Community | University 

Oct 07, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Meta introduces new AI-powered tools
   (Once again AI will make us play with “tools”)

2. Google experiments with an AI-powered gaming platform
   (Yes, because we have so much time to start creating games now)

3. Hark releases an AI personal assistant with a focus on privacy
   (It’s me and my AI assistant now against the world)  

Marketing Joke

I just wrote a rap song to send to everyone who signed up for my email list.
It’s kind of a nurture track.

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Google’s Search Antitrust Ruling: What Advertisers Should Check Next
  If you manage Google Search campaigns, you have explained rising CPCs many times: more competitors, broader match types, a lower Quality Score, an account that needed restructuring. Each explanation is plausible.

• Using AI To Assist With SEO Work, Not Replace The Worker
  We do not need an LLM to discover these things; in fact, most LLMs are likely to write a deterministic check to then reliably capture this data themselves. For a process you are going to repeat time and again, a firm framework rather than a probabilistic token-eating word-predictor IS the better option.

• Treasure AI takes on two martech headaches at once
  Treasure AI today announced Personalization Studio, a marketer-facing user interface that helps teams build, launch, and manage real-time website personalization.The announcement came at Treasure AI’s Agentic World 2026 conference, where Treasure AI also announced a new engagement-based pricing model that ties pricing directly to aperformance.

• Google Is Fighting SERP Tracking. AI Agents May Make It Worse
  Google is entering a new phase of SERP scraping due to AI agents. Some of it may be driven by networks of LLMs that are reverse engineering Google’s search results. The public face of Google’s war against scraping remains rank trackers but the real battle may be elsewhere.

  ____________________________________________________________

People

Not many movements from our fellow Senior Growth Marketers today 🫠 

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• OpenAI To Test Visual Ads In ChatGPT Image Generation
  OpenAI is testing a new visual ad format in ChatGPT that will first appear during image generation.The test will begin later this month with an initial group of U.S. advertisers. OpenAI says the format will use images to show product inspiration, usage, or experiences associated with products and services.

• X launches AI-powered ad creation option
  X announced a new X Lift ad option at Advertising Week New York, which is an automated ad creation process that can convert a business’s URL into a series of ad options in just a few clicks.With X Lift, advertisers enter their URL and X’s AI ad generation system provides a range of ad options, including images and copy, which the advertiser can choose from for a campaign.

Some teams never seem to stop moving. They're on Attio, the agentic CRM.

Every customer signal is captured in one shared context layer, always current and compounding. Agents and workflows build pipeline, chase every buying signal, and move deals forward, an always-on revenue engine running alongside your team.

With Attio, you’ll get:

• Leads automatically prioritised and routed to the right rep

• Expansion and risk signals caught the moment they land

• Follow-ups written in your voice, already there when you arrive

Teams like Parallel, Turbopuffer, and Wordsmith build on Attio. Are you one of them?

Get started now

 Community | University 

Oct 06, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Google froze its open source bug bounty program due to a ‘significant rise’ in AI submissions
   (Google got too many AI bug reports and basically said “everyone stop.” 😭💀)

2. Meta’s Muse AI collects private user data
   (Muse collecting private data... suddenly “personalized AI” sounds very personal. 👀)

3. LibreOffice says ‘no AI’ is now a software feature
   (“No AI” is officially a feature now. We’ve come full circle. 💀)

Marketing Joke

Tech in 2026:
2024: “Now with AI!”
2026: “Now WITHOUT AI!”

Marketing really is a circle. 😭💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Anthropic is giving startups a free year of Claude Team and $1,000 in credits
  Anthropic announced an expansion of its Claude for Startups program, offering subsidized access to its AI models and a variety of other benefits to qualifying companies.

• Google Is Fighting SERP Tracking. AI Agents May Make It Worse
  Google is entering a new phase of SERP scraping due to AI agents. Some of it may be driven by networks of LLMs that are reverse engineering Google’s search results. The public face of Google’s war against scraping remains rank trackers but the real battle may be elsewhere.

• AI usage surges 6X for local search, fragmenting the digital ecosystem 
  The most dramatic evidence of this fragmentation is the rise of AI search. The share of consumers who used an AI tool to find a local business in the last 30 days rose from 9% in 2025 to 52% in 2026, close to a sixfold increase in a single year.

• How to maximize ROI with first-party data strategies
  Modern marketers are shifting away from passive data collection toward high-value exchange mechanics that incentivize direct opt-ins while maintaining strict consent management. The highest revenue returns emerge when capture tactics directly match customer purchasing behavior.

• Mirror Particle is building a ‘world model’ of human behavior
  Startups that promise to predict how humans will behave are having a moment. Over the past year, Simile raised $200 million at a $2 billion valuation; Aaru raised $88 million at a $1 billion valuation; and humans&, an AI startup that announced a massive $480 million seed round in January at a $4.48 billion valuation, launched Persimmon to model human behavior.

  ____________________________________________________________

People

Not many movements from our fellow Senior Growth Marketers today 🫠 

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• OpenAI To Watermark ChatGPT Text In The EU, Opens API Opt-In

  OpenAI will introduce an invisible watermark to qualifying ChatGPT and Codex texts within the European Union over the coming weeks. Their testing indicates that replacing certain words with synonyms can weaken the watermark’s effectiveness. In one test, substituting 25% of the words in 400-token English passages with synonyms lowered detection rates from approximately 92% to 17%.

• Reflection debuts Beam, an open-weight AI model to rival Chinese models at lower compute cost
  Reflection AI is officially unveiling Beam, its first frontier, open-weight AI model. The two-year-old, Brooklyn-based startup claims Beam matches the performance of leading Chinese open models on advanced reasoning benchmarks at dramatically lower costs, a claim that could heat up the race to build a Western answer to DeepSeek, Qwen, and Z.ai.

Some teams never seem to stop moving. They're on Attio, the agentic CRM.

Every customer signal is captured in one shared context layer, always current and compounding. Agents and workflows build pipeline, chase every buying signal, and move deals forward, an always-on revenue engine running alongside your team.

With Attio, you’ll get:

• Leads automatically prioritised and routed to the right rep

• Expansion and risk signals caught the moment they land

• Follow-ups written in your voice, already there when you arrive

Teams like Parallel, Turbopuffer, and Wordsmith build on Attio. Are you one of them?

Get started now

 Community | University 

Oct 05, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Instagram adds AI songs to DMs
   (Instagram adding AI songs to DMs... because apparently sending a normal message was too easy. 😭🎵)

2. OpenAI safety employee resigns, claiming the company’s ‘culture is broken’
   (OpenAI safety drama is giving “the group chat has officially leaked.”)

3. ChatGPT can now virtually try on clothes for you
   (ChatGPT virtual try-ons... AI is coming for the fitting room too.)

Marketing Joke

AI in 2026:
Writes the campaign.
Makes the music.
Tries on the clothes.

Marketer: “Can we make it more human?” 😭💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Google Shows How Long Crawling, Indexing & Recovery Can Take

  Google’s Gary Illyes showed timing ranges for common Search processes at Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe in Barcelona, from discovering a new URL to settling a site move. The ranges also cover changes made on a website, including title updates and canonical changes.

• Shopify Now Enrolls Your Store In Every New AI Shopping Channel
  Leave it on and watch it. Shopify’s agentic storefronts put your products inside AI chat apps, and if your store is eligible, Shopify signs it up for every new app it adds.That is how eligible stores’ products reached Meta on 8 September 2026, the day Meta launched Muse. Muse is an AI agent that, in Meta’s words, can “open a browser, fill out forms, and negotiate” for the people using it.

• Amazon responds to data center backlash, says it no longer uses NDAs
  Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) in its dealings with government agencies as it seeks approval to build new data centers.

• Google’s Hidden Data Layer: What Is It And What To Do About It
  At some point, most of us working in ecommerce have had that email. A client, a colleague, someone senior, asking why a product looks like it’s on sale when it isn’t. Or why an old product image is showing up in Shopping. Or why a campaign that looks fine on Google is getting rejected somewhere else entirely.

  ____________________________________________________________

People

• OpenAI Founding Member: Make LLMs Write Like An Aircraft Manual
  Andrej Karpathy said in a post on X Thursday that he’s had success asking language models to explain things in ASD-STE100, a controlled form of English built to make aircraft maintenance manuals easier to read.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• Meta’s Muse AI collects private user data
  Meta’s Muse AI agents are gaining traction in the U.S., with the app surpassing 5 million downloads last week. So it’s worth reviewing the information Meta is gathering to power its Muse recommendations, including the specific types of personal info that Muse can infer and track, based on people’s interactions with the app.

