😨 Bye, websites?
OpenAI tests chat ads inside ChatGPT, Google raises CPCs for budget-limited campaigns, Microsoft sets AI ad disclosure rules, and more.
In this issue
Happy hump day.
Morning runs get all the credit. The sunrise, the smug glow, the “look at me, I’ve already accomplished something” energy.
But a night run is a different sport entirely. Empty streets. Streetlights doing their best moody cinematography. Nobody around to judge your pace.
And it also turns out the best thinking happens when everything else has gone quiet.
AI advertising moved on four fronts in five days
OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft all shipped AI ad news in the last 48 hours.
Click to chat, not to site: OpenAI is piloting Sponsored Agents, which are ads with a “Chat with us” button that opens a branded conversation inside ChatGPT.
Wayfair is testing at a limited scale. Your landing page stops being the destination, and OpenAI owns the middle of the funnel. More natural for the user flow perhaps, less control for you.
Worth caring about because ChatGPT just entered Brand Keys’ loyalty ranking at No. 5, ahead of Netflix and Coca-Cola.
An outstanding ranking for such a new brand, and a sign of things to come?
Google pays some publishers when its AI uses their content, but it tried to keep it secret.
An “AI contribution” pilot in Search Console pays out when your content significantly feeds AI Mode, AI Overviews, or Gemini.
Dozens of sites approached so far, mostly small and mid-sized. Hopefully, this can be more than a pilot and publishers get rewarded for their contributions regularly.
And monetizing those same answers: Google is testing plain text-link ads in AI Mode. Anchor text that reads like the answer, one “Sponsored” label above the whole response.
Finally, Microsoft brought the rulebook for AI ads. New guidance on AI-generated ads, pretty clear: disclose synthetic creative, preserve watermarks and provenance metadata, place disclosures near the content.
Strip that metadata and your ad gets rejected. A label alone won’t rescue deceptive creative either.
An AI tool ranking high in brand loyalty, and all these steps forward for the ads served by AI… Yeah, AI is “here to stay.”
But there’s news for the more classic Google Ads too, which we’ll dive into next.
Your budget-capped campaigns just got more expensive
Google’s reps spent a month insisting the August 17 bidding update wouldn’t change much. The data disagrees.
Turns out bid suppression was subsidizing you. Mike Ryan’s numbers show CPCs climbing for budget-limited campaigns, with the cheap clicks they used to win now flowing to uncapped competitors.
Google also confirmed the rollout finished globally on August 27, and it will not adjust your targets or budgets for you.
So if your “Limited by budget” campaigns look worse since late August. And that’s the feature, not the bug, apparently. Womp womp…
Meanwhile, in the department of bad omens, Google briefly tested hiding sponsored results in the Shopping tab. It vanished within a day, but remember someone still built it and deployed it.
Your landing page has a rival. PMax now asks where people should go after clicking: your website, or a Google-hosted page built from your Business Profile.
Built-in conversion measurement. Less owned traffic. As long as you can choose deliberately, we like the options.
And Google has been calling your business. The new “Collected info” tab shows what its automated assistant pulled from calls, texts, and WhatsApp, and lets you delete what’s wrong.
So, before the week ends, you might want to audit what Google thinks it knows about you.
Technology can scale partnerships. People make them work.
Machines that actually earn their keep: Awin’s machine-learning partner recommendations have contributed to $50M in sales this year, surfacing next-best partners across creators, loyalty, editorial and comparison sites.
Humans who know what to do with the insight: Awin grew its North American support teams by 140%, so real expertise helps you act on what the algorithm flags.
The best partnership teams understand the nuances behind the numbers: which partners are the right fit, where there’s untapped potential, how to build relationships that deliver long-term value and when to change course.
Receipts, because vibes don’t close budget:
- $578M+ revenue recovered, 29.4M transactions protected
- 10,000+ advertisers migrated, +6% average post-migration uplift
- 1M+ partners, 30,000+ brands including Under Armour and Samsung
AI provides the intelligence. People provide the strategy.
Can TikTok actually land you high-paying clients?
Short-form video looks like a strange place to go hunting for retainer work.
But Jack Shaw makes a reasonable case that it’s one of the cheapest acquisition channels a solo freelancer or two-person team has.
We were intrigued, so here’s what we thought was worth sharing.
1) Switch to a Pro account before you post anything: It’s free, takes a minute, and it’s the only way to see which videos pulled which audience.
Post without it and you’re guessing who’s watching.
2) Steal your hashtags from three creators. Find the accounts already serving your niche, note the sounds and tags on their best-performing videos, and use those.
3) Turn the tutorial into the pitch: Record the process you’d normally hide behind a locked Google Doc.
Live skill demos consistently beat polished ad-style videos. Hook in the first two seconds, and split bigger jobs into multipart series so viewers come back for part two.
The Crew’s take: Nano-influencers averaged 10.3% engagement in 2024. Four hundred of the right viewers beats 40,000 strangers, so make the video for the one client you actually want.
4) Put the CTA in three places: The video, the description, and the pinned comment. Keep the language blunt like “Tap the link” and give a reason to act now rather than eventually.
5) Answer every comment for 90 days: It feeds the algorithm, and it’s the first thing a prospect checks before they DM you. Skipping it is the cheapest mistake on this list.
Then pick one niche, run this for a quarter, and go read the analytics you switched on in step one. It might just be effective…
Steal the growth plays 20+ experts are using so your next campaign doesn’t completely flatline
Search, AI, and shopping agents are all changing at once. Like doing your job while someone remodels the office. Or trying to build a plane after jumping off a cliff…
But you don’t have to do it alone.
Twenty-plus experts, two days: Prepathon 2026 runs practical sessions and live demos across AI, ecommerce, agencies, and digital growth.
Ideas you can actually deploy. Because every session answers one question: What should you build and grow next?
Free, online, September 22–23.
More than half of consumers now use AI to research products weekly
Consumers will probably never scroll through ten pages of Google results to pick a product.
Here’s how it is now:
AI is the new shopping assistant: A whopping 55% of consumers use AI tools to research products or services at least multiple times a week (30% 2–6 times/week; 25% daily).
And the traditionalists are extinct: Only 7% of respondents never use AI tools for product research, officially making conversational search a primary discovery channel.
Consumers are swapping traditional search engines for conversational bots to bypass search clutter.
When over half your audience asks AI for product recommendations weekly, your market share depends heavily on LLM indexing, not just traditional Google rankings.
What to do: Audit your brand’s Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
Ensure your site structure, press mentions, and third-party reviews are updated so AI tools accurately summarize and recommend your products.
PROGRAMMATIC: Plan, launch, and measure programmatic campaigns across CTV, display, video, audio, and more, all in one platform. Reach the right audiences without adding more tools, teams, or complexity. See Growth Channel in action.*
FACEBOOK: Cheaper clicks, better engagement. WordStream’s 2026 benchmarks across nearly 1,800 campaigns show traffic CPC down 14.29% to $0.60 while CTR climbed to 1.93%. Lead campaigns got cheaper too, though average cost per lead barely moved at $27.39.
REDDIT: Holiday gift research is running on human opinion. Nearly 70% of US Redditors trust the platform’s gifting advice over AI recommendations, and 74% actually want brands in those conversations. Over half spent $1,000-plus last season. Good to know if this is your channel.
MICROSOFT ADS: Customer Match just doubled its plumbing options. The CDP partner list jumps from 10 to 20, adding Adobe Real Time CDP, Amperity, and Emarsys (SAP), while Salesforce drops off. If you sync first-party audiences, check whether your stack survived this cut.
*This is a sponsored post.
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