editor, Author at Mediastreet

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YouTubers aren’t relying on ad revenue anymore — here’s how some are diversifying

April 2, 2026 No Comments

YouTube has become the biggest platform out there, offering tons of opportunities for creators to earn a living. Back in June, the company reported that its creative ecosystem added over $55 billion to the U.S. GDP and created more than 490,000 full-time jobs.

However, many YouTubers have reduced their reliance on ad revenue and brand deals. There are several reasons for this shift. First, ad revenue can be unpredictable. With YouTube continually updating its policies, some creators find it challenging to secure ads for their videos, which can negatively impact their earnings. They’ve also realized that income from these streams can vanish unexpectedly.

Recognizing the volatility of platform-dependent revenue, many YouTubers are no longer just creators. They’re vertically integrated media companies with parallel businesses, including product lines, brick-and-mortar ventures, and consumer brands that can outlast algorithm changes and policy shifts.

In some cases, these side businesses are growing faster and more sustainably than their YouTube channels.

MrBeast

Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, who has 442 million subscribers, isn’t just one of the platform’s biggest creators — he’s its most aggressive entrepreneur.

In November 2025, for example, The Times reported that the YouTuber is set to open a theme park in Saudi Arabia, with rides inspired by his video content. Among other features, there will supposedly be a game where six players stand on trap doors and must press a button when it lights up or fall down.

MrBeast is also venturing into telecommunications. He plans to establish a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which could involve partnering with one of the major operators, such as AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon.

Additionally, the YouTuber was spotted filing a trademark application for a mobile app that offers banking, financial advisory, and crypto exchange services. In February 2026, MrBeast announced the acquisition of Step, the banking app targeting Gen Z users.

But there’s so much more. What started with a merchandise store in 2018 — ShopMrBeast — has exploded into a broad business portfolio, including his now three-year-old snack brand, Feastables.

Feastables’ initial product was the “MrBeast Bar,” a chocolate bar that generated over $10 million in sales within its first 72 hours, selling over 1 million bars at launch. As of today, Feastables is more profitable than his YouTube content and even his “Beast Games” competition series on Prime Video. In 2024, Feastables generated roughly $250 million in revenue and over $20 million in profit, while his media business lost approximately $80 million.

Other ventures include his packaged food brand Lunchly (co-founded with YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI), the toy line MrBeast Lab, MrBeast Burger, and the analytics platform Viewstats. He even attempted to buy the U.S. operations of TikTok by joining the American Investor Consortium, a group of investors led by Employer.com founder Jesse Tinsley.

Emma Chamberlain

Emma Chamberlain, who rose to fame as a teen vlogger in 2016, now has over 12 million subscribers and has found success in the beverage industry.

She launched her coffee brand, Chamberlain Coffee, in 2019, which offers a variety of products, including cold brew, coffee pods, ground and whole bean options, as well as tea and matcha. Notably, other YouTubers have followed suit, such as Jacksepticeye with his Top of the Mornin’ Coffee brand and Philip DeFranco with Wake & Make Coffee.

In 2023, Chamberlain Coffee had a significant year, introducing ready-to-drink canned lattes and reaching approximately $20 million in revenue, according to Forbes. The brand recently experienced even more substantial growth, opening its first physical location in January. Previously, it had only an online and retail presence at places like Target, Sprouts, and Walmart.

Although Chamberlain Coffee faced some challenges in 2024 due to supplier issues, it’s expected to rebound, with projected revenue growth of over 50% by 2025, reaching more than $33 million, according to Business Insider. The brand is also aiming for profitability by 2026.

Logan Paul

Logan Paul (23.6 million subscribers) is now known for his wrestling career but was earlier known for numerous controversies, like an infamous 2017 video and an allegedly scammy NFT project, CryptoZoo.

He also gained attention through his energy drink brand, Prime, which achieved rapid viral success in 2022. The brand, co-founded by YouTuber KSI, surpassed $1.2 billion in sales in 2023, a figure far exceeding what most content creators earn from views, ads, and brand deals. However, it has since faced declining sales, regulatory scrutiny for its high caffeine content, and lawsuits from business partners. Sales have particularly cooled in the U.K., where revenue dropped by about 70% from 2023 to 2024.

Another venture of his, Maverick Apparel, made between $30 million and $40 million in 2020.

His brother, Jake Paul, is also involved in various ventures, including co-founding the Anti Fund, which has touted past investments in OpenAI, Anduril, Ramp, and Cognition, among others. The younger Paul also owns a grooming line, called W, and a mobile betting platform called Betr.

Ryan’s World

Ryan’s World, hosted by 13-year-old Ryan Kaji, is another prominent YouTuber with a staggering following. Ryan rose to fame through his toy reviews and unboxing videos, which have captivated nearly 40 million young viewers.

In addition to his YouTube success, Kaji has expanded his brand through a line of toys and apparel that are sold in major retail chains and that reportedly generated over $250 million in revenue in 2020. Kaji and his family have since diversified their ventures, including launching a TV show and an app that provides educational content tailored for children.

Rosanna Pansino

Rosanna Pansino is a popular baker on YouTube known for her baking tutorials and themed treats. With 14.8 million subscribers, she gained fame for her recipes inspired by pop culture, gaming, and movies.

Beyond YouTube, Pansino has released several cookbooks that have been well-received, expanding her Nerdy Nummies brand. She also sells baking tools at several retailers, such as Amazon.

Other YouTubers have ventured into cookware and food products as additional revenue streams. Notable examples include cook and author Andrew Rea, known by the pseudonym Babish, who launched his Babish Cookware brand in 2021, as well as comedy duo Rhett & Link, who sell MishMash Cereal.

Michelle Phan

Michelle Phan gained fame in 2007 with her makeup tutorials, becoming one of the first beauty influencers to effectively monetize her content. In addition to her successful YouTube career, she co-founded the beauty subscription service Ipsy, which has become highly popular. Phan also has her own makeup line, EM Cosmetics.

Huda Kattan

Huda Kattan founded the globally recognized beauty brand Huda Beauty in 2013. She sold a minority stake to private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners in 2017 but bought it back in June after investor pressure to bring in senior leadership clashed with her vision for the fast-moving brand, which reportedly brings in hundreds of millions of dollars in sales each year.

Many influencers have created their own makeup brands. Other well-known makeup brands launched by YouTube influencers include Jeffree Star Cosmetics and Tati Beauty.

Feature image credit: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

By Lauren Forristal

Lauren covers media, streaming, apps and platforms at TechCrunch. You can contact or verify outreach from Lauren by emailing [email protected]

Sourced from TechCrunch

In News

An agency guide to working from home effectively

April 2, 2026 No Comments

By Jamie Clifton

As an inbound marketing agency, Bolt has been fortunate enough that all our team are working from home during this time. This transition hasn’t been without its challenges and has taken some getting used to for everyone involved. Trying to run a business and keep all your employees, clients and customers connected takes real adjustment.

After a few weeks of working from home, it’s safe to say we’ve learnt a lot in a short period of time. Here are Bolt’s key takeaways from working from home effectively:

Hannah Benton, creative lead:

I’ve really enjoyed building my little home office on my dining table, but there are challenges. The dog doesn’t understand I’m not at home and available for playtime or door opening duties constantly. I have to refill the kettle a lot and there are still not enough hours in the day. But the positives are that I still feel connected to the team. Living alone means I really value time on calls with the team and seeing their faces (I do that TV presenter thing where I wave at everyone, cringe). There’s no commute anymore and we get to share more dog pics!

