In this newsletter, you’ll find:

⚙️ Smart+ isn’t all-or-nothing, and most advertisers are running it like it is

📊 Meta and Pinterest are leading returns, but only one of them is getting the budget it deserves

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

⚙️ Smart+ isn’t all-or-nothing, and most advertisers are running it like it is

Smart+ launched as TikTok’s fully automated campaign solution, and most advertisers treat that framing literally: turn it on, hand over targeting and budget decisions, accept whatever the automation decides across the campaign.

That’s not actually how the tool works anymore. Automation now runs at the module level, meaning audience targeting, creative selection, budget pacing, and bidding can be individually automated or manually controlled within the same campaign, rather than forcing an all-in or all-out decision.

Most teams either avoid Smart+ entirely because full automation feels too risky to hand over blind, or run it fully automated. After all, that’s how it was originally pitched, and nobody revisited the setup once module-level control became available. Both leave performance on the table.

Identify which decisions you actually trust the algorithm to make

Not every campaign decision benefits equally from automation. Budget pacing and bid optimization tend to be genuinely strong candidates, since the algorithm has more real-time signal than a human adjusting manually once a day.

Creative selection and audience definition are different, especially for a brand with strong brand-safety opinions or a narrow audience the algorithm hasn’t seen enough data on yet. Map your campaign against these categories before deciding what to automate, rather than accepting or rejecting the whole system as one block.

Use the Auto-select layer as a research tool even where you keep manual control

TikTok’s Auto-select feature scans existing ads and eligible creator content to surface what the algorithm identifies as high-performing assets, even in campaigns where other modules stay on manual control.

Run Auto-select’s recommendations alongside your own manual creative choices for a cycle before fully trusting or dismissing it.

The signal is useful even for a team that wants final say over what runs, since it surfaces pattern matches a manual review might miss. If you’re not yet running ads on the platform at all, get started with TikTok for Business before this decision gets made for you by default.

Revisit your Smart+ configuration now, not just at initial setup

A Smart+ setup configured months ago under the old all-or-nothing framing is very likely running with less control than the current version allows, simply because nobody went back to check what changed.

Auditing which modules are currently automated versus manual in your live campaigns, and rebuilding the split deliberately rather than by default, is worth doing before BFCM volume makes any misconfiguration expensive to leave uncorrected.

Full automation was never actually the only option. It was just the default nobody thought to question.

📊 Meta and Pinterest are leading returns, but only one of them is getting the budget it deserves

Last week delivered one of the more coherent efficiency setups in recent months, costs fell on several major platforms while returns improved meaningfully, creating a cleaner case for scaling decisions than the prior two weeks allowed.

The Breakdown:

CPC - Meta, Snapchat, and Pinterest all saw click costs fall, while Google and TikTok pushed higher; where CPCs dropped alongside improving ROAS like Meta, this is the week to push proven creatives harder rather than holding budget back out of cost caution.

CAC - Meta, YouTube, Snapchat, and Pinterest all improved while Google and TikTok worsened. Google’s CAC deterioration despite growing share is worth flagging; audit which campaigns are driving the cost increase before adding more budget to the channel this cycle.

ROAS - Pinterest led at +11.47%, and Meta posted +10.22% while Snapchat barely held at -0.08%; both Pinterest and Meta are posting double-digit returns simultaneously, making this the clearest aligned scaling signal either channel has shown in several weeks.

Meta holds 53.53% of spend with +10.22% ROAS, the strongest return signal it has posted in over a month, and the first week in five where share and performance are genuinely aligned.

Pinterest at 0.52% posted +11.47% ROAS and remains structurally underfunded. Scale Meta with confidence, open a meaningful Pinterest test budget this week, and trim Google where CAC worsened despite share gains.

🏆 Ad of the day

What Works:

Scale Creates Disruption - The oversized skincare tube instantly breaks visual expectations, giving the ad strong thumb-stop power while keeping the product and brand impossible to miss.

Movement Adds Story - Putting the giant product on a trolley turns a static pack shot into a playful action scene, increasing attention retention while making the creative feel more dynamic.

Branding Feels Monumental - The massive THALGO signage and oversized product reinforce each other, creating strong branding recall while the clean neutral palette keeps the concept premium rather than gimmicky.

Take the hero SKU and scale it into the physical world, then add human interaction. That contrast creates instant visual drama without sacrificing product recognition.

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🔀 The segment that doesn’t survive the move

🔎 Google is giving marketers more AI visibility and control

🏆 Ad of the day

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🔀 The segment that doesn’t survive the move

A contact list migrates cleanly in most platform switches: name, email, phone number, purchase history, all of it transfers without much drama.

What doesn’t migrate cleanly nearly as often is the segmentation logic built on top of that data, the custom tags, the behavioral triggers, the “purchased in the last 60 days but hasn’t opened an email in 30” style compound segments that took months of tweaking to get right and exist nowhere except inside the old platform’s segment builder.

A segment defined by a single property, like “VIP tier,” usually transfers fine. A segment defined by three or four combined conditions, especially ones referencing custom events or calculated fields specific to how the old platform tracked behavior, is exactly the kind of thing that can silently fail to reconstruct, sending a campaign to the wrong audience or, worse, to nobody at all, without triggering any error.

Export every segment’s actual logic before migrating, not just its name

Before the migration starts, document every active segment’s full definition, every condition, every threshold, every combined rule, not just the segment’s name and current member count.

Most teams can list their segment names from memory. Almost nobody can recite the exact logic behind a segment built eighteen months ago by someone who’s since left the team, and that’s precisely the segment most likely to break silently during a migration.

Rebuild and verify membership count before trusting any segment post-migration

A rebuilt segment that looks correctly configured can still return the wrong member count if even one condition was translated slightly differently between platforms.

Compare the rebuilt segment’s member count against what it showed on the old platform immediately before migration.

A meaningful discrepancy, even a small one, means the logic didn’t translate exactly, and it’s worth tracing down before that segment gets used in a live send.

This is part of what let one agency’s migration to Omnisend hold through Black Friday without incident, landing $113K in holiday revenue matching the year before.

Run your highest-stakes segment through a real send before BFCM depends on it

The segment most worth verifying first is the one with the highest revenue per send, since a silent failure costs the most and gets noticed the least until the results come in low. Jocelyn A., COO at Ecom2Win, walks through exactly what got verified before her own switch. You can read the full story here.

Contacts migrating is the easy check. Whether the logic built on top of them survived is what determines whether your next send reaches the right people.

🔎 Google is giving marketers more AI visibility and control

Google is expanding AI across content creation, advertising, and Search, while publishers and marketers are finally getting more insight into how these systems use and surface their content.

The Breakdown:

Google Pics moves into Workspace: AI Pro, Ultra, and most Workspace business customers can create and edit images directly inside Docs and Slides, with Drive support coming next.

Customer reviews are becoming ad copy: Google Ads now labels its “What customers love” section as AI-generated from store-rating reviews, turning existing customer feedback into automatically generated advertising messages.

AI Search finally gets performance reporting: Search Console now provides worldwide reporting for AI Overviews and AI Mode, including impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates.

Markdown files may not help AI crawlers: Google’s John Mueller found only SEO tools requesting Markdown files in his test, recommending publishers inspect crawler requests before creating AI-specific files.

Google’s AI expansion is giving marketers more creation and measurement tools, but also less direct control over how content gets reused. Meanwhile, EU regulators are examining Google’s AI Search opt-out and its impact on publishers.

🏆 Ad of the day

What Works:

Luxury Signals Lead - The oversized lipstick texture, restrained typography and monochrome palette create instant premium perception, making the product feel collectible rather than promotional while strengthening brand desirability.

Scarcity Adds Desire - “Limited Edition” introduces scarcity without discounting, while the clearly stated satin and matte shade counts make the launch feel curated, exclusive and worth exploring.

Texture Sells Product - The macro crop makes the lipstick finish almost tactile, helping shoppers imagine application quality while the embossed Hermès logo reinforces craftsmanship and branding recall.

For premium products, magnify one tactile detail like texture, stitching or material finish. Pair it with restrained copy so craftsmanship becomes the conversion argument.

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🌊 Stop seeding creators one at a time

📊 Google and Snapchat give marketers more control

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🌊 Stop seeding creators one at a time

The default seeding motion looks methodical: reach out, ship, wait for content, move to the next creator, repeat for weeks. It feels like progress. It’s the weaker version of the same strategy, and most teams never test the alternative long enough to notice.

One documented campaign seeded 55 creators at once instead of in sequence. The batch beat the sequential rollout by 3.2x. Nothing complicated is happening underneath that number. A trickle of posts spread across weeks never builds a moment anyone notices.

A wave landing in a compressed window looks like a real trend, to the algorithm surfacing it and to a customer who sees the same product from three creators in one afternoon.

01. Collapse the outreach into one window, not a rolling one

Sequential seeding usually isn’t a choice, it’s an accident. Someone finds a creator, reaches out, ships product, moves to the next name when there’s time, and nothing about that sequence was ever intentional, it’s just what happens without a deadline forcing it together.

Set a hard outreach and shipping cutoff for the full BFCM roster and hold every creator to it regardless of when they were first contacted. The target is a batch receiving product within days of each other, not weeks.

02. Compress the posting window as tightly as the shipping window

Product landing together says nothing about content landing together. Some creators post within days, others sit on product for weeks. Build a posting deadline into the brief itself, a specific window, not an open-ended ask, with a modest incentive for hitting it.

That closes the gap between shipped and posted for real instead of on hope, and it’s worth watching in real time.

Insense pairs Ads Manager with a live performance dashboard so a brand can see who’s on track mid-window, not after the wave’s scattered, which is how Il Makiage, Quince, Huda Beauty, and Monster Energy scale seeding past $2M without losing the compression. You can book a free strategy call to map creator availability in your niche and get $200 toward your first campaign.

03. Read the wave as a dataset, not just a content push

55 creators posting in one window isn’t only louder, it’s faster data. Performance signals arrive close enough together to compare directly, not against a moving baseline that shifted while creator twelve was still waiting to post.

A wave gets noticed, a trickle gets scrolled past.

📊 Google and Snapchat give marketers more control

Snapchat is improving how app advertisers measure results, while Google is giving publishers more control over AI Search and advertisers clearer guidance for improving YouTube creative.

The Breakdown:

Snapchat expands Unified Attribution - All advertisers can now combine Snapchat campaign signals with AppsFlyer or Adjust data, connecting ad decisions more directly with installs, purchases, onboarding, and acquisition performance.

