Dear Media Buyer
👀 60% of your week just got automated so here’s how you can still be the MVP, and more!
Howdy Readers 🥰
In this newsletter, you’ll find:
👀 Dear Media Buyer, 60% of your week just got automated
🤖 Bots now outnumber humans on the web
🏆 Ad of the Day
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Together with AirOps
Google didn’t update Search at I/O 2026. It replaced it.
AI Mode is expanding. The Search box just got its biggest AI upgrade in decades. Search agents now crawl the web and answer for users in the background, before anyone reaches your page.
If you’re still grading yourself on rankings and traffic, you’re scoring a game that no longer exists.
On June 17th, Chris Long, co-founder of Nectiv, breaks down what changed, what it means for B2B visibility, and how to build the workflows that get you cited in AI search.
In 60 minutes, you’ll get:
The I/O 2026 updates that belong on your roadmap now
How to measure visibility past rankings: citations, prompt coverage, mentions
What makes content surface in fan-out and decision-stage queries
The workflows to audit, refresh, and publish content built for AI search
The old rules are gone. This session covers what replaced them.
Can’t make it live? Register anyway and get the recording in your inbox within 24 hours.
👀 Dear Media Buyer, 60% of your week just got automated
Meta’s official AI connectors launched in April. Claude and ChatGPT can now connect directly to ad accounts, pull every active competitor ad from the Ads Library, scan for creative fatigue, detect audience overlap, draft briefs from winning patterns, and produce the weekly digest before the first coffee is finished.
The work that defined the majority of a media buyer’s week collapsed into a single instruction.
The buyer still running those processes manually is not being thorough. They are being slow at something that got automated.
The audit that tells you where you actually stand:
Pull your last two weeks of activity and tag everything into one of two columns. Automatable now: data pulls, fatigue checks, weekly reports, competitor screenshots, overlap audits, brief drafts from existing patterns.
Judgment-required: creative direction, strategic budget shifts, hypothesis formation, reading a competitor’s strategic move, synthesizing what customers are actually saying.
Most buyers find 50-70% of their week sits in the first column. That is not a reflection of how good they are. It is a reflection of what the role was designed around before the connector existed.
The shift is not about learning new tools. It is about redesigning what the role is for. The connector pulls, scans, audits, reports, and drafts. It cannot decide which creative bet to make next quarter, which audience hypothesis is worth backing, or what a competitor’s scaling pattern actually signals about their positioning. That gap is where the role lives now.
The new shape looks something like this:
30% prompting, reviewing, and correcting connector output
50% strategic decisions on tests, budget allocation, and hypothesis prioritization
20% creative direction and customer insight synthesis
Most paid media job descriptions are still hiring for platform proficiency, dashboard fluency, and optimization tactics. Those are now the baseline the connector clears before the buyer shows up.
The criteria that actually matters going forward: judgment on when the connector is wrong, instinct on which questions to ask the data, and the ability to turn a pattern into a creative bet.
The buyers who make this shift become the product managers of paid media. The ones who don’t are running a process that leadership will eventually notice takes twenty seconds.
🤖 Bots now outnumber humans on the web
Cloudflare, Google, and independent SEO researchers all highlighted major shifts in search this week. AI agents are generating more web traffic than humans, Google’s rankings are rewarding better intent matching, and the company is reminding marketers to be cautious about third-party SEO advice.
The Breakdown:
AI agents cross a major milestone -Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince revealed that bots now account for 57.3% of webpage requests worldwide, overtaking human traffic much earlier than his original 2027 prediction.
Authority alone isn’t enough anymore - Aleyda Solis’s analysis of Google’s May core update found that some large sites lost visibility while original sources gained ground, with search intent and result-type fit becoming increasingly important.
The right format is winning - The analysis suggests pages performed best when they matched what Google believed users wanted, whether that meant a news source, original research, local result, or another content type.
Official guidance remains the source of truth - Google published new advice reminding marketers that third-party SEO platforms do not have access to Google’s internal ranking systems and should not be treated as officially endorsed tools.
AI agents are changing how traffic reaches websites, while Google’s ranking systems are placing greater emphasis on delivering the right type of result for each query. For publishers and marketers, understanding intent and relying on first-party data may matter more than ever.
🏆 Ad of the Day
What Works:
Routine Positioning - “How do you start your day right?” anchors the product to an existing morning habit. The brand is competing for ritual space, not shelf space.
Identity Signaling - The sunscreen isn’t presented as skincare. It’s presented as evidence of being disciplined, informed, and self-caring before the day begins.
Platform Mimicry - The fake Instagram interface lowers ad recognition. Users process it more like social content than traditional promotional creative.
If your product benefits from daily use, stop advertising outcomes and start advertising rituals. Habits create stronger retention than benefits because consumers eventually stop evaluating and start repeating.
🥳Events
🔥 Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder of SparkToro, Is Revealing How AI Forms Brand Opinions From Signals Most Marketers Never Controlled
Today | Virtual Event | Free
AI already has an opinion about your brand, and you didn’t write it. Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder of SparkToro, and Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search at Wix, show you exactly which signals shape it and how to own them across 30 sessions zero vendor pitches.
Can’t make it live? Every session lands in your inbox.
🔥 How to Know If a Creator Will Move Perception or Just Move Impressions Before You Sign Them
June 11 | Virtual Event | Free
Reach and fit are two different things, and most rosters confuse them. Eric Ford, formerly Global Communications at L’Oréal, and Brooks Miller, EVP of Creator Marketing at Edelman, show exactly how brand-side teams predict creator performance before a launch, not after.
Can’t make it live? Every session lands in your inbox.
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