Tom Wright, apprentice web developer:

Good communication is key, even more so at home. As there’s so much distance between people, you can’t just shout across the room. Keeping everyone up to date about what’s happening in the company and our general daily lives really helps to keep motivation high. It means everyone is in the know about client goings-on which is needed when working on large projects.

Ellie-Paige Moore, inbound digital lead:

Flexibility has never been an issue for us here at bolt but working from home for the foreseeable future just adds that little bit more. You see a lot of comments and views of people saying to treat the day as if you were in the office which is definitely still something you should do. But if you need to do a little bit of cleaning that you were going to do in the evening and have a spare minute, I say go for it! It takes our eyes and minds away from the screen for a short while and it does give you that flexibility. So even if you’ve worked your full working day, you’ve been able to do those little jobs around the house meaning your evening is fully dedicated to yourself and relaxation.

Jamie Clifton, head of commercial and strategy:

My main takeaway is walking and talking. Usually, in office-style meetings, you might see people sitting around desks, slumped in a poor posture and yawning because they didn’t sleep well the night before, for example. It’s not necessarily people being disinterested but they’re not in their most engaged position. I’ve seen clients, the team and myself be more enthusiastic when walking and talking during conference calls. The way that we convey ourselves is better when standing up and we come up with more ideas. Are walk and talk meetings the future?

Thomas Coughlan, inbound marketing executive:

Having Cloud storage in place has made working from home a lot easier as all our work is accessible for everyone when they need it. It’s meant that there’s no work left in the office as we can access it wherever we are. Having work saved in Google Drive has meant that storage can be saved on my laptop. Using Google Sheets and Docs allows us to work in the same documents without having to be sitting next to each other. This means we can still collaborate on projects by jumping on a call and working on a document.

A downside of working from home though is with more people working from home, the internet can sometimes be slow or cut out completely for a minute or two which isn’t great when most of the work is done online.

James Coughlan, head of operations:

Having a dedicated workspace and great music is what helps me when working from home. Your own area to work away from distractions reduces the dreaded procrastination, as well as making sure I keep my work-life balance separate. Music also helps me zone into the workspace I’ve created and keeps me on point throughout the day.

Ella Mawer, digital designer:

A positive take away from working from home is that I can skip the commute to work every day. Travelling to work for one hour ten minutes takes up a lot of time and is costly with the money I spend on fuel. Having zero commute has freed up my morning and saved so much money. Usually, time is wasted travelling but now I can use it more effectively, like completing a morning workout, carrying out household chores and getting an early start to the day. I’m completing my daily tasks earlier and having more time in the evening when I’ve finished work to wind down, relax and have more time with loved ones.

Laura Greenhalgh, copywriter:

Wear whatever you want! We’ve all heard it somewhere that we should wear what we’d wear to the office while working from home. It’s supposed to be good for routine and get you in the work mindset but for most people, it just isn’t realistic. You should put on whatever you feel comfortable and productive in. Whether that’s the same pair of joggers all week, your gym leggings, pyjamas or dressing gown – wear it!

Sam Blevins, graphic designer:

Working from home has had its challenges. From sharing workspaces with family to relying on messaging or phone calls for communication instead of the usual face-to-face interaction we’d have in the studio. With that said, I believe we’re pulling together and working as efficiently as we can to ensure morale remains high.

So there you have it, bolt’s key takeaways from working from home. Communication is a major issue that’s required a lot more effort from the team to stay as connected as possible. Comfort and flexibility are everything. Whether that’s being in your pyjamas, listening to your favourite playlist or breaking up with the day with the washing up – you can keep your mind focused and productive. Plus, there’s no commute which means we’ve all got time to spare and money saved up!

By Jamie Clifton

Sourced from The Drum

In News

E-Commerce: 5 Small Tweaks That Make Buying Online Feel Effortless

April 1, 2026 No Comments

Sourced from Parlé

Most people don’t set aside time to shop online. They squeeze it in between real life.

When an online store feels confusing or demanding, that moment disappears fast. Little things like unclear pricing, extra steps, added friction, or missing answers create hesitation where there shouldn’t be any.

The simple truth is, making e-commerce feel easier rarely requires major changes. It’s typically about smoothing the rough edges and removing the small frustrations people notice immediately.

Below are five small tweaks that make buying online feel effortless:

01. Guest Checkout

When someone is ready to click buy, the last thing they want to do is recount part of their life story just to gain access to a checkout.

Letting people purchase without committing removes that pressure and keeps the momentum going. If accounts matter to your business, the invitation can come later, once trust is already built.

A simple prompt after payment feels helpful instead of demanding.

02. Real Product Photography

Buying online already asks people to trust what they can’t try or touch. Real photography helps close that gap, even when shot in a home studio.

When shoppers see products in an everyday kind of way, not a studio-perfect way, they get a clearer sense of scale, texture, and how the item will fit into their real life. That clarity matters far more than the perception of perfection.

When your product images are too perfect, people wonder what you’re trying to hide. Real photos do the opposite. They reassure customers that what they see is what they’ll get.

03. Visible Delivery Costs

Delivery costs shouldn’t ever be a surprise waiting at the end of checkout.

Most shoppers would appreciate knowing what the costs are upfront so they know what the real total is before they get invested. It lets them make a clear decision instead of feeling cornered at the last step.

Clear delivery pricing also reflects well on your ecommerce fulfillment, because it shows you’ve thought through the full experience, not just the sale. Customers know what they’re paying, what they’re getting, and what exactly happens next.

04. Remove Guesswork

When people shop online, they’re usually doing it in the gaps of a normal day – between meetings, in the carpool line, and on the couch with one eye on the TV.

So if your store makes them work for basic info, they’re going to get out of there so fast. No one wants to increase their daily mental taxation. No hunting, no “maybe it’s here”, no fine print surprises.

That kind of clarity offers immediate relief. It tells customers you’ve thought it through, and it makes them feel safer spending money with you.

05. Use Trust Signals

Most shoppers aren’t looking for proof stacked sky-high.

They’re just checking for a few signs that everything is legit before they continue. A handful of honest reviews, an easy to follow returns policy, and payment options they recognize do plenty of the work without drawing immediate attention to themselves.

The goal here is reassurance that feels normal and expected. When trust shows up that way, customers don’t hesitate or second-guess.

Conclusion

Work on these five elements above to remove friction so buying feels almost forgettable – in the best possible way! Get these basics right, and you won’t need to work so hard for cart conversions.

Feature image credit: V H on Unsplash

Sourced from Parlé

In News

Why Brands That Still Run Ads Are Losing to Brands That Tell Stories

April 1, 2026 No Comments

By Jonny Caplan | Edited by Micah Zimmerman

Modern brands can no longer buy attention through advertising — they must earn it by becoming storytellers people choose to spend time with.

Key Takeaways

People don’t remember ads. They remember stories that reflect who they are and what they value.
Attention isn’t bought anymore; it’s earned through meaning, emotion and sustained narrative.

We are living through the age of brand-built entertainment.

This is not a marketing trend, and it is not a creative fad. It is a structural shift in how attention is earned, how trust is built, and how value is created. Brands are no longer competing only with each other. They are competing with entertainment, culture and story itself.

For decades, brands relied on repetition and interruption. You bought media, you pushed messages and you hoped frequency would do the work. That model is breaking down because attention has fundamentally changed. Audiences are more selective, more distracted and far less tolerant of anything that feels like an advert. The moment something feels transactional, people scroll past it.

As a result, brands are struggling to sell to their customers in the normal way. Not because their products are worse, but because the mechanics of persuasion have shifted. People do not want to be marketed to. They want to feel something. They want to be engaged. They want to be drawn into a narrative in which they recognise themselves.

