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In the early 2010s, hashtags were basically free advertising. Slap enough of them on a post and strangers would find you. That era is over, and Instagram just made it official.

In December 2025, Instagram capped posts at five hashtags and said using too many irrelevant or generic tags can actually hurt a post's performance. Instagram's own leadership has said hashtags don't meaningfully move reach anymore. Discovery now runs almost entirely on the algorithm reading behavior signals like watch time, saves, and shares, not the tags you typed in.

That doesn't mean hashtags are dead, it means sloppy hashtags are dead. The brands still winning with them use a handful of specific tags. Skincare brand KraveBeauty built an entire community around its own branded hashtag, #PressReset. Snack brand SmartSweets pairs its branded tags with a single relevant community hashtag instead of a wall of generic ones.

For a small business, that means throwing thirty hashtags at every post isn't a growth strategy anymore. A better move: pick one branded hashtag you own, one or two niche tags your actual customers search, and skip the rest. Put real keywords in your caption and bio instead, since that's increasingly what surfaces you in search now, not a pile of hashtags.

Test what's actually working before you lock in a hashtag list forever. Type the # symbol while writing a caption and Instagram will suggest relevant tags directly. Then track which posts using which tags actually bring in engagement or followers over a few weeks, instead of guessing and repeating the same list forever.

Source: Shopify

While everyone was still arguing about ChatGPT, Google quietly shipped three new Gemini models in a single day, and one of them is already working inside Google Search.

Google introduced 3.6 Flash, its new workhorse model for everyday tasks, 3.5 Flash-Lite, its fastest and cheapest model yet, and a specialized cybersecurity model. The headline number: 3.6 Flash uses 17% fewer tokens than its predecessor while performing better, which in plain English means faster answers at a lower cost to run.

"Developers and customers building production AI agents need higher token efficiency, lower latency, and more reliable performance," said Tulsee Doshi, Senior Director of Product Management for the Gemini team at Google.

Here's the part that actually touches your business today. 3.5 Flash-Lite isn't staying locked inside developer tools, it's rolling out directly into Google Search right now. That's the model doing more of the thinking behind AI Overviews and AI-generated answers, the same answers increasingly showing up above your website in search results.

If you use the free Gemini app to draft social captions, summarize a contract, or brainstorm content ideas, you're getting a meaningfully faster, more capable assistant starting today, at no extra cost. Google also confirmed it has started training Gemini 4, calling it their "most ambitious pre-training run yet." Translation: Google isn't standing still, and neither is anyone else in the AI race.

Source: Google

Ask ten business owners whether they should spend on Facebook ads or a local radio spot, and you will get ten confident opinions. Look at the actual data, and the real answer is not which channel wins. It is that both are losing to something free.

Stop asking whether Facebook ads beat a radio spot. Both are paid, and paid is losing to something free: a referral from a real customer. Put a referral system next to whatever you are already paying for, and you will out earn business owners still stuck picking sides.

The budget fight is already settled. Small business marketing dollars have shifted hard toward digital and social, and when a paid social campaign is run well, a 5 to 1 return is the standard industry benchmark, according to Sprout Social's 2026 ROI research.

Here is the part nobody selling ad space wants you to see. Nielsen data shows more than 9 in 10 consumers trust a referral from a friend or family member over anything else, while only 36% trust an online video ad, the exact format most social budgets get poured into.

Referral marketing converts at 3 to 5 times the rate of other channels, and businesses running a real referral program saw revenue jump by an average of 86%. For small businesses specifically, referral programs return 3.6 times their cost, a real number, not a vibe.

So the fight was never social versus traditional. It is paid versus earned. Every paid dollar, social or traditional, should be paired with a system that turns customers into referrers: a review ask after every job, a simple "who do you know," an incentive for sharing. The channel is just the delivery truck. Trust is the cargo.

Source: Sprout Social

One business owner watched 4,651 real reviews collapse to 63 in about a day, and Google admits its own system did it.

Screenshot your current review count and a handful of your best reviews today. And if you spot a fake review on your own listing this week, think twice before hitting report, that action looks like exactly what triggers the wipe.

Since around July 1st, the Google Business Profile forums have filled with complaints from owners watching reviews vanish overnight. Some lost a handful, some lost thousands, and several report their star rating dropping straight to zero with new reviews blocked from posting afterward.

