Threads has overtaken X, Meta says

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Threads now beats X in monthly users LINK

• Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg told analysts that Threads has passed X in monthly active users, with the social network now counting more than 275 million people each month.
• On the quarterly financials call last night, finance chief Susan Li said Threads' time spent per user is growing over 20% year-over-year, though Zuckerberg gave no exact figure for monthly actives.
• Across Meta's family of apps, including Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger, daily active people reached 3.64 billion in September, up 3% year-on-year, as the company reported strong operating profit.

ChatGPT sends you under 1% of Google's traffic LINK

• ChatGPT sent websites less than 1% of the traffic Google organic search did, according to Marie Haynes' study of 100 sites spanning 12 months of GA4 data and more than 145 million sessions.
• ChatGPT drove 0.62% as many sessions as Google organic search, and adding referrals from other LLMs lifted that to 0.73% of Google organic traffic, not 0.73% of all website traffic.
• Among 55 sites tracking conversions, 13.8% of ChatGPT visitors converted versus 3.02% from Google organic, yet Google organic produced 27 times as many conversions as all LLMs combined.

Walmart just opened its checkout to approved AI shopping agents LINK

• Walmart has opened its checkout to approved AI shopping agents, letting software search for products and buy on a customer's behalf through a new Agent Gateway that connects to Walmart and Sam's Club inventory.
• The Gateway is an MCP server that works with agents and apps including Meta's Muse, ChatGPT and Gemini, letting an agent complete purchases without handing over the customer's personal information or purchase history directly.
• Next month Walmart adds Agent Profiles, giving each agent its own identity inside an account with separate purchase records, a spending limit or per-transaction approval, no Walmart+ needed, and the normal returns process if an agent behaves incorrectly.

EU opt-outs are slowing Meta's ad revenue LINK

• Meta's advertising growth in Europe is slowing after new rules let residents choose a Less Personalized Ads option that draws on less of their personal data to shape what they see on Instagram and Facebook.
• Advertising revenue in Europe rose 18 percent year-on-year in the three months through September, trailing the 33 percent growth in the US and Canada, with the European rate falling for a third straight quarter.
• The LPA option uses 90 percent less data, showing ads based on a single session plus age, location, and gender, which Meta says brings poorer returns for advertisers, fewer transactions, and prices per ad growing slower than in North America.

Strategies & Tactics

> Headless Content Marketing: A New (Old) Strategy for Search: Write stripped-down, machine-readable content that AI search engines can cite directly, aiming for brand mentions in AI answers rather than clicks to your site.

> SEO at scale: How to manage SEO on a large website: Explains how to manage SEO on a huge website by grouping pages into templates, prioritizing the types that drive revenue, and fixing shared problems at once.

> The Secrets of Human Behavior Applied to Social Ads: Match each ad's emotion, target self, and buying-journey stage to the product and audience so people remember the brand, not just click once.

> How We Doubled AI Visibility for a B2B SaaS Client in 9 Months: Win AI recommendations by publishing highly specific, bottom-of-funnel content for each customer type and pain point, teaching language models when and for whom to recommend your product.

> What to Charge for a Sponsored Post: Real Rates From 3 Creators on Our Team: Price sponsored posts by content format rather than follower count, since brands mostly want video and video takes far longer to produce.

Other news you might like

• AI Overviews have nearly doubled across five commercial search modifiers LINK

• Google turns on PMax image extraction by default from December 4 LINK

• Meta Ads Manager gains 7 product-level metrics for catalog campaigns LINK

• Google Updates Control What You Share With Google Search With Existing Options LINK

• Shopping habits by generation: What brands need to know LINK

• Google Ads Customer Lifecycle Goals: Value Mode, Retention Goals & Percentage Multipliers 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

iFixAi: audits AI agents with 250 inspections across 69 misalignment categories, flagging failures and giving engineers evidence to investigate and fix issues LINK

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

Pexo: an AI video agent that creates videos from your ideas through natural conversation, no editing or generation skills required. LINK

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

agentic-ai-starters: provides ready-to-use blueprints, API stacks, prompts, and patterns for building autonomous AI agents like research tools, lead generation, and SEO automations. LINK

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