Content is changing

That is why we are seeing such a sharp rise in vertical dramas, short-form series, mini dramas and episodic storytelling designed specifically for mobile and social platforms. These formats are not a downgrade from television. They are a response to how people actually consume content today. Short episodes, strong hooks, emotional continuity and characters that return again and again.

What brands are beginning to understand is that audiences do not build relationships with products. They build relationships with stories. When a brand becomes part of a story world, rather than an interruption around it, the dynamic changes completely. Trust forms, then memory and then attachment.

This is where brands stop behaving like advertisers and start behaving like media companies.

At that point, the focus shifts away from surface-level messaging and towards meaning. It is no longer about how a product looks, but what it represents. This is not a new idea. It is an old one, articulated long before marketing departments existed.

As Aristotle remarked, “Art aims to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” That is exactly what is happening now. Brands that move into storytelling are no longer selling features. They are expressing values, identity and emotional truth.

I have been working at the intersection of brands and media for over twenty years, and the last five in particular have made this shift impossible to ignore. Media companies are learning how to think like brands, and brands are learning how to build studios, intellectual property and story engines. The line between the two has collapsed because audiences no longer separate them. They only decide what is worth their time.

AI has accelerated this change, but it has not altered the fundamentals. Production is faster, distribution is cheaper and experimentation is easier than ever. But as the volume of content increases, meaning becomes scarcer. Technology does not replace storytelling. It amplifies the importance of those who know how to do it well.

By Jonny Caplan

Edited by Micah Zimmerman

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

The 3 Influencer Marketing Misconceptions That Could Hurt Your Brand

March 31, 2026 No Comments

BY ANNABEL BURBA

Influencer marketing experts share the most common misconceptions about their field.

When Stephen Titus and his co-founders launched London-based influencer marketing agency Faved in 2022, the creator economy was still proving itself. While major consumer brands had been going all in on influencers for years, much of the business world questioned the value of creator-led advertising campaigns.

“We as a platform—and as an industry—often had to go to brands and convince them of the power of influencer marketing,” he says.

But over the last few years, that changed, according to Titus. The CEO rarely has to sell the idea of partnering with creators to prospective customers anymore. “Businesses are self-evangelized on creator marketing,” he says. Ad spend data backs this up. In 2022, brands planned to spend $18.4 billion on creator economy ads in the U.S., according to a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. In 2026, the firm expects that figure to reach $43.9 billion.

But people still get plenty of things wrong about influencer marketing. Here’s what Titus and other agency founders say are the most common misconceptions they encounter during conversations with executives and founders.

Misconception 1: Influencer marketing doesn’t work for high-intent products

While many business owners now know how valuable influencer marketing can be, Titus reports that a number of them still think it only works for “impulse purchases” like protein powders and supplements.

“A lot of people hold themselves back because they feel that their product isn’t suited to influencer marketing,” he says.

While Titus admits that he’s biased, he adds that, based on the data Faved measures across brands in different categories, “there is no product to which influencer marketing doesn’t apply, just as much as there is no product to which paid media or Google or Facebook doesn’t apply.”

Misconception 2: You’ll get results by partnering with any popular creator

Dylan Huey, the founder and CEO of Reach, a Los Angeles-based creator economy company, argues that when brands don’t see the return on investment they hoped to, it’s not because influencer marketing doesn’t work. “It does work,” he says. “The way that you’re going about doing it, strategy-wise, doesn’t work.”

“The problem that we see,” he adds, “is that small business owner Jimmy will be like, ‘Oh my God, my wife’s friend is an influencer with 20,000 followers, and she said she’s going to promote us for free.’” But the creator in question built her following by posting videos about food, for example, while Jimmy is building a tech platform for investing.

“Just because they’re a creator doesn’t mean that their audience makes sense,” Huey says. “And sometimes, having a relationship with someone already doesn’t mean that’s the best creator that you should invest in—especially as you’re trying to grow and get more market share as a company.”

Instead, he advises business owners to stick with creators whose audiences fit their ideal customer profile. If you’re struggling, figure out which influencers your social-media savvy competitors work with, then look at who they follow on Instagram. “If that creator got a good ROI for [your competitor],” Huey says, “their friends are probably going to get the same good ROI for you as well.”

Misconception 3: Lots of brand partnership experience is a good thing

Unfortunately, there are bad actors in every industry. And according to Vin Matano, the founder of business-to-business influencer marketing agency Creatorbuzz, the creator economy is no different.

Matano says he’s wary of any creator that works with “different brands frequently” and is “a little too focused on the payment portion” because it makes him feel like they’re “in it for the wrong reason.” He adds that if he’s considering working with a creator “and they’re asking for upfront payments, and we’ve never worked with this person before,” he typically sees that as “a red flag.”

Creators who do countless brands and seem to be in it just for the money will likely come off as less genuinely interested in your company’s products. That’s a big problem, since the success of an influencer marketing campaign depends largely upon authenticity.

Feature image credit: Getty Images

BY ANNABEL BURBA

Sourced from Inc.

In News

TikTok is tracking you, even if you don’t use the app. Here’s how to stop it

March 31, 2026 No Comments

By Thomas Germain

TikTok is growing its data harvesting empire, and avoiding the app won’t protect you – but some easy steps can keep you safe.

TikTok keeps track of everything you do on its app – no surprises there. What’s less obvious is how the company follows you around other parts of the internet that have nothing to do with TikTok.

In fact, TikTok collects sensitive and potentially embarrassing information about you even if you’ve never used the app. Over the past week, I’ve watched websites sending TikTok data about cancer diagnoses, fertility and even mental health crises. It’s part of a tracking empire that extends far beyond the social media platform. Now, thanks to a new set of features, TikTok is poised to expand its network and see even more details about your life.

The change comes just weeks after the sale of TikTok’s US operations to a group of companies with ties to US President Donald Trump. The deal has led to fresh privacy concerns from some human rights experts and users, though TikTok says it has transparent guidelines on how it responds to government requests for data.

Fortunately, this is a privacy story with a positive note. Some easy steps you can take in about five minutes will help you keep your information out of TikTok’s hands.

The issue centres around major changes to TikTok’s “pixel”, a tracking tool that companies use to monitor your online behaviour. I asked a cybersecurity company called Disconnect to analyse it. They found the updated TikTok pixel collects information in unusual ways compared to its competitors.

“It’s extremely invasive,” says Patrick Jackson, chief technology officer at Disconnect. “This expanded data sharing, when you do analysis of the actual pixel code, you see things that look really bad.”

When I clicked a button on a form that said I was a cancer patient or a survivor, the website sent TikTok my email address along with those details

TikTok says its users are informed about its data practices in privacy policies and notifications in some cases. The company also says it gives people privacy settings to take control.

“TikTok empowers users with transparent information about its privacy practices and gives them multiple tools to customise their experience,” a TikTok spokesperson says. “Advertising pixels are industry standard and used widely across social and media platforms, including by the BBC.”

But most people might not realise that TikTok holds data about them even if they have never used the social media platform.

An invisible trackerTracking pixels are nothing new. For years, companies that run advertising networks – including Google, Meta and hundreds of others – have used them to eavesdrop on what people do across the web. They’re an invisible image the size of one pixel of your screen that loads in the background of a website, full of data-harvesting tech. They’re everywhere, and they’re constantly watching you.