• Google Wants AI Content Fact-Checked, Gemini UTM Tags – SEO Pulse

  Google’s guidance on AI-generated content now tells sites to fact-check it by hand before publishing, metadata included. On Oct. 1, Google updated its guidance on using generative AI content by adding three sentences to the “Focus on accuracy, quality, and relevance” section

Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads

Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:

After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.

The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.

“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”

Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.

Learn More

 Community | University 

Oct 02, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Google Gemini Adds UTM Parameters For Referral Attribution
   (Gemini adding UTMs... marketers can finally prove the AI sent the traffic. 😭📈)

2. Meta’s Muse app surpasses 5M downloads and 3M weekly users
   (Muse hit 5M downloads... Meta’s AI bet is officially leaving the “experiment” phase. 👀)

3. ChatGPT can now virtually try on clothes for you
   (ChatGPT can try on clothes for you now... even the fitting room got automated. 💀👗)

Marketing Joke

SEO in 2026:
AI finally sends you traffic with UTMs.

Marketers: “FINALLY, RECEIPTS.” 😭📊

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Google Tells Sites To Fact-Check AI Content Before Publishing

  Google has updated its guidance for sites that use generative AI, adding a warning that AI output may contain errors and advice to fact-check it by hand before publishing.

• YouTube updates Shorts algorithm to put more focus on original content
  YouTube announced an update to its Shorts algorithm in order to put more focus on original content. The update will provide more incentive for creators to keep posting, while also reducing the presence of aggregator accounts.

• Laytr’s new app lets you save anything you find online, not just articles to read
  After Mozilla’s read-it-later app Pocket shut down in August, a number of alternatives popped up to take its place. But one newcomer, Laytr, is taking things further than offering a way to save things to read. The app lets you save anything on the web for later consumption, whether that’s an article, recipe, screenshot, video, PDF, bookmark, or tab.

• OpenAI cuts ties with 3 safety researchers, WSJ reports
  OpenAI has parted ways with three researchers on its safety team who allegedly shared confidential company information with a third-party AI safety organization, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

  ____________________________________________________________

People

• OpenAI fires workers for 'mishandling sensitive information'
  OpenAI has fired three researchers for allegedly mishandling information, including work which involved an external organisation analysing AI models.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• AI Changed Your Buyer Faster Than Your Business Can Adapt
  Buyers arrive confident and half-informed, businesses were built for a different customer, and the gap widens with every planning cycle that doesn’t address it.

• Salesforce buys AI customer research startup Listen Labs
  The companies announced a definitive agreement late Tuesday. Salesforce didn’t disclose financial terms, although many outlets are reporting a price of about $2 billion. The transaction is expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal fourth quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approval and other customary conditions.
  

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 Community | University 

Oct 01, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your Weekly unfair advantage.

Once a week, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. OpenAI unveils AI assistant 'dots' while safety worries delay new model
   (OpenAI launched “dots” while delaying another model... AI said multitasking. 😭🤖)

2. TikTok adds certification tiers for agency partners
   (TikTok certification tiers for agencies... even scrolling has qualifications now. 💀)

3. Google releases Gemini 4 Argon, called its most powerful model yet
   (Gemini 4 Argon is Google’s “most powerful model yet”... until next Tuesday. 😭)

Tech Joke

AI in 2026:
“This is our most powerful model yet.”

Please check back next week. 💀🤖

3-Minute News Bulletin with Roxie

This week's 🙌 News Bulletin explores:
AI Rapidly Transforms Buyer Behavior

AI Rapidly Transforms Buyer Behavior

This week’s News Bulletin explores how AI is changing buyer behavior, marketing measurement, and the economics of the web.

From understanding the difference between training AI and building smarter knowledge systems to Gemini improving AI traffic attribution, businesses are being pushed to rethink how they use and measure AI. Meanwhile, Cloudflare experiments with charging AI agents for content, and new research shows buyer behavior is evolving faster than traditional marketing plans can keep up.

The takeaway: AI is moving faster than annual strategies. Winning means building better context, measuring what actually works, and adapting as quickly as your customers do.

Latest Growth Hacking News

Strategies

• Google Analytics Adds App Conversions To Cross-Channel Reports

  Google Analytics now includes app conversions in its cross-channel conversion reports for web conversions. This update was announced on Sept. 29 on Google’s What’s new page.Right now, the feature isn’t available for every property, but Google says it’s actively working to bring it to more.

• Hearing tech startup Legato launches its AI hearing glasses
  Hearing tech startup Legato announced on Thursday that its flagship AI-based hearing glasses are now available for purchase. The glasses, called Legato Frames, integrate the company’s patented hearing-assistance technology into the arms of eyewear frames. Starting at $999, Legato Frames are designed for adults with up to moderate levels of hearing loss.

• The new Kindle ditches the raised bezel in a push toward a smaller, lighter e-reader
  Amazon is giving the Kindle its most significant physical redesign in years, introducing a refreshed lineup of e-readers built around a deceptively simple idea: getting rid of the raised bezel.

• Instagram rolls out an AI video assistant for creators
  Instagram announced on Wednesday that it’s bringing an AI video assistant tool to Edits, its CapCut competitor.This conversational AI chatbot is intended to provide personalized feedback to creators, rather than generic advice.

• Satlyt, founded by a former Google and SpaceX product manager, raises $8M to run AI on satellites
  The Kenyan American engineer previously worked in Google’s cloud computing business before a brief stint at SpaceX’s Starlink communications network in 2024. His experiences convinced him that there was untapped potential for computers in space.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Google AI Pilot Pays Some Sites Under 0.1% Of Ad Revenue

  Google is paying roughly 100 digital publishers through its AI contribution pilot, The Information reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the tests. The reported payments vary widely. Some smaller sites have earned less than $1,000 over several months, while one early participant is earning more than $1 million a year.

• Salesforce buys AI customer research startup Listen Labs
  The companies announced a definitive agreement late Tuesday. Salesforce didn’t disclose financial terms, although many outlets are reporting a price of about $2 billion. The transaction is expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal fourth quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approval and other customary conditions.

• Brian Chesky interview: AI agents need their own operating system
  With more AI on the way to the Airbnb app, I caught up with Chesky over Zoom to talk about how the company is approaching it, where interfaces are headed, why consumer AI still isn’t working, and what role voice will play.

• Braze expands AI from content creation to campaign operations
  The customer engagement platform announced BrazeAI Decisioning Studio Go, Agentic Standards, and Operator Connect at its Forge conference in Las Vegas. Together, Braze expects these tools give marketers direct access to individualized decisioning, automated compliance checks, and fluid connections to external AI environments like Claude.
  

The best in influencer marketing. And you’re invited.

Get ready for Return on Influence Festival '26. An entire day dedicated to influencer marketing with speakers running some of the best programs in the world. 

Already booked: 

• Maya Shaff, ŌURA

• Leah Walker, Adobe

• Georgia Humphries, Stanley 1913

• Tyler Vaught, Edelman

• Josh Rangel, Ogilvy 

and many more to be announced soon…

It’s free, it’s online, and you’ll take away something you can apply to your job the very next day. Scout’s honor!

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 Community | University 

Sep 30, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. You Are Probably Not Training Your AI
   (You’re just having very long conversations with it.)

2. Yes, You Can Change AI’s Opinion.
   (You can change AI’s opinion? Reputation management just unlocked a new difficulty level. 💀)

3. 'Super Intelligence'?
   (“Super Intelligence” because apparently AI needed a rebrand too)

Marketing Joke

SEO in 2026:
First we optimized Google’s opinion of your website.

Now we optimize AI’s opinion of your brand. 💀🤖

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• OpenAI takes on Microsoft with the launch of what feels a whole lot like ChatGPT’s own office suite
  OpenAI has been a close partner of Microsoft from the jump, but the AI lab is increasingly going after the company’s bread and butter, workplace software, with new features that closely resemble an office software suite like Microsoft’s.

• How to build a visual SEO strategy for AI search
  Images and videos have long been important SEO assets. Now, they are also inputs that AI systems interpret, connect to entities and context, and use to help people discover and evaluate brands.