Google reveals AI Search visibility - Search Console’s global AI performance report shows impressions across AI Overviews and AI Mode, with breakdowns by page, country, device, and date.

Publishers can opt out of AI Search - Websites can now block content from Google’s generative AI features without affecting traditional Search rankings, though they will lose corresponding AI impressions and traffic.

YouTube puts numbers behind better creative - Google found human voices associated with 12% higher conversions, early brand visibility with 4% higher conversions, and text overlays with 3% higher conversions.

These updates give marketers more control over two increasingly important areas: measurement and creative. Better attribution and AI visibility clarify what drives results, while YouTube’s findings show creative execution can materially influence campaign performance.

🏆 Ad of the day

What Works:

Human Expression Hooks - The exaggerated smile creates an instant emotional cue, while holding the tubs over the eyes makes the product inseparable from that feeling and boosts thumb-stop potential.

Flavor Feels Playful - Floating candy and caramel pieces reinforce indulgence, while the pink background creates a high-energy visual world that makes the flavors feel fun, bold and memorable.

Product Drives Recall - Both tubs dominate the frame with clear flavor labels and centered branding, strengthening product recognition while the playful composition keeps attention on the core SKUs.

Use the product as part of the person’s pose, expression or interaction. It makes the pack feel more native to the creative and improves branding recall.

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🔍Your AI visibility is a lie

🤖 AI is changing what happens before the click

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🔍Your AI visibility is a lie

Most ChatGPT answers never touch a search. Independent tracking puts the share of US ChatGPT answers carrying an actual web citation at under 7% this year, meaning most responses come from the model’s own training, with no live retrieval and nothing to cite.

That fact breaks a specific category of AI visibility tool. Several platforms teams use to track “AI search visibility” work by forcing a search behind the scenes, submitting a prompt in a mode that triggers retrieval, then reporting whichever citations come back.

The report looks legitimate. It just doesn’t reflect what a real user typing that question into ChatGPT normally sees, since most of the time no search happens at all.

A team optimizing against that data is optimizing against an artifact of how the tool queries the model, not actual brand visibility.

Ask your current tool exactly how it generates its data

Before trusting another monthly AI visibility report, get a direct answer to one question: does this platform force search mode to generate citation data, or sample how the model actually responds by default.

Vendors that force search aren’t being dishonest, that’s often the only reliable way to get a citation to measure, but the report needs to say so plainly. If yours doesn’t disclose the methodology, that’s itself the answer.

Separate presence in forced-search results from presence in real answers

These are two different numbers, and a tool reporting only one is telling you half the story, possibly the less useful half.

Where your platform allows it, compare your citation rate under forced search against your mention rate in the model’s default, no-search response to the same prompts. A brand that shows up well under forced search but never gets named in a default answer has a different problem than a brand invisible in both, and the fix differs completely.

Rebuild the client conversation around what’s actually verifiable

Reporting an isolated visibility score to a client or leadership invites a follow-up question no tool can answer with precision. A trend line, tracked consistently against a disclosed methodology, survives that scrutiny.

Getting citation and mention data across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Gemini from a source that’s explicit about how each number was generated, rather than guessing at a single vendor’s black-box methodology, is the baseline Semrush One is built to give you. You can see how it works here.

A visibility score is only as honest as the search it took to produce it, and most reports never say which kind they ran.

🤖 AI is changing what happens before the click

Google is redesigning how people search, advertisers manage AI-generated copy, and creators produce video. Meanwhile, OpenAI is turning product discovery into a dedicated ChatGPT experience.

The Breakdown:

Google Search gives AI more space: Some AI Overviews now expand automatically with an “Ask anything” box, pushing organic links lower and moving users closer to an AI Mode-style search experience.

Advertisers can finally inspect AI-written titles: Google Ads is testing a report showing generated versus original product titles, plus impressions, clicks, CTR, cost, CPC, and controls for keeping copy on-brand.

Gemini makes video drafts cheaper: Omni 1.1 Flash creates 360p drafts up to 60% faster at one-third of 720p’s cost, letting creators test concepts before upscaling winners to 4K.

ChatGPT makes shopping a destination - OpenAI pinned Shopping to the sidebar with dedicated landing and search pages, giving product discovery a permanent place rather than leaving it inside general conversations.

Search, advertising, video creation, and shopping are all moving toward AI-native experiences. Google and OpenAI are reducing the steps between discovery and action, while giving marketers new ways to understand, control, and optimize how AI shapes those interactions.

🏆 Ad of the day

What Works:

Surreal Hook Stops - The exaggerated stretched neck creates an immediate pattern interrupt, turning the aroma benefit into a visual gag that dramatically improves thumb-stop potential in crowded feeds.

Benefit Becomes Visual - “Smell the power before the first sip” is reinforced by the rising steam, making the product promise easy to understand while connecting aroma directly to anticipation.

Product Stays Visible - The coffee cup dominates the foreground while the Power Coffee packs sit beside it, preserving product communication and branding recall despite the attention-grabbing surreal concept.

Take one sensory product benefit and exaggerate it visually. Making smell, taste or energy physically impossible to ignore can turn ordinary product claims into memorable creative.

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Thanks for your support :) We'll be back again with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🔑 Your segment reporting just lost its key

🛍️ Social platforms are cutting steps between ads and conversions

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

Together with Insense

The 3-Step Playbook for Winning BFCM Before October

By October, CPMs can already be 20–60% higher. Brands that win BFCM build their creator roster in September, while costs are lower and there’s still time to find proven winners.

Here’s the playbook:

1. Seed now so creators know the product before November. Seed in Aug-Sep and flag organic winners early, since 81% of BFCM collaborations involve repeat creators.

2. Source modular UGC with flexible hooks and raw footage. Refresh fatigued ads without funding another shoot.

3. Run proven creators across organic and paid. Put winning content behind the creator’s handle to carry existing trust into each impression.

Bonus: Connect Ads Manager to Insense’s performance dashboard to identify the creators driving performance, then rehire them before availability tightens.

Insense helps DTC brands scaling beyond $2M build repeat creator rosters and is trusted by Il Makiage, Quince, Huda Beauty, and Monster Energy.

Book a free strategy call by September 11 to map creator availability in your niche and get $200 toward your first campaign.

🔑 Your segment reporting just lost its key

Google confirmed that campaign-level language targeting disappears from Search and AI Max for Search campaigns in late September, with Performance Max affected on Google Search inventory.

An English query can now serve a French ad, or vice versa, based on what Google’s systems infer a user understands, not on which language setting a campaign was built around.

The setting quietly did double duty for most teams. It targeted the audience, and as a side effect gave you a clean way to segment reporting by language, since campaigns split along that line by default. Losing it doesn’t just change how ads match. It breaks the reporting structure a lot of international accounts were quietly built on.

Rebuild your language segmentation before the campaign structure that gave it to you disappears

If your reporting relies on campaign name or ID to infer which language an impression served in, that inference stops being reliable the moment language matching moves to inference on Google’s side.

Move the language signal into the asset layer instead. Tag creative assets and landing pages with a language identifier in your own tracking parameters, independent of campaign structure, so a report can answer “which language performed” without depending on a campaign split that no longer maps cleanly to language.

Build the query-language-versus-serve-language check

The gap worth watching isn’t average performance. It’s the mismatch rate, an English query getting served a Spanish asset, or the reverse, and what that does to conversion.

Pull impression-level data where available and compare inferred query language against served asset language for your highest-spend segments.

Where mismatches concentrate, that’s worth a manual override request or a dedicated landing page for that crossover audience, since Google’s own signal says it’s a real, recurring pattern rather than noise.

Get the workaround live before the reporting gap does

Teams running this manually in a spreadsheet find it works but doesn’t scale past a handful of markets before someone’s job becomes maintaining language tags by hand every week.

Automating the tag-and-reconcile step, so language segmentation persists regardless of what campaign structure Google settles into next, is exactly the kind of workflow a platform like AirOps is built to run continuously rather than as a one-time audit.

Losing a control this abruptly is also the resourcing story AirOps surveyed 300+ CMOs and VPs about directly: rising targets now affect 75.4% of marketing leaders, and most are absorbing changes like this one without any added headcount to handle it. You can get the Marketing Leaders Reality Index.

The control is going away regardless of how anyone feels about it. The reporting built on top of it doesn’t have to go with it.

🛍️ Social platforms are cutting steps between ads and conversions

YouTube, X, and Google are all rolling out tools designed around the same goal: keep more of the journey from discovery to purchase or lead capture inside the platform.

The Breakdown:

YouTube connects creators directly to Amazon - Eligible U.S. creators can tag Amazon products inside videos, Shorts, and livestreams and earn commissions. YouTube says Shopping tags generated over 110% more product clicks than description links alone in a July experiment.

Amazon tagging can happen automatically: Creators who connect their YouTube and Amazon Influencer accounts can access eligible products and enable auto-tagging, turning existing and future content into more direct shopping surfaces.

X brings lead capture back into the feed - Its revived Lead Gen Ads open native forms with one tap, letting people book demos, join waitlists, request quotes, or submit details without visiting an external landing page.

Google adds messaging to Demand Gen - Google is testing YouTube ads that let high-intent prospects start conversations with brands directly through messaging apps. Demand Gen is also adding personalized travel offers and expanding AI video creation.

The landing page is increasingly becoming optional. YouTube is moving product discovery closer to Amazon checkout, X is capturing customer details natively, and Google is letting prospects move from video ads directly into conversations. For advertisers, the conversion journey is getting shorter and increasingly controlled by the platforms themselves.

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Visual Metaphor Hits - Turning the pack into something the athlete literally pulls makes “pre-workout fuel” instantly visual, creating a strong pattern interrupt and giving the benefit real physical weight

Proof Scans Fast - The 28g protein, 200mg caffeine and 0% sugar callouts make the performance proposition easy to process, giving high-intent shoppers three concrete reasons to believe quickly.

Energy Matches Category - The sunset road, muscular athlete and oversized pack create an intense performance aesthetic that fits gym culture well, strengthening message-market fit and perceived product potency.

Take the core performance claim and turn it into an exaggerated action scene. The more literally the product “powers” the user, the more memorable the benefit becomes.

