💲 Midnight.
Shopify drops new features just before Black Friday, Google puts reviews in ads, and more.
In this issue
Happy Monday.
Quick heads-up: Black Friday is exactly one month (and one day) away.
That extra day is a gift. Use it wisely. Lock in the offer, brief the designers, or just stare at the campaign doc…
We’re not saying panic. We’re saying your coffee machine should start working overtime.
Shopify’s pre-BFCM drop: midnight price switches and no surprise shipping bills
Cinderella’s magic ran out at midnight. Your Black Friday prices can now kick in at midnight instead, and you won’t have to stay late to flip them.
Set it and forget it, finally: Rollouts, Shopify’s tool for scheduling and testing store changes, now handles catalogs. You can:
- Set prices and product availability per market ahead of time
- Switch catalogs on or off at a set date and time
- Test one catalog’s offer against another
- Launch catalog, theme and checkout changes together
Shipping costs, no plot twists: Managed Markets, Shopify’s service for selling internationally, now sets your Standard and Express shipping rates abroad. Buyers see one simple shipping price at checkout.
Managed Markets folds part of that cost into your product prices. Buy qualifying prepaid FedEx or DHL Express labels through it, and you won’t pay for later carrier adjustments.
The catch: it requires duty-inclusive pricing, and you can’t edit the rates yourself.
Before you blame the traffic: Checkout now shows payment methods as compact tiles instead of a list for stores offering four or fewer methods.
If your conversion rate swings, check your layout first.
Small print: Your store now blocks links to sites Shopify flags as malicious and asks customers to confirm before visiting suspicious ones. Other links work as before.
AI shoppers, meet your stores: UCP is the open protocol that lets AI shopping agents work with online stores. Now agents can also find a merchant’s physical locations.
They can search by city or distance and see which stores carry the items a buyer wants. Agents only see locations you’ve enabled as a Physical storefront, so check yours.
Cinderella had a fairy godmother. You have a scheduler.
AI makes the shortlist, reviews close the sale… and Google now puts them in your ads
On Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, contestants phone a friend, then ask the audience anyway before locking in.
Shoppers now treat ChatGPT the same way.
Phone a friend, then check the work: 16% of shoppers start product searches in ChatGPT, according to a Feedvisor survey covered by Modern Retail.
Only 5% buy on the spot after an AI recommendation. PartnerCentric’s survey found that after an AI suggestion, shoppers:
- Check reviews (33%)
- Compare prices (22.3%)
- Search Amazon or another retailer (18.8%)
- Visit the brand’s site (14.8%)
They still Google you, too: Similarweb data shows 93.7% of ChatGPT.com’s visitors also visited Google.com in September.
And your reviews just landed an ad slot: Google’s review summaries are AI-written recaps of your online reviews that appear inside your Search ads.
They’re positive-only, you can’t edit them, and Google shows them only when it predicts better ad performance. They only run in English in the US, UK, Australia and India.
Small traffic, big intent: SEO consultant Marie Haynes analyzed 100 sites and found ChatGPT drove just 0.62% as many sessions as Google organic.
But on sites tracking conversions, 13.8% of ChatGPT visitors converted, vs. 3.02% from Google organic. Google organic still drove 27 times as many conversions as all LLMs combined.
What to do this holiday season:
- Read your reviews across the web and see what Google’s AI could praise, and what it couldn’t.
- Fill review gaps on Google and Amazon.
- Match shipping and returns terms on your site and every retailer listing. 33% of shoppers say these terms often or always change what they buy.
- Move part of your AI-visibility budget into a review collection.
The AI may be the friend on the line, but the audience still decides.
When someone asks AI what to buy, be the answer
Search didn't die. It moved. Your buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity what to buy, and they act on the answer they get.
That answer is assembled from sources most companies have never looked at. If you're not in there, a competitor is.
ChatFeatured is the AEO platform that does the work to get you in AI answers:
- See exactly what AI says about you, and how you stack up against competitors on every major engine.
- Ask the built-in analyst agent why AI skips you, and get the specific fixes.
- Publish content engineered to get cited, then watch every AI bot that crawls your site.
Vessel grew its AI visibility 2,200%+. Most customers see their first citations inside 7 days.
Google Maps now answers specific questions, so your business needs specific answers
“Mexican restaurant nearby” used to be the whole search. Now people ask Google Maps for a restaurant quiet enough to talk business.