  The challenge is no longer simply making an image understandable

• Shoppers will spend more and buy less this holiday season
  Higher prices are doing some of the work in the retail forecasts. Shoppers are also protecting spending on gifts while cutting back elsewhere, and ecommerce continues to grow faster than retail overall. So retailers could have a pretty good season in dollar terms without consumers buying much more stuff.

• Braze expands AI from content creation to campaign operations
  Braze is expanding its AI lineup with three new tools designed to integrate deeply into daily workflows and reduce the technical barriers that slow teams down.The customer engagement platform announced BrazeAI Decisioning Studio Go, Agentic Standards, and Operator Connect at its Forge conference in Las Vegas. Together, Braze expects these tools give marketers direct access to individualized decisioning, automated compliance checks, and fluid connections to external AI environments like Claude.

• TikTok adds certification tiers for agency partners
  TikTok’s updated agency partner structure will see each partner given either an Agency Partner badge or a Premier Agency Partner badge. Each designation is designed to best represent that organization’s depth of experience and demonstrated understanding of TikTok ads.

  ____________________________________________________________

People

Not many movements from our fellow Senior Growth Marketers today 🫠

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• OpenAI unveils AI assistant 'dots' while safety worries delay new model
  OpenAI on Tuesday unveiled "dots", a new artificial intelligence (AI) assistant it says can proactively carry out tasks on a user's behalf.At its annual developer day in San Francisco, chief executive Sam Altman referred to "dots" as "remarkably capable, always-on agents that can handle really anything you can think of."

• Meta launches Muse AI for SMBs

  Meta launched another element in its agentic artificial intelligence push with its Muse for Small Business package, which offers a range of functional options and tools that can help SMBs implement AI within their workflows.

The ice cream shop that makes money when it's cold

28 Wishes sells ice cream in Los Angeles. Below 70°F, sales fall about 20%. The weather is out of their hands. Rent isn't.

So the owners started putting about $20 a day into Kalshi weather markets, taking the cold side. The days that keep customers away now pay something back.

This is hedging. Big companies have done it for decades, buying protection against bad weather, fuel spikes and rising rates. It used to take a broker, a trading desk, and an order size no corner shop could meet.

Kalshi opens it up. Contracts on weather, fuel prices, inflation, tariffs and regulation, starting at a few dollars. Take a position on the outcome that would hurt you. If it hits, the payout softens it. If it doesn't, the contract expires and the good month was the point.

See how other owners are doing it at Kalshi.com/hedging

 Community | University 

Sep 29, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. OpenAI scraps rollout of new model over safety concerns
   (OpenAI cancelling a model over safety concerns... even AI gets stuck in approvals. 😭🤖)

2. Instagram shares Reels creation tips in new guide
   (Instagram sharing Reels tips again... the algorithm has assigned homework. 💀🎬)

3. YouTube previews AI-powered Conversational Editing
   (YouTube conversational editing... “make it shorter” is officially a production workflow. 😭)

Marketing Joke

Content marketing in 2026:
AI makes the video.
AI edits the video.
The algorithm judges the video.

You just approve version 17. 💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Microdramas: What You Need to Know About the Actors
  AI microdramas are making it possible for small teams to produce entire fictional series without cameras, locations or even traditional actors. But creating the story may be the easy part. The real challenge is deciding who your actors are, how their identities remain consistent, who owns or verifies those identities, and whether they can move between platforms.

• Amazon Blocked Meta’s Muse, And Robots.txt Had Nothing To Say
  On the night of Sept. 20, 2026, shoppers who sent Meta’s shopping agent Muse to amazon.com got a page that said: “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.” Todd Bishop reported it for GeekWire that night, with Amazon confirming the block.

• Shopify opens checkout to browser-based AI agents
  While some retailers, like Amazon (and Adidas, apparently!), are blocking AI agents from making purchases on users’ behalf on their respective platforms, e-commerce platform Shopify has moved in the other direction.

• Google is killing off Gemini’s Gems in favor of ‘skills’
  As all-in-one AI agents like Meta’s Muse and Instinct take off, Google announced it’s shutting down the Gemini feature known as “Gems,” which had allowed users to build custom AI assistants for specific tasks. However, the work users invested in creating the Gems won’t be destroyed. Gems will be automatically migrated to “skills” that can be used across different AI tasks.

• MIT & Harvard Data Show How SEO And Paid Media Managers Become Directors
  David Rotman’s article in the MIT Technology Review analyzes the bet behind every AI tool in your marketing stack. Hyperscalers will spend about $750 billion on data centers this year. Gary Gensler, who ran the SEC under President Biden and now teaches at MIT Sloan, puts total AI revenue at $150 billion to $200 billion.

  ____________________________________________________________

People

• After losing his voice to cancer, this founder is building “glasses for voice”
  Konrad Zieliński lost his voice to cancer years ago while he was a student at the University of Warsaw. People with his condition have traditionally relied on handheld speaking devices that sound flat and robotic, or on surgically implanted voice prostheses, which require ongoing maintenance to prevent complications

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• Anthropic’s prospectus details losses, growth, and, yes, a warning that its AI could end humanity
  Anthropic devoted nearly a third of its hotly anticipated IPO prospectus to risk factors, according to the Financial Times, which says it has reviewed the filing in recent days. The filing details specific, worrisome behaviors that Anthropic says its models have already shown or could show, including attempts to “resist shutdown,” to “conceal or manipulate information,” and behavior “resembling blackmail,” according to Reuters.

• What marketing job postings say about AI skills
  In 45 of the 60 cases, designing or shipping AI agents and automated workflows is a listed requirement. Only two mark it as a nice-to-have. One job posting states plainly: “AI is the way in which this role will be carried out. We are looking for a builder’s mindset: one that involves workflows and agents, not just prompts.”

Join 29,000+ Marketers at the Email Conference Everyone Talks About

What do Molly Ringwald, Dan Levy, Amy Porterfield & a world record have in common? They'll all be at GURU Conference 2026. 100% Free. 100% Virtual.

If you're obsessed with marketing like we're obsessed with marketing, GURU is the must-attend conference of the year. We'll be covering all things email marketing: B2B, B2C, newsletters, deliverability, email design, AI & more.

You can expect to walk away with new email strategies, the very latest digital trends, and how to step up your email performance. But don't worry, we also like to have fun. This year's theme is rom-com, so there will be DJs, meet-cutes, and a cutest pet contest. (Start prepping your dog's headshot now.)

Don't miss out. Join us Nov 12th & 13th for the largest virtual & free email marketing conference, powered by Constant Contact.

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 Community | University 

Sep 28, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. YouTube previews AI-powered Conversational Editing
   (YouTube conversational editing... “make it shorter and more viral” is officially a feature. 😭🎬)

2. Truecaller takes its scam intelligence to the open web as it looks beyond caller ID
   (Truecaller taking scam detection to the web... scammers just lost another hiding spot. 💀)

3. Insurers claim AI is already increasing healthcare costs
   (AI was supposed to make healthcare cheaper. Healthcare said “best I can do is more expensive.” 😭)

Marketing Joke

AI in 2026:
Saves you time.
Saves you effort.
Sends you the invoice. 💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• How can Instagram creators use Muse AI agents?
  As demonstrated at its Connect presentation last week, Meta is very excited about the potential of its Muse AI agents, which enable users to task its artificial intelligence-powered system with various functions that can be undertaken on the users’ behalf.

• After a deepfake voice fooled her grandfather, this founder sprang into action
  DetectifAI is selling first to phone manufacturers, licensing its software tools so that detection can ship as a built-in feature of the phone’s operating system. Her analogy is AT&T’s role in the original iPhone launch, when the carrier’s exclusive deal set it apart from its rivals: the first phone maker to ship DetectifAI will gain an edge over competitors, she argues, and deepfake detection will become a standard spec, like camera resolution.

• The Text-Only Version Of Your Website Strips Out The Wrong Layer
  The text-only versions now being served to AI do not merely fail to carry actions; they strip them out. A markdown mirror of a web page is prose. Whatever a visitor could have pressed is gone by the time the machine receives it.

• The Generative AI Report Sucks – Let’s Make It Brilliant
  On first glance, Google’s Generative AI report might seem insulting. But with a bit of nous we can make it genuinely valuable.
  “The impressions are based on links to your site being shown in AI Overviews / AI Mode. I don’t know if just a favicon would be linked, but if it’s linked to a page on your site, that would count… a link shown directly can count, while a link that requires activation only counts after that activation.”