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At ScaleUP, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. If you'd like to stay in touch, be sure to follow us EVERYWHERE🥰

Thanks for your support :) We'll be back again with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📉 The deliverability signal that quietly disappeared

📊 YouTube quietly became the most efficient major platform, and most budgets haven’t noticed

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

📉 The deliverability signal that quietly disappeared

Microsoft pulled trap hit counts from its SNDS Data Report on July 22, removing a signal neither Google nor Yahoo ever offered.

If your team relied on that number to catch a bad list segment before it torched your sender reputation, that early warning is gone, nine weeks before Black Friday.

Most teams don’t notice a monitoring signal is missing until the thing it caught shows up somewhere worse.

A spam trap hit means part of your list contains addresses that shouldn’t be getting mail, dead accounts recycled into traps or scraped addresses never opted in.

Left uncaught, that segment erodes your sender score across all three major providers, not just the one that stopped reporting it.

Rebuild the visibility Microsoft’s tool used to give you

Google Postmaster Tools still reports spam rate, reputation, and authentication status, on primary domains only, as a rolling multi-day average, not the trap-specific signal Microsoft removed.

Cross-reference the two remaining sources you have. Pull spam complaint rate trend from Postmaster Tools weekly rather than checking only when something looks wrong, and treat any unexplained jump as the proxy signal you no longer get directly.

Audit list hygiene before volume ramps, not during it

Nearly one in six ecommerce brands earns at least 30% of annual orders during the holiday period, meaning send volume then can run several times a normal month’s baseline. A segment borderline in October becomes the one that tips your complaint rate over threshold in November, exactly when the cost is highest.

Run a full suppression pass now: hard bounces from the last two sends, any address with zero opens across your last ten campaigns, and anything flagged by your platform’s own engagement scoring. Removing that segment before volume increases is cheaper than discovering the problem after a BFCM send lands in spam.

Choose infrastructure that carries this monitoring for you

Auditing deliverability signals manually across three separate provider dashboards is a real ongoing job, not a one-time cleanup, and it’s exactly the kind of overhead that becomes a liability the week before your biggest sales period.

A platform managing that monitoring as part of the send infrastructure itself, rather than leaving a team to reconstruct visibility Microsoft just took away, is worth weighing against whatever platform currently owns your list.

One agency’s pre-BFCM migration to Omnisend closed with a client generating $113K over the holiday period, matching the prior year’s revenue despite the switch. You can read the full story.

The signal disappearing didn’t create the risk. It just removed your warning that the risk was building.

📊 YouTube quietly became the most efficient major platform, and most budgets haven’t noticed

Last week’s media buyer index produced a mixed but readable signal set, CAC improved on several high-spend platforms while returns fragmented across the board, creating a clear divide between channels worth scaling and channels worth trimming heading into the final stretch of August.

The Breakdown:

CPC - Meta and Google saw click costs fall while TikTok and Pinterest pushed higher, where CPCs dropped alongside improving CAC like Meta and Google, test a controlled budget increase this week before auction pressure rebuilds and closes the window.

CAC - Meta, Google, YouTube, and Microsoft all improved while Snapchat and Pinterest worsened sharply, Pinterest’s +14.06% CAC spike makes it an immediate pause candidate; hold all spend increases there until costs stabilize and CvR shows a recovery signal.

ROAS - YouTube led at +8.42% and Snapchat posted +5.26% while Pinterest collapsed at -19.59% and Meta slipped to -0.35%, shift incremental budget toward YouTube now where CvR and ROAS are both moving in the right direction simultaneously.

Meta shed share to 54.47% with -0.35% ROAS despite improving CAC, he efficiency gains aren’t reaching the return line yet, so hold Meta’s budget flat rather than scaling into a signal that hasn’t fully confirmed.

YouTube at 3.15% posted +8.42% ROAS and +8.94% CvR in the same week, making it the clearest scaling case on the board. Move budget from Pinterest into YouTube this week and review mid-cycle before committing further.

🏆 Ad of the day

What Works:

Scale Creates Impact - The oversized sneaker dominating the city street creates an immediate pattern interrupt, giving the product huge thumb-stop power while making comfort feel larger than life.

Environment Adds Meaning - Placing the shoe directly over an urban walking route connects the product to everyday movement, strengthening message-market fit for consumers who spend long hours on their feet.

Copy Reinforces Benefit - “Sink into comfort. Conquer every step.” pairs a sensory promise with an active outcome, helping the creative sell both cushioning and confidence without adding cognitive load.

Take the core product promise and exaggerate it visually. If comfort is the benefit, make the product feel powerful enough to dominate the entire environment.

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🌐 You might not exist in the language your customers actually search in

📣 Ad platforms are pushing beyond traditional ads

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🌐 You might not exist in the language your customers actually search in

Google confirmed this month that campaign-level language targeting disappears from Search and AI Max for Search in late September, with matching moving to inference: what language a user is judged to understand, not which setting a campaign was built around.

An English-language query can now serve a French ad if Google’s systems decide the user understands French.

That’s a paid-media mechanic. It also describes something already true on the organic AI-answer side that almost nobody checks, because most visibility tracking only runs in one language: whichever one the team building it happens to speak.

This is different from whether your Spanish or French pages read well. It’s whether your brand exists at all in the answer a model gives when the same question arrives in a different language.

Run the test before assuming the answer

Take your ten most category-defining prompts, the ones a customer would type when comparing options, and run each in English and in whichever second language a meaningful share of your customers speak.

Compare which brands get named. A brand cited confidently in English often disappears entirely from the same category question asked in another language, not because it did anything wrong there, but because the sources an AI system draws from in that language are a different set of publishers, forums, and retailers than the ones feeding its English answers.

Trace the gap to its actual source before building anything

A brand invisible in a second language is usually invisible for one of two different reasons, and the fix depends entirely on which one it is.

Sometimes the brand has real coverage in that language, reviews, local press, retailer listings, and the AI system just isn’t drawing from those sources yet.

Other times the coverage genuinely doesn’t exist, and no amount of waiting fixes that. Checking which case you’re in before investing in localization or citation-building saves months of the wrong work.

That diagnostic, running the same prompt across languages and mapping which sources cite you in each, is what Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit is built to surface in one pass. You can try it free for 7 days.

Recheck after the September change lands

Once language matching moves fully to inference in late September, the crossover between what a query is written in and what gets served back may shift again, on both the paid and organic side.

Rerun the same ten-prompt test after the change takes effect, not just before it. A gap that exists today because of stale source coverage could shrink or widen depending on how aggressively AI systems start serving cross-language answers once the setting stops constraining anything.

📣 Ad platforms are pushing beyond traditional ads

Meta, TikTok, and ChatGpt are all expanding how advertisers can reach, convert, and measure audiences, from automated Instagram DMs to TikTok ads appearing on physical screens.

The Breakdown:

Meta is testing comment-to-DM ads - Advertisers can choose up to five keywords that automatically trigger a private Instagram message when someone comments one of them on a promoted post.

TikTok ads are moving into the physical world - Its Out of Phone program is expanding across Europe, putting TikTok content on billboards, shopping mall screens, supermarkets, universities, bars, and other public displays.

ChatGPT Ads gets automated bidding - A new Maximize results strategy automatically adjusts bids toward an advertiser’s selected campaign goal to generate as many results as possible within budget.

ChatGPT adds targeting and attribution controls - Advertisers can choose between iOS, Android, and Web placements, while one-day view-through conversions can now be measured at campaign, ad group, and ad level.

The ad itself is becoming only one piece of the system. Platforms increasingly want to automate what happens before and after someone sees it, from bidding and placement to DMs and attribution. For marketers, the advantage shifts toward designing better journeys and feeding these systems better inputs rather than manually controlling every step.

🏆 Ad of the day

What Works:

Scale Stops Scroll - The oversized jeans create an immediate pattern interrupt, turning a familiar product into something visually impossible to ignore while keeping the fashion category obvious at first glance.

Styling Shows Identity - The model’s relaxed pose and casual outfit give the jeans a clear lifestyle context, helping shoppers picture the fit and reinforcing an effortless, everyday positioning.

Copy Reinforces Choice - “Always the right choice” works as simple confidence framing, while the minimal layout and bold typography keep cognitive load low and branding recall strong.

Take one recognizable product detail and blow it out of proportion. The surreal scale creates thumb-stop power without sacrificing product communication or brand relevance.

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🤖 When the buyer is not a person, who gets the commission

📊 Google gives advertisers more control over testing and tracking

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

Together with Tatari

The brands winning BFCM start optimizing early.

Tatari surveyed TV advertisers about their 2026 holiday plans, and brands are moving early.

Nearly 6 in 10 are increasing their BFCM TV budgets, and 54% plan to launch holiday messaging before mid-November

Launching earlier gives brands time to find what converts before TV inventory gets more competitive and expensive.

That’s how Knix approached TV. After testing ahead of peak season, one spot drove 9,000 site visits within five minutes at a 70% lower CPA. Creative testing also doubled response rates and cut CPV by 45%.

The extra runway helped Knix identify what deserved more budget before purchase intent peaked.

By Black Friday, you don’t want to still be testing. You want to be scaling.

See how Tatari can help you scale TV for BFCM.

P.S. In NYC Oct. 29? Join Tatari at Forward for an afternoon on what’s next in advertising with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and marketers from Liquid IV, MANSCAPED, and more.

🤖 When the buyer is not a person, who gets the commission

Accountability questions around AI buying agents surfaced again this month, and the conversation has been mostly about liability. There is a quieter problem sitting underneath it that will hit affiliate programs first.

Affiliate attribution assumes a human clicked a link, browsed, and bought. An agent researching on a buyer’s behalf reads, compares, and arrives at checkout carrying whatever session state its architecture happened to preserve.

Creator-influenced demand still exists. The tracking parameter proving it frequently does not survive the trip.

Test what actually persists through an agent-mediated purchase

Run your own affiliate links through an agent-assisted purchase flow before Q4, not after.

Place a test order using your standard creator link, then check whether the referral parameter appears in the order record. Repeat with a shortener in the path, then with a redirect through your own domain. Programs routinely find the shortener drops the parameter and the direct redirect keeps it. Ten minutes, real commission consequence.

If the parameter dies, your creator sees a click and no conversion, and the assumption they will reach is that your product does not convert.

\That conclusion is very hard to reverse once a creator has drawn it, and it is the sort of thing worth heading off during recruiting rather than explaining in December.

Building that runway is exactly what Levanta’s 90-Day Holiday Sprint is structured around, with Day 30, 60, and 90 checkpoints that surface problems while there is still time to fix them. You can download the free playbook.

