TLDR Marketing 2026-05-07

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Major AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta are rapidly increasing spending on linear TV ads. Some are close to matching or surpassing their 2025 totals in just a few months. The goal is to shape public perception and drive AI adoption. Consumer sentiment is mixed and trust in AI remains low. Big campaigns, including Super Bowl spots, position AI as useful and accessible. Trust building is becoming a central competitive focus.

Spending on boosting influencer posts is on track to overtake what brands pay creators for sponsored content by 2028. The trend is driven by shrinking organic reach on major platforms, which has made paid promotion essential for extracting ROI from influencer campaigns. Some agencies now operate on a performance model where brands promote creator content and track downstream actions like customer acquisition costs. Creators still hold leverage as the source of content brands need to amplify, but the economics increasingly favor those who can demonstrate consistent organic engagement.

Content freshness in SEO is relative, not absolute. Google compares a page's age to competing results rather than its publish date. Older pages can rank as fresh if rivals are older, while newer pages can be seen as stale if competitors are more recent. Track the last updated age of the top results for key queries and compare it to your own pages. When you fall behind the SERP median, make substantial updates like rewrites, new data, or intent shifts, not minor edits.

Email A/B tests are often interpreted too narrowly, with marketers rolling out "winners" based on a single metric without examining what happened further down the funnel. One example showed a "winning" subject line with higher click-through rates actually produced lower conversion rates, lower average order values, and less revenue per recipient than the losing version. Test results are shaped by timing, audience composition, inbox conditions, and competing messages, making them unreliable as a permanent strategic direction. The recommended shift is to use testing as a learning system focused on behavioral patterns rather than isolated wins.

Target is overhauling its creator strategy after winding down its 2023 affiliate program, replacing it with two distinct offerings. Club Target is a gamified platform for smaller creators with as few as 500 followers, rewarding them for completing weekly challenges on TikTok and Instagram. It already has around 8,000 participants after its pilot. Target Ambassadors is an invite-only program for established influencers with tiered commissions and campaign opportunities.

If AI handles discovery and research for buyers, your site needs to work for retrieval bots, not just humans. Scrunch reveals how AI agents experience your site—what gets surfaced, ignored, and why. Get a free AI site audit to find content gaps and technical blockers.

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Some managed WordPress hosts may be silently blocking AI crawlers at the platform level, preventing sites from appearing in AI-generated search results. An investigation into one site hosted on WP Engine found that bots like ClaudeBot and GPTBot were receiving 429 rate-limit responses on cache-miss requests, while browser and Googlebot requests passed through normally. The block operates below both customer Cloudflare dashboards and WordPress security plugins, making it invisible to standard SEO audits.

WebMCP lets you expose structured site actions directly to AI agents, which creates a new surface for discovery and conversion. Google's demo shows that implementation relies on defining clear “tools” such as search and filtering, each with strict inputSchema and outputSchema that control what an agent can request and return. This structure turns site functionality into machine-readable actions, which makes it easier for AI systems to interact with and recommend your offerings. Registering these tools through navigator.modelContext is the key step that makes them callable, which effectively opens your site to agent-driven experiences. You can use this to shape how AI agents surface products, control outputs, and guide user journeys through predefined actions instead of relying on traditional page crawling.

LinkedIn is pushing short-form video, but performance is dropping. Video views are down 36% year-over-year while engagement per post is only up 7%. At the same time, overall reach has fallen sharply, especially for company pages, as organic visibility shrinks and personal profiles dominate the feed. The 360Brew ranking system prioritizes dwell time and depth of engagement, which favors documents and carousels over video. Despite platform messaging, video is becoming less efficient while text and carousel formats consistently outperform.

Meta is expanding AI systems to detect underage users on Facebook and Instagram by analyzing photos, videos, and profile activity for cues like height, bone structure, captions, and interactions. The goal is to estimate age, not identify individuals. Accounts flagged as under 13 may be deactivated until age verification is completed. The system is already live in select regions and will expand globally alongside stricter Teen Accounts with added safety controls for younger users.

5 Claude prompts to help with job applications.

Millennials still lean on structure and carefully explained benefits, while Gen Z has little patience for that.

Founders either overdo personal content and lack positioning, make it too generic to stand out, or avoid it and lose the reach that drives their funnel.