Here’s how it works. TikTok, for example, encourages companies to put pixels on their websites to help the social media giant harvest more data. Let’s say I have an online shoe store. If I use a pixel, it lets TikTok collect lots of data about my customers in order to show them targeted ads. Plus, it helps TikTok figure out whether people who see those shoe ads end up making a purchase. That way, I know the ads I paid for are working, and maybe I’ll pay for more. (Like most news organisations, the BBC uses analytics tools and shares data with advertising partners in accordance with our privacy policy. The BBC does not use TikTok tracking pixels on its website or place advertising pixels on third-party sites.)

When it’s shoe store data, the information might be innocuous. But I’ve reported on TikTok’s data collection for years and pixels can collect extremely personal information.

For example, last week I visited the website for a cancer support group. According to Disconnect, when I clicked a button on a form that said I was a cancer patient or a survivor, the website sent TikTok my email address along with those details. A women’s health company sent TikTok data when I looked at fertility tests. A mental health organisation pinged TikTok when I indicated I’m looking for a crisis counsellor. Websites that use pixels send data about every single visitor, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a TikTok account.

A TikTok spokesperson says, essentially, that this isn’t TikTok’s responsibility. They say websites are required to abide by privacy laws and tell you about their data practices. TikTok says websites are prohibited from sharing certain kinds of sensitive information, such as health data. And the company says it takes proactive steps to alert websites that share anything inappropriate.

Many of the world’s top websites have pixel trackers on them that send data back to big tech companies (Credit: Serenity Strull/ BBC)

If you’re concerned about these individual websites you’re missing the point. Critics say the issue is that large tech companies like TikTok are increasingly following everything you do online. According to DuckDuckGo, a privacy company, TikTok has trackers on 5% of the world’s top websites. That number has grown steadily, though it’s nothing compared to Google with trackers on almost 72% of top websites and Meta at about 21%.

“This is verbatim the playbook that Google and Meta have used over the years,” says Peter Dolanjski, executive director of product at DuckDuckGo. They started collecting small amounts of data and grew that into an empire that has massive visibility into your daily life, he says.

All of this data could mean you see ads that are more tailored to you, which you might like. But these detailed records of your personal life wouldn’t exist if tech companies weren’t surveilling you, and it exposes you to all kinds of risks, Dolanjski says.

“Algorithms can use this data to exploit you,” he says. “It could be coercing you to buy something, it could be political campaigns, it could be price discrimination.” Advertising data has been used for all kinds damaging purposes, from alleged civil rights violations to sexual discrimination.

TikTok’s data empireTikTok’s pixel is years old, but it just shifted in some major ways. On 22 January 2026, when TikTok’s US operation officially changed hands, users had to agree to a new set of data collection practices. That includes a new advertising network that TikTok will use to show targeted ads on other people’s websites. To facilitate that new advertising system, TikTok updated its pixel.

In the past, TikTok’s pixel basically just told companies if their ads were generating sales in the app itself. Now, the pixel will help companies follow users who see an ad when they leave TikTok and make a purchase elsewhere.

That probably means more companies will buy TikTok ads and the pixel will show up in more places, according to Arielle Garcia, chief operating officer at Check My Ads, a digital advertising watchdog group. In other words, TikTok’s tracking empire is set to expand. “These tools naturally make the platform more attractive to advertisers, which is ultimately how ad platforms grow,” Garcia says.

Keeping Tabs

Thomas Germain is a senior technology journalist at the BBC. He writes the column Keeping Tabs and co-hosts the podcast The Interface. His work uncovers the hidden systems that run your digital life, and how you can live better inside them.

Disconnect found TikTok’s pixel now collects more information than ever before, automatically intercepting data that websites are sending to Google. Experts tell the BBC this is unusually invasive. “They’re silently capturing that data without the site owner explicitly sharing that information with TikTok,” Jackson says, and that means websites might unintentionally send TikTok even more data than they intend to.

TikTok disagrees. A spokesperson says TikTok is clear about what data the pixel collects, and companies can just set up their websites differently if they don’t want TikTok to see what they send Google. (Google did not respond to a request for comment.)

TikTok also has some privacy controls you can use. Users can “clear” the data TikTok collects with pixels using a setting in the app. People who don’t have an account can ask TikTok to delete any data it has about you.

But if you want to stop the data collection before it happens, you need additional steps.

How to protect yourselfThere’s good news and bad news. Let’s start with the cheerful stuff.

The best option? Use a more private web browser. I know switching seems like a pain, but it’s easy to import your bookmarks. Try it.

Something like 71% of people use Google Chrome, which has been found in preliminary academic research to leak more information than many competitors. Privacy experts often recommend the DuckDuckGo browser and Brave, which are specifically built to safeguard data. Firefox and Safari are considered better options than Chrome, though they’re less strict about privacy by default.

If switching browsers is too much, install a browser extension that blocks these trackers. I asked Disconnect and DuckDuckGo to help with this article because they both make tracker blockers, but there are other options, including Privacy Badger and Ghostery. Certain ad blockers also block some data harvesting, including AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin. DuckDuckGo has a chart comparing which ad blockers do it best. Just don’t install browser extensions that aren’t recommended by reputable sources – it’s just like installing an app. Some are dicey.

Now the bad news. Following those two steps will block the TikTok pixel and lots of other privacy invasions. But I won’t pretend your data problems are solved.

There are lots of other ways that companies share data with TikTok, Google, Meta and other advertising companies. Companies collect data about you and send it directly to the tech giants from their own servers, for example. “It’s a black box, I can’t tell you how often that’s used because it all happens behind the scenes,” says Dolanjski. “It’s much harder to protect yourself from that. Your only real defence is to not use the same personal information on different services”, so it’s harder to match up what you do on different parts of the internet.

The real solution is better privacy laws, says Garcia from Check My Ads. “This isn’t a problem limited to one platform. It’s a broader advertising technology ecosystem issue that ultimately needs to be addressed through stronger regulation,” she says. “The only thing that’s really going to change this is when people make their voices heard with lawmakers and make it clear that privacy is something they actually care about.”

By Thomas Germain

Sourced from BBC Future

In News

They Quit an Influencer Marketing Startup and Built Their Own. Now They’re Projecting to Make $3 Million

March 30, 2026 No Comments

BY MARIAPAULA GONZALEZ

Storytime aims to turn influencer marketing into a scalable, city-by-city marketplace for local businesses.

When Aris Yeager and Philip Davis quit their jobs at influencer marketing software company Lefty to start their own business Storytime in 2024, they weren’t sure whether they were about to raise venture capital—or get sued.

The co-founders had met one year earlier, when Davis hired Yeager as an influencer marketing specialist on his team at Lefty. While working for the Paris-based startup, they saw how luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Sephora manage influencers with huge budgets, 100-person teams, and software that costs about $1,500 a month.

At the same time, Yeager was running into friction as he engaged with local brands as a content creator. The 25-year-old had begun cultivating a flamboyant internet persona—known as Louis to his audience—about three years earlier while attending Northeastern University. Today, he has roughly 3 million followers across TikTok and Instagram and regularly commands five-figure brand deals.

Yeager tells Inc. “there was no easy way” to communicate with the brick-and-mortar businesses he visited daily. That sparked an idea: “I was like, ‘Okay, this needs to be more automated—this whole space.’”

As the U.S. head of growth at Lefty, Davis, 27, wrestled with that inefficiency from the other side. The company’s software worked well for global brands, he says, but fell short for fast-growing, location-based businesses trying to drive real foot traffic. So, when Yeager brought him the problem, they built something that did.

Lefty’s co-founder and former CEO Thomas Repelski wasn’t too thrilled when he found out, though, according to Yeager. “He was like, ‘Yo, you’re building in the same space? What the hell?’” he recalls. “I thought we were gonna get into legal trouble.”