Add a fallback credit rule to your terms now

Waiting until a dispute arrives means negotiating a rule with someone who already believes they were shorted.

Write the fallback before peak. A workable version: where a conversion occurs within a defined window of a tracked creator click, and no competing tracked source exists, credit defaults to that creator at the standard rate.

Define the window using your own observed click-to-purchase lag rather than an industry default. Publish the rule to your roster in writing.

Instrument the questions, not just the clicks

Agents surface products by matching stated requirements against readable product facts.

Ask three things about your top ten SKUs:

• Are the attributes a shopper would specify present as structured text on the page

• Does the page answer the comparison question directly, or imply the answer

• Would a creator’s own description match what the page says

Where a creator’s framing and your page disagree, the agent resolves it by trusting the page. Align them, and the creator’s work stops being invisible at the point it matters most.

📊 Google gives advertisers more control over testing and tracking

Google is making two parts of advertising easier to manage: testing bigger campaign changes before committing to them, and setting up accurate conversion tracking without relying as heavily on developers.

The Breakdown:

Test changes across multiple campaigns - Starting in September, advertisers can A/B test different budgets and ROI targets across several Search campaigns at once, giving them a broader view of how scaling could affect performance.

AI Max tests keep their guardrails - Advertisers can now test AI Max while keeping brand and location controls enabled, making experiments closer to how campaigns would actually run.

Conversion tracking is going no-code - Google’s new visual tagging lets advertisers navigate their website, select actions such as purchases and create events without manually configuring selectors or writing code.

Google tag and Tag Manager are coming together - Existing Google tags will gain Tag Manager capabilities including debugging and version control, while optimized containers can transmit data more directly and show where measurement data is flowing.

Google is automating more of advertising while also making that automation easier to test and measure. That combination matters. Advertisers can give Google’s systems more freedom without having to blindly trust the result, because experimentation and measurement are getting stronger alongside the automation.

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Reflection Creates Focus - Using the sunglass lens as a frame isolates the can and creates an immediate pattern interrupt, giving the product strong thumb-stop power without cluttering the composition.

Seasonal Context Works - The bright sky, warm orange frames and “See Summer Differently” hook build a clear seasonal mood, helping the cold brew feel naturally tied to hot-weather consumption.

Product Feels Premium - The close-up photography, restrained typography and centered pack shot make the drink feel editorial and elevated, while the flavor remains readable enough to support branding recall.

Place the hero SKU inside a reflective surface, window or object already relevant to the campaign theme. It creates visual novelty while keeping attention tightly controlled.

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We are concerned about everything DTC and its winning strategies. If you liked what you read, why not join the 50k+ marketers from 13k+ DTC brands who have already subscribed? Just follow this.

At ScaleUP, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. If you'd like to stay in touch, be sure to follow us EVERYWHERE🥰

Thanks for your support :) We'll be back again with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📡 The discovery channel missing from your weekly report

📈 Microsoft, X, and ChatGPT push ads deeper into AI

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

📡 The discovery channel missing from your weekly report

TikTok Shop reached roughly 2% of total US online retail spend in July, up from 1.2% a year earlier, per Consumer Edge card data, putting its US business ahead of Costco’s online operation and larger than Home Depot and Lowe’s online businesses combined.

A meaningful share of that platform’s category discovery is happening entirely outside the surfaces most reporting stacks treat as their discovery funnel.

The share number is not the interesting part. The interesting part is how many teams have a discovery dashboard that simply has no row for it.

Most reporting stacks were built around a small, stable set of discovery channels: organic search, paid search, maybe Amazon. Each addition since got bolted on separately, if it got measured at all. A channel now doing more volume than several major retailers sitting entirely outside that structure is a measurement gap, not a strategy choice anyone made.

Map what you’re not measuring before you decide it doesn’t matter

Pull last quarter’s new-customer attribution data and check which discovery channels are represented. If TikTok Shop, or any platform-native discovery surface, appears only as “social” or “other,” that’s not a small channel underperforming. It’s an unmeasured channel wearing a label that hides its actual size.

The test is simple: can you currently answer what share of new customer discovery happened on a surface you don’t have a dedicated line for? If the honest answer is no, the dashboard is telling you a channel doesn’t matter because it was never built to see it.

Build a share-of-discovery view before building a strategy for it

A strategy response to a channel you can’t measure is guesswork dressed as a plan.

Before allocating budget to a new discovery surface, build the measurement layer first: a defined view tracking share of new-customer discovery across every surface where your category gets found, refreshed on the same cadence as existing channel reporting, not as a quarterly special project.

Getting a single, comparable view across search, social commerce, and AI-driven discovery surfaces without stitching five separate exports together is exactly the reconciliation problem Semrush One is built to solve. You can try free for 7 days here

Revisit the channel list quarterly, not annually

The gap TikTok Shop represents now will be a different platform in a year. A channel list reviewed annually is always a year behind whatever actually moved.

Set a standing quarterly review of which discovery surfaces exist in your category and whether your reporting has a dedicated line for each one. The review itself takes an afternoon. Not doing it costs you a channel’s worth of blind spend for however long it takes someone to notice.

📈 Microsoft, X, and ChatGPT push ads deeper into AI

AI is moving from helping advertisers write ads to actually managing how campaigns run. Microsoft, X, and OpenAI are each opening a different path toward more automated ad buying and optimization.

The Breakdown:

Microsoft takes AI Max global - Microsoft’s AI Max is rolling out globally with broader search matching, AI-generated ad copy, and final URL expansion, while retaining brand controls, exclusions, and ad group-level settings.

X lets advertisers bring their own AI - X Ads MCP connects campaign data and analytics to MCP-compatible tools like Grok, Claude Code, or custom agents, letting advertisers analyze and refine campaigns through natural language.

ChatGPT gets automated bidding - The new Maximize results strategy automatically adjusts bids toward an advertiser’s chosen goal, aiming to generate as many results as possible from the available campaign budget.

ChatGPT adds targeting and attribution - Advertisers can separately target iOS, Android, and Web, while new one-day view-through conversions measure users who convert after seeing an ad without clicking it.

The ad dashboard is slowly becoming an interface for agents. Microsoft is automating Search, X is opening campaign data to outside AI, and ChatGPT is automating bidding itself. The advertiser increasingly sets the goal while software handles the mechanics.

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Audience Cue Lands - “Little Hands, Big Cravings” instantly signals the target buyer and consumption moment, giving parents a clear emotional hook while keeping the product positioning playful and family-friendly.

Ingredient Story Works - Fresh mangoes, diced fruit, and the filled glass make the flavor feel tangible, while “Real Mango, Real Goodness” reinforces naturalness without overloading the creative with claims.

Color Builds Appetite - The yellow-green palette creates strong sensory association with mango and freshness, while the child’s reaching hand guides attention toward the product and adds lifestyle context.

Use a hand, bite, pour, or reach to dramatize desire around the product. That small behavioral cue can make static food creative feel more immediate and emotionally persuasive.

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We are concerned about everything DTC and its winning strategies. If you liked what you read, why not join the 50k+ marketers from 13k+ DTC brands who have already subscribed? Just follow this.

At ScaleUP, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. If you'd like to stay in touch, be sure to follow us EVERYWHERE🥰

Thanks for your support :) We'll be back again with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📺 Your TV benchmark just lost its denominator

📊 Meta and Google hand more ad decisions to AI

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

Together with AirOps

The Growth Targets Changed. Did Your Plan?

Growth targets are rising faster than the resources behind them, forcing marketing teams to make critical budget decisions without a credible view of how peers are responding.

AirOps surveyed 300+ CMOs and VPs to reveal how leaders are reallocating budgets and closing capability gaps as pressure grows to deliver more pipeline with limited support.

• Compare how peers are responding to higher targets, now affecting 75.4% of marketing leaders across the market.

• Build a stronger budget case using the reality that only 43.0% received more funding.

• See why 86.6% prioritize AI search while just 23% feel confident measuring its impact.

The report lets you compare your growth targets and available resources against responses gathered directly from 300+ marketing leaders.

You’ll immediately see whether your performance gap starts with execution or a plan that was under-resourced from day one.

Get the Marketing Leaders Reality Index.

📊 Meta and Google hand more ad decisions to AI

Meta and Google are both pushing AI deeper into campaign management, but from different directions. Meta wants AI analyzing what is already running, while Google is giving advertisers more ways to test AI-driven changes before committing.

The Breakdown:

Meta AI becomes an ad analyst: Advertisers can connect Meta Ads and Google Workspace, then ask Meta AI to analyze audiences, creative and budgets, recommend optimizations, and identify ads losing traction.

Meta automates the reporting layer: Campaign analysis can be turned directly into decks, documents and spreadsheets, while recurring tasks can automatically run the same performance reviews on a schedule.

Google expands AI Max testing: Starting in September, advertisers can A/B test different budgets and ROI targets across multiple Search campaigns while keeping brand and location controls enabled.

Google lets advertisers forecast first: Performance Planner can model how bidding or budget changes may affect campaigns, then advertisers can apply Google’s recommended changes directly with one click.

Ad platforms are moving AI from campaign setup into the decisions that happen afterward. The shift is toward a loop where AI analyzes performance, proposes the next move, tests it, and increasingly handles the reporting around it.

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Event Creates Urgency - The oversized “12.12” immediately anchors the creative to a shopping moment, while the sale framing gives viewers a clear reason to act now rather than later.

Bundle Shows Value - Showing the full skincare lineup together makes the promotion feel substantial, while the open-box composition helps shoppers instantly understand they are getting a complete routine.

Discount Drives Attention - The 45% discount badge and double-voucher callout create strong offer framing, adding perceived savings without distracting from the product range or weakening visual hierarchy.

For tentpole sales, make the event date the primary hook, show the full product value visually, then reinforce urgency with one unmistakable discount cue.

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We are concerned about everything DTC and its winning strategies. If you liked what you read, why not join the 50k+ marketers from 13k+ DTC brands who have already subscribed? Just follow this.

At ScaleUP, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. If you'd like to stay in touch, be sure to follow us EVERYWHERE🥰

Thanks for your support :) We'll be back again with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

✋Stop rewriting every missing AI citation

📊 Microsoft is the week’s standout, and it’s getting almost none of the budget

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

✋Stop rewriting every missing AI citation

When a brand isn’t cited for an important AI query, the default response is usually some version of “we need better content.” Sometimes that’s correct. Sometimes another rewrite of the owned page won’t change anything, because the source currently winning is evidence that the model is looking for an entirely different kind of answer.

