☕️ Google must share its search data with rivals

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.

In today's MarketingShot:

🔍 Google must share its search data with rivals

🛒 AI shoppers could be skipping your checkout

📉 Why branded search no longer measures your demand

✍️ Your GEO rewrites could cut AI retrieval 16%

💰 Your marketing budget is set to grow in 2027

Plus: 💡 4 strategies & tactics, 🎁 9 other news you might like, and 🧰 6 tools.

🔍 Google must share its search data with rivals LINK

The European Commission has ordered Google to open parts of its Android system to rival AI assistants and to share anonymised Search data with competing search engines, after ruling that Google's own compliance plans did not work.

Google Search has held more than 90 percent of the EU market for decades, and Google's first data-sharing offer stripped out 90 to 100 percent of unique queries and shut out AI chatbots, producing no meaningful uptake among rivals.

Around 60 percent of European mobile users carry an Android device, and the shared dataset will exclude advertising clicks, since URLs tied to paid results are stripped out, along with account information, search histories and precise timestamps.

🛒 AI shoppers could be skipping your checkout LINK

Shoppers now often arrive at retail sites having already finished much of their buying journey through AI tools like ChatGPT, which can leave the standard checkout mismatched with what those customers actually need.

The article calls this mismatch the "intent gap," meaning the difference between the context a shopper brings and the static cart, checkout and confirmation pages they find regardless of how they got there.

Retailers can test practical steps such as measuring transaction performance by arrival context instead of one conversion metric, and finding points where shoppers from different sources consistently abandon the purchase journey.

📉 Why branded search no longer measures your demand LINK

Branded search, once a trusted stand-in for brand demand, no longer reflects it accurately because AI-powered search now sits between what consumers prefer and what they type into a search box.

Across the firm's client portfolio, branded search demand fell 11.1% over the past month even though the auction environment stayed steady, while branded acquisition costs ran 76.6% lower than non-branded costs.

AI Overviews appeared in 57.2% of commercial searches for one client's core keyword under a year ago, but by June 2026 that figure climbed to 95.9%, capturing more of the decision before users search.

✍️ Your GEO rewrites could cut AI retrieval 16% LINK

A critical survey posted to arXiv on July 15, 2026, found that rewriting only a page's body for generative engines can lower its top-10 presence after reranking by 16 percent, contradicting the industry's popular "40 percent" visibility claim.

Author Olivier Martinez traced that "40 percent" figure to a single metric, Position-Adjusted Word Count, which rose from 19.3 to 27.2 in a testbed where five documents were already supplied to the generator, not to any gain in clicks.

Testing across the SAGEO Arena environment, run over 171,003 documents and 2,700 queries, found that optimizing only the body cut average top-20 presence by roughly 9 percent and lowered final citation by 6 percent.

💰 Your marketing budget is set to grow in 2027 LINK

Marketing budgets are expected to grow in 2027, with 89% of B2B marketing decision-makers and 91% of B2C marketers planning to increase their investments over the next 12 months, according to Forrester's latest budget planning guides.

For B2B organisations, technology will get the biggest boost, with 80% of marketers raising spending, followed by personnel and programmes at 76% each, while B2C marketers also expect technology to see the strongest growth.

Forrester urges marketers to redirect money towards answer engine optimisation, noting that 94% of business buyers now use generative AI during the purchasing journey, which makes visibility within AI-generated responses more important.

💡 Strategies & Tactics

> The 2026 Paid Playbook: Audience, Channels, and AI: Feed platforms your own customer conversion data and resolve buyers' personal identities so cheaper channels match, because targeting is the one edge competitors can't copy.

> How to run a CTV incrementality test (and why most fail): Explains how to prove streaming TV ads actually drive sales by withholding a control group of accounts before launch, since untested comparisons only measure targeting.

> RCS or SMS? It Depends on the Task: Choose the richer RCS text format only when images or buttons help shoppers finish a task; otherwise cheaper plain SMS wins.

> Why Meta Descriptions Still Matter: Write meta descriptions for high-intent pages because Google and AI tools like ChatGPT still pull them into snippets when they summarize a page best.

Other news you might like

• ROAS Goal for Maximize Number of ConversionsLINK

• Retail media was the first wave. Financial services may define the next one.LINK

• The End Of Head‑In‑The‑Sand Children’s Privacy PracticesLINK

• Why Friday afternoon is the worst time to shop online — and marketers know the window when your guard is downLINK

• AI synthetic audience matches human polling in studyLINK

• Nearly Half of Marketers Now Use Podcasts, But Measurement Gap Undercuts ROI ConfidenceLINK

• Safari 27 blocks LinkedIn and Bing ad trackers by IP addressLINK

• IP-based CTV targeting fails 3 in 4 times, Adstra study findsLINK

• Google touts billions of weekly AI Search clicks as CTR data drops 58%LINK

🧰 Trending tools

OpenSEO: an MCP-connected SEO data tool offering keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink data, and site audits starting at $10/month.LINK

Honestly: aggregates and verifies authentic social media conversations about your product from TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit and X into actionable insights.LINK

SocialEcho 2.0: an AI copilot that helps teams find trends, create on-brand content, publish across platforms, manage interactions, and track engagement for multiple brands from one workspace.LINK

Goals from Loops: tracks user actions and conversions automatically, triggering targeted lifecycle emails so SaaS teams measure engagement without manual event setup.LINK

Kobbe: cookie-less website analytics tracking traffic, revenue, referrers, and conversions with ready-made dashboards and no lengthy setup required.LINK

Fuzzy AI: an API that lets developers add AI-driven decision logic to apps without needing training data or data science skills.LINK

See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ MarketingShot!