"We had approximately 4,651 legitimate customer reviews collected naturally over many years from real customers. Suddenly, within about 24 hours, our public review count dropped to only 63 reviews," one owner wrote in the forums. Google confirmed to Search Engine Land this is intentional, not a random bug: "When our systems detect suspicious reviews, we take a range of actions including removing reviews and temporarily pausing reviews on the profile to prevent further abuse. We are investigating the issue and will restore any reviews that were incorrectly removed."

A Google Product Expert tracking the complaints says the pattern often starts right after an owner reports a fake or spam review on their own listing. The report itself seems to trip the spam system, which then hides the whole review history and blocks new ones from posting. No fix timeline has been given, and reviews are one of the biggest local ranking and trust signals a small business has.

Until Google says more, hold off on mass reporting fake reviews on your own listing, and keep proof of your current numbers on hand in case you need it for a restoration request.

Source: Search Engine Land

For three years, using ChatGPT meant asking a question and doing the work yourself with whatever came back. That deal just changed.

Give it a real project this week, not a quick question. Hand ChatGPT Work a task you've been avoiding, a report, a spreadsheet, a client deck, and see how far it gets before you have to step in. That's the actual test of whether this is worth your time.

On July 9, OpenAI released GPT-5.6, its new model family, in three tiers: Sol, the strongest, built for heavy lifting; Terra, everyday work at half the cost of the last flagship; and Luna, the fastest and cheapest, still surprisingly capable. The rollout had been delayed at the request of the U.S. government and went broadly available the same day.

The bigger deal for a small business owner shipped alongside it: ChatGPT Work. It's an agent that takes an outcome you want, not just a question, gathers what it needs from your connected files and apps, breaks the job into steps, and stays on it for hours without you re-prompting every five minutes. Ask for a client deck or a quarterly report and it hands back something finished, not a rough draft you still have to assemble yourself.

Access is rolling out first to Pro, Enterprise, and Edu plans, with Plus and Business getting it within days. The desktop app is already live on Mac and Windows, even on the free plan.

Source: OpenAI

For twenty years, good product photography meant hiring a photographer and paying the bill before a single ad ever ran. Meta just handed every advertiser on its platform a version of that photographer that works for free, and it lives right inside the tools you already use.

On July 7, Meta launched Muse Image and previewed Muse Video, the first media generation models built by its Superintelligence Labs research group. Muse Image is available today in the Meta AI app, on meta.ai, in Instagram Stories in the US, and on WhatsApp in limited countries, with Facebook coming soon.

The advertiser-facing version is what should get your attention. Meta says Muse Image can restyle ad images inspired by your existing creative, and it can generate still images pulled straight from your video assets. The headline feature: it lets Meta AI take a photo of a shopper's actual room and show your product staged inside it, pulled from your real product catalog.

This is already at real scale. Meta says more than 8 million advertisers are already using at least one of its generative AI ad creative tools, and Muse Image currently ranks No. 2 on Arena for text-to-image and both single and multi-image editing, based on human preference rankings as of July 5.

Every image Muse Image generates in the Meta AI app or on meta.ai carries Content Seal, an invisible watermark that survives cropping, compressing, and resizing, even a screenshot, so there's a way to check whether an image was AI made.

Source: Social Media Today

More of your future customers are asking ChatGPT for recommendations instead of Googling. So who does the AI actually recommend, and why? Semrush just bought us all the answer.

AI doesn't recommend the business with the best website. It recommends the business that's described consistently across reviews, directories, and community sites. This week, check that your name, services, and story match everywhere you're mentioned online, and start stacking reviews.

The company's new AI Visibility Index analyzed 126 million real AI prompts to see which sources chatbots pull from when they build an answer. The headline finding: chatbots cite specialists over generalists, and they lean hard on third-party sources, review platforms, community sites like Reddit and Quora, directories, and reference pages, rather than a brand's own website.

Each AI tool also has its own favorite sources, so where you show up matters as much as showing up at all.

Here's the part that should change how you think: the brands AI describes most consistently aren't the ones publishing mountains of content. Per Semrush, they "publish the right content on the right surfaces, owned and third-party, so AI systems receive a consistent, coherent signal about who they are and what they do."