The first question shouldn’t be what to write next. It should be: who got cited instead?

Diagnose the winner before touching your content

Take the highest-value queries where the brand is currently absent and classify the source that appears instead.

This turns the citation itself into a diagnostic. Ten missing citations might look like one visibility problem in a dashboard while actually representing four completely different problems.

Make the losing source write the brief for you

Suppose a review platform keeps beating the brand. Rewriting another product page attacks the wrong weakness. The model is repeatedly choosing independent evidence, so the work belongs in genuine reviews, creator coverage, and other third-party discussion.

A competitor’s own page winning is different. Put the two pages beside each other and find what theirs makes easier to extract. Maybe their answer appears immediately under a matching heading while yours requires three paragraphs of context.

Roundups require another response entirely. A beauty brand losing a “which ingredient does what” query to an old generic listicle built a single-page, table-structured answer covering the category clearly. Within two content cycles, it took the citation.

Same symptom. Three different interventions.

Build your own citation treatment history

The first classification tells you what to try. The next few months tell you whether your diagnosis was right.

For every intervention, keep four fields:

Query → Winning source type → Fix shipped → Citation one month later

After several cycles, stop looking at individual wins and look across the log. You may discover competitor-page losses respond quickly to structural rewrites while review-site losses barely move until independent coverage accumulates. Another brand could see the reverse.

That history becomes increasingly valuable because the next missing citation no longer starts with a brainstorm. It starts with evidence about which interventions have previously moved that exact type of loss.

Semrush One puts traditional search and AI visibility into the same workflow, making it easier to see which domains and source types are taking visibility before deciding whether the next investment belongs in owned content or somewhere else. You can try Semrush One free for 7 days.

A missing citation isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a symptom. The source currently occupying that spot is often the closest thing you have to instructions for what to fix next.

📊 Microsoft is the week’s standout, and it’s getting almost none of the budget

Last week’s environment produced a clear split between platforms where costs and returns aligned positively and those where rising CPCs pushed CAC in the wrong direction, making channel selection more consequential than overall budget size heading into mid-August.

The Breakdown:

CPC - Google, TikTok, Meta, and Pinterest all saw click costs fall while YouTube pushed sharply higher, where CPCs rose alongside deteriorating CAC like Snapchat.

CAC - Google, TikTok, YouTube, Microsoft, and Pinterest all improved while Meta, and Snapchat worsened, on platforms where CAC improved alongside positive ROAS like Google and Microsoft, pushing budgets 15–20% higher this week before the efficiency window closes.

ROAS - Microsoft led at +12.37% and YouTube posted +5.25% while Meta (-2.45%) slipped, Microsoft at 0.89% budget share with the week’s strongest ROAS is being systematically ignored; open a meaningful test budget there before next week’s cycle opens.

Meta holds 55.27% of spend with -2.45% ROAS and -5.49% CvR, a fourth consecutive week of share growth without return justification. Microsoft at 0.89% posted +12.37% ROAS and +2.46% CvR simultaneously, making it the most underfunded platform on the board.

Redirect 10–15% of Meta’s incremental budget into Microsoft and YouTube this week, set CAC floors on both, and treat Snapchat’s +15.80% CAC spike as a full pause signal.

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Context Sells Routine - The gym-bag setup places the product inside a believable workout ritual, helping shoppers instantly understand when it fits while strengthening message-market fit through familiar fitness cues.

Monochrome Builds Identity - The all-green palette creates a distinctive visual world, increasing branding recall while making the white-capped OLLY bottle stand out clearly at the center of attention.

Lifestyle Adds Credibility - Shoes, weights, earbuds and hydration gear make the product feel naturally integrated into an active routine, adding contextual proof without relying on heavy performance claims.

Surround your product with the objects customers already use alongside it. This makes the product feel like an essential part of an existing routine rather than an extra purchase.

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We are concerned about everything DTC and its winning strategies. If you liked what you read, why not join the 50k+ marketers from 13k+ DTC brands who have already subscribed? Just follow this.

At ScaleUP, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. If you'd like to stay in touch, be sure to follow us EVERYWHERE🥰

Thanks for your support :) We'll be back again with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📊AI visibility isn’t a position it’s a probability.

📢 AI advertising meets a trust test

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

📊AI visibility isn’t a position; it’s a probability.

Traditional rank tracking works because the result is reasonably stable within a short window. AI search breaks that assumption.

Run the same prompt repeatedly, and the sources, recommendations, and framing can change between answers, which means checking once and recording whether the brand appeared creates confidence from a sample that was never large enough to support it.

Stop repeating the prompt. Stress-test the topic.

Five identical runs tell you about volatility around one wording. Five different formulations tell you whether the brand survives the ways buyers actually express the same intent.

Take one core question and deliberately push it through different contexts:

• Direct: What are the best accounting tools for startups?

• Comparison: X vs Y for an early-stage startup?

• Use case: Best accounting software for a five-person company?

• Follow-up: Which of those is easiest to implement?

• Skeptical: Which accounting tools aren’t worth paying for yet?

If the brand survives several of those shifts, that’s much stronger evidence than appearing repeatedly against one carefully chosen prompt.

Turn five runs into an investment ladder

Not every citation result deserves the same response. A simple confidence system prevents teams from spending equal effort everywhere.

4 to 5 appearances: defend it. The association is holding across different formulations, so keep the underlying content current and protect whatever third-party coverage is reinforcing it.

2 to 3 appearances: investigate it. This is often the most valuable group because the brand has already established enough relevance to appear, but something is preventing that relevance from holding consistently.

0 to 1 appearance: don’t automatically rewrite the page. At this level, the problem may be broader authority, source coverage, or whether the brand belongs in the answer at all. More polishing isn’t necessarily the highest-return move.

The middle tier is where the easiest visibility gains can hide.

Read the losses, not just the score

Suppose a brand finishes 3/5.

That number isn’t the diagnosis. Open the two losing answers.

If both losses came from comparison prompts, inspect whether competitors have clearer comparison pages or stronger third-party validation. If skeptical prompts consistently replace the brand, look at whether independent reviews surface the objections buyers are asking about. If direct questions work but use-case prompts fail, the content may explain the product well without establishing who it’s specifically for.

Now a volatile citation score becomes a content brief rather than another dashboard metric.

Doing this across dozens of topics becomes difficult to maintain manually. Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit tracks brand visibility across AI search surfaces, making repeated citation patterns easier to monitor alongside the competitors replacing you when visibility changes. You can try it for free for 7 days.

One AI answer tells you that you appeared once. The useful information starts when you understand which versions of the buyer’s question keep bringing you back, and which ones consistently make you disappear.

📢 AI advertising meets a trust test

AI advertising is expanding across ChatGPT and Google while paid search remains surprisingly resilient. But technical issues and growing public anxiety show that monetization is moving faster than consumer confidence.

The Breakdown:

1. ChatGPT Ads Reach Europe - OpenAI says ads reach Free and Go users in the EEA and Switzerland later this month. Targeting starts contextual, while personalization requires opt-in and sensitive topics are excluded.

2. ChatGPT Ads Glitch - Brodie Clark spotted ads switching advertisers mid-load, potentially creating questionable impressions where one advertiser briefly appears before another replaces it. It highlights early growing pains in OpenAI’s ad infrastructure.

3. Google Still Drives ChatGPT - Across 13.1B Google search events, ChatGPT had the highest paid-click share among major destinations. Google’s zero-click rate rose 2.6 points and organic clicks fell 2.8, while paid clicks stayed flat.

4. AI Ads Are Spreading - Similarweb says sponsored ads appear in 26% of ChatGPT responses, while nearly 30% of ad-eligible Google AI Mode queries show ads, signaling rapid commercialization of AI interfaces.

5. Public Trust Weakens - Pew found 52% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI, including 55% of under-30s. More significantly, 71% believe AI will result in fewer jobs over 20 years.

AI is quickly becoming a serious advertising channel across search and chat. The bigger challenge may be whether monetization can scale without further weakening the public trust these platforms depend on.

🏆 Ad of the day

What Works:

Flavor Stops Scroll - The saturated citrus palette and oversized lemon-lime imagery create an immediate sensory pattern interrupt, making the drink feel refreshing before shoppers even process the functional benefits

Benefits Scan Fast - “6g protein” and “zero sugar” sit in isolated callouts, reducing cognitive load and helping mobile viewers understand the product’s nutritional value within seconds.

Product Owns Center - The tilted can dominates the visual hierarchy, while floating fruit and bubbles frame it naturally, strengthening branding recall and making the product feel energetic and refreshing.

Use oversized ingredients, bubbles, splashes, or texture cues around the pack so shoppers can almost taste the product before reading the copy.

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We are concerned about everything DTC and its winning strategies. If you liked what you read, why not join the 50k+ marketers from 13k+ DTC brands who have already subscribed? Just follow this.

At ScaleUP, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. If you'd like to stay in touch, be sure to follow us EVERYWHERE🥰

Thanks for your support :) We'll be back again with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

👎 AI is losing its distribution advantage

📊 Google rewires ad measurement

🏆 Ad of the day

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👎 AI is losing its distribution advantage

Snapchat has adjusted its recommendation systems so that only videos featuring real people are eligible for Spotlight recommendations, removing AI-generated videos from one of its highest-visibility discovery surfaces. Earlier this year, TikTok and Meta introduced their own restrictions around AI-generated content in commerce and recommendation environments.

Three major platforms arriving at similar policies independently suggests something larger than isolated moderation updates.

The question is no longer whether AI-generated content has a place. It’s where platforms are still willing to distribute it.

Not every piece of content carries the same risk

One mistake brands make is auditing content by asking, “Was AI used?”

The more useful question is: “Where is this content expected to appear?”

A piece of AI-assisted content sitting in a standard feed post faces a very different level of exposure than one designed for recommendation engines, shopping surfaces or other algorithmically amplified placements.

The production method matters. The placement matters even more.

Prioritize by distribution risk, not production volume

Instead of rebuilding an entire content library, work from the top down.

Start with the placements that generate the most discovery, recommendation traffic or commerce activity, then identify which of those currently rely on AI-generated assets.

