Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.
In today's MarketingShot:
🤖 Meta's new Muse agent shops and pays for shoppers
📺 YouTube opens live commentary to more of your creators
🔍 Google AI overviews are swallowing your people also Ask traffic
📈 What 7 Brew and Mr. Pibb did to grow in a tough market
🏪 Google Ads gives you new ways to track in-store sales
Plus: 💡 6 strategies & tactics, 🎁 6 other news you might like, and 🧰 6 tools.
Meta's new Muse agent shops and pays for shoppers LINK
- Meta launched Muse on Tuesday, September 8, a personal AI agent that can open a browser, fill out forms, negotiate deals, shop for items, and complete payment transactions for users.
- For payments, Muse relies on Stripe's Link to create a one-time card so the agent never sees the real card number, and it can reach Gmail, Spotify, Ticketmaster, OpenTable, and Shopify.
- At launch Muse is available only in the U.S. on web, iOS, and Android, with a free version plus subscriptions priced at $20 and $100 a month, according to reports.
YouTube opens live commentary to more of your creators LINK
- YouTube is widening its test of Watch With, a feature that lets more creators broadcast their own live reactions and commentary alongside livestreams inside the mobile app.
- Creators in the experiment group get a "React live" button in the Share panel on eligible streams, which locks the phone camera horizontally and cannot be switched off during the reaction.
- Reaction creators earn revenue normally and share viewing metrics with the original broadcaster, while YouTube reported that in September 2025 more than 30% of daily logged-in viewers watched live content.
Google AI overviews are swallowing your people also Ask traffic LINK
- Google now answers close to 100% of its People Also Ask questions in search with AI Overviews, a sharp jump from roughly 12% recorded about 14 months earlier.
- AlsoAsked reviewed a sample of 19.2 million English questions made in 2026 and found 97% of People Also Ask answers in the first week of September were AI Overviews, up from 86% in August.
- The rise was first spotted by Saeed Khosravi of Allintitle, whose Also Ask Miner data showed answers hitting 100% AI-generated starting August 2026, while Mark Williams-Cook of AlsoAsked measured 97%.
What 7 Brew and Mr. Pibb did to grow in a tough market LINK
- 7 Brew and Mr. Pibb managed to grow their purchase consideration during a tough market, landing on Morning Consult's 2026 Fastest Growing Brands report at a time when only 14% of brands saw any growth.
- Mr. Pibb's growth came from its October 2025 relaunch, which retired Pibb Xtra and added a new formula with 30% more caffeine and a cherry kick, doubling purchase consideration and lifting previously flat awareness.
- 7 Brew won with Gen Z, women, parents and TikTok users by opening more locations, launching its mobile app in August for ordering ahead, and giving away a free branded NeeDoh squishy toy with two medium or large drinks.
Google Ads gives you new ways to track in-store sales LINK
- Google Ads is launching two features for multi-location retailers, restaurants and local service businesses: Local Customer Optimization for Performance Max store goals campaigns and a simpler way to bring store sales data into Data Manager.
- Local Customer Optimization is a campaign-level toggle that, when enabled, prioritizes budget toward reaching consumers who are actively in-market nearby across Google Maps, Waze and local Search, and it is rolling out now.
- Store Sales in Data Manager lets advertisers connect their CRM or Google Sheets directly to measure in-store sales and optimize campaigns toward their highest-potential walk-in customers, and it begins rolling out in the coming weeks.
Strategies & Tactics
> How to build your first AI SEO agent (full walk-through): Build a narrowly scoped AI SEO agent that automates one repeatable task like keyword research, connecting verified data sources and keeping human approval on risky steps.
> Inside Google Maps: 72 ranking signals and the architecture behind local search: Google ranks places by scoring an underlying entity assembled from 793 data sources, so fixing a listing edit competes against other evidence rather than overriding it.
> How to Approach Meta Advertising Control: Default to Meta's automated targeting for age, gender, and remarketing, and only intervene with bid-lowering value rules when data shows Meta wasting budget on cheap, low-quality conversions.
> A better way to answer the AI ROI question: Sort AI work into three layers, foundation, systems built on it, and business outcomes, so leaders see honest progress instead of overclaimed or undersold revenue gains.
> How to optimize your website for AI search: Optimize sites for AI search by pairing strong SEO fundamentals with original, expert content that answers questions upfront so answer engines can cite you.
> How To Optimize for Claude Visibility: AEO Guide for B2B Companies: Structure comprehensive, honestly-sourced comparison pages that Claude can reason across and cite when B2B buyers research vendors, since Claude rewards depth over snippets.
Other news you might like
- OpenAI launches Images 2.5 with faster editing tools LINK
- StreetTalk Study Shows Street Interview Ads Reach More New Buyers Than Standard Creative LINK
- Cision report finds 66% of journalists use PR content for story ideas LINK
- Marketers say they want transparency—their ad spending says performance matters more LINK
- Google Opens AI Mode to Exact-Match Search Ads in Quiet Test LINK
- Infobip study finds brands struggle to prove sports ROI LINK
Trending tools
OpenSEO: an open-source Ahrefs alternative for keyword research, competitor analysis, backlinks, rank tracking, and technical audits powered by real DataForSEO data. LINK
AdAnt AI: converts product URLs or inspiration videos into editable short-form ad variants for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts, streamlining creative testing at scale. LINK
Astute: a B2B new media platform that tracks your creator presence, builds data-backed partnership strategies, and automates campaigns with trusted influencers. LINK
Unabyss for Claude: pulls context from Slack, Gmail, Notion, and GitHub into one shared memory for MCP tools, so you stop re-explaining yourself across apps. LINK
AgentSky: runs managed AI coding agents with auto-recovery, letting you control remote development from WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, web, API, or CLI LINK
akta.pro: private company data platform offering deep coverage, event signals, and news to help finance and GTM teams source deals and target outreach. LINK
See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ MarketingShot!