Half of US shoppers now buy with AI, NIQ says

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In today's MarketingShot:

🛒 Half of US shoppers now buy with AI, NIQ says

🕵️ Temu ran a $1B fake-influencer ad network on Meta

🎬 Best Buy is becoming a content studio for your ads

🔗 ChatGPT now sends 95% of your AI referral traffic

📉 Google's September spam update could hit your rankings for two weeks

Plus: 💡 6 strategies & tactics, 🎁 7 other news you might like, and 🧰 6 tools.

🛒 Half of US shoppers now buy with AI, NIQ says LINK

More than half of US shoppers, 51%, used at least one AI tool to help them buy something in the past month, the first time the figure passed 50% in NIQ's Agentic Commerce Tracker.

Product recommendations were the most common use at 20% of consumers, followed by AI personal shopping assistants at 16%, with people mostly comparing options, judging value and narrowing their choices.

The monthly survey asks about 500 US consumers each month as part of NIQ's Quick Question research, and use has grown steadily over the past two quarters, now covering every step of a purchase.

🕵️ Temu ran a $1B fake-influencer ad network on Meta LINK

Temu has mostly stopped paying for a network of fake influencer accounts on Meta’s platforms after Fortune exposed it, having spent nearly $1 billion on partnership ads across Instagram and Facebook targeting the U.K. and 27 E.U. countries.

Around 73 of the 100 influencers running the most Temu ads were probably fake, based in China, Russia, Bangladesh, or Iran, and together these accounts ran more than 1.4 million partnership ads reaching almost 17 billion pairs of eyeballs.

After Fortune’s August 31 story, Temu’s daily partnership campaigns nearly halved, with weekly partnership ads dropping from 115,114 to 64,008, and the biggest fake account, “Ya Lilly,” stopped posting entirely on September 7.

🎬 Best Buy is becoming a content studio for your ads LINK

Best Buy has moved beyond selling advertisers access to shoppers and now offers to make the ads themselves, adding a studio, creator network and production workflow on top of its retail media business.

Best Buy Studios spans 70,000 square feet with sound stages, editing and audio suites, a fabrication shop, a food stylist prep room and a prop warehouse, more than doubling the number of videos the retailer produces.

Best Buy's influencer network splits awareness influencers from conversion influencers, its in-house team made more than 3,000 campaigns last year, and 93% of transactional revenue could be tied to a customer ID.

🔗 ChatGPT now sends 95% of your AI referral traffic LINK

ChatGPT sent 95.1% of the website traffic that AI chatbots referred in August, its highest share this year, according to new data from the search marketing company BrightEdge.

Referral traffic from ChatGPT grew 101% between January and August, rising 36% in August alone, while Gemini came second with 2.4%, Perplexity had 1.1%, and Claude 0.8%.

BrightEdge linked the rebound to OpenAI's push to improve ChatGPT after Sam Altman declared a "code red" in December, and found total AI referral traffic grew about 73% in under a year.

📉 Google's September spam update could hit your rankings for two weeks LINK

Google rolled out its September 2026 spam update to search rankings today, and unlike the three earlier cycles this year that wrapped in about three days, this one may take as long as 14 days to finish.

The update applies across every country and language, and sites caught breaking Google's anti-spam policies can slide down the results or drop out entirely, while sites that stay within the rules are not the target.

This is the fourth spam cycle of 2026 and the seventh confirmed ranking update this year, arriving 37 days after the August cycle began, with the 14-day allowance carrying the rollout to about October 8 if used fully.

💡 Strategies & Tactics

> B2B answer engine optimization: How to show up in AI: Get named in AI vendor answers by mapping each buyer role's questions, keeping review profiles current, and correcting inaccurate descriptions, because most B2B committees now shortlist through AI.

> A Complete Guide to Facebook Ads Placements for 2026: Let Meta automatically place your ads across Facebook and Instagram, excluding specific spots only when your own performance data shows they underperform.

> The Versus Layer: Who Owns the Pages AI Uses to Compare Your Product?: AI often compares your product using competitors' or third-party comparison pages, so publishing your own versus, category, and product pages controls the evidence.

> Methods for Creating Short-Form Video Content That Consistently Ranks on Social Media Discovery Pages: Open every video with a strong hook and build around niche-specific trends, because watch time and engagement drive what discovery pages recommend.

> The micro-influencer era is here—brands need a new playbook: Retain micro-influencers with ongoing branded communities, gamified rewards and in-house storefronts rather than one-off deals, because consumers trust their recommendations far more than celebrities.

> The Two Internets Behind AI Answers, and What They Mean for B2B Marketing: Track AI citations separately per platform because Google and ChatGPT cite different sources beyond vendor pages, so one blended score hides gaps.

Other news you might like

• TikTok One Adds AI Creator Search, Faster Payments, and a Label for Vetted Creators, Showcased at Its LA Creators SummitLINK

• Trusted Creator Recommendations Make Consumers 2.5 Times More Likely to Buy, Report FindsLINK

• Kalshi’s AI ad turned an Asian YouTuber into ‘a white dude’LINK

• Google provides more Demand Gen ad featuresLINK

• Podcasts Are Becoming More Programmatic. But Now Advertisers Have To Keep The Ad Load In CheckLINK

• LTK Unifies AI Search, Creator Discovery, and Chatbot in New Search TabLINK

• Creators drive discovery for 29% of Gen Z, but only 6% buy immediately: ReportLINK

🧰 Trending tools

AdAnt AI: generates and tests editable short-form video ad variants for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts using AI agents that recommend hooks and templates.LINK

Anysite.io: delivers fresh web and business data via MCP or REST for outbound, ABM, research, and monitoring, with flat monthly plans and no setup.LINK

Browzer: connects to your codebase to auto-generate self-healing docs, blogs, quickstarts, and videos, freeing DevRel teams for community and growth work.LINK

akta.pro: private company data and signals API with event tracking, news, and entity resolution, helping finance and GTM teams source deals and target outreachLINK

Articos: tests messaging, positioning, and landing pages against simulated personas matched to your ICP, delivering audience feedback in under 30 minutes.LINK

line-harness-oss: a self-hosted CRM for LINE Official Accounts offering step messaging, broadcasts, forms, and reservations, with MCP and TypeScript SDK support.LINK

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