Pinterest and Shopify’s Q1s signals that your audience is big, cheap, and already in buying mode

Earnings season is here, and Pinterest’s numbers are still looking as good as its content.

Pin it to win it: Pinterest crossed 631M monthly active users in Q1 2026, up 12M from last quarter, with revenue growing 18% year-over-year and ad impressions jumping 24%.

Pinterest has ten quarters of user growth data to show that the Taste Graph is working, and your targeting is sharper for it.

According to the platform, Performance+ campaigns are showing the difference as they deliver higher ROAS, better CPA, and lower CPC compared to standard campaigns. Did you test them?

Also, ad pricing dipped 5% year-over-year. That means you can reach a larger, better-matched audience for less than you could twelve months ago. For now.

And Shopify didn’t get the rescission memo: It reported 34% revenue growth and crossed $100B in GMV in Q1 alone, with merchant solutions revenue surging 39% YoY.

Growth was broad across geographies, merchant sizes, and channels. Meaning, consumer spending is not concentrated in one pocket. It is active across the board.

President Harley Finkelstein pointed to two decades of commerce data as Shopify’s edge as it builds out its AI layer.

Your campaigns are reaching an audience that is already in buying mode, across more surfaces and geographies than this time last year.

Instagram adds a creator label to unblur AI content, Reddit shows you where to show up

Real or AI? It’s becoming the question of the decade.

And Instagram’s offering some council: Creators can now toggle a profile-level “AI creator” label to tell followers upfront that AI tools are a regular part of how they make content.

It sits alongside Instagram’s existing post-level “AI info” labels, so followers can now see AI involvement at both the account and content level.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has flagged that AI tools will soon replicate any creator’s work indistinguishably. And you’ll want to know which side of that label your brand or partners are on.

And in other news, how to get on the internet’s front page? Reddit just released a 13-page guide walking small businesses through where and how to show up in its communities.

The guide identifies five consumer trends playing out inside subreddits right now. Three worth knowing:

• Throwbacks: Old-school products getting a second look.
• Little luxuries: Users hunting for small, high-quality upgrades to everyday life.
• Detail-driven detectives: Consumers doing serious research before they buy anything.

Each trend comes with subreddit recommendations and notes on what people are actually searching for, which makes it a useful starting point.

Why we care: Reddit’s ad revenue grew 74% last year, and Reddit threads are appearing more frequently in Google results and AI chatbot answers.

In other words, advertising on Reddit might now come with a free side of search visibility.

Why shorter content works better for SEO?

The era of “ultimate guides” might be over.

Kevin Indig ran a big AI citation study: 815,000 query-page pairs, almost 17,000 queries, and a pipeline that captured every URL ChatGPT touched.

And it turns out, shorter content is what’s getting the robots excited.

The study: AirOps ran 16,851 queries through ChatGPT three times each, capturing every fan-out sub-query, every URL searched, and every citation made.

Each query generates an average of two fan-out queries. ChatGPT retrieves roughly 10 URLs per sub-search, reads them, then selects which to cite.

Density barely moves the needle: Covering 100% of subtopics adds just 4.6 percentage points to citation rates over covering none.

Moderate coverage (26–50%) actually outperforms exhaustive coverage among pages with strong query match.

What actually predicts citation? Two signals dominate everything else: Retrieval rank and query match.

A page at position 0 in ChatGPT’s search results earns a 58% citation rate. By position 10, that collapses to 14%.

Query match is the strongest content signal. Pages with 0.90+ heading match hit a 41% citation rate versus 30% for pages below 0.50.

The Wikipedia exception: Wikipedia has the worst retrieval rank in the dataset and still achieves a 59% citation rate, the highest of any site type.

Your 3,000-word blog post isn’t in the same category.

58% of retrieved pages are never cited. 25% are always cited. Only 17% fall in between. Only retrieval rank separates always-cited and never-cited pages.

What this means for your content: The citation sweet spot is 500–2,000 words, 7–20 subheadings, and one direct heading to match the query.

Build the best answer to one question, not an adequate answer to twenty.

Why do people stick around for your brand?

Brand values? We like to think that’s why.

But more often than not, it’s gamification:

The number one reason consumers remain loyal (at 41%) is simply that the brand offers a loyalty rewards program. The golden handcuffs, if you like.

Program can be bigger than the product: While 33% stay for high-quality products, the program itself is the stronger tether for this specific segment.

Only 7% stay because the brand aligns with their values, and only 5% because the brand makes them “feel special.”

This data contradicts the “love the brand” narrative.

For many, loyalty is transactional. They are loyal to the rewards, not necessarily the logo. If the program stops, the customer stops.

The takeaway: If you don’t have a loyalty program, you are losing 41% of your potential retention power. Start simple: a points-for-purchase system is better than nothing.

Reward points keep customers. And Pro subscribers get weekly retention insights like this for $349/year for up to 10 teammates. Join today.

#RoundUp

AI EDUCATION: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjourney… So many names, but what’s actually useful for you in your work? There’s a newsletter called The Deep View that exists to sift through all the noise and get you up to speed on what’s actionable with AI products, and it’s free. Join 512,000+ subscribers with one click and let AI empower you.*

GOOGLE: A new beta option in Ads called “Use AI to add products” lets the platform scan your website and pull in your products automatically, without manual entry. Fewer typos, faster setup, and one less procrastination excuse. Worth testing if product feeds have been your blocker.

SEO: Web Bot Auth is Google’s experimental way of using cryptographic verification to confirm whether automated traffic is actually from the bot it claims to be. It’s early days, with not all Google agents signed yet, so keep IP addresses and reverse DNS in your toolkit for now.

INFLUENCER MARKETING: Equity-for-content deals sound exciting, but they’re mostly a macro-creator privilege. With nearly 80% of influencer collabs costing under $300, most creators are nowhere near landing startup stakes, and experts say these arrangements don’t scale for mid-tier or micro-level partnerships. Know your tier before pitching ownership.

THREADS: Meta has expanded AI-generated trending topic summaries to Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Brazil, building on a feature live in the US since February 2024. With 400M monthly activities, the platform is closing in on X’s 600M. A growing, summarised feed means easier audience listening.

TIKTOK: With 93% of daily users researching purchases on the platform and 31% of UK online shoppers having already bought something there, TikTok has graduated from discovery tool to serious commerce channel. Over 100,000 EU Shop merchants are already in, with fashion leading. If your brand sells product, a TikTok storefront deserves a proper look.

*This is a sponsored post.