And Laura I. Abreu explains how to make your business easier to recommend.
The gist: Maps now reads between the lines. Ask Maps, the Gemini-powered chat Google added to Maps in March, matches businesses to what people need.
It draws on 300 million+ places and reviews from 500 million+ contributors.
It also weighs context nobody typed, like saved places, dietary needs, how busy a place is and, for Gmail users who opt in, upcoming flights.
A category won’t cut it. Relevance, distance and prominence still drive rankings. But bakery hunters may also care about hours, dietary options and seating.
Fill in your Google Business Profile, your Maps listing, with attributes, amenities, photos and hours, so Google can tell when you’re the right pick.
Your reviews know things your profile doesn’t: Customers mention things no attribute covers, like being handy before an early flight or gentle with older patients.
If reviews keep praising something your site barely mentions, add it.
“Flexible” answers nothing: A driving school promising “flexible lessons” still leaves learners wondering about after-work slots, weekends and start dates.
Answer the deciding questions on your main service pages. No need for a page per question.
Go undercover as your own customer: Rank trackers check “Botox near me.” Customers ask for Botox that still looks natural, so search that, too. See who shows up and what they say that you don’t.
Fewer stops before the sale: From Ask Maps, people can already book tables and start navigating. US users can even prep a food order. The recommendation is becoming the storefront.
The Crew’s take: Outside the US? Since August, Ask Maps has been rolling out in 150+ countries and territories in English.
US users can also suggest new hours by photographing the sign on your door, so keep it and your profile in sync.
Basics first: no AI-targeted content fixes wrong hours or a half-empty profile. Being nearby still matters. Being the obvious answer might matter more.
What if doing nothing beats 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
But over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals.
The edge isn't intelligence. It's patience, and that’s hard when your portfolio is an abstract index fund. 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.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
Holiday sales are on track to pass $1 trillion
Santa just joined the trillion-dollar club. The National Retail Federation (NRF) forecasts US holiday sales of $1.01 trillion for 2026.
That would be the first time they top the trillion mark.
If the forecast holds, holiday sales will reach $1,013.2B this year, up 4.2% from 2025’s $972.3B.
That would be the fastest growth since 2021, when sales jumped 12.7% during the pandemic spending boom.
Since that surge, growth has cooled to roughly 2% to 4% a year. Over the full decade, though, holiday sales have grown about 61%, from $629.4B in 2016.
Shoppers cut back in other places, but they protect the holidays. Higher prices also push totals up, so a record dollar figure doesn’t necessarily mean more items in carts.
More brands will chase the same holiday shoppers, so ad costs will climb.
Finish your creatives early, and give past customers a reason to buy from you first with email and loyalty offers.
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.*
GOOGLE ADS: Your Search budget may quietly drift to Display. From February 2027, Google moves Search campaigns using Display Expansion—which sends unspent budget to Display Network ads—to channel prioritization. The hidden 50% allocation goes, and High or Low priority tiers take over. Want today’s setup? Set Display to Low priority with a 50% cap.
META: Shoppers are already handing their carts to Muse, Meta’s AI agent for US and Canada users. Zuckerberg says 25% of people who set it up use it daily, shopping is its top use, and average purchases top $200. The catch: Sensor Tower data shows retention drops sharply two weeks after download.
SOCIAL MEDIA: Your audience’s news desk is now their feed. Pew found 58% of US adults call social media an important way to keep up with news, up from 43% in 2022, and 13% say it’s their most important source, up from 5%. Among 18 to 29 year olds, it’s 76%.
OPENAI: Frontier models at OpenAI now train without live internet access. After one used a DNS misconfiguration to reach the web on September 20, OpenAI moved all frontier training to an “offline world” of indexed and cached web content. What makes the cache?
CANVA: …trained Craft, its first in-house image model, on human-designed templates instead of photos. Craft makes up to 2K images in 30 aspect ratios with legible text. Canva Magic, its image-to-design tool, can split them into editable layers. Every user gets it in Dream Lab.
GOOGLE: Google is now putting words in your page’s mouth. It seems to be testing AI-written descriptions in AI Overviews citation cards, the source boxes beside the answer. Brodie Clark spotted that the text doesn’t match the cited page: Google summarizes what it finds most relevant. Check your top queries to see what it says.
*This is a sponsored post.
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