Meta will soon scrape advertisers' sites

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Meta's new terms let it scrape your website for AI LINK

• Meta has added a clause to its revised Commercial Terms, taking effect on October 30, 2026, that lets it crawl, copy and re-crawl the websites linked to a business's products and use that content to train its own AI.
• Agreement is passive, since continued use of Meta's commercial products counts as consent with no partial opt-out, and the crawler, Meta-ExternalAgent, is a mixed-use agent that the terms do not tie to robots.txt.
• The new rights land two days after October 28, when Meta switches on in-app product browsing in existing ads, so the businesses that buy its ads are also the ones whose sites it may now copy.

See how your short videos stack up in 2026 LINK

• Metricool's 2026 report lets brands and creators see how their short videos compare by studying views, comments, and shares across Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.
• The study covered 375,462 accounts grouped into five tiers by follower count, finding that TikTok leads in views for tiny through big accounts while Instagram leads among accounts with over 1 million followers.
• Instagram leads in shares across every account size and in comments in most tiers, with medium accounts averaging 21 comments per Reel, nearly four times the figure for YouTube Shorts.

Safari now caps some tracking cookies at 7 days LINK

• Safari now cuts tracking cookies to just seven days when a site's tracking subdomain, such as sst.​example.​com, actually runs on a different company's servers, according to an analysis published on September 30, 2026 on the TAGGRS blog by analytics engineer Mariusz Brucki.
• WebKit compares the network address behind the tracking response with the main site's; if it spots CNAME or IP address cloaking, it applies the cap even to cookies set through an HTTP response, a rule added with Safari 16.4 on March 27, 2023.
• When a shopper returns after more than a week, the site may issue a new identifier and count them as a brand-new visitor, which inflates new-user numbers and stops campaign clicks from connecting to the conversions that follow.

Amazon Ads now lets AI run your full-funnel targeting LINK

• Amazon has reworked its ad-buying tools under a new system called Amazon Ads Agent, where an AI chat assistant can pick channels, audiences and bids for a brand's full-funnel campaigns, according to an analysis from trade newsletter ADOTAT.
• The setup stacks three campaign types behind the chat interface, with the old Amazon DSP controls now tucked into DVA+ advanced settings, while the most automated option, Full-Funnel Campaigns, carries a minimum daily budget of $100, or at least $3,000 over a month.
• ADOTAT points out that Full-Funnel, the least controllable product, is the one already live for US advertisers, while DVA+, which keeps manual controls like audience targeting and bidding, was still in closed beta on October 1 with open beta expected in late October.

Brands want creator microseries, but control is the catch LINK

• Brands are moving into creator-led microseries for the built-in attention and audiences they bring, but the format is raising an unsettled question over who controls the characters, audience and intellectual property that make a series valuable.
• Brands can join an existing hit to buy guaranteed distribution, often at a higher cost, or build a series from scratch for more control; Home Game Studios puts an average season budget near $200,000, with seasons shrinking to about half their former episode count.
• Because value sits in the repeated link between brand and a format people keep watching rather than immediate clicks or sales, ownership terms stay unresolved, with no clear answer on expiry dates, whether licenses return to the creator, or who can develop a spin-off.

Strategies & Tactics

> 9 Overlooked Marketing Budget Leaks (+How to Plug Them): Find where marketing money gets wasted, vague goals, too many channels, broken landing pages, neglected content, or ignored existing customers, and fix the costliest leak first.

> Best Claude skills for marketing and sales teams: Package the recurring marketing and sales tasks you repeat into reusable Claude instruction sets, keeping strategy and fact-checking under human review.

> What actually happened when our blog went AI-first: A manager's account: HubSpot gave writers AI tools but found drafting sped up while fact-checking and quality review grew, so human judgment matters more, not less.

> GEO Strategy 101: Building an AI Search Plan That Works: Build an AI search strategy from real buyer research tied to pipeline, not formatting tricks, since AI shortlists brands before a single click happens.

> The psychological advantage of incrementality testing: Measuring each channel's true added revenue gives marketers the confidence to cut inefficient spending and discuss budgets with finance in profit terms.

> You Know Your Ideal Customer. But Can Your Media Plan Actually Reach Them?: Build media audiences from consumers' self-declared attitudes and intentions, not just inferred behavior, so campaigns actually reach the persona marketers defined.

Other news you might like

• YouTube tests AI replies in searches LINK

• Google Ads Now In AI Mode With Personal Intelligence LINK

• AI Shopping Agents Force Retailers to Rethink Customer Access and Payment Controls LINK

• More Than Half of Podcast Listeners Say Ad Load Is Too High, Favor Host Reads, Free Membership Tiers, Study Finds LINK

• Google Ads Data Manager stops requiring hashed customer data November 16 LINK

• ChatGPT Ads Manager adds conversion diagnostics and weekly reports LINK

Trending tools

Ami AI: analyzes your website to find high-converting buyers, plans outbound campaigns around lead goals, then runs and self-corrects outreach automatically. LINK

Pexo: turns your product details and assets into a finished launch video, planning the story, generating scenes, and handling voiceover, music, and edits from comments. LINK

Browzer: connects to your GitHub repo to auto-draft demo videos, blog posts, changelogs, and docs, keeping them current on every merge LINK

PixVerse R2: generates infinite, interactive video in real time, producing continuous streams that respond instantly to your input for live creative control LINK

Kombai Gallery: browse a growing library of web and mobile UI designs, then remix them with Kombai or hand them to your coding agent. LINK

agentic-ai-starters: provides plug-and-play blueprints for building autonomous AI apps, including agent workflows, API stacks, architecture patterns, prompts, and monetization ideas. LINK

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