• Astra and Opus just passed Turing’s other test
  Computer pioneer Alan Turing is best known for his eponymous experiment to test whether artificial and human intelligence can be distinguished. However, the more important test he faced during his lifetime was cracking the Enigma code used by Nazi Germany during World War II.

  ____________________________________________________________

People

• Automattic has a new board after failed attempt to put CEO on leave
  Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has rebuilt the company’s board just weeks after its previous directors tried, and failed, to oust him. The board, which was announced to staff Friday, is an eclectic group that includes a best-selling science-fiction author and two co-founders of the now-defunct social app IRL, TechCrunch has learned, and Mullenweg has confirmed.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• X launches Grok Bot rewards program to showcase AI utility
  X has launched a new Grok Bot Template Rewards program, which will provide cash rewards to users who suggest valuable use cases for its artificial intelligence-powered Grok bot that showcase how others can use its latest AI tool in their everyday processes.

• Can Meta be trusted with user data to power its AI agents?
  With the launch of Meta’s new AI agents push, the company has also initiated a public relations blitz in an effort to reassure users that it can be trusted with their data, despite many past instances of data misuse.

 Community | University 

Sep 25, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Google Search Console Adds Multimodal Filter For Image-Based Searches
   (Search Console tracking image-based searches... SEO has officially entered its visual era. 👀📈)

2. Everything new coming to Meta’s AI agent Muse
   (Meta Muse keeps leveling up... at this point, “AI assistant” feels like an understatement. 🤖)

3. Anthropic says its biology lab has already found something big
   (Anthropic’s AI biology lab found something big... AI really said “content creation was just the warm-up.” 🧬💀)

Marketing Joke

SEO in 2026:
Optimize the text.
Optimize the images.
Optimize for AI.

Next week: optimize your vibes. 😭💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Google provides more Demand Gen ad features
  Google has shared its latest Demand Gen ads updates, including artificial intelligence-powered assistance for product discovery on YouTube, new one-click ads on YouTube Shorts and Gmail and promoted location pins on Google Maps.

• Meadow lets you leave your smartphone at home without sacrificing the essentials
  Though Narlanka is only 25-years-old, Meadow isn’t his first startup. He dropped out of UC San Diego in 2020 when his last company, Scoutapp AI, started gaining traction. The inventory management platform for online businesses ended up being acquired by fashion resale platform StockX.

• AI Agents Won’t Fix Bad Audience Data, They’ll Amplify It
  AI agents are supposed to replace a lot of what human researchers used to do before a purchase decision got made, including pulling sources, spotting patterns, and building audiences.

• How to build cross-sell email flows that drive repeat purchases
  Selling anything is tough, and you’re right to celebrate every time a customer makes their first purchase. You’ve earned it. But the initial order is just the first hurdle. The real challenge lies in getting a customer to make additional purchases and increase their customer lifetime value (CLV).

  ____________________________________________________________

People

• Instagram chief shares algorithm insights and posting tips
  Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has shared a range of videos on his Instagram profile which aim to demystify the algorithm, and explain why and how the platform ranks content.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• B2B brands turn to creator video to fight AI slop and aid AI search
  B2B brands are increasing their use of creator video to stand out from AI marketing slop, thereby improving their reputation with customers who rely on AI recommendations.

• YouTube Turns Ask YouTube AI Into A Product Discovery Surface
  YouTube is introducing shopping features to Ask YouTube, its experimental conversational search tool. When users search for reviews of a particular product, search results might include videos displayed in a comparison table.

• Google Photos ‘Clueless’-inspired virtual closet is now available on Android and iOS
  Google’s new AI-powered feature that turns photos of your outfits into a virtual closet — one seemingly inspired by Cher’s iconic virtual wardrobe app featured in the movie “Clueless” — is now available to everyone in the U.S., Brazil, and India, on both iOS and Android devices.

 Community | University 

Sep 24, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your Weekly unfair advantage.

Once a week, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Everything new coming to Meta’s AI agent Muse
   (Meta Muse keeps getting upgrades... the AI agent wars are officially personal. 🤖👀)

2. Anthropic says its biology lab has already found something big
   (Anthropic’s AI biology lab already found something big... casual reminder that AI isn’t just making content anymore. 🧬💀)

3. ChatGPT mobile app gets voice-based agentic features
   (ChatGPT gets voice-based agent features... talking to your phone just became productive again. 😭📱)

Tech Joke

AI in 2026:
Answers your questions.
Takes actions for you.
Makes scientific discoveries.

Meanwhile, I’m still looking for the tab that’s playing music. 😭💀

3-Minute News Bulletin with Roxie

This week's 🙌 News Bulletin explores:
Quantum Marketing: Embrace Uncertainty for Success

Quantum Marketing: Embrace Uncertainty for Success

This week’s News Bulletin explores how AI is rewriting the rules of marketing, search, and commerce.

From quantum-inspired marketing and AI agents shopping directly through Shopify to the growing demand for GEO, brands are adapting to a world where discovery is increasingly shaped by AI. Meanwhile, citation strategies, publisher monetization, and B2B buying behavior are putting brand authority firmly in the spotlight.

The takeaway: visibility is no longer just about being found. It’s about being trusted, cited, and considered before the buying journey even begins.

Latest Growth Hacking News

Strategies

• AI Agents Will Game Your SEO Metrics, MIT & Stanford Research Points To The Risk
  If your SEO team is handing more of its work to AI agents, the metric you reward those agents for will matter more than the model you choose. Recent pieces from MIT and Stanford, read side-by-side, point to that conclusion, and each comes with a fix you can drop into next quarter’s plan.

• Google Search Console Adds Multimodal Filter For Image-Based Searches
  The announcement on the Search Central blog says the data includes searches with Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and the Chrome right-click “Search this image” feature. Google says it’s rolling out globally starting today.

• YouTube will let you build your own algorithm with AI
  YouTube says it’s going to let you build your own algorithm — well, kind of. The company on Wednesday announced a new feature called custom feeds that allows you to describe, in your own words, the kinds of videos you’d like YouTube to recommend to you.

• Marketo co-founder Jon Miller rethinks B2B marketing automation for the AI age
  For Miller, Phave represents a deliberate attempt to rethink a category he thinks is falling behind the realities of modern revenue teams. Marketing automation platforms originally promised to help B2B companies identify, nurture, and convert prospective buyers at scale.

• Search Console Uses Block Flattening For AIOs, Forget Position & Focus On Outcomes
  Declining clicks from organic search have been a shift in the industry for the past couple of years, and we’ve faced increasing pressure from clients and stakeholders to provide explanations for this, or to show that “traffic” has basically shifted to AI.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Meta outlines Muse, AI glasses and VR device updates at Connect 2026
  Meta announced a range of new artificial intelligence-powered options at its Meta Connect conference in Menlo Park this week, including improved data security for Muse agents, and new partnerships to facilitate more agentic AI functionality. Meta also showcased new AI glasses models, and a streamlined VR headset that weighs five times less than its current Meta Quest headset.

• YouTube presents new AI and engagement features at Made On 2026
  YouTube announced a range of updates at its 2026 Made On event this week, including custom feeds, Shorts series, new artificial intelligence-powered editing tools, real-time language dubbing for livestreams and more.

• Amazon Marketing Cloud’s 5-Year Dataset: 6 Use Cases Worth Building Now
  Brands advertising on Amazon often struggle to get the full picture of their performance across ad tactics. This stems from Amazon’s last-touch attribution model, which limits visibility into the impact of upper-funnel tactics such as display ads via Amazon DSP.

Most founders are one system away from turning LinkedIn into their best sales channel.

Engagement is easy to mistake for pipeline. On Sep 30, watch how a founder turns LinkedIn content into real outreach. Live. You'll walk away with a repeatable system: what to post, who to reach out to, and how to sequence it. 

Eligible startups also get the LinkedIn-to-Leads Toolkit: ad credits, Apollo, Captions, and HubSpot's Prospecting Agent.

Claim my spot

 Community | University 

Sep 23, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. When flat marketing budgets threaten growth
   (Flat marketing budget, ambitious growth targets. Love that journey for us. 😭📈)

2. LinkedIn adds new tools to fight fake profiles and bogus work histories
   (LinkedIn fighting fake work histories... résumé fan fiction is officially under attack. 💀)

3. OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and Luna, boasting lower cost and fewer mistakes
   (GPT-6: cheaper, smarter, fewer mistakes. AI finally understood the client brief. 🤖😭)

Marketing Joke

Marketing in 2026:
Budget: unchanged.
Targets: +40%.
AI: “I can help.”

Management: “Perfect, make it +60%.” 💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Spotify’s is giving you the keys to its recommendation algorithm with US launch of ‘Taste Profile’
  The music streaming giant on Wednesday began rolling out a feature called “Taste Profile” to its Premium subscribers in the U.S. that allows users to see, for the first time, how Spotify understands their taste across music and other audio. Users can request changes using natural language commands to fine-tune their recommendations, or make broader changes.

• How to build a marketing team with AI coworkers
  Several platform vendors have spent this year building products and features that are vying to be hired for one or more non-human roles in next year’s org chart. How many of the roles on your 2027 org chart will be non-human, and what will a truly hybrid workforce look and operate like?

• Google Analytics Adds Include Filters For Hostnames

  Google Analytics now supports Include data filters for hostnames, letting a property list the domains it will keep event data from. The change appears in a Sept. 21 entry on Google’s What’s new in Google Analytics page.

• IAB sets new standards for agentic buying and measurement
  IAB Tech Lab announced AAMP 3.0, the latest version of its Agentic Advertising Management Protocols framework. The release adds OpenProposal, a specification designed to standardize the part of media buying between an advertiser’s brief and a commitment to buy a process that has largely depended on people exchanging and evaluating proposals manually.

  ____________________________________________________________

People

• The man who built Apple’s stores doesn’t buy Silicon Valley’s bet on AI shopping
  Ron Johnson, 66, has heard predictions about the demise of physical retail before. He joined Apple in 2000 to build its retail business as online shopping was beginning to take off, and went on to help create a store network that became central to how Apple sells its products and connects with customers.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• Anthropic releases Opus 5.5 with lower prices and Fable-level performance
  Anthropic’s newest model, Opus 5.5, was released on Tuesday, setting a new state-of-the-art in coding and knowledge work performance, according to the company. Opus is the most capable and expensive tier in Anthropic’s three-tier Claude lineup; Sonnet sits in the middle, while Haiku is the fastest and cheapest. Notably, Anthropic says, the release outpaces the larger Fable model in many benchmarks and succeeded in a number of informal tasks that Fable failed to complete.

• ChatGPT Ads Appeared In 47% Of Video Gaming Chats, Data Shows

  Sponsored ads appeared in 47% of the ChatGPT conversations about video games and consoles that Comscore tracked in U.S. PC activity in June, up from 3% in March.

• Snorkel AI triples valuation to $3.5B as demand for AI training data booms
  The new round, which was led by Insight Partners and S32, valued the seven-year-old startup at nearly triple the $1.3 billion valuation it garnered when it raised $100 million in a Series D 17 months ago. Existing investors, including Addition, Lightspeed, Greylock, GV, and Wells Fargo, also participated in the round.

The ice cream shop that makes money when it's cold

28 Wishes sells ice cream in Los Angeles. Below 70°F, sales fall about 20%. The weather is out of their hands. Rent isn't.

So the owners started putting about $20 a day into Kalshi weather markets, taking the cold side. The days that keep customers away now pay something back.

This is hedging. Big companies have done it for decades, buying protection against bad weather, fuel spikes and rising rates. It used to take a broker, a trading desk, and an order size no corner shop could meet.

Kalshi opens it up. Contracts on weather, fuel prices, inflation, tariffs and regulation, starting at a few dollars. Take a position on the outcome that would hurt you. If it hits, the payout softens it. If it doesn't, the contract expires and the good month was the point.

See how other owners are doing it at Kalshi.com/hedging

 Community | University 

Sep 22, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Meta’s Muse is outpacing ChatGPT’s early mobile launch
   (Muse outpacing ChatGPT’s early launch... Meta did not come to play. )

2. X shares more insight into penalties impacting post reach
   (X explaining reach penalties... finally, the algorithm is showing its receipts. 💀)

3. Customer Lifecycle Goals: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
   (Customer lifecycle goals: because getting the customer was apparently just level one. 😭📈)

Marketing Joke

Growth marketing:
Acquire the customer.
Retain the customer.
Reactivate the customer.

Eventually just ask if they want to be friends. 😭💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Pinterest offers predictive optimization for Performance+
  Pinterest launched a new way to measure the likely effectiveness of ad campaigns in the app using a campaign optimization score, which offers a simplified metric that factors in a range of ad setup elements to predict performance.

• Research Shows Google AI Mode Sends Less Clicks & Is A Poor User Experience
  New research published in August confirms that Google’s AI Search reduces clicks to publisher websites and presents a user experience that is so bad it makes them seek out alternative search engines like Duck, Duck, Go, Bing, and Yahoo.

• Threads advertisers will no longer need an Instagram account
  Meta is changing its Threads ad creation process so that advertisers will no longer need to have a matching username on both Threads and Instagram to run promotions. Advertisers who don’t have an Instagram presence will also now be able to launch ads on Threads.

• Oura’s $2.2B IPO is mostly a payday for existing shareholders
  According to the company’s updated IPO filing, Oura and its shareholders are together offering 50 million shares at a price range of $40 to $44 each. But most of the IPO’s proceeds will go to shareholders, who are offering 36.5 million shares, or almost two-thirds of the total.

  ____________________________________________________________

People

• Shopify CEO Warns AI ‘Slop Grenades’ Shift Work To Coworkers

  Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke says AI has produced a new kind of lazy work at his company, where employees generate too much and leave coworkers to check it.Lütke made the comments on The Knowledge Project podcast, released Sept. 15. He said Shopify has an internal name for AI output that gets handed to a colleague without being read. Staff call it a slop grenade.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• How To Find The Sources Shaping AI Answers In Your Industry
  Your brand can appear in Google results without appearing in the sources an AI answer cites. Before commissioning another article or starting an outreach campaign, it helps to understand which pages are actually informing the answers your buyers see.

• Healthcare doesn’t have a claims problem, it has an intelligence problem 
  Healthcare has spent decades digitizing work, yet it still struggles to truly observe, understand and leverage how that work functions in practice. With AI, we can automate processes, but if information remains locked in silos, it can’t generate the intelligence that powers autonomous agents to execute workflows. Creating those connections between work and data is a key enabler in transforming revenue operations.

Join Fin, Anthropic, and Clay at Pioneer on October 7th

Pioneer, the summit where CX leaders redefine what’s possible, is on October 7th.

Join leaders from Fin, Anthropic, and Clay for an insightful conversation on the state of AI transformation.

You’ll discover how some of the most innovative minds in CX have transformed their organizations, learn how they think about CX, and hear how they're planning for what's next.

Join the conversation in San Francisco, or tune in virtually.

Reserve your spot

 Community | University 

Sep 21, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Is the AI industry really ready to slow down?
   (AI industry slowing down? Sure, right after everyone ships their next model. 😭🤖)

2. Faster AI can make slow marketing processes worse
   (Faster AI + slow approvals = congratulations, you automated the waiting)

3. Google DeepMind launches institute to widen the AGI debate
   (DeepMind widening the AGI debate)

Marketing Joke

AI: “Done in 30 seconds.”

Marketing team: “Amazing.
Approval should only take 3–5 business days.” 😭💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Google’s new ‘CC’ is an AI agent that helps families run their households
  The move to make CC more family-focused comes as a number of AI startups are experimenting with how to best fit agentic AI into consumers’ lives. Some AI tools, like Ollie and Fambot, for instance, have aimed their services directly at helping parents and families.

• Pinterest announces visual search ads and an AI restyle feature

  Pinterest announced a range of new discovery innovations at its annual Pinterest Presents event today. The platform is adding multiple features, including visual search ads, artificial intelligence-powered restyle options for home décor, and a new season of its CTV show.

• HubSpot rebuilds its platform around AI agents
  This is part of a major overhaul of HubSpot built around what it calls “Growth Context,” which combines information about a company, its teams, and its customers. That context feeds the redesigned Breeze Assistant, a self-updating Smart CRM, and a new Context Home for identifying gaps in the information available to HubSpot’s AI.

• Google UCP Update Lets Merchants Enable Cart Transfer To Site
  Merchants who use the hub for UCP-powered checkout can turn on a path that lets shoppers move items from Google to the merchant’s own site to finish buying. The new options are gradually rolling out in the U.S., with Australia and Canada to follow early next year, according to a holiday shopping post from Ashish Gupta, Google’s VP and GM of Merchant Shopping.

• Checking A Page Is Part Of A Retrieval Pipeline For AI
  The “site:” search operator in Google/Bing has been the mainstay of SEOs wanting to check if a page is in a search index if they didn’t have access to Google Search Console or similar. So simple, so effective.

  ____________________________________________________________

People

• A new kind of AI model from a ChatGPT inventor is thrilling developers
  Almeida was an OpenAI researcher who helped build the chatbot and then invent reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the model-training technique perhaps most responsible for our current age of AI. But despite its capabilities, he was disappointed.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• Google's Gemini AI hacked three companies in security test
  Google's AI model Gemini autonomously hacked into three companies during a test of its cyber-security capabilities, the company has said, in what is thought to be the first known case of it carrying out such an act.

• Your Brand Needs An AI Accountability Document, A School District Beat Big Tech To It
  The district’s guidebook won’t make headlines outside of our local community. It should. It’s a working answer to the exact question Cass says the industry keeps dodging, and buried inside a PK-12 policy document is a governance template that translates directly into what earns brand citations in AI search results right now.

Join Fin, Anthropic, and Clay at Pioneer on October 7th

Pioneer, the summit where CX leaders redefine what’s possible, is on October 7th.

Join leaders from Fin, Anthropic, and Clay for an insightful conversation on the state of AI transformation.

You’ll discover how some of the most innovative minds in CX have transformed their organizations, learn how they think about CX, and hear how they're planning for what's next.

Join the conversation in San Francisco, or tune in virtually.

Reserve your spot

 Community | University 

Sep 18, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Meta shares holiday 2026 planning guides
   (Marketers are already mentally in December. 🎄😭)

2. Anthropic and OpenAI want to embed safety evaluators. Will they really be independent?
   (AI companies evaluating AI safety themselves... “trust me bro” just got enterprise funding. 💀🤖)

3. Meta’s Muse hits Mac, letting the AI take actions on your computer
   (Muse can now take actions on your Mac... AI officially graduated from suggesting to doing. 👀💻)

Marketing Joke

Marketing in September:
Customer: “Isn’t Christmas months away?”

Marketer: “We’re already behind.” 🎄💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• More People Expect AI To Cut Jobs Than Add Them, Pew Finds

  Expecting fewer jobs is more common in high-income countries than in middle-income ones, and so is awareness of AI. The country-by-country results give you a read on how much people in each market say they’ve heard about AI and what they expect from it.

• Cloudflare Lets Sites Disallow AI Training Without Blocking Googlebot

  Cloudflare has announced a new Disallow AI Training setting, and it says it will move sites that already block AI training onto it. This setting adds a no-training preference in robots.txt, while still allowing Googlebot, Applebot, and Bingbot to crawl for search purposes.

• Facebook Pages get charged for link posts
  Meta One for Business includes the ability to add a limited number of links to Instagram posts and Reels each month, which varies by paid tier.

  Facebook post links are not listed as a benefit at this stage, but that looks set to change. This week, a range of Facebook managers shared this pop-up alert that appeared on their accounts.

• Researchers used Anthropic’s Claude to hack into OpenAI
  In a twist that captures the strange new state of AI security, independent security researchers have used Anthropic’s Claude to break into OpenAI, exposing cracks in the ChatGPT-maker’s defenses, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday evening.

• Crusoe raises $3.9B to build massive data centers and small modular ‘AI factories’
  Data center developer Crusoe said Thursday it raised $3.9 billion in a Series F round that pushes its valuation to $30.9 billion. The massive round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners. Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures, and TPG also participated, according to Crusoe.

  ____________________________________________________________

People

• Inertia co-founder Jeff Lawson’s next big bet is fusion
  Jeff Lawson has already helped build a company with more than $4 billion in revenue and 300,000 customers worldwide. After scaling Twilio into a public company, his next challenge reaches well beyond software: bringing fusion power to the grid as co-founder and CEO of Inertia.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• Google DeepMind launches institute to widen the AGI debate
  Google and Google DeepMind researchers launched the DeepMind Institute on Wednesday to advance the conversation around artificial general intelligence (AGI). The institute lists DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg, Google executive James Manyika, and Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis as directors, with Legg serving as managing editor.

• Pinterest announces visual search ads and an AI restyle feature
  Pinterest announced a range of new discovery innovations at its annual Pinterest Presents event today. The platform is adding multiple features, including visual search ads, artificial intelligence-powered restyle options for home décor, and a new season of its CTV show.

Hire Ava, the AI BDR built for enterprise

Ava is the first AI BDR to run outbound end to end, and you decide whether she runs autonomously or on copilot.

She finds leads or ingests accounts from your CRM, enriches them, sends personalized emails on behalf of your reps, follows up, handles replies and books meetings. Website visitor de-anonymization, intent signals, and a parallel dialer come built in.

A small team can manage her centrally for thousands of reps who never log in. Everything syncs two-way with Salesforce and HubSpot.

Ava runs outbound for companies like DoorDash and Grammarly, and one customer deploys her across 1,000+ reps. Ava is SOC 2 Type II audited, SSO and GDPR ready. Ava is how revenue teams grow pipeline without growing headcount.

Book a demo

 Community | University 

Sep 17, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your Weekly unfair advantage.

Once a week, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Apple will let EU apps use less-alarming tracking-consent screens
   (Apple making tracking pop-ups less scary... marketers everywhere just felt hope again. 😭📈)

2. Al Gore says the real AI risk isn’t data centers
   (The real AI risk isn’t data centers? Plot twist unlocked. 🤖💀)

3. Pinterest announces new deal with Nvidia
   (Μood boards are getting serious computing power. 😭🔥)

Tech Joke

Digital marketing in 2026:
Ask for tracking consent.

But, like... don’t make it sound like tracking. 😭💀

3-Minute News Bulletin with Roxie

This week's 🙌 News Bulletin explores:
Invisible Engagement: The New Social Media Metric

Invisible Engagement: The New Social Media Metric

This week’s News Bulletin explores how AI is changing what marketers measure, monetize, and optimize.

From “invisible engagement” shifting attention beyond likes and comments to new ways of generating revenue through ChatGPT, the metrics that matter are evolving. Meanwhile, Google experiments with compensating publishers for AI-powered answers, Salesforce builds specialized AI around customer workflows, and Meta packages AI and deeper analytics into new business subscriptions.

The takeaway: AI marketing is moving beyond experimentation. The next advantage comes from measuring real intent, building smarter workflows, and turning AI into measurable business value.

Latest Growth Hacking News

Strategies

• Anthropic and OpenAI want to embed safety evaluators. Will they really be independent?
  In a lengthy essay published over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a proposal that the AI industry would have rejected instantly even a year ago: embed third-party evaluators inside all frontier AI companies, giving them the power to report safety incidents, assess whether AI models are truly aligned, and share their unvarnished findings with the world.

• Google UCP Update Lets Merchants Enable Cart Transfer To Site

  Merchants who use the hub for UCP-powered checkout can turn on a path that lets shoppers move items from Google to the merchant’s own site to finish buying. The new options are gradually rolling out in the U.S., with Australia and Canada to follow early next year, according to a holiday shopping post from Ashish Gupta, Google’s VP and GM of Merchant Shopping.

• Lucid Motors has a potential robotaxi partner for Europe
  Lucid Motors has entered into a partnership with European mobility platform Bolt that could bring robotaxis made by the California company to the continent.

• Spotify expands its partner program for podcasts to 35 new countries
  Spotify is expanding its partner program for podcasts, which lets podcasters earn money from ad and Premium revenue sharing, to a total of 35 regions, including Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Poland, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas this fall.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• HubSpot rebuilds its platform around AI agents
  On the first day of Unbound26, HubSpot unveiled updates to change how people work with AI on its platform. Instead of choosing an agent or tool for each job, users tell Breeze Assistant what they want accomplished, and it selects the agents needed to do it.

• Cloudflare Lets Sites Disallow AI Training Without Blocking Googlebot
  Cloudflare has announced a new Disallow AI Training setting, and it says it will move sites that already block AI training onto it. This setting adds a no-training preference in robots.txt, while still allowing Googlebot, Applebot, and Bingbot to crawl for search purposes.

• Google Tests Paying Publishers For AI Answers Via Search Console

  Google is testing a program that pays publishers when their content contributes to answers in Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode, according to a Digiday report. The program runs through Search Console, and Google confirmed to the outlet that it’s an early-stage pilot.

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 Community | University 

Sep 16, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. The problem with AI doing exactly what you ask
   (AI doing exactly what you asked... turns out the prompt was the problem.)

