🛒 Growing marketplaces.
Meta launches dedicated Marketplace seller app, TikTok Shop tests subscriptions, Amazon requires AI-generated person labels, Google adds income targeting to Performance Max, and more.
In this issue
Good morning.
New week, clean slate, zero mistakes so far. That’s a perfect record, if you ask us.
Sure, it’s technically only been a few hours. And yes, the coffee hasn’t fully kicked in yet. But you have to admit: right now, this week is undefeated.
Let’s keep it that way, shall we?
The marketplaces are all growing up at once
Meta, TikTok, and Amazon each shipped something this week that changes how you list, sell, and stay compliant.
Meta gave sellers their own front door: Facebook Marketplace just launched a dedicated app called Seller, pulling listings, messages, and performance data into one place.
It also throws in AI listing creation and bulk uploads. If Marketplace is more than a closet-clearing side gig for you, this is the workflow to test.
TikTok Shop is building toward routine: Product subscriptions and a Shop Plus membership test show ByteDance moved on from chasing just impulse buyers.
It’s now chasing repeat buyers, too.
The Amazon Prime playbook is visible from space. With $4.9B in US GMV last quarter, this is no longer a channel you can dismiss as a mascara-video experiment.
The lesson for sellers: the first order is easy. The second one is the whole game now.
Speaking of Amazon, a new compliance step: Following New York’s synthetic-performer law, Amazon now requires sellers to label AI-generated people in product photos, listing graphics, and videos.
Fictional characters and lightly edited real people are exempt. Photorealistic fake humans are not, so audit your creative before it gets flagged.
Another thing on your checklist to avoid account suspension.
Google sprinkles more AI into Merchant Center, plus new controls for PMax
Google’s back in the kitchen, and the seasoning of choice is, once again, AI.
A fresh dash of it: Merchant Center just gained more AI features, including summary insights, a search box with suggested queries, and a section for your previous chats.
This means less clicking around to figure out what your feed is doing. Handy for anyone drowning in diagnostics.
Some manual control, for once: A new setting in Performance Max lets you exclude specific household income brackets right at the campaign level.
For industries like luxury, finance, or auto, income can be a real purchase signal and value brands can drop high earners instead.
It’s only been spotted in a European campaign so far, so sit tight.
Editor levels up: Google Ads Editor 2.13 brings AI Max to Shopping campaigns, finally closing the gap with Search and PMax.
Bulk managers can now configure AI-powered Shopping features offline, no web-interface detours required. It’s the standout for PPC folks who practically live in Editor.
Notice a pattern? Google’s quietly threading AI through every last corner of its ad stack.
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.
When AI chatbots help you sell and when they just get in the way
AI chatbots are a must for any store, right? Or… let’s hold on one second.
Science Says dug up research that could save you from an expensive, chatbot-shaped mistake.
The short version: it all comes down to how hard your product is to evaluate.
Hard-to-evaluate products? Roll out the bot.
When shoppers wrestle with fit, size, and style, chatbot suggestions lifted purchase intentions by a chunky 44.7%.
Ambiguity makes us freeze up. A bot that structures the options hands us back a feeling of control.
Simple product, tiny range? Leave the bot at home.
Selling a vitamin line with a handful of options? A chatbot just becomes clutter. Shoppers actually had lower intent to buy when one butted in.
Nobody needs a concierge to pick between four bottles.
Big catalogue changes everything: Easy products with a sprawling assortment like 10+ multivitamins flip the result.
Suddenly the bot boosts engagement again, because choice overload is real and people want a hand narrowing it down.
The Crew’s take: The reality isn’t”chatbots good” or “chatbots bad.” It’s that they earn their keep when choice gets overwhelming, and annoy everyone when it doesn’t.
Make it talk like a human.
Two easy wins from the research: bots using interjections (“oh wow,” “aw”) made people up to 49% more satisfied.
And reassuring language (“this suits long hair”) beats pressure tactics (“only 3 left”) every time.
So before you greenlight that shiny new AI chatbot assistant, ask one question: are your customers actually overwhelmed?
If yes, the bot’s your friend. If no, you’re just adding a pop-up nobody asked for.
Smart marketers read smarter news
Understanding the economy sharpens your marketing instincts—no doubt about it.
But let’s be honest: most business news feels like a chore to read. (Think: filing taxes, but with more jargon.)
That’s where The Daily Upside stands out. It’s sharp, insightful, and yes—actually enjoyable.
The Daily Upside delivers sharp, market-moving stories with clarity, wit, and zero filler.
It’s the kind of intel that helps you make faster, smarter marketing and business decisions.
AI search vs traditional search? It’s closer than you’d think
Robots versus humans. Who wins?
Turns out, the gap is smaller than expected. When comparing Gen AI to organic search results, 43% trust them exactly the same.
Even more surprising:
- 28% trust Gen AI more than traditional organic results
- 28% trust Gen AI more than paid search results
- Only 12-14% trust AI “a little less”
The AI “black box” is perceived as no more biased—and perhaps cleaner—than the ad-heavy, SEO-gamed lists we’ve grown used to.
Traditional search has become a noisy bazaar of ads and SEO gaming. AI offers a direct answer.
Users are starting to view that directness as a form of honesty, even with the “hallucination” risk.
Next Step: Start optimizing for “Answer Engine Optimization” (AEO).
Structure content with clear Q&A formats and bullet points so AI models can easily scrape and cite your content as the definitive answer.
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.*
SEO: Nothing shocking here. The search giant just made the quiet part explicit, adding a guideline that bars fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews from your snippet markup. Reviews traded for cash, discounts, or freebies without clear disclosure now formally disqualify you. Consider it a written reminder.
CHATGPT ADS: Still catching up to the big kids, the platform just added conversion-optimized bidding, geo exclusions, bulk API tools, and AppsFlyer/Adjust app measurement. None of it flashy, but that’s the point. It’s using the proven Google Ads and Meta playbook.
FACEBOOK: A free selfie-based badge now proves there’s a real human behind a profile, showing up on Marketplace, Dating, Groups, and profiles. The catch for you? Pages and ProMode accounts don’t qualify. It’s rolling out in phases across select markets first, before it goes global.
SEO: Here’s a quirk that could quietly wreck your indexing. John Mueller warns that if your robots.txt has a Googlebot-specific block, the crawler ignores your user-agent: * rules entirely. The fix? Copy those shared directives into the Googlebot section, or list agents together. Otherwise, your carefully set disallows do nothing.
*This is a sponsored post.
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