One supplement brand facing this exact challenge rebuilt only the creator content supporting its three highest-value commerce placements first, completing the work within three weeks while leaving lower-priority evergreen content on its existing production schedule. The result wasn’t a full content overhaul. It was a targeted reduction in platform risk where visibility mattered most.

Replace calendar reviews with trigger-based reviews

Most teams review platform policies every quarter.

That cadence is becoming too slow.

Instead, treat every major platform announcement as its own audit trigger. When Snapchat, TikTok or Meta changes how a recommendation surface works, immediately check whether any active content depends on the affected placement rather than waiting for the next scheduled review.

The faster platforms change distribution rules, the less useful fixed review calendars become.

Building a sustainable pipeline of real-person content is exactly where Insense fits. Brands can source from a vetted marketplace of 100,000+ creators across 57 countries, making it easier to produce authentic UGC for the high-visibility placements platforms increasingly favour. You can book a free strategy call by August 28 and receive $200 toward your first campaign.

One platform changing its recommendation rules could be dismissed as an isolated decision. Three platforms making the same move is a shift in how visibility itself is being allocated.

📊 Google rewires ad measurement

Google is changing how advertisers measure brand demand, understand social discovery, and optimize Demand Gen. The updates increasingly capture what happens between ad exposure and direct conversion.

The Breakdown:

1. Branded Searches Change - Google’s Branded Searches now uses a 7-day default window, adjustable from 1–30 days. Current documentation supports YouTube and Demand Gen, but no longer lists Performance Max.

2. Reporting, Not Bidding - Branded Searches measures whether ad exposure later triggers a Google or YouTube brand search. It appears in reporting but cannot be used as a bidding optimization goal.

3. Social Search Data - Search Console now provides queries, clicks, impressions, CTR, and position for verified social accounts across Search, Discover, and News. Data only begins after verification, with no historical backfill.

4. Demand Gen Goes Video - VTC optimization becomes video-only, expands to Display, and defaults on for new Demand Gen campaigns. Display video also moves from CPC to CPM billing.

Google is giving marketers more ways to measure demand beyond direct clicks, while simultaneously changing which signals advertisers can actually use to optimize campaigns.

🏆 Ad of the day

What Works:

Perspective Stops Scroll - The extreme low-angle shoe shot creates an immediate pattern interrupt, making the product feel larger, faster and more dominant while improving thumb-stop potential in crowded feeds.

Features Feel Functional - Zero-drop, flexible sole and wide toe-box callouts translate technical footwear benefits into quick purchase reasons, strengthening product communication without pulling focus from the hero shoe.

Energy Matches Usage - The dynamic runner pose, curved headline and gritty outdoor styling reinforce movement and athletic identity, giving the creative stronger message-market fit for active, performance-focused shoppers.

Shoot the hero product from an unconventional perspective, then surround it with three or four benefit callouts. This creates visual drama while keeping conversion-focused information easy to scan.

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🧐Why Creators Ignore Affiliate Offers

🔄 Google and ChatGPT are becoming one discovery loop

🏆 Ad of the day

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🧐Why Creators Ignore Affiliate Offers

For years, creator recruitment has been built around one question: “What’s your commission rate?” Recent research suggests many creators are asking a different one instead: “Is this relationship going anywhere?” Nearly 45% of creators now say they prefer long-term brand partnerships over one-off campaigns, while affiliate commissions and product sales already account for more than a fifth of creator income.

That means many recruitment messages aren’t being rejected because the commission is too low. They’re being rejected because the opportunity feels too temporary.

Make the future visible from the first conversation

A creator can’t commit to a long-term relationship if they can’t see one.

Instead of offering a flat commission with vague promises of future growth, build every outreach message around four questions a creator is silently asking before they ever reply.

A creator should be able to read the offer and immediately understand how the relationship grows over time instead of wondering whether there is one at all.

Let acceptance data choose your recruiting strategy

Not every creator segment responds to the same message.

Run one recruitment cycle comparing relationship-focused outreach against traditional commission-first outreach, then compare both acceptance rate and long-term performance.

The winning template shouldn’t be decided by opinion.

It should be decided by the creators you’re actually trying to recruit.

That’s exactly the philosophy behind Levanta’s 90-Day Holiday Sprint, which uses structured 30, 60 and 90-day checkpoints to identify high-potential creator relationships early and grow them before holiday budgets become more competitive. You can download the free playbook.

The best creators aren’t just comparing commission percentages anymore. They’re comparing which brands have already shown them what the next six months will look like.

🔄 Google and ChatGPT are becoming one discovery loop

Search and AI are increasingly feeding each other. New data shows users moving from Google to ChatGPT, then from ChatGPT to external websites.

The Breakdown:

1. Google Feeds ChatGPT - ChatGPT became Google’s sixth-most-clicked destination in iPullRank’s study and had the highest paid-click share among leading destinations, showing Google can actively funnel users toward AI.

2. Scale Still Small - Despite rapid growth, ChatGPT referrals remain tiny compared with overall web traffic. The 303% increase also comes from a relatively small base of 645,000 monthly visits.

3. Crawling Gets Complicated - OpenAI says ChatGPT-User may bypass robots.txt when users request pages. OAI-SearchBot separately controls ChatGPT search visibility, creating different decisions around AI access and discoverability.

4. ChatGPT Referrals Surge - Demandbase recorded 303% YoY growth in ChatGPT referrals to B2B sites, reaching 2.6 million monthly visits, while Perplexity declined and Gemini and Claude stayed flat.

Search is becoming a loop rather than a replacement story. Google sends users to ChatGPT, ChatGPT sends users to websites, and AI agents increasingly access those sites directly.

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Collab Creates Desire - Rhode and Starbucks combine two highly recognizable brand worlds, using cultural familiarity and limited-edition framing to create instant novelty, stronger thumb-stop potential and higher perceived collectibility.

Texture Sells Sensation - The dripping pink drink visually mirrors the lip tint’s glossy texture, turning product communication into a sensory cue that makes the formula feel juicy, indulgent and memorable.

Color Owns Attention - The monochromatic pink palette creates immediate branding recall, while the central product placement and Starbucks cup guide attention cleanly without adding unnecessary cognitive load.

For collaborations, do more than place two logos together. Blend a familiar ritual from one brand into the product experience of the other so the partnership feels inevitable

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🥲The monthly FAQ email is answering the average objection, which is nobody’s actual one

📍 Google ads is giving automation even more control

🏆 Ad of the day

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🥲The monthly FAQ email is answering the average objection, which is nobody’s actual one

FAQ emails work because they remove uncertainty before it turns into inaction. A well-written answer can eliminate hesitation, build trust and generate sales without relying on another discount. The problem isn’t the format. It’s that most brands send the exact same FAQ email to everyone, even though the question stopping someone from buying changes dramatically over time.

A list isn’t one audience, It’s several audiences moving through different stages of the relationship.

The objection changes as the customer does

Someone who subscribed three days ago isn’t asking the same question as someone who’s been opening emails for six months without buying.

One blended FAQ inevitably answers the wrong question for most of the list.

The issue isn’t the writing, it’s that the objection being addressed no longer matches where the reader is.

Organize objections by lifecycle, not just topic

Support tickets, live chats and customer emails already contain the answers.

Instead of building one master list of objections, tag them by subscriber tenure and purchase status. Patterns emerge surprisingly quickly.

Questions from new subscribers often revolve around trust and product fit. Questions from long-term non-buyers usually revolve around urgency, differentiation or timing. Existing customers introduce an entirely different set of concerns again.

Once those patterns become visible, the FAQ naturally becomes two or three different emails instead of one generic version.

Make at least one answer feel genuinely human

Every version should include at least one honest trade-off. Not every product is the fastest. Not every feature is perfect.

A specific concession often does more to build credibility than several paragraphs of reassurance because it signals the email is trying to inform rather than persuade.

Building lifecycle-specific FAQ emails manually means sorting customer conversations, identifying recurring objections and matching them to subscriber stage before writing anything.

Omnisend AI can do much of that work automatically by analyzing customer interactions, scoring subscriber segments and drafting lifecycle-specific emails based on where customers are in their journey.

Brands using Omnisend generate an average of $79 for every $1 spent, migration is free in as little as five days, and pricing is up to 35% lower than Klaviyo’s. Get started with ready-made prompts. You can read the guide

The best FAQ email isn’t the one that answers the most common objection. It’s the one that answers the question the reader is actually asking right now.

📍 Google ads is giving automation even more control

Google is changing how advertisers control language, local intent, and even how sponsored placements appear to shoppers. The common thread is clear: more decisions are shifting from explicit advertiser settings toward Google’s automated systems.

The Breakdown:

1. “Sponsored” could become “Featured Store” - Google is testing “Featured Store” alongside “Shop these top products” for sponsored Shopping placements. The underlying ad unit remains, but the softer language could change how consumers perceive commercial results.

2. Search is losing campaign-level language targeting - From late September, Search will rely on creative, landing pages, and Google’s understanding of user languages instead. Existing multilingual structures can remain, but compliance-focused advertisers may lose an important control layer.

3. PMax can now chase nearby, high-intent customers - Local customer optimization lets store-goal campaigns prioritize people navigating or searching nearby across Maps, Waze, and Search. Merchant Center feeds and online conversion goals are incompatible with it.

4. YouTube and Discover policies got clearer, not stricter - Google has rewritten its YouTube and Discover Feed ad requirements for readability. The company says there are no new requirements or enforcement changes, so advertisers don’t need to adjust campaigns.

Google Ads is steadily replacing advertiser-defined controls with automated interpretation while experimenting with how advertising itself is presented. Marketers gain simpler optimization, but increasingly surrender visibility and precise control over delivery.

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Depletion Creates Urgency - The crushed toothpaste tube visually communicates product depletion before you read anything, creating a strong behavioral cue that makes “time to restock” feel timely and natural.

Minimalism Builds Recall - The monochrome palette, oversized negative space and single hero product keep cognitive load extremely low, giving the creative strong visual hierarchy and premium branding recall.

Copy Feels Conversational - “It’s probably the end of the tube?” mirrors an everyday thought shoppers already have, making the ad feel relatable while smoothly moving them toward a replenishment decision.

Build ads around recognizable depletion signals like empty bottles, worn packaging or low stock. These cues activate replenishment intent without needing aggressive discounts or urgency language.

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🙂Some brands are getting a rich card. others are getting skipped entirely.

📊 Snapchat and AppLovin are posting the strongest returns, at budgets too small to matter

🏆 Ad of the day

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🙂Some brands are getting a rich card. others are getting skipped entirely.