2. AI agents now have a place to snitch
   (AI agents can snitch now. Corporate culture achieved. 💀)

3. Spotify finally lets parents exclude kids’ music from Wrapped and recommendations
   (Spotify finally separating kids’ music from Wrapped... parents are getting their identity back. )

Marketing Joke

AI in 2026:
Does exactly what you ask.

Unfortunately, you asked badly. 💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Meta Published 2 Documents About Muse And Only One Mentions Attacks
  Meta launched Muse on September 8. In Meta’s own words, it “can open a browser, fill out forms, and negotiate on their behalf,” and when it comes time to pay, it “can check out with Link built by Stripe.” It runs on Muse Secure VM, “a dedicated, virtual machine (VM) that houses both the agent and a person’s data.” U.S. only, in WhatsApp or the Muse app, and coming to AI glasses.

• LinkedIn shares tips on Thought Leader ads
  LinkedIn recently shared some tips on how to make best use of its Thought Leader Ads, in order to reinforce brand messaging and drive better responses.

• The next martech strategy starts with the operating environment
  As software begins to interpret objectives, make decisions, and act across systems, the question is whether the environment around the stack contains enough context, rules, permissions, and accountability for both people and machines to operate reliably.

• OpenAI, Anthropic, Google have been in talks on AI safety for weeks
  Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s global policy chief, told reporters on Tuesday that the company has been working with rivals Anthropic and Google DeepMind on AI safety for weeks, as first reported by Bloomberg. Lehane is reportedly in Washington to work with U.S. lawmakers addressing catastrophic risks associated with AI.

• Meta expands subscription push with new AI-focused plans
  Meta on Tuesday introduced a new subscription service called Meta One, offering expanded AI usage and other premium features across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The new plans let users access a number of AI tools, like those for creating and editing images and generating videos, as well as in-app tools like the AI-powered Restyle editing tool on Instagram.

  _____________________________________________________________

People

• Former TikTok execs built an app that uses AI to teach you how to pose for a photo

  Two former TikTok employees, Melody Chu and OpenAI, Anthropic, Google have been in talks on AI safety for weeks, are launching a new iOS app called Superpose that uses an AI guide to teach people how to pose for pictures.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• Companies are measuring AI against the wrong goal
  AI productivity gains won’t translate into growth unless companies connect their AI strategy to creating more value for customers.More money went into AI infrastructure in the last three years than was spent building the interstate highway system over four decades.

• The AI data center boom is colliding with cities scarred by big industry 
  Across the country, Americans are debating how their lives might change if new AI data centers are built in their backyards. Data center companies and their customers are promising new jobs and economic growth, but that pitch hasn’t won over a majority of Americans who oppose data center construction in their area, often over environmental and energy concerns.

How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.

LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.

The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.

Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more.

 Community | University 

Sep 15, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. LinkedIn shares tips on Thought Leader ads
   (LinkedIn monetizing thought leadership... even opinions have media budgets now. 💀)

2. Google updates Data Manager platform
   (Google updated Data Manager... because apparently we hadn’t looked at enough dashboards today. 😭)

3. Νew Siri takes on AI productivity apps
   (Siri entering the AI productivity race... comeback season is officially on)

Marketing Joke

Marketing in 2026:
Your thought leadership has a media budget.
Your data has AI.
Your Siri has a productivity strategy.

And the campaign still needs “one tiny revision.” 😭💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Google Tests Paying Publishers For AI Answers Via Search Console
  Google is testing a program that pays publishers when their content contributes to answers in Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode, according to a Digiday report. The program runs through Search Console, and Google confirmed to the outlet that it’s an early-stage pilot.

• Pinterest announces new deal with Nvidia
  Pinterest announced a new partnership with Nvidia that is designed to improve the app’s artificial intelligence-powered discovery processes. Using Nvidia’s advanced hardware, the updated system will enable Pinterest to build in more AI elements with less infrastructure investment, ensuring better performance across the platform

• Google Admits Search Console Reporting For AI Search Is Inadequate
  Google’s John Mueller answered a question about search console reporting’s inadequacies, defending the shortcomings as based on the inherent complexity of AI search itself.

• Spotify finally lets parents exclude kids’ music from Wrapped and recommendations
  At last, parents, your prayers have been answered! On Tuesday, Spotify announced that it’s finally doing something to fix how your kids’ listening habits ruin your end-of-year Spotify Wrapped experience, and then some.

• Fashion app Daydream uses Apple Intelligence to help you shop the outfits in your camera roll
  Daydream, an AI-powered fashion discovery app, launched two new features on Monday to let iPhone users turn saved outfit photos into shoppable results and search for clothing and accessories through Siri, without opening the app.

  _____________________________________________________________

People

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tells Trump ‘we’re not going to let [an AI slowdown] happen’
  While Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was onstage at the All-In Summit on Monday morning in Los Angeles, he got a phone call that he couldn’t send to voicemail it was from President Donald Trump.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• The AI performance shake-up: What’s really driving results across channels now
  Performance marketers are being asked to hand algorithms the keys to campaign execution while simultaneously proving that every dollar delivers measurable business value.That tension is real. But the solution isn’t to fight automation or surrender full control.

• AI Isn’t Delivering Marketing Efficiency, It’s Repeating Programmatic’s Broken Promise
  Eight years ago, I taught a course called Programmatic Buying Foundations. The pitch, right there in the course title, was that data and technology could deliver highly relevant, effective, and measurable ads at scale. Read Kevin Indig’s new Growth Memo column on the hidden hours buried inside AI marketing workflows, and you’ll recognize the dark side of my old pitch.

AI made PMs faster. Multiplayer mode is still broken.

A PM can summarize research, draft a PRD, and mock up a prototype before lunch. The hard part starts when the team has to decide what actually gets built.

Jira Product Discovery gives product teams one place to capture insights, prioritize ideas with consistent frameworks, and build living roadmaps stakeholders can rally around.

And because it’s connected to Jira, the context behind every decision stays with the work—so developers and their agents know not just what to build, but why.

AI helps PMs move faster. Jira Product Discovery helps the whole team build with confidence.

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 Community | University 

Sep 14, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Google updates Data Manager platform
   (Google updated Data Manager... because marketers definitely needed one more dashboard. 😭📊)

2. Anthropic CEO outlines plan to slow AI development
   (Anthropic wants to slow AI down. AI industry: “Wait, we can do that?” 💀)

3. OpenAI’s feud with mathematicians is only escalating
   (OpenAI beefing with mathematicians was not on my 2026 bingo card. 🍿)

Marketing Joke

Marketing in 2026:
Google: “Here’s more data.”
Marketers: “Great. What does it mean?”
Google: “Here’s more data.” 💀📊

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Google Search Redesign, Business Profile Post Views
  Google has introduced a new layout for Search results in some commercial queries within the European Economic Area. This layout includes specialized units for comparison sites and direct suppliers.

• FTC puts personalized pricing practices on notice
  The FTC’s call for transparency includes first-party data. For the past several years, marketers were told to respond to the decline of third-party cookies by collecting first-party data from their customers to create personalized experiences.  But in some instances, the personalization is being extended to the prices for goods and services. 

• AI is changing media faster than marketers can measure it
  AI is changing where people discover products and how they move toward a purchase. The problem is that advertisers’ measurement systems aren’t changing nearly as fast.

• The real AI decision every CMO is making this quarter
  AI is collapsing the distinction between technology strategy and product strategy. As martech vendors absorb more of the common work marketers do, CMOs increasingly have to decide which capabilities are strategic enough to develop and own inside the organization.

• The Simple Analysis That Reveals Who Your Best Customers Are
  Stop treating all customers equally. RFM analysis empowers you to identify your most valuable customers, understand their behavior, and tailor strategies for true business growth. Discover who truly drives your success.

  _____________________________________________________________

People

• Insight Partners’ Deven Parekh on why the firm is diversifying while everyone else bets the farm on OpenAI and Anthropic
  Deven Parekh has co-run the heavyweight investment firm Insight Partners for 26 years. Unlike many VCs who are loud on X and seem to live on podcasts, Parekh and Insight Partners tend to lay low.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• AI staff 'genuinely frightened' for humanity's future, ex-Anthropic researcher tells BBC
  An artificial intelligence researcher who quit AI firm Anthropic has said people working on the technology were "genuinely frightened" about the speed of its advancements and what it could mean for humanity.