Instead, their ex-boss became one of their earliest investors.

Betting on the power of hyperlocal influencers

About a year and a half ago, Yeager and Davis launched Storytime, an influencer marketing platform that connects local content creators with 450 businesses across 1,000 New York City locations, from restaurant chains to jewellery brands to coffee shops. The startup has so far raised about $1 million in pre-seed funding that values it at $15 million. And while Storytime only began monetizing last April, Davis expects to make anywhere from $2 million to $3 million in revenue by late summer.

For brands, the set-up is simple. After downloading the app, they can tailor campaign details, select reach tiers for influencers, and set offer amounts. Storytime takes over from there.

Any Instagram user with at least 2,000 followers can apply to join the platform as a creator, but not everyone gets accepted. Only those with strong local reach—which Storytime measures through audience city demographic data it collects via Instagram’s API—actually make the cut.

Here’s how the math works: a creator with 50,000 followers might draw 5,000 views on a post, but if only 10 percent of that audience is in New York, that translates to about 500 local views, according to Davis. Meanwhile, a smaller creator with 5,000 followers could see 2,000 views per post, with half that audience based in New York—or roughly 1,000 local views. “Their local reach is actually going to be twice as high as the much larger influencer,” he says.

Small business success stories

Most businesses pay a flat monthly fee to use the Storytime app. It costs as little as $150 for 15 Storytime creators per month for smaller brands, while larger brands pay about $5 per influencer collaboration, or roughly $2,500 for 500 collaborations.

That predictable pricing appealed to Ana Luisa, a jewellery brand accustomed to expensive influencer partnerships with murky returns. Storytime allows the Brooklyn-based company to keep its influencer spend under $500 each month and reward creators with gifts ranging from a $30 store gift card to a custom, solid-gold charm bracelet.

Ana Luisa measured a 30 percent increase in internal foot traffic metrics during its first two weeks of working with the startup. Eve Gertzman, the brand’s marketing director, says those gains have held steady in the slower seasons: “For us to be able to maintain pretty strong levels of foot traffic, even in these cold New York weathers, we can heavily attribute that to Storytime.”

For Joe and the Juice, Storytime’s value extends beyond foot traffic. Global brand manager Raania Hammoudan says the platform gives her the ability to dictate how local creators post about Joe and the Juice, including which products they feature, during campaigns like its collaboration with tennis star Novak Djokovic last fall. “That is so valuable to us,” she says.

The bigger picture

The shift towards brands working with hyperlocal influencers has been building for about two to three years now, according to creator economy expert Keith Bendes. “The more reach is harder to achieve organically without paid media, the more you’re trying to niche down to find the loyal pockets,” he says.

The question now is whether Storytime’s local-first model can scale. Yeager and Davis say they’re planning to expand into new cities, including Miami, in the near future. The co-founders are also planning to enter industries beyond food and beverage and add more features like paid campaigns across TikTok and Instagram.

The marketplace they imagined almost two years ago is just getting started. “My vision with it is to make it a ClassPass for creators,” Yeager says. “Every single business that’s on ClassPass, I believe could be on Storytime.”

Feature image credit: Getty Images

BY MARIAPAULA GONZALEZ

Sourced from Inc.

In News

Horizon Media pilots AI solution to detect cultural shifts mid-campaign

March 30, 2026 No Comments

By Jessica Hammers

The tool developed by Sightly and Vurvey Labs helps brands quickly respond to news developments that could affect perceptions of campaign messaging.

Dive Brief:

Horizon Media is testing a new artificial intelligence solution from marketing intelligence company Sightly and AI research firm Vurvey Labs that detects cultural shifts mid-campaign and adjusts media decisions accordingly, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
The solution, which is being piloted within the HorizonOS partner ecosystem, pairs real-time human sentiment from Vurvey Labs with cultural and contextual media data from Sightly. The effort is the result of a partnership between Vurvey Labs and Sightly announced Monday.
Other agency players, including Dentsu’s Carat, are also experimenting with the AI capability. Horizon Media continues to focus on growing its AI know-how while agencies at large face pressure to move beyond dabbling with the technology to deliver more tangible outcomes.

Dive Insight:

Horizon Media’s pilot of Sightly and Vurvey Labs’ new AI-powered solution offers a way to adjust campaigns on the fly in response to changing cultural trends. Agencies face growing pressure to implement AI solutions that provide demonstrable results, with many undergoing acquisitions and substantial restructurings along the way.

With Vurvey Labs and Sightly’s audience tool, Horizon Media can perform with greater precision, said John Koenigsberg, executive vice president and head of platform partnerships at the agency. The capability is being piloted through the HorizonOS partner ecosystem, an open ecosystem introduced in December that enables clients to create marketing products with a variety of different vendors.

“The challenge for agencies isn’t access to more data, it’s knowing which signals are worth acting on,” Koenigsberg said in a statement. “This is exactly why we launched HorizonOS — to foster a community of emerging technology partners who can innovate through intentional, curated collaboration.”

The audience tool integrates Vurvey Labs’ AI-driven People Model with Sightly’s Brand Mentality platform, allowing brands and agencies to create custom audiences informed by cultural signals and always-on human insight across social platforms.

In a hypothetical use case provided by the companies, an athletic apparel brand launches a campaign with a “no excuses” messaging — language that historically performs well — before a major college football program falls under fire for abusive conditioning culture. While a traditional programmatic system wouldn’t process the risk until purchase behaviour changes, Vurvey’s People Model captures real human sentiment from the campaign’s target audience, including live responses signalling that the emotional posture around “toughness” messaging has shifted. In turn, Sightly’s Brand Mentality platform layers that human signal against contextual signals already in the market, including news coverage and brand risk indicators, and surfaces the conflict to the agency.

Along with Horizon Media, Dentsu’s Carat is also piloting the integration. Similarly to Horizon Media, Dentsu has also looked to build its AI capabilities. In January, the company launched Generative Audiences, its own audience intelligence solution that leverages people-based data against AI-driven signals to simulate real audience groups.

As agencies race to advance their AI expertise, some analysts are sceptical about how far those bets can go, with half of agencies’ proprietary AI platforms expected to either wind down or become obsolete by 2029, Gartner predicts. Open-source platforms are expected by Gartner to support more than 75% of enterprise AI deployments on the client side by 2028, per the researcher.

Feature image credit: Getty Images

By Jessica Hammers

Sourced from Marketing Dive

In News

AI bots crawl retail sites 198x more than Google, new report warns

March 27, 2026 No Comments

Sourced from PPC.Land

AI bots crawl retail sites 198x more per visit than Google, bot traffic rose 5.4x in 2025, and 80% of websites are exposed to agent spoofing, per new research.

A new industry report published this week by Retail Economics, Amazon Web Services, Botify, and DataDome has put a precise number on how dramatically artificial intelligence has disrupted the underlying mechanics of retail discovery – and it is a number that should concentrate minds across search, e-commerce, and advertising alike. For every single visit OpenAI’s systems deliver to a retail website, those same systems perform 198 crawls. Google, by comparison, generates one visit for every six crawls. The disparity, drawn from analysis of approximately 200 retail and e-commerce websites, illustrates how AI platforms interact with the web in a fundamentally different way from the search engines that have shaped digital marketing for the past two decades.

The report, titled “The Future of Search and Discovery: A strategic playbook to understand agentic commerce,” is based on a consumer survey of 6,000 nationally representative respondents across the UK, US, and France, conducted in November 2025. Its conclusions range from quantitative measurements of bot traffic growth to qualitative assessments of consumer trust, and it arrives at a moment when agentic commerce infrastructure is being built at pace across every major platform.