Source: Social Media Today

Ever wonder why a post from a business you've never followed lands in your feed like it belongs there? That's not an accident. That's the whole strategy now.

Every public post you publish now gets tested on people who have never heard of you, on every platform, not just Facebook. Write for the stranger, not the regular. And know this: posts set to "friends only" are exempt from the whole system, for better and for worse.

For years, social media ran on the "follow graph": you saw posts from people and pages you chose to follow. That era is over. Every major platform, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, has shifted to an "interest graph," where AI decides what you see based on what you watch, save, and share, not who you follow. Meta's own engineers describe it as recommendation systems pulling from "tens of billions" of pieces of content outside your network. In practice, your post gets an audition: it's shown to a small batch of non-followers first, and if they watch, save, or send it to a friend, the platform widens the audience. Perform again, and it widens again.

Why did every platform make the same move at once? Because TikTok proved that interest beats friendship for holding attention, TikTok never needed you to follow anyone to keep you scrolling for an hour. The others copied the playbook to survive. And there's a business reason the platforms don't advertise: recommendations give brand-new content from small accounts a fighting chance (Meta literally says every new piece of quality content gets a shot at "a large, relevant audience"), which keeps small businesses and creators posting, and keeps the feed full of free inventory to sell ads against.

Now the question Scroll readers keep asking: "If my posts are set to friends-only, does the algorithm still push them to strangers?" No, full stop. Recommendation systems only pull from PUBLIC content. Friends-only posts, private accounts, and limited-audience posts are not eligible to be shown to non-followers, your privacy setting overrides the algorithm every time. Which cuts both ways: your family posts stay private, but if you're running your business from a personal profile locked to friends, you are invisible to the single biggest growth engine on social media. Your business Page and public account are where the auditions happen, that's where your best work needs to live.

Source: Meta AI

Google just rewrote the rules on its own AI, and it did it quietly.

Stop assuming Google's automated tools are hands off. The new terms spell out that you're on the hook for reviewing, approving, or removing anything Google Ads generates automatically, headlines, sitelinks, whole asset groups. If an AI written line makes a claim you can't back up, that's now on your account, not Google's.

The old Google Ads terms, last updated back in 2018, treated automation like an optional feature you could opt into or ignore. The new terms, effective July 1, treat it as the system you're already running inside. Whatever you type into AI Brief, Ask Advisor, or any of the conversational campaign tools can now be used to shape your account. So can the URLs you hand over and whatever Google crawls on your site once you give it permission.

Here's the part that should actually worry a small business owner. Your website isn't a curated ad library. It's got old blog posts, expired promotions, a careers page, legal disclaimers, all of it crawlable. Automation doesn't know the difference between your best offer and something you took down eight months ago. If it pulls the wrong thing into an ad and that ad runs, the terms are clear the responsibility sits with you, not Google.

Go check your Performance Max landing page report and your Search terms report filtered by landing page. See what pages Google's actually pulling from. If something shows up that was never meant to sell anything, exclude it with a page feed or a URL exclusion at the campaign level. Set a weekly review on new campaigns until you know what the automation is doing, then drop to monthly once it settles down.

Source: ZATO PPC Marketing

Here's the quiet change that's about to make a lot of marketing reports look like a mistake.

Before you trust this month's report, export or screenshot your current Reach numbers as a baseline. When the new “Viewers/Views” figure shows up, it will likely read higher, because it counts repeat views, not just unique people. Stop comparing this month to last month, and judge your content on what actually moves your business: saves, shares, DMs, calls, and clicks.

Meta is pulling its legacy “Reach” metric, along with old Video Impressions and Story Impressions numbers, out of the Graph API, the back-end pipe that feeds nearly every third-party tool you use. Metricool, Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout, Iconosquare, the dashboard your VA pastes into your monthly report: they all pull from that pipe. In its place, Meta is rolling in a new “Viewers” metric meant to count how many people saw your content the same way across Facebook and Instagram.

Why should a busy shop owner care about an API? Because “Reach” was unique people, and “Views” counts every time your post got seen, same person, three scrolls, three views. Your headline number is going to jump, and it won't mean more humans saw you. Anyone glancing at a report and thinking “we're crushing it” is about to be fooled by a counting change, not a growth spurt. And anyone comparing June to May is comparing two different rulers.