Microsoft’s roadmap for Copilot introduces Rich Answer Cards, replacing plain AI responses with interactive cards for categories like weather, sports, finance, places, products, images, video and news. That sounds like a visual update. It’s actually a different retrieval system.

A citation and a rich card aren’t competing for the same thing.

One rewards good written content.

The other depends on structured data.

These are two different visibility contests

A page can rank well, earn AI citations and still never appear inside a Rich Answer Card.

Why?

Because the card isn’t built by summarizing your content. It’s built by pulling structured information such as price, availability, ratings or location directly into a predefined format.

Strong copy alone won’t qualify a page for a card if the underlying structured fields don’t exist.

Audit the pages that should qualify

Start with the parts of your business most likely to appear in Microsoft’s supported categories.

Product pages, store locations, reviews, pricing information and anything containing live or frequently updated information are the obvious places to look.

Then ask a simple question.

Is this information available as structured data, or is it only described in paragraphs?

A product page can explain everything perfectly for a human reader while providing almost nothing a rich card can actually display.

Visibility is becoming more than a content problem

This shift matters because AI search is expanding beyond generated text.

Some answers will continue rewarding strong written content. Others will increasingly depend on structured information that never appears inside the copy itself.

That’s why AirOps’ State of AEO 2026 looks beyond traditional citation tracking, covering how structured signals, third-party mentions and evolving AI retrieval patterns are changing visibility across platforms. You can get the State of AEO Report.

The next generation of AI search won’t have one winner for every query. Some brands will win the citation. Others will win the card. The brands preparing for both will be much harder to ignore.

📊 Snapchat and AppLovin are posting the strongest returns, at budgets too small to matter

Last week’s media buyer index split cleanly between platforms absorbing the most spend and platforms generating the best returns, a familiar pattern, but the gap between the two widened enough this week to make reallocation a more urgent conversation than usual.

The Breakdown:

CPC - AppLovin, TikTok, YouTube, and Google all saw click costs fall while Snapchat and Microsoft pushed higher, where CPCs dropped sharply alongside negative CvR like TikTok and AppLovin, hold budgets flat and refresh creative before treating lower costs as a scaling opportunity.

CAC - Meta, Google, YouTube, Snapchat, and Microsoft all improved while TikTok and AppLovin worsened, on platforms where CAC improved alongside positive ROAS like Snapchat and Microsoft, test a 15–20% budget increase this week and track whether gains hold at higher spend.

ROAS - Snapchat led at +11.55% and AppLovin posted +8.49% while TikTok (-2.91%) slipped, both Snapchat and AppLovin are posting top-tier returns at under 2% budget share each; open dedicated test budgets on both before the auction reprices the efficiency.

Meta holds 55.16% of spend with barely positive ROAS at +0.01%, three consecutive weeks of holding share without a meaningful return signal is a slow bleed, not a stable base. Snapchat at 0.77% posted +11.55% ROAS and +28.18% CvR simultaneously.

Redirect 10–15% of Meta’s incremental budget into Snapchat and AppLovin this week, set CAC ceilings on both, and review mid-cycle before committing to a full shift.

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Benefit Leads Fast - “Boost your mood and energy” gives the creative an immediate functional promise, while the large headline creates strong thumb-stop potential and keeps the value proposition easy to process.

Ingredients Create Proof - The exploded nuts and cinnamon visually reinforce what is inside the product, making the formula feel tangible while the focus and energy callouts connect ingredients to clear outcomes.

Offer Drives Action - The bold “Get 20% OFF” button creates clear CTA hierarchy, while the contrasting blue treatment makes the offer feel prominent without overpowering the product itself.

Show the ingredients physically surrounding the product, then attach one outcome to each side. This makes functional claims easier to believe and improves product communication quickly.

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🥲Keywords may not win citations

🤖 AI platforms are building the infrastructure around content and ads

🏆 Ad of the day

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🥲Keywords may not win citations

Most teams still assume keyword rankings and AI visibility are measuring the same thing. They aren’t. Traditional search tells you where your pages rank when someone searches. AI citations tell you which content models trust enough to quote. Sometimes those winners are the same. Often they aren’t.

That’s why looking at only one report can create a false sense of progress.

Compare the lists before making another content decision

Take your ten highest-performing topics from traditional search and compare them with the ten topics generating the most AI citations.

The overlap, or lack of it, tells you far more than either report on its own.

The goal isn’t forcing both lists to become identical.

It’s understanding why they differ.

Every gap points to a different opportunity

Pages that rank well but rarely earn citations usually don’t need another SEO overhaul.

More often, they need clearer structure, stronger standalone claims or better formatting that makes important information easier for AI systems to quote.

The opposite pattern is just as valuable.

If a topic consistently earns AI citations despite modest rankings, you’ve found an area where authority is already developing. Strengthening that content with additional supporting pages, original data or deeper coverage can help it grow across both search environments instead of treating AI visibility as a separate project.

Stop managing two strategies in two different reports

The comparison itself is where most teams get stuck.

Keyword rankings often live in one platform while AI citation tracking lives somewhere else, turning a simple analysis into a spreadsheet exercise that rarely happens consistently.

Semrush One brings traditional keyword research and AI visibility into the same workflow, making it much easier to compare rankings and citations topic by topic instead of manually reconciling separate reports every month. You can try Semrush One free for 7 days.

Winning Google doesn’t automatically mean you’re winning AI search.

The fastest way to see where your content strategy is actually working is to compare the two lists instead of assuming they’re already telling the same story.

🤖 AI platforms are building the infrastructure around content and ads

Anthropic is making AI-generated content easier to trace, while OpenAI is steadily building ChatGPT into a more mature advertising and commerce platform. Both shifts show how the AI layer surrounding everyday internet activity is becoming increasingly structured.

The Breakdown:

1. Claude is quietly watermarking its output - Claude now embeds imperceptible watermarks into generated text and adds signed C2PA metadata to supported files. The system applies across supported Claude products and models worldwide.

2. Detection comes with major caveats - A Claude mark only indicates that content may have been processed by Claude, not that Claude originally authored it. Heavy editing, short excerpts, screenshots, and format conversions can also destroy the signal.

3. ChatGPT Ads still has relevance problems - A 50,006-prompt study found ads on 25.94% of commercial prompts, with 14.35% appearing against unrelated topics. More strikingly, 96.37% of advertisers weren’t cited in the answer above their ad.

4. OpenAI is already preparing to scale advertising - OpenAI’s Yelp integration now completes bookings inside ChatGPT, while six job listings point toward a dedicated SMB ads organization staffed with talent from major advertising platforms.

AI platforms are moving beyond generating answers. Anthropic is building provenance into AI content, while OpenAI is assembling the targeting, commerce, measurement, and advertiser infrastructure needed to turn ChatGPT into a much larger commercial ecosystem.

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Social Proof Leads - The Trustpilot review sits at the top of the hierarchy, giving the ad immediate credibility and reducing conversion friction before shoppers even process the product benefits.

Benefits Feel Concrete - “26 vitamins and minerals,” “full for 3 to 5 hours,” and “high in protein” turn nutrition claims into fast, scannable reasons to believe.

Offer Feels Accessible - The £17.45 taster pack lowers trial friction, while the five-drink framing makes the offer feel specific, tangible and easier for first-time buyers to justify.

Lead with third-party validation, then surround the product with three measurable benefits and a low-friction trial offer. This compresses trust, value and action into one creative.

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Thanks for your support :) We'll be back again with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🫣The creator well is drying up?

🤖 Google and Meta add more AI automation and ad controls

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

Together with AirOps

Why your AI visibility keeps disappearing overnight

Only 30% of brands stay visible in an AI answer from one run to the next. Run the same prompt five times and just 20% show up in all five. That’s not a ranking problem.

Rankings barely move day to day. AI visibility does, and most teams are still measuring it with a dashboard built for the old game.

AirOps broke down what’s actually driving citations in 2026:

• Freshness compounds. Pages updated in the last 3 months are 3x more likely to get cited.

• Structure matters more than design. Clean heading hierarchy alone lifts citation odds 2.8x.

• Most of it happens off your site. 85% of brand mentions in AI search come from third-party sources, not your domain.

Five metrics replace the old scorecard: citation rate, mention rate, share of voice, sentiment, and source attribution. They need a weekly review, not a quarterly one.

If your GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) strategy still lives inside your SEO report, you’re measuring last quarter’s game.

Want the full breakdown on where citations come from and how to track them weekly?

Get the playbook

🫣The creator well is drying up?

When creator response rates start falling, the first instinct is usually to rewrite the outreach. Teams tweak subject lines, shorten DMs, adjust briefs and assume the problem sits somewhere inside the message.

That explanation feels logical, but recent creator economy data points to another possibility. More than half of Americans are posting less than they were five years ago, while demand for creator content continues to rise. Sometimes the outreach hasn’t become less effective. The market has simply become more competitive.

Start by checking whether the market changed

Before rewriting your process, compare the last six to twelve months.

Hold budget, outreach style and briefing quality as constant as possible, then review two metrics:

• Creator response rate

• Time to first content

If response rates have steadily declined while time to first content has increased, despite the process staying largely the same, you’re probably looking at a supply problem rather than an execution problem.

That’s an important distinction because each diagnosis leads to a different solution.

Different causes require different fixes

Many brands keep optimizing the first while quietly experiencing the second.

No amount of copywriting can create creators who aren’t available.

Manual sourcing becomes less effective as supply tightens

Cold outreach worked well when the creator pool was growing faster than demand.

Today, the same process often means searching profiles, sending dozens of messages, following up repeatedly and waiting weeks for enough responses to begin a campaign. The process hasn’t suddenly become inefficient. It’s operating in a market where more brands are competing for a smaller group of active creators.

That’s exactly where marketplaces begin changing the economics. Insense gives brands access to a vetted network of 100,000+ creators across 57 countries, with applications for new campaigns typically arriving within 48 hours instead of relying on weeks of one-to-one outreach. You can book a free strategy call by August 28 and receive $200 in platform credit toward your first campaign.

Before rewriting another outreach template, run the six-month audit first.

If the numbers point to shrinking creator supply rather than weaker outreach, the solution isn’t finding better words.

It’s finding a bigger pond.

🤖 Google and Meta add more AI automation and ad controls

Google and Meta are upgrading different parts of the advertising workflow. Google wants AI to handle more campaign analysis, while Meta is giving advertisers tighter control over who automation should never reach.

The Breakdown:

1. Google turns reporting conversational - Ask Advisor can now investigate campaign changes and answer natural-language questions about performance, competitors, and impression share, reducing the need to manually navigate multiple reports.

2. AI can build dashboards - Google Ads marketers can generate visual dashboards using text prompts, complete with real-time AI summaries explaining underlying trends. Similar dashboard capabilities are coming to Google Analytics.

3. Meta strengthens audience exclusions - Meta’s new exclusion-only audiences permanently prevent selected customer lists from receiving ads, helping businesses exclude opt-outs, legally restricted audiences, employees, or other unwanted recipients.

4. Automation gets clearer boundaries - Google is making AI more active in interpreting advertising data, while Meta is creating stronger targeting guardrails. Together, the updates show automation expanding alongside advertiser controls.

Advertising platforms are increasingly automating analysis, optimization, and targeting. The next advantage may come from using AI to reduce manual work while defining precise boundaries around where that automation should operate.

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Pairing Feels Memorable - Turning the two products into characters holding hands makes the routine instantly more memorable, while the “perfect match” hook simplifies complementary product positioning into one visual idea.

Hierarchy Stays Clean - The headline lands first, then the eye drops directly to the paired products, creating a simple visual hierarchy that keeps cognitive load low and supports mobile-first readability.

Playfulness Builds Recall - The illustrated arms, legs and heart motif add personality without hiding the packaging, creating a light pattern interrupt while keeping both SKUs highly recognizable.

When two products work better together, give them a relationship visually. Pairing, teamwork or character-based interaction can make bundle logic easier to understand and remember.

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We are concerned about everything DTC and its winning strategies. If you liked what you read, why not join the 50k+ marketers from 13k+ DTC brands who have already subscribed? Just follow this.

At ScaleUP, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. If you'd like to stay in touch, be sure to follow us EVERYWHERE🥰

Thanks for your support :) We'll be back again with more such content 🥳

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🔎 Search demand is now divided

📊 AI is reshaping ads, shopping and search measurement

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

🔎 Search demand is now divided

A study released this month analyzed more than one million high-volume keywords across 379 brands in eight industries.

The headline number says 29% of tracked search volume is declining, but that isn’t the real story. Roughly the same amount of demand is growing elsewhere, leaving overall search demand broadly stable. What’s changing is where that demand sits, and the dividing line is how completely AI can answer the query without sending someone anywhere else.

The split isn’t between good and bad keywords

It’s between answerable queries and decision-making queries.

The first category includes searches where a chatbot can satisfy the user’s need immediately, such as explaining a tax deduction or summarizing an investment fund. Those areas are declining the fastest, with FinTech down 37.7%.

The second category still requires judgment. Comparing products, evaluating alternatives or deciding what to buy pushes people beyond a single AI response, which is why categories like Lifestyle, down 15.2%, are holding up much better.

Each bucket rewards a different content strategy

For fully answerable queries, the objective is no longer maximizing clicks. It’s becoming the passage AI chooses to quote.

That means putting the answer near the top of the page, writing it as a complete, self-contained explanation and avoiding long introductions or unnecessary SEO filler that separates the question from the answer.

Comparison and purchase keywords need almost the opposite treatment. Visitors still want pricing, feature comparisons, trade-offs and proof before making a decision, so those pages should focus on helping someone evaluate options rather than simply answering a question.

Applying the same content template to both categories usually underperforms because each serves a different type of search behaviour.

Audit your keyword portfolio before changing your strategy

Industry averages only reveal the direction of travel.

The more useful exercise is reviewing your own keyword set and separating informational searches from comparison and buying-intent searches before deciding what success should look like for each.

Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit combines traditional keyword tracking with AI mentions and citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI experiences, making it possible to see which keywords are competing for citations and which are still competing for clicks. You can try it for free for 7 days.

Search demand hasn’t disappeared. It’s split into two different games, and brands still using one strategy for both are usually losing ground in each.

📊 AI is reshaping ads, shopping and search measurement

OpenAI is rapidly building ChatGPT into a performance advertising platform, while Google is bringing generative AI deeper into both Shopping ads and conversational search measurement.

The Breakdown:

1. ChatGPT Ads targets conversions - ChatGPT Ads now supports oCPC product-feed campaigns, dynamic URL parameters, bulk CPC migration, and multi-product carousel testing, giving ecommerce advertisers more tools to optimize directly toward conversions.

2. OpenAI strengthens measurement - Triple Whale, Hightouch, and Sonar Optimize integrations improve attribution and conversion signals. Pixel diagnostics are expanding, while Automatic Advanced Matching becomes default for new pixels and existing ones from August 17.

3. ChatGPT leads, Gemini accelerates - ChatGPT remains preferred by 33.7% of recent U.S. generative AI users versus Gemini’s 18.2%, but Gemini gained 6.8 percentage points while ChatGPT declined 5.9 points.

4. Google experiments across ads and search - Google is testing AI-generated Shopping ad descriptions. Search Console also records AI Mode follow-ups like “Yes“ as new queries, giving conversational searches separate impressions, clicks, and positions.

AI is moving beyond answering questions into the commercial infrastructure around discovery. Advertising, optimization, attribution, creative generation, and even the definition of a search query are changing together.

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Context Makes Relevant - Placing the snack directly into a stressful work scene gives the product an immediate consumption occasion, strengthening message-market fit and making the creative feel behaviorally grounded.

Color Stops Scroll - The yellow, pink and mint palette creates a loud pattern interrupt, while the oversized floating pack keeps visual hierarchy focused on the product despite the busy scene.

Hook Connects Emotion - “Take a bite, and your work stress is out” links the product to emotional relief, giving the snack a stronger role than taste alone and improving memorability.

Build creatives around high-friction daily moments like work stress, commuting or deadlines, then position the product as the immediate reward that breaks that tension.

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🗡️AI citation is a double edged sword

🔍 Search is putting up more walls

🏆 Ad of the day

If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!

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🗡️AI Citation is a double edged sword

Run the same AI prompt five times and you’ll often get five slightly different answers. Recent research found that only 20% of brands appeared in all five responses. The explanation isn’t simply that AI is unpredictable.

The models tend to cite brands across a wide range of topics, but they consistently recommend brands only where they’ve repeatedly demonstrated authority on the same narrow subject.

That’s an important distinction because being mentioned and being the answer are two very different outcomes.

Repetition matters more than breadth

The instinct is usually to publish one comprehensive page that covers an entire topic.

That approach makes sense for traditional SEO.

It’s less effective for retrieval systems that surface individual passages instead of entire pages.

A more durable strategy is to break one broad topic into multiple focused pages, each answering a specific question within the same subject area and linking naturally to the others.

The objective isn’t creating more content. It’s creating more opportunities for the same topic to be reinforced.

Authority isn’t built only on your own website

The same pattern applies beyond owned content.

Research shows that 85% of brand mentions in AI answers come from third-party sources, not brand-owned websites.

That means repetition should extend across multiple independent sources.

The same topic appearing in a guest article, a forum discussion, a review and a podcast creates a much stronger signal than repeating it only on your own domain. Independent confirmation is one of the clearest indicators that the expertise exists outside the brand’s own marketing.

Measure concentration, not volume

Most teams review citations page by page. A more useful audit groups them by topic.

If one citation appears across twelve unrelated subjects, you’ve created visibility.

If the same three or four topics accumulate repeated citations across both your own content and third-party sources, you’ve started building the consistency AI models reward.

AirOps’ latest research supports the same direction. Pages refreshed within the previous three months were cited three times more often, while well-structured heading hierarchies increased citation likelihood by 2.8×.

Their playbook also recommends tracking citation rate, mention rate, share of voice, sentiment and source attribution on a weekly basis instead of relying on occasional snapshots. You can get the playbook

Twenty mentions spread across twenty topics can look impressive in a report.

Four topics that AI consistently associates with your brand are usually far more valuable because that’s the difference between being cited occasionally and becoming the answer repeatedly.

🔍 Search is putting up more walls

Google and Cloudflare are making automated access to search and websites harder, while new controls are emerging for AI visibility. At the same time, Google is experimenting with giving paid ads even more clickable space.

The Breakdown:

Google Adds Sign-In - Google is testing sign-ins instead of captchas for deeper searches. If expanded, SEO tools that scrape deeper rankings could have a much harder time collecting reliable SERP data.

Googlebot Could Get Blocked - From September 15, Cloudflare’s AI-training blocks will include mixed-purpose crawlers like Googlebot. Brands need to audit settings or risk accidentally preventing Google from crawling their websites.

AI Opt-Out Confusion - Google-Extended doesn’t block content from AI Overviews, where Top Stories appear on 15.5% of U.S. trending news queries. Publishers need Search Console’s generative AI exclusion instead.

Clarity Tracks AI Discovery - Microsoft Clarity now separates branded and non-branded AI queries. Marketers can see whether AI visibility comes from existing brand demand or people discovering them through broader searches.

Ads Get More Clickable - Google Ads is testing keyword-rich clickable text inside descriptions. The links lead to the same landing page, potentially giving searchers more ways to engage with sponsored results.

Search visibility is becoming harder to measure and easier to accidentally restrict. Audit Cloudflare bot settings before September 15, understand Google’s correct AI controls, and start tracking branded versus non-branded AI discovery separately.

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Offer Leads Instantly - The oversized “30% OFF” gives the creative immediate thumb-stop power, while “Fine Hair Rescue Set” quickly connects the promotion to a specific high-intent problem.

Benefits Feel Specific - “Density Support” and “Lightweight Volume” assign a clear job to each product, reducing cognitive load and making the two-step system feel purposeful rather than bundled arbitrarily.

Pastels Feel Premium - The soft blue and pink gradient creates a polished beauty aesthetic, while the oversized floating pack shots keep visual hierarchy focused on the products and strengthen branding recall.

Instead of discounting random SKUs together, group products around one customer problem and label each product’s role. That improves offer framing and makes bundles easier to justify.

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Wanna put out your message in front of over 50,000 best marketers and decision makers?

Find our Partner Kit here🤝

We are concerned about everything DTC and its winning strategies. If you liked what you read, why not join the 50k+ marketers from 13k+ DTC brands who have already subscribed? Just follow this.

At ScaleUP, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. If you'd like to stay in touch, be sure to follow us EVERYWHERE🥰

Thanks for your support :) We'll be back again with more such content 🥳