Bot traffic has multiplied – and skewed analytics

The headline infrastructure finding is stark. According to Botify’s analysis, AI-driven bot traffic across the approximately 200 retail and e-commerce websites examined increased 5.4 times during 2025, with the index moving from a baseline of 100 in the first quarter to roughly 640 by the fourth quarter. The growth was not linear. A particularly sharp acceleration occurred in the weeks preceding September 2025, when crawl intensity rose sharply as AI systems refreshed and ingested product data. Shortly after, OpenAI expanded its commerce-related capabilities, including agent-led shopping and in-chat purchasing features. Visits from OpenAI to retail websites then increased 200% month on month in September 2025 following that rollout – a direct illustration of the relationship between platform-level capability updates and referral traffic patterns. PPC Land reported on OpenAI’s instant checkout launch on September 29, 2025, covering how the Stripe-backed Agentic Commerce Protocol enabled direct purchases within ChatGPT conversations.

The category-level picture is even more granular. According to the report, food and grocery experienced a 29-times increase in AI-driven bot traffic over the course of 2025, driven by the high volatility of prices and stock levels that make the category valuable for AI systems to monitor continuously. Home and DIY saw an 11-times increase. Electronics and appliances also crawled significantly. The divergence reflects a structural insight: AI systems treat retail categories differently based on how frequently data changes, not purely on commercial significance or retailer performance.

The scale and velocity of this automated traffic introduces a measurement problem that retailers have only begun to grapple with. According to the report, AI bot systems generate high-volume, concurrent requests that are not always distinguishable from human browsing in traditional analytics. The consequences are concrete. When Google removed a technical shortcut – the &num=100 parameter – that many tracking tools relied on in early September 2025, Botify’s enterprise retail clients reported search impressions fell by approximately 67%, while clicks stayed largely flat and average position appeared to improve. Click-through rate growth then increased by approximately 150%, not because performance had genuinely changed, but because the data was no longer contaminated by synthetic bot impressions. Much of the apparent growth in impressions had been driven by AI bots capable of making 100 or more simultaneous requests, not by real consumers.

Nearly 80% of websites exposed to agent spoofing

Perhaps the most operationally urgent finding in the report concerns security. DataDome, the bot and agent trust management company that co-produced the research, analysed 698,214 live websites using a spoofed “ChatGPT AI assistant” user-agent. The result: 79.7% did not block or challenge the impersonation attempt. Of those, 79.2% returned a “200 OK” response code, meaning the spoofed agent was admitted without challenge. Only 17.2% returned a “403 Forbidden” response.

This is not an abstract vulnerability. According to the report, spoofable user agents and incomplete IP lists make it difficult for retailers to distinguish legitimate AI agents from stealth or human-driven automation using shared infrastructure. The practical effect is that malicious actors can clone weakly declared AI agents to exploit pricing, inventory, or checkout flows. The report notes that DataDome’s threat research team, Galileo, recently identified that 80% of AI agents do not declare themselves properly when visiting websites. That figure underpins a broader argument that retailers face “skewed performance metrics that undermine commercial decisions and expose them to fraud.”

The risk is asymmetric. Blocking all AI traffic to protect against spoofing carries a different cost: if brands do not allow AI bots to find and use content on their websites, according to the report, those systems may find data elsewhere – from third-party review sites, forums, or competitors. PPC Land has tracked how Amazon chose the restrictive path, blocking AI bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Huawei in August 2025, a strategy that runs in parallel with Amazon’s development of its own proprietary AI shopping tools.

The 1-in-198 ratio and what it means for discovery

The visit-to-crawl ratio is worth dwelling on. It signals that for OpenAI’s systems, the primary purpose of engaging with retail websites is not delivering visitors but rather ingesting, validating, and comparing information within their own interfaces. Discovery and evaluation increasingly happen inside AI interfaces before a consumer ever reaches a retailer’s site. This challenges the foundational assumption of SEO: that being crawled translates, over time, into being visited.

The report frames this as a shift in where influence operates. According to Botify’s data, Google drives one visit per six crawls, compared with one per 198 for OpenAI. In practical terms, a product that ranks highly in Google search still generates traffic directly. A product evaluated by an OpenAI agent may shape a recommendation without ever producing a referral visit. Conversion attribution, session metrics, and bounce rate become less meaningful as a result. Brainlabs reported earlier in 2025 that AI search visitors can be worth 4.4 times more than traditional organic traffic, but that premium depends entirely on the visitor arriving at a website in the first place – an outcome the 1-in-198 ratio suggests is far from guaranteed.

The report introduces a taxonomy of AI-led traffic that distinguishes between training crawlers (such as GPTBot from OpenAI and ClaudeBot from Anthropic), live retrieval crawlers (such as ChatGPT-user and Perplexity-user, which fetch fresh content in real time), index-building crawlers (such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot), AI assistants and shopping agents (such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, and Amazon Rufus), agentic browsers (such as Perplexity Comet, ChatGPT Atlas, and Gemini integrated into Chrome), and malicious or exploitative bots(unauthorised scrapers, competitive intelligence bots, and automated fraud traffic). Each category carries different implications for governance and access policy. PPC Land reported on OpenAI’s revised ChatGPT crawler documentation in December 2025, which created different compliance standards for different crawler types.

JavaScript invisibility and the structured data imperative

A separate technical finding deserves attention among search and e-commerce professionals. According to the report, most AI bots cannot read content rendered in JavaScript. If a brand’s product data – pricing, availability, specifications, reviews – sits behind JavaScript, AI systems will see only a stripped-down version of the page. The report illustrates this with a comparison: a shoe product page viewed by a consumer shows size, colour options, materials, price, and promotional details; the same page seen by most AI bots shows only a handful of visible text labels and a stripped visual shell.

The consequence is direct. If AI systems cannot access or interpret a retailer’s data, that retailer may never appear in AI-mediated discovery. The report places structured, authenticated, and accessible data at the centre of its five identified forces of disruption, alongside discovery shifts, infrastructure requirements, LLM evolution, and measurement change. Poor metadata or inconsistent taxonomies can make products invisible to AI crawlers entirely. PPC Land reported in December 2025 on Google’s documentation clarifications around JavaScript rendering for error pages, reinforcing the same underlying technical vulnerability.

The report identifies Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) as the growth layer built on top of traditional SEO. Traditional keyword rankings, organic impressions, click-through rate, domain authority, and bounce rate – the standard dashboard of digital marketing performance – were built for a world of links and human clicks. They do not show how AI agents see, interpret, and act on content. The report proposes a new generation of performance metrics: agent inclusion rate (what proportion of products or pages are recognised and surfaced by AI agents), discovery visibility (presence rate across multimodal environments), engagement confidence index (how often consumers act on AI-surfaced results), structured-data coverage, trust signal strength, visibility-to-sale ratio, and discovery ROI index. These are emerging standards, not yet widely deployed, but the report argues they are necessary to understand commercial impact in an AI-mediated environment. An SEO expert released a related AI search content optimisation checklist in June 2025 that addressed similar requirements around server-side rendering and structured data coverage.

Consumer adoption: 73%, but trust lags

The consumer survey component of the report draws from 6,000 respondents across the UK, US, and France surveyed in November 2025, with 2,000 per country. According to Retail Economics, 73% of consumers across the three markets have consciously used AI in some form over the past twelve months. Of those, 38% have used AI assistants specifically for shopping tasks including product ideas, suggestions, or comparisons. A further 34% have used AI features on retailer websites or apps. Twenty-one percent have used AI tools to make decisions or support purchases.