So do two things this week. First, save a clean snapshot of your current numbers before they vanish, that's your only honest before-and-after. Second, pick the two or three outcomes that actually pay your bills, booked calls, form fills, DMs, foot traffic, and make those the line you watch. Reach was always a vanity number wearing a business suit. This is your excuse to stop bowing to it.

Source: Social Media Today

Quick story while it's fresh.

If any part of your business runs on a single AI tool, you just got a preview of how fast it can disappear. This wasn't a server crash or a billing snag. A federal directive ended the model overnight. Spend an hour this weekend writing down what AI you use and making sure you've got a working backup.

At 5:21pm Eastern last night, the US Commerce Department sent Anthropic an export control directive. The letter was signed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, written with help from the Bureau of Industry and Security. It told Anthropic to cut off any foreign national from using its two most powerful AI models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5. Anthropic said the only way to actually comply was to shut both models off worldwide, for every customer, foreign or American. Just gone.

Fable 5 came out Tuesday. Three days is how long the strongest publicly available AI model on the planet lasted before the government took it down.

Some background. Mythos 5 is the unrestricted version. Anthropic was only sharing it with about 50 vetted partners through a program called Project Glasswing. That list includes Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike, and they were using it to hunt down security holes in their own software before the bad guys could find them. Fable 5 was the toned-down public version with guardrails baked in. The government claims Fable can be jailbroken to do the same security-hunting work. Anthropic basically said, sure, sort of, but every other big model can do that too, including OpenAI's GPT-5.5. They got verbal evidence only. No paper, no specifics, and the example they were shown was, in Anthropic's words, the model being asked to read a codebase and find software flaws. That's a thing cybersecurity defenders do every single day with regular ChatGPT.

The whistle blew yesterday, and the platforms had clearly been waiting for it.

For the next five weeks, your customers' feeds belong to the tournament. Stop posting like it's a normal week, attach your content to match days, watch parties and game-night energy instead of competing against them. And keep an eye on your ad costs around big matches, because the auctions are about to get loud.

Meta just announced World Cup features across every app it owns: live score alerts and a dedicated tournament community on Threads, a special search hub on Instagram with its own tournament button on football videos, a double-tap "Football Mode" on Facebook, and a Live Updates feature in Messenger that pipes goals and red cards straight into your group chats. WhatsApp got themed stickers and a tournament channel directory last week. Snapchat rolled out its own activations the day before, and TikTok signed up creator correspondents weeks ago. The tournament runs through mid-July, 48 teams, the biggest edition ever played.

Here's why this matters even if you couldn't care less about soccer: when every major platform builds dedicated surfaces for one event, the algorithm's attention follows. Tournament-adjacent content is about to get distribution help, and everything else gets squeezed. A business posting its usual Tuesday promo is now competing with the most-watched television event in human history, inside the same feed.

The play isn't to fake being a soccer brand. It's to borrow the moment: match-day hours posts, watch-party energy, "open during the game" angles, prediction contests. One caution, "World Cup" and "FIFA" are fiercely protected trademarks, so in paid ads say "the tournament" or "the big game" and you'll stay out of trouble.

Source: Social Media Today

For fifteen years, the deal was simple: you post, the algorithm decides who sees it, and nobody gets a vote. That deal just changed.

Stop posting random one-offs. Instagram now files every post under a topic, and users can add or delete those topics from their feed. If your content doesn't clearly belong to the topics your customers actually pick, you don't get demoted, you get removed. Pick your lane and make every post obviously about it.

Instagram announced it's extending “Your Algorithm”, the topic-control dashboard it tested on Reels last October and Explore in April, to the main feed. Users get a list of topics Instagram thinks they care about, and they can add the ones they want more of and delete the ones they don't. Whatever they choose directly rewires what shows up when they open the app.

Here's why this matters for a local business more than for a big brand: topics are now the currency. When a homeowner adds “home renovation” to their feed topics, every contractor whose content clearly fits that topic just got a standing invitation into that feed. The plumber posting a mix of memes, vacation photos, and the occasional water heater tip? The system can't file that account under anything, so it shows up nowhere.

What to do this week: audit your last ten posts and ask one question, could a stranger name your topic in two seconds? If not, tighten it. Use clear spoken keywords in your Reels, put your niche in your captions and on-screen text, and stay in your lane long enough for the system to learn what you are. Industry analysts are betting most users won't touch the settings, which means the ones who do are your highest-intent customers, literally raising their hands for your category.