• Google Admits Search Console Reporting For AI Search Is Inadequate
  Google’s John Mueller answered a question about search console reporting’s inadequacies, defending the shortcomings as based on the inherent complexity of AI search itself.

• Superhuman acquires YC-backed notetaker Fathom as productivity platforms push for agentic work
  Superhuman is joining the cadre of productivity platforms launching notetakers — but rather than building one internally, it is acquiring Y Combinator-backed Fathom.

AI made PMs faster. Multiplayer mode is still broken.

A PM can summarize research, draft a PRD, and mock up a prototype before lunch. The hard part starts when the team has to decide what actually gets built.

Jira Product Discovery gives product teams one place to capture insights, prioritize ideas with consistent frameworks, and build living roadmaps stakeholders can rally around.

And because it’s connected to Jira, the context behind every decision stays with the work—so developers and their agents know not just what to build, but why.

AI helps PMs move faster. Jira Product Discovery helps the whole team build with confidence.

Get Started for Free

 Community | University 

Sep 11, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Google Launches Meridian GeoX Globally
   (Marketers just got another reason to open a dashboard. 📊😭)

2. Instagram chief warns against eliminating algorithms
   (Instagram without algorithms? Mosseri said absolutely not. 💀)

3. Anthropic reveals rogue AI agents hate CAPTCHAs, just like you
   (Rogue AI agents hate CAPTCHAs too... finally, something humans and AI agree on. 🤝🤖)

Marketing Joke

Marketing in 2026:
Humans hate CAPTCHAs.
AI agents hate CAPTCHAs.

Finally, a target audience everyone agrees on. 💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Google Adds Post View Counts To Business Profiles

  Google says view counts for Business Profile posts are rolling out globally, confirming a feature practitioners spotted in testing last month.
  Post-level view reporting returns three and a half years after Google discontinued the old metric. The company’s API deprecation schedule lists post views and post button clicks as ending on Feb. 20, 2023, with no replacement.

• Is Your Local SEO Strategy Ready For Google’s Next AI Updates?
  For a multi-location brand, that changes what a local SEO strategy has to deliver. Ranking in the map pack is no longer the finish line. The test is whether AI Overviews and Gemini know enough about each location to recommend it, and whether the details they read are right.

• Snapchat expands Dynamic Product Ads to Sponsored Snaps
  Snapchat has launched a new Commerce Power Pack offering which is designed to help retail advertisers tap into valuable engagement opportunities, and includes new artificial intelligence-powered promotions

• How to do keyword research with Claude and Semrush
  Keyword research is an important stage in creating content that meets your audience's needs and provides value for your own business. But basic keyword research often gives you the same list of keywords that everyone in your category is getting when they run their own process.

• Maven Robotics wants to steal your robot deployment deal
  Today, the startup is emerging from stealth after raising $100 million from RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, and XTX Markets Ventures, with plans to build 250 of their third-generation robots and begin design on a fourth-generation platform.

  _____________________________________________________________

People

• Jensen Huang explains why Nvidia will grow an astounding 70% next year
  Founder, CEO, and tireless Nvidia hype man Jensen Huang told attendees at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology conference on Thursday why his company’s AI domination — and revenues — will continue its record-breaking growth streak through the end of next year.

  He can see the future.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• OpenAI puts Pro subscriptions on hold due to Astra demand
  The move was announced on X by OpenAI’s product leader, Thibault (Tibo) Sottiaux, who leads core products like Codex and ChatGPT at the AI lab. He said that the Pro plan puts the most strain on its systems, which is why sign-ups for this service tier are now being disabled.

• AI is putting marketing’s in-house model to the test

  The problem is what happens after the tools are adopted. Previous in-house pushes exposed hidden costs around talent, culture, and technology. This time, the test could come when boards ask whether all that AI-driven efficiency is actually producing better marketing results.

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Aimfox Avatars allows you to rent dedicated, customizable profiles for client outreach, all managed inside the same platform.

Launch more campaigns, keep client access separate, and hand interested replies to the right person.

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 Community | University 

Sep 10, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your Weekly unfair advantage.

Once a week, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. ChatGPT Shopping Results Lean Hard On Product Feeds
   (ChatGPT Shopping loves product feeds... turns out AI commerce still wants clean data. 😭🛒)

2. OpenAI adds a prominent AI doomer to its board of directors
   (Nothing says confidence like inviting your biggest existential concern into the meeting. 💀🤖)

3. Apple unveils its first foldable, the iPhone Duo
   (Apple finally made a foldable iPhone... your screen time can now literally double. 📱😭)

Tech Joke

SEO in 2026:
Optimize your pages.
Fix your schema.
Clean your product feed.
Convince ChatGPT you exist.

Then someone buys on Amazon anyway. 😭💀

3-Minute News Bulletin with Roxie

This week's 🙌 News Bulletin explores:
Google DeepMind Unveils New AI Search Model

Google DeepMind Unveils New AI Search Model

This week’s News Bulletin explores how AI is changing what marketers measure, optimize, and ultimately consider successful.

From the rise of “invisible engagement” and the underestimated sales impact of influencers to the challenge of proving real ROI from AI investments, traditional marketing metrics are being questioned. Meanwhile, Google, LinkedIn, WordPress, and Reddit are adapting their platforms as AI reshapes search visibility, security, authenticity, and advertising.

The takeaway: marketers need to look beyond surface-level metrics and focus on the signals that actually demonstrate influence, intent, and business impact.

Latest Growth Hacking News

Strategies

• Everything Apple announced at its fall iPhone event, from the foldable iPhone Duo to an always-listening Apple Watch
  Apple on Wednesday unveiled its latest iPhones and Apple Watches at its first fall event under newly appointed CEO John Ternus. The main event was the tech giant’s highly anticipated first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo. Apple also announced its iPhone 18 Pro lineup, along with new AirPods, and more.

• A better way to answer the AI ROI question
  AI productivity is easy to demonstrate. Revenue impact is harder. When revenue questions come up in leadership updates, the answers often turn vague, focusing less on numbers and more on signals. A three-layer framework helps you show what AI delivers at each stage and what must happen before its impact reaches the revenue line.

• Automattic’s board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

  Earlier Wednesday, Mullenweg posted in a Slack channel visible to all employees that the company’s Chief Financial Officer, Mark Davies, had “conspired” with other board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker to vote to put Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence.

• Google Responds To Sitemap SEO Technique That Forces Daily Crawling
  Google’s John Mueller was asked about a technique designed to force Google and other search engines to crawl sitemaps every day. The person asking the question said they saw this in action on a large site.

• Shipt becomes the latest delivery app with an AI shopping assistant
  Shipt, the same-day delivery platform owned by Target, is the latest delivery app to join the AI cart race. The company announced on Wednesday that its new “Ask Shipt” tool will help customers shop more intuitively and turn prompts into customized ready-to-buy carts.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Le Monde Says AI Overviews Haven’t Hurt Its Audience So Far
  Le Monde reports that its audience hasn’t dropped suddenly since Google launched AI Overviews in France. The company’s experience contrasts with early warnings that AI Overviews could greatly decrease news traffic.

• 5 AI Models, 4 Signals: What 120K Mentions Reveal About Multi-Location SEO
  A mere year ago, the verdict on AI and local search was that it was pretty beta-esque: Local results were still vague, missing images, and recommended places that weren’t even nearby.Today, AI tools deliver more useful local results, more consumers use them for local recommendations, and we know more about where they pull business information from.

• AI research startup Listen Labs scrubbed a $1.5B funding round for Salesforce talks
  Listen Labs, a market research startup that uses voice AI to conduct customer interviews, recently signed a term sheet for a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, with Menlo Ventures set to lead the round, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.

Exploring AI Voice With SuperBloom

Scaling a campaign globally means finding a voice that resonates everywhere—without losing the overall message. For Deel's "Feeling of Deeling" campaign, agency SuperBloom needed exactly that: a consistent brand voice across markets, deployed fast, without sacrificing quality or consent. They built it with Branded AI Voice, powered by real, professional talent.

SuperBloom and Voices break down how the campaign came to life in this on-demand video session—from strategic talent selection through seamless production workflows and global scale, to the governance that future-proofs an audio strategy built to last. You'll hear directly from the team on how they made this happen, plus their advice if you're looking to explore AI voice for your brand.

If you're a marketing executive, agency creative, or brand leader mapping campaigns in international markets, watch this on-demand session to get a real playbook, not a hypothetical—lessons any creative team can apply to their own global rollout.

Watch On-Demand Now