The US records the highest adoption rate at 73%, with France at 69% and the UK at 68% – closer to each other than might be expected given differences in digital culture. Among 18-to-24-year-olds, approximately one in four use AI assistants regularly and one in five use them day-to-day. Among those aged 55 and older, fewer than one in ten report day-to-day use. The gap widens further when examining AI use relative to other discovery channels: among 18-to-24-year-olds, AI assistants and social discovery channels exert influence that matches or exceeds traditional search engines in the discovery phase.

Trust, however, tells a different story. Thirty-two percent of consumers across the surveyed regions say they do not trust AI-enabled search and discovery. Whereas 38% feel comfortable with recommendations from tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini, far fewer are willing to let those systems act on their behalf. Nearly half – 49% – say discovery is something they want to do themselves, not something to outsource. The report describes this as a “key tension in the shift towards agentic commerce: people value the benefits afforded by AI, but don’t yet feel fully confident to delegate decisions.”

The trust gap is structured by age and income. Higher-income consumers exhibit greater confidence in AI systems, likely reflecting greater familiarity from work settings. Middle-aged, high-affluence consumers emerge as the most AI-trusting segment. Least affluent consumers show the lowest trust, where concerns about risk, accuracy, and control are most acute.

Which categories and missions face the earliest exposure

The report maps retail categories by consumer trust in AI-led discovery and willingness to use AI, weighted by typical spend. Electronics and appliances consistently lead across all three markets. Purchases in this category involve technical specifications, rapid product cycles, and meaningful price differences – exactly the conditions where AI assistance in comparison and shortlisting is most valued. Travel and leisure sits close behind. Clothing and footwear shows rising exposure, with large online ranges and frequent browsing creating fertile ground for AI-led personalisation.

Categories sitting lower on both axes include jewellery, beauty, and homewares – purchases that involve emotional, tactile, and personal judgements where consumers still seek human reassurance. Food and grocery shows strong regional variation: the US shows higher openness to AI assistance in grocery discovery, while France reflects a stronger food culture centred on freshness and physical inspection.

Shopping missions follow a parallel gradient. According to the survey, consumers show the highest willingness to delegate to AI for “considered or technical purchases” and for “buying gifts for others” – both missions involving uncertainty, high information load, and benefit from structured comparison. Routine replenishment sits at the bottom of the willingness scale across all three markets. The pattern is consistent: AI assistance is welcomed where decisions feel cognitively demanding, and resisted where habitual or emotional judgement dominates.

Amazon Rufus provides a commercial datapoint that anchors these projections. According to the report, more than 250 million customers used Rufus during 2025, with interactions up 210% year on year. Customers who use Rufus while shopping are over 60% more likely to make a purchase during that session. Amazon’s full-year financial results subsequently confirmed that Rufus generated nearly $12 billion in incremental annualized sales during 2025, with more than 300 million customers using the tool throughout the year.

Four consumer personas and three readiness workstreams

The report identifies four distinct shopper personas in relation to AI-assisted discovery. AI-first optimisers (10% of the total, skewing younger at an average age of 38) use AI assistants as their primary discovery tool and show 47% complete trust in AI for research and comparison. Assisted explorers (55%, average age 42) welcome AI as a practical co-pilot for shortlisting and comparison but want to remain in the approval loop. Guarded adopters (16%, average age 53) use AI in controlled, low-risk ways but scrutinise results and hesitate before delegating meaningful decisions. Human loyalists(19%, average age 62) rarely use AI for shopping and require concrete evidence of benefit before adopting more meaningfully.

The strategic section of the report organises its recommendations into three readiness workstreams. The first concerns traffic policy for AI bots and agents – establishing which systems should be allowed, blocked, limited, or monetised, with continuous trust assessment and dynamic behaviour-based security. The second concerns data readiness and product information management – standardising product attributes, metadata, and taxonomy to create a single machine-readable source of product truth, and testing how AI crawlers actually extract and interpret that data. The third concerns on-site AI experiences – building conversational, voice, and embedded-agent user experiences that complete the discovery-to-purchase loop without losing the customer to a competitor’s AI interface.

Cloudflare’s launch of pay-per-crawl in July 2025 and its subsequent Markdown for Agents service in early 2026represent infrastructure-level responses to exactly these workstreams, creating mechanisms for retailers to control and monetise AI access to their content while reducing the token cost of that access by approximately 80%.

The report concludes that early-mover advantages are emerging, but brands that delay action risk becoming harder to find, harder to trust, and easier to replace. The age of agentic search and discovery, it argues, will arrive gradually – but the transition is already underway, and hastening.

Timeline

2010-2014 – Keyword search dominates retail discovery; consumers type exact phrases into search engines with results ranked on keywords and page relevance.
2014-2017 – Behavioural and personalised search takes hold; retailers use cookies and browsing history to introduce recommendation engines.
2017-2019 – Mobile, social, and voice discovery expands search beyond text through smartphones, Alexa, Siri, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
2019-2021 – Visual and contextual discovery arrives with Amazon Lens, Pinterest Lens, and Google Lens enabling image-based shopping.
2022-2024 – Generative discovery begins; ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews transform search into dialogue, summarising and comparing products.
August 7, 2023 – OpenAI announces GPTBot; major websites begin implementing blocks within two weeks. Coverage on PPC Land
2024 – Bot traffic exceeds human website visitors for the first time, according to Imperva data cited in Brainlabs research. Coverage on PPC Land
May 2024 – Google launches GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video crawlers for research and development data gathering. Coverage on PPC Land
Q1 2025 – AI-driven bot traffic baseline established at index 100 across approximately 200 retail and e-commerce websites analysed by Botify.
April 18, 2025 – Microsoft launches Copilot Merchant Program for retail integration. Coverage on PPC Land
April 28, 2025 – OpenAI introduces shopping features to ChatGPT, reporting over 1 billion weekly searches. Coverage on PPC Land
July 1, 2025 – Cloudflare launches pay-per-crawl service in private beta. Coverage on PPC Land
July 16, 2025 – SEO expert warns Google’s AI could eliminate website clicks amid deteriorating crawl-to-visit ratios. Coverage on PPC Land
August 21, 2025 – Amazon blocks AI crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Huawei. Coverage on PPC Land
Early September 2025 – Surge in AI crawl intensity at retail websites precedes OpenAI’s commerce capability expansion; Google removes &num=100 tracking parameter, causing apparent 67% drop in search impressions.
September 29, 2025 – OpenAI launches Instant Checkout for ChatGPT with Stripe partnership and Agentic Commerce Protocol. Coverage on PPC Land
September 2025 – OpenAI commerce capabilities expand; visits from OpenAI to retail websites increase 200% month on month, per Botify analysis.
October 6, 2025 – Independent analyst questions commercial viability of agentic commerce despite ChatGPT checkout launch. Coverage on PPC Land
November 2025 – Retail Economics consumer survey of 6,000 respondents conducted across UK, US, and France.
November 13, 2025 – Google launches agentic checkout and AI shopping tools for the holiday season. Coverage on PPC Land
November 17, 2025 – Google Search Console adds annotations; Google’s AI Mode gains agentic features including table reservations. Coverage on PPC Land
November 25, 2025 – UK research shows 85% of consumers planning AI-assisted holiday shopping would trust agents to place orders and pay. Coverage on PPC Land
Q4 2025 – AI-driven bot traffic reaches 5.4x the Q1 2025 baseline across retail websites analysed by Botify.
December 9, 2025 – OpenAI revises ChatGPT crawler documentation with significant policy changes. Coverage on PPC Land
December 18, 2025 – Google clarifies JavaScript rendering behaviour for error pages. Coverage on PPC Land
January 8, 2026 – Microsoft launches Copilot Checkout with PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe integration. Coverage on PPC Land
Early 2026 – Cloudflare launches Markdown for Agents, reducing AI token costs by 80%. Coverage on PPC Land
February 2026 – Amazon confirms Rufus generated nearly $12 billion in incremental annualised sales during 2025, with over 300 million users. Coverage on PPC Land
March 5, 2026 – Greenough Agency pitches the Retail Economics/AWS/Botify/DataDome report to PPC Land.
March 7, 2026 – “The Future of Search and Discovery: A strategic playbook to understand agentic commerce” published by Retail Economics, AWS, Botify, and DataDome.