Source: Social Media Today

Yesterday Anthropic flipped the switch on Claude Fable 5, and quietly changed what a small business can do with AI overnight.

Stop renting five different AI tools this week. The new top-tier model is included free for paid Claude users through June 22, so pick one real job you've been avoiding (a month of captions, your whole FAQ, a messy spreadsheet) and hand it the entire thing, not a sentence at a time.

On June 9, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, the first model in a new tier that sits above its already-strong Opus line. It rolled out everywhere at once, the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, and GitHub Copilot, and here's the part that matters for you: it's included free for Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users during an introductory window from June 9 through June 22.

Translation for a business owner: the gap between "AI toy" and "AI employee" just closed. This model is built to take a whole task and run with it, reading your messy documents, working through multi-step jobs, and checking its own work before it hands it back. That's the difference between asking it to write one caption and asking it to plan, write, and organize a month of them while you go run your actual business.

What to do this week: don't overthink the tech. If you already pay for Claude, the upgrade is just there, no new signup. Block 30 minutes, grab the single most tedious recurring task on your plate, and give it the messy raw version (the export, the notes, the half-finished doc). The free window is the cheapest R&D budget you'll ever get. After June 22 the premium tier carries premium pricing.

Source: Anthropic

For three years Siri was the assistant everyone made fun of. Apple just stopped the joke cold.

When a customer asks an AI agent for a recommendation, it reads your reviews, hours, and website to decide whether to surface you, nobody scrolls to page two. Your job this week is boring but decisive: make sure your business name, hours, services, and reviews say the exact same thing everywhere online. Consistency is what AI trusts, and trust is what gets you recommended.

At its developer conference on June 8, Apple unveiled "Siri AI", a complete rebuild that can hold a real conversation, see what's on your screen, pull details out of your texts and emails, search the open web, and actually take actions across your apps. Point your camera at a plate of food and it estimates the nutrition; ask it to split a bill and it does it through Apple Cash. Under the hood, Apple is blending its own models with Google's Gemini, running on-device and through private cloud. It hits beta later this year, U.S. and English first (not the EU or China at launch).

Here's why a shop owner should care more than a tech blogger. For twenty years, "getting found" meant ranking in a list a human scrolled. Agentic assistants don't scroll, they read, judge, and hand back one or two answers. That means the businesses with clean, consistent, well-reviewed information online don't just rank higher; they become the recommendation. Everyone else becomes invisible, not because they're worse, but because the AI couldn't verify them.

So do the unglamorous work now. Audit your Google Business Profile, your website, and your social bios so the hours, services, address, and phone number match to the letter. Ask happy customers for reviews this month, volume and recency are exactly the signals an AI leans on. You can't optimize for Siri AI directly yet, but you can be the kind of clean, trusted listing every agent wants to recommend.

Source: Apple Newsroom

Every few years Google tries to become a social network. This time it might actually stick, because it's bolting the idea straight onto Search.

Search is turning into a feed. Ranking for a keyword used to be the finish line, now Google wants searchers to follow you and get your posts pushed back to them later. Stop treating your Google Business Profile like a phonebook listing and start running it like a channel: fresh posts, photos, and answered questions every single week. That habit is what earns the follow when this reaches you.

Google is testing "Search Profiles", social-style profiles that live right inside your Search results. They pull your latest articles, videos, and social posts into one branded spot, and they add a Follow button so the people who find you once get your content surfaced again later in their Discover feed. Social Media Today broke down the rollout this week.

Two shifts are hiding in this. First, Google's AI Overviews are now answering questions at the top of the page and starving the blue links underneath, so a "follow" relationship is Google's peace offering to anyone watching their organic traffic dry up. Second, the door isn't open to everyone yet: right now you need 100,000 followers on YouTube, Instagram, or X (300,000 on TikTok), US only. Most local owners don't clear that bar, yet.

Don't wait for the invite to act. The version of this you already own is your Google Business Profile: the posts, the photos, the Q&A, the reviews. That IS your search profile today. Feed it weekly like you'd feed a social account, because the follow button is going to come down-market, and the businesses already acting like a publisher will be first in line.

Source: Social Media Today

For years, "AI on the phone" meant a robot menu that made customers want to throw their device across the room. That era is over.

Stop sending calls to voicemail. The technology to staff your phone around the clock with an AI that reasons, books appointments, and speaks your caller's language just went live, but you reach it through a voice-agent platform, not from the company that built it. If you run a service business, missed calls are almost certainly your biggest unplugged leak.

OpenAI shipped three new realtime voice models that any app can plug into: one (GPT-Realtime-2) that reasons through a request like a sharp human and books or looks things up mid-conversation, one (GPT-Realtime-Translate) that translates speech across 70+ input languages into 13 output languages without the speaker pausing, and one (GPT-Realtime-Whisper) that transcribes a call live as it happens. They're not a demo. They're available right now.

Sit with that number. The leads are already calling you. The marketing already worked. The phone just rang into the void because you were under a sink, on a job site, or asleep. An AI that picks up on the first ring, qualifies the lead, and even handles a Spanish-speaking caller in their own language isn't a luxury anymore, it's plugging a hole that's been quietly draining your revenue for years.

Now the catch, because you deserve the truth: OpenAI released this as a developer tool, not an app you sign up for. You access it through voice-agent platforms, the Goodcalls, Synthflows, Retells and CloudTalks of the world, that wrap the models into something you can actually use. The economics are wild: the live-translation model runs about $0.034 a minute (roughly $2 an hour of perfect interpretation), and a full AI receptionist lands at $65, $499 a month versus $3,750, $4,000 for a human one. Real and bookable today, through a platform, not a download.

Source: OpenAI

For years the advice was “answer your DMs faster.” Meta just deleted that chore.

Turn it on, but train it before you trust it. Feed it your real prices, hours, FAQs, and the exact way you talk to customers, then watch the first 50 conversations like a hawk. The businesses that win here aren't the ones who automate the most; they're the ones whose agent sounds like a human who actually works there.

At its Conversations conference in London on Tuesday, Meta unveiled the Meta Business Agent, an AI that lives inside your WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram inboxes and actually does the work. It answers questions, pulls products from your catalog, qualifies leads, books appointments, and yes, closes sales. It speaks your customer's language, mimics your brand's tone, and knows when to tap you in for the human touch. There's even a morning briefing summarizing every overnight chat you missed.

Here's why this lands harder for a small operator than for a big brand: you don't have a night shift. A roofing company, a med spa, a bakery, the lead that DMs at 9pm usually goes cold by morning because nobody's there. This agent answers in seconds, every time, and Meta tested it with over a million small businesses in India, Mexico, and Brazil before flipping it on globally this week. It plugs into Shopify and Zendesk too, so it can take real action, not just chat.

The catch, and this is the line buried in the announcement, it's free now, but Meta says it “may become a paid subscription in the coming months.” Translation: get in while it's free, learn it cold, and build the muscle before there's a price tag on it. Start small, let it handle FAQs and hours first, keep your hands on anything involving money or a quote.

Source: Business Today

For years you had two ways to control how Google tracked your visitors. In 11 days, you'll have one, and it's the one most business owners have never touched.

Stop assuming a setting buried in Google Analytics is protecting your data. After June 15, Google Ads ignores those Analytics toggles entirely and obeys only the consent banner on your site. Pull up your banner this week, click through “Accept” and “Reject” yourself, and confirm it's actually telling Google the truth, because a broken banner now means broken numbers everywhere.

Google is rolling out what it calls “destination-specific controls” on June 15. In plain English: the master toggle inside Google Analytics that quietly let you throttle how ad data gets collected is going away. From that date, Google Ads stops looking at your Analytics dashboard and listens only to the consent (cookie) banner code on your website. If the banner says yes, Google goes all-in on linking and audience building. If it says no, or if it's misconfigured, Google goes dark.

Here's the part that should make you sit up: nothing in your dashboard will warn you. Your reports will keep loading. The numbers will just quietly get less accurate, fewer tracked conversions, smaller retargeting audiences, worse automated bidding, because the AI is now flying on whatever your banner feeds it. If you run any paid ads, or you pay someone to run them for you, this is your money on the line.

