand stripped out completely.

Why this matters: That nonbrand figure is the real number. Plenty of comfortable-looking campaigns sit below break-even once the store’s own name comes out.

Not all brand spend is a waste, though. Keep paying if competitors bid on your name, if resellers outrank your product pages, if your brand doubles as a category word, or if the Shopping unit sits above your organic result anyway.

Last but not least: Sequence matters more than the lever you pick. Negative keywords, brand exclusion lists, or a dedicated brand campaign, they’re all valid.

But launch the brand campaign first, confirm it’s serving, then apply the exclusion. Do it backwards, and you hand the top of your own results page to whoever was bidding second.

And when your return dips afterwards? That’s the point. Lock in a four-week measurement window before you touch a single setting.

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Shoppers still refuse AI to have a final say… for now

AI might write a killer summary, but shoppers still double-check its work like a suspicious professor grading a freshman essay.

Data reveals where consumers draw the line with AI shopping tools:

Data reveals where consumers draw the line with AI shopping tools:

• Fact-checking the bot: Two-thirds (66%) of shoppers turn to external sources to verify product specs, while 61% use them to double-check prices.
• Human proof wins: Over half rely on outside channels to read real user reviews (57%) and get reassurance from trusted sources (51%).
• Ideation vs. verification: Just 23% seek inspiration elsewhere—proving shoppers trust AI to spark ideas, but not to sign off on purchases.

The Crew’s Take: AI acts as a search shortcut, not a single source of truth. Because shoppers fear hallucinations and phantom prices, they continuously loop back to trusted review hubs and retail sites to validate details before converting.

Actionable tip: Optimize for the verification visit. Ensure product spec tables are flawless, surface unedited customer reviews prominently, and maintain real-time pricing across product pages to catch shoppers validating AI claims.

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.*

PAID SEARCH: Media brands dropped $113 million on paid search in July, up 274% in three years, while organic referrals fell roughly 25%. Forbes alone spent $72.2 million. The irony: they’re funding Google, the same AI-powered search that’s draining their traffic.

ADVERTISING: Optimizing content for AI-generated answers is now buyers’ top area of increased focus at 76%, with LLMs right behind at 72%. The trade body also lifted its 2026 US ad growth forecast 2.8 points to 12.3%, and nearly nine in ten buyers are reworking measurements for AI-driven browsing.

GOOGLE: Nearly every “People Also Ask” answer is now AI-generated, per AlsoAsked’s look at 19.2 million queries: 97% in early September, up from 12% just 14 months ago. Allintitle clocked 100% in August. Another click-free surface closes.

AMAZON: If you pause a show on Prime Video, a new Shop tab surfaces what’s on screen. “Shop the Scene” uses Lens visual search across 600+ titles, while “Shop the Show” expands from 1,300 to over 8,000 titles. US only, for now.

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