Summary

Who: Retail Economics, Amazon Web Services, Botify, and DataDome published the report. The consumer research covers 6,000 nationally representative consumers in the UK, US, and France. Key data contributors include Botify’s analysis of approximately 200 retail and e-commerce websites, and DataDome’s security test of 698,214 live websites. AJ Ghergich, Global VP of AI at Botify, is available for comment on the findings.

What: A 35-page strategic report measuring the scale and commercial implications of AI-driven crawling and agentic discovery in retail. Core quantitative findings include: AI bot traffic grew 5.4 times during 2025; OpenAI generates 1 visit per 198 crawls compared to Google’s 1 visit per 6 crawls; 79.7% of websites are unprotected against AI agent spoofing; 73% of consumers have used AI in some form; and 38% have used AI specifically for shopping tasks. The report introduces a new taxonomy of AI traffic types and a set of next-generation performance metrics for the agentic era.

When: The consumer survey was conducted in November 2025. The bot traffic analysis covers the full calendar year 2025. The report was published today, March 7, 2026.

Where: The report covers retail and e-commerce markets across the UK, US, and France for consumer data. The bot traffic analysis draws from approximately 200 retail and e-commerce websites globally. The security analysis of agent spoofing covers 698,214 live websites internationally.

Why: AI systems now function as gatekeepers between brands and consumers, shaping consideration sets before shoppers ever visit a retailer’s site. The combination of rapidly escalating bot traffic, widespread vulnerability to agent spoofing, and the invisibility of JavaScript-rendered content to most AI crawlers creates material commercial risk for retailers who have not yet adapted their data infrastructure, traffic governance, and measurement frameworks to the agentic era. The report argues that early-mover advantages are already emerging and that delay increases the risk of being excluded from AI-mediated discovery entirely.

Sourced from PPC.Land

In Uncategorized

A Website Alone Isn’t Enough For Today’s Digital Shoppers

March 27, 2026 No Comments

By Karan Sharma

If you think that just having a good website for your business can bring in customers, it’s time to rethink. Yes, a website plays an important role: It showcases your products, shares essential information and introduces your brand to potential customers. But times have changed, and today’s digital shoppers expect more than just an online presence. What matters now is the experience customers have before, during and after visiting your site.

What Today’s Digital Shoppers Really Expect

An Omnichannel Experience

Let’s say a customer sees an ad for sneaker boots on Instagram while watching a video on an over-the-top (OTT) platform. They click the ad, browse the boots in the brand’s mobile app, add them to their wish list and then later read reviews and complete the purchase via an email link, the app or in-store. For a shopper, this is a single shopping experience, even though it spans multiple platforms.

To create this kind of experience for your customers, focus on how you can connect with them across channels. For example, you could use a customer data platform, enable cart synchronization across devices and include product links in ads. Also, integrating your customer relationship management (CRM) platform with sales and marketing data can give you a complete view of customer behaviour.

Mobile-Friendly Apps And Websites

A lot of customers’ browsing, product comparing and purchasing takes place on mobile now. Yet there’s still a noticeable gap between what shoppers expect and what the mobile experience delivers. Many mobile journeys still feel slow or disconnected due to issues like slow loading, incomplete product details or complex checkout. Customers might not complain; they’ll simply leave or avoid revisiting the app. To retain them, focus on fast-loading pages, clear menus, smooth navigation and organized inventory.

Retargeting

Retargeting is a highly effective way to reengage shoppers after they leave your website. But this strategy performs best only when ads are relevant. Make sure your ads recommend products based on customers’ interests and that they’re shown with limited frequency.

To implement this strategy, start by using dynamic pixels, which are tracking tools embedded on a website or app, that collect real-time data about customers’ actions, such as what they browse, what they add to their cart and what they’ve bought before. Using this data, you can group audiences and automatically deliver personalized retargeting ads.

Push Notifications

Push notifications about order status, price drops, new offers, fresh stock or saved items are a smart way to keep shoppers informed and engaged without being an interruption. But make sure the notifications you send are relevant and personalized to customer preferences. For example, instead of sending a “New stock is here” alert, you could notify a customer that an item saved to their wish list has dropped in price.

A Quick Checkout

One thing I always recommend is providing a smooth checkout experience for your customers. Nobody wants to deal with complicated forms, forced account creation or other unnecessary steps during checkout. When checkout is simple and hassle-free, with multiple payment options, it increases the chances of quick purchases. Plus, it leaves customers with a positive impression of your brand.

Real-Time Support When It Matters

Customers frequently ask questions about a product, pricing, order status or delivery. But if they don’t get immediate answers, they often leave. Therefore, assisting with live chat, messaging, chatbots or in-app support features is essential.

When customers get real-time support, they are more likely to continue their shopping rather than leaving it incomplete. Also, it helps your brand stay ahead of competitors who do not provide timely support.

AI Shopping Assistants

I have observed that brands that ignore AI-driven shopping are not losing customers; they’re becoming invisible over time. Today, in the digital age, many customers use AI assistants to find products, compare prices and make informed decisions. For example, instead of navigating multiple stores, a customer might simply ask the AI, “Find me the best-rated boots under $100 that can be delivered by tomorrow.”

To stay visible in this landscape, focus on the updates that help AI systems find and recommend your products. For example, structure your product data using clear schemas and consistent attributes, update inventory in real time, improve titles and descriptions, and clearly display pricing. AI looks for accuracy, clarity and freshness when deciding what to surface to customers.

Community Engagement

Today, many shoppers check product reviews or learn about the brand through real customer experiences before purchasing. They visit platforms like YouTube, Reddit and social media communities. To win over this audience, provide real customer experiences, authentic reviews and transparent feedback that shoppers can trust. In my experience, brands that are real to their customers are the ones that earn respect, loyalty and long-term trust.

Simple Returns

I’ve noticed that customers often abandon their carts just because they are not sure about the return process. They think that if they have issues with the item and they want to return it, the process will be too complicated, time-consuming or frustrating. Brands that make returns simple, clear and with timely updates encourage customers to make their purchase more confidently.

Final Thoughts

In today’s digital marketing era, just building a good website and following trends aren’t enough. You need to consider what customers expect and what touchpoints make their shopping journey enjoyable and convenient. When you align these digital touchpoints, you can deliver a strong, consistent experience that supports sustainable growth and repeat purchases.

Feature image credit: getty

By Karan Sharma

Find Karan Sharma on LinkedIn and X. Visit Karan’s website.

COUNCIL POST | Membership (fee-based). Karan Sharma is a digital commerce expert and the co-founder at Kinex Media Inc, a creative digital agency in Toronto. Read Karan Sharma’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes