TikTok now feeds news to 1 in 5 adults

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TikTok now reaches 1 in 5 U.S. adults with news LINK

• About one in five U.S. adults, or 20%, now regularly get their news on TikTok, according to a Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 people conducted in August 2026.
• TikTok trails Facebook and YouTube, which draw 40% and 34% of adults for news, but 53% of TikTok's own users say they regularly get news there, close to Facebook's 57%.
• Younger adults, women, people without a college degree, and Democrats are each more likely to turn to TikTok for news, shaping who the platform reaches.

Spotify lets podcast creators sell memberships to fans LINK

• Spotify is launching "Memberships," a feature that lets podcast creators sell exclusive content and perks to fans in return for recurring payments, with subscribers getting instant access from a show's Spotify page.
• Creators keep 90% of Membership revenue, higher than Apple Podcasts Subscriptions, which starts at 70% and rises after a subscriber's first year, and about in line with Patreon's standard platform fee before its added charges.
• Memberships launches in 34 markets and is open to smaller shows: any show on Spotify for Creators or Megaphone with at least 100 consumption hours, a similar number of listeners or viewers, and three published episodes can qualify.

Google's AI Overviews often cite your rivals in buying searches LINK

• Google's AI Overviews often send B2B buyers toward rival vendors, with about one in five answers for branded buying searches citing a direct competitor's own site, according to tracking by Foundation and Writesonic.
• Across 15,716 AI Overviews on branded searches that added a buying word like "pricing" or "alternatives", 21.7% cited a direct competitor, and in 11.9% the competitor appeared while the brand the buyer named was left out entirely.
• The risk concentrates on "alternatives" searches, where the brand's own site shows up in only 32.9% of answers, while pricing and reviews searches cite competitors far less because Google turns to the brand's own site or to review sites like G2 and Capterra.

AI slop sites are the new threat to your ad spend LINK

• A study out today from DecryptAds found more than 2,100 AI-generated recipe sites that copy the made-for-advertising playbook, cramming low-effort content with overlapping ad placements that pull in spots from major blue chip and Fortune 500 brands.
• Starting with about 300 ad tech companies registered in "risky geos" such as Russia, China and Turkey, DecryptAds traced ads.txt and sellers.json records to 2,116 sites that use fabricated authors, including AI-generated avatars and stolen or altered photos of real chefs and celebrities.
• These sites break a Google helpful content update rolled out this month that calls fabricated creator profiles a form of deception and a signal of a low-quality page, though one SSP source argued the search guidance does not apply to Google Ads.

Meta lets you pick an audience for each ad creative LINK

• Meta switched on a Marketing API option yesterday that lets advertisers attach a separate age range and gender to each image or video inside one ad set, rather than setting a single audience for every creative in the group.
• The toggle, named "Choose an audience for each ad creative," works only when the ad set stays broad, open to all genders with a minimum age no higher than 25 and a maximum of 65, and it cannot run alongside Advantage+ audience.
• Meta has published no test data for the feature, and the posts do not say whether a creative is never shown outside its assigned band or whether the age and gender act only as a signal the delivery system weighs against others.

Strategies & Tactics

> Content pruning case study: Cutting 33% of pages that drove just 3% of clicks: Cutting a third of a site's pages that drove just 3% of clicks cleared out index bloat without losing traffic, though rewriting thin-but-valuable pages drove the real ranking gains.

> What options exist for running AEO without a large team?: Pick a DIY workflow, all-in-one software, or an agency to run Answer Engine Optimization, shaping content for AI search answers, based on available time and budget.

> How to use CRM segmentation to drive holiday repeat purchases: Sort your customer list by how recently each person bought, then send the biggest discounts and heaviest outreach to lapsed buyers, who are the likeliest holiday repeat purchasers.

> Your marketing metrics are training your team to make bad decisions: Choose marketing metrics that reward decisions improving actual pipeline, since optimizing cheap leads or clicks trains teams to pursue numbers that never become customers.

> How to Get Recommended by AI: Being Found Isn’t Enough: Build a clear brand positioning statement and align your website, reviews, and profiles around it so AI assistants like ChatGPT recommend your business to the right buyers.

> AI search is turning prompts into customer research: Detailed AI search prompts reveal customers' real motivations and situations, so brands should mine that insight to shape products, not just chase rankings.

Other news you might like

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• Google Local Services Ads removes featured professionals LINK

• Telling AI to act as your customers makes its answer worse: 52% of shoppers would buy, it said. Real sales: 33%. LINK

• Google Business Profiles Review Appeals Are Delayed Again LINK

• Pinterest says 36% of its ad impact comes after a campaign's eighth week LINK

• Google Ads AI Max spotted automatically enabled in some Ad Grants accounts LINK

• EDPB tells AI developers to avoid sites that block scraping with robots.txt LINK

• Search drops to 12% of North American publisher pageviews, Chartbeat finds LINK

Trending tools

akta.​pro: delivers private company data through an API with event tracking, news, and entity resolution, helping finance and GTM teams source deals faster LINK

OpenSEO: provides keyword research, competitor analysis, backlinks and site audits via MCP, feeding your AI agent real data for SEO strategy from $10/month. LINK

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

Tadata: an AI Slack assistant that connects your tools and delivers daily briefings on meetings, contacts, and relevant news before work. LINK

dif.​sh: open source feature flags stored as markdown files beside your code, reviewed in pull requests, with context your coding agent reads automatically LINK

awesome-submitlist: a curated list of 300+ directories, launch sites, newsletters, and communities to submit your startup, including domain rating and pricing data. LINK

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