Three moves before June 15. One: open your own site and actually click “Accept,” then “Reject,” on the cookie banner to confirm it behaves. Two: make sure your privacy policy mentions associating data with Google sign-in information. Three: if you use an agency, email them today and ask one question, “Are we ready for the June 15 consent change?” If they hesitate, that's your answer.

Source: Launch

LinkedIn just put a clock on something a lot of business owners do without thinking: hitting “go live” on a whim.

If you ever tap “go live” to talk to customers, that button disappears in three weeks. Starting now, build the habit of scheduling a LinkedIn Event first, even one set for ten minutes out, so your team isn't scrambling on a launch day in late June.

As of June 22, 2026, you will no longer be able to start a live broadcast on LinkedIn without first attaching a scheduled Event, a page with a title, a description, and a start time. The instant, no-setup “go live” option is being removed entirely. You can still go live on short notice; you just have to spin up an Event first, even one scheduled for a few minutes from now.

Here's why this actually helps the little guy: a scheduled Event is promotable. It gets a landing page, a reminder system, and a window where people can register before you ever go on camera. The spontaneous stream got whoever happened to be scrolling. For a local business owner doing a product demo, a Q&A, or a behind-the-scenes look, that pre-event runway is the difference between three live viewers and thirty.

Do this before June 22: practice the new flow once this week. Create a test Event, schedule it for ten minutes out, and go live from it so the steps are muscle memory. Then build a simple repeatable title format for your broadcasts so setup never becomes the reason you skip going live.

Source: Social Media Today

A month ago, the smart move on ChatGPT ads was “interesting, sit tight.” That advice just expired.

Put a conversion pixel on your site this week, even if you have zero plans to advertise on ChatGPT yet. The early-access auction is thin and cheap right now, and the businesses with tracking already firing get smarter delivery before everyone else floods in and bids the price up.

In about two months OpenAI has gone from “we're testing ads” to a full self-serve ad platform: cost-per-click bidding, daily budgets, geo-targeting down to the ZIP code, a conversion pixel, a server-side Conversions API, and now cost-per-action bidding. The last piece, conversion-optimized campaigns that steer your ads toward the people most likely to actually buy, begins rolling out June 5. Until now you could only pay for impressions and clicks. You were buying attention and hoping it turned into something. That's over.

Here's why this lands on a small business owner's desk and not just an agency's: your customers already talk to ChatGPT before they ever fill out a form. “Is my current provider ripping me off?” “What should I pay for this?” “Do I even need this service?” Those are bottom-of-funnel conversations with real money behind them. The only reason to wait was that you couldn't prove the spend paid off. Now you can, recommended bids are sitting at just $3, $5 a click while the auction is still quiet.

What to do: get the pixel or Conversions API on your site, define a real conversion (a booked call, a quote request, a form submit, not a pageview), and confirm it's firing before you spend a dime. One warning from the people doing this daily: tracking set up badly is worse than none at all, because it quietly optimizes toward the wrong action and burns budget while looking busy. Measure twice, cut once.

Source: PPC Land

On May 5, OpenAI flipped a switch that changes who gets to play in AI advertising, and it's not just the big agencies anymore.

Stop writing broad “we're awesome” brand copy for this channel, it will burn your budget. ChatGPT ads reward one thing: a specific, intent-matched offer dropped in front of someone who's literally asking about your category. If you sell a clear service to a clear customer, you can test this with a few dollars and learn before your competitors even hear about it.

The pilot that launched in February required a $50,000 minimum spend. That number alone told you who it was built for: holding companies and national brands. As of May, that wall is gone. The ChatGPT Ads Manager is now self-serve with no minimum, open to any U.S. business that wants to test it. They also added cost-per-click bidding on top of the old CPM model, which is exactly what a performance marketer needs to take a channel seriously.

Here's why this matters for a small business: the ads appear in clearly labeled boxes at the bottom of AI answers, and targeting is contextual, based on what the person is actually talking about in that conversation, not the keywords you guessed at. The catch is that advertisers get zero user data back. No emails, no IPs, no precise locations. Just aggregated performance. That means the measurement game is different, and last-click thinking will leave you blind.

What to do this week: don't bet the budget. Pick your single sharpest offer, the one a customer would search for by intent, write three versions of it, and run a small CPC test. Bids under $3 tend to get no impressions, so plan for $3, $5 a click and treat it as paid research, not a scale play. Yet.

Source: Workshop Digital