Good morning.
We ran a little experiment over at Tactics, our AI tips newsletter: we asked AI to write us a theme song.
The result? An absolute banger. We’re not proud of how much we’ve had it on repeat this weekend, but here we are. Humans make better music, obviously…
…but give this a listen and tell us we’re wrong. Not bad for a five-minute prompt.
Short-form may be eating search, Instagram now lets you fix your Stories
No one thought Blockbuster would go out of business. But here we are.
Is Search heading the same way? Meta’s new 3-part series research shows Google searches per US user are down nearly 20% year-over-year.
Most brands are only showing up for half of where people now look.
According to Meta, the reason is that consumers now search in two modes, traditional and social, and the gap between them is growing.
If you’re not building content for both, you’re not hitting half your audience. A few things are driving the shift:
- People learn what to buy while they scroll. Short-form video now does the job search once did.
- Creators turn entertainment into purchase decisions, often more effectively than ads.
- Meta is building tools that connect what people want with what they find, inside the social feed itself.
If you haven’t recently questioned how your audience is searching, this might be a useful read.
And hopefully nobody noticed: Instagram now lets you edit published Stories without deleting them, though for now, it’s iOS only.
Fewer panic-deletes, more breathing room. The kind of update that sounds small until you need it.
One catch: Editing wipes all likes, reactions, and comments on that Story. If engagement matters more than the correction, leave it alone.
An AI ranking update says stop chasing shortcuts and do the SEO basics better
Google just dropped its official AI ranking guidance, and the twist is the same as every other.
Breaking news: Nothing changed. Kind of…
Solid SEO fundamentals still run the show. Good content, a site that works, a smooth user experience. That’s the meat and potatoes of running a healthy site.
However, the myth-busting section alone is worth bookmarking. Google explicitly confirms you can skip:
- Faking third-party buzz to game rankings.
- Breaking up content for AI readability.
- Creating llms.txt files or special AI markup.
And about those buzzwords: Google officially retired AEO and GEO as separate disciplines. Both are just SEO wearing a new hat.
Google rewards content that comes from doing new things, not summarising what’s already out there or what any AI could produce on demand.
The biggest new piece: AI agents that browse your site on their own are showing up more. Google flagged emerging protocols like Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).
AI search isn’t a separate game; it’s the same one, just with more eyes on the score. If your content was already built on substance, you don’t need to fiddle around too much.
If not, well, now’s a better time than after AI search swallows everything…
If your affiliate platform just told you there’s a forced migration coming, have a look at this
As partner marketing enters a wave of consolidation, brands and agencies are rethinking what they need from a platform partner.
Migration conversations tend to follow, but the real question goes beyond switching systems — it’s about choosing a foundation built for durable, scalable growth in a market that’s getting more complex.
Migrations are rarely just technical. There’s tracking continuity, publisher relationships, reporting stability, operational lift and how quickly performance shows up after the move. And in practice, execution matters just as much as the platform itself.
Awin brings both scale and momentum today.
Last year alone, it successfully transitioned more than 10,000 advertisers and 230,000 affiliate partners through one of the industry’s largest platform upgrades.
That experience now underpins a platform that continues to invest in AI-powered tools, automation, flexible tracking, and strong global partner relationships designed to help brands grow through change, not just manage it.
Want to reduce cart abandonment? Suggest practical products
Your customers might be abandoning their carts because they feel bad about what’s inside.
According to Science Says, what’s sitting in a customer’s cart directly affects whether they complete a purchase. And a lot of the time, it comes down to guilt.
Why this matters: Online carts aren’t used the way physical ones are. Shoppers treat them as wishlists, which already makes abandonment more likely than in-store.
Add indulgent items, such as decorative candles or four shades of the same blush, and guilt compounds the problem.
Across four experiments and over 14M ecommerce sessions, researchers found:
- Carts with more pleasurable than practical items saw abandonment rates rise by around 8% to 17%.
- A cart with 3-4 indulgent items was 15% more likely to be abandoned than an all-practical cart.
- Shoppers felt around 40% more guilty when their cart held 4 pleasurable items versus none.
The Crew’s take: This is the kind of stat that impacts your entire recommendation strategy. You’re reducing psychological friction.
The fix is straightforward: When you detect a cart heavy on indulgent products, surface 1-2 practical items on the product page or at cart review.
The results speak for themselves:
- Recommending practical items cuts abandonment by 10% to 21% vs. no recommendation.
- It also reduced shopper guilt by 14%.
- Recommending pleasurable items increased abandonment by roughly 13%.
The bottom line: Don’t just recommend what’s popular. Recommend what balances the cart and the customer’s conscience.
429% boost in AI traffic. How? This way!
ChatGPT, Claude, and AI Overviews are quietly siphoning off the clicks you used to count on, and most SEO tools weren’t built to track any of it.
That’s the gap Semrush One closes. Keyword-based SEO with prompt-level AI search insights, so you can see exactly how your brand shows up across Google, AI Overviews, and more.
The data backing it is unmatched:
- 239M+ LLM prompts tracked globally
- The largest ChatGPT prompt database in the US
- AI-powered next steps built for marketers, not analysts
Social media is having a credibility crisis
Trust is like a mirror: once broken, you can fix it, but the cracks remain.
Right now, social platforms look pretty shattered:
41% of US consumers don’t trust the information they see on social media. Another 39% think it’s only “somewhat” trustworthy.
The least trustworthy platforms:
- TikTok: 21%
- Facebook: 20%
- Twitter/X: 17%
Why this matters: It’s the era of misinformation, deepfakes, and clickbait. The barrier to entry for posting “news” is zero. If it’s on a feed, it’s guilty until proven innocent.
Smart play: Don’t rely on platform reputation. Use heavy social proof (UGC, third-party reviews, trust badges) within your creatives to build your own micro-bubble of trust.
When 41% don’t trust social media, your credibility strategy can’t rely on the platform.
AI MARKETING: Most teams cap out at 200 creator outreaches a month. Creally’s AI agents handle the full pipeline: find, qualify, outreach, negotiate, and manage. So you close more deals without burning out. One client hit 5,000 monthly outreaches. Same team size. Learn more here.*
YOUTUBE: Smart TVs are getting an upgrade. AI-powered search, video chapters, gaming title cards, like counts, and artist headers are all coming to the big screen. If your audience watches on CTV, now is the time to optimise your content for that format.
SNAPCHAT: Creator ads on Snapchat hold attention 25% longer and drive 16% more active engagement than standard ads. When sponsored content feels real rather than polished, audiences are 66% more likely to feel excited about a brand. Authenticity is the strategy, folks.
TIKTOK: Shop Ireland has opened its doors to every Irish business, and the early numbers are worth an inquisitive beard stroke. Seller counts have grown triple digits, over €2M in creator commissions have been paid out, and active creators are up 600% since December.
CHATGPT: A personal finance tool has landed inside the chatbot, letting Pro users in the US connect accounts via Plaid to analyse spending, balances, and investments. TurboTax and QuickBooks integrations are on the way. For finance brands, this could suggest people will start asking more money questions.
*This is a sponsored post.
Sara has four daughters, and each of her daughters has a brother. How many children does Sara have?
You can find the answer here.
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