☕️ Bots now outnumber humans on the web

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.

In today's MarketingShot:

📌 Bots now outnumber humans on the web

⭐ Google Maps hunts paid reviews

📸 Instagram Plus launches worldwide

🤖 ChatGPT asks for Reddit by name

🛒 DoorDash Ads goes global with 400,000 advertisers

💡 + 4 strategies & tactics

🎁 + 7 other news & articles you might like

• Cloudflare Radar data shared by Cyrus S. shows bots accounting for 57.4% of HTML web traffic in the week ending June 5, 2026, with humans at 42.6%, crossing the 50% threshold faster than analysts expected.
• Loganix's breakdown reveals training-related bots make up 50.6% of total traffic while search bots account for just 10.7%, meaning most crawls extract content for AI models without sending referral traffic, attribution, or revenue back to publishers.
• For marketers, bot traffic inflates request counts without producing ad impressions or conversions, distorting analytics; Microsoft Clarity added Bot Activity tracking in January 2026, and Himanshu Sharma argues AI brand mentions show no measurable commercial value.

• Google Maps is now asking users visiting a business location whether that business offers rewards in exchange for reviews, with three response options - "Yes," "No," and "Not sure" - feeding directly into mass review deletions.
• According to Claudia Tomina's client data, one Google Business Profile saw 496 review deletions in November 2025 and 1,045 in December, with over 80 percent of the year's removals happening in the final 60 days.
• Google is auditing historical content, removing reviews posted as far back as August and September 2024 when they fit a high-risk pattern, combining the user survey signal with algorithmic detection across the entire profile.

• Meta has rolled out Instagram Plus around the world, a paid subscription tier priced at $3.99 per month that gives users tools to reach broader and more-specific audiences across the photo-sharing platform.
• Features include Story Spotlight, which prioritizes profiles for friends, and Story Extend, which keeps disappearing content visible for 48 hours rather than 24, plus multiple audience lists for targeting specific stories.
• Subscribers get a preview tool with story rewatch statistics and viewer search, can publish posts directly to profiles or highlights, pin six profile items, pick app icons, choose bio fonts, and send animated super hearts.

• ChatGPT is now writing "reddit" into its query fanouts 24 times more often than in January, with Reddit reclaiming the top spot in ChatGPT citations at an 8.5% share, according to new Profound analysis.
• The research, drawn from roughly 7 million real ChatGPT prompts between January and late May, shows the share of fanouts naming Reddit climbed to 3.68% by late May, moving in lockstep with the citation spike.
• Fanouts work as an upstream signal where ChatGPT declares trusted source types like "reddit", "G2", "GitHub", or "pricing" before citing any page, meaning visibility gets decided one layer earlier than most marketing teams measure.

• DoorDash Ads has expanded its commerce media business worldwide, now counting more than 400,000 advertisers and over $5 billion in annualized ad and promotional spend across its DoorDash, Wolt and Deliveroo properties.
• A new partnership with LiveRamp uses clean rooms to match DoorDash data with advertiser data, and one CPG test across four brands found nearly all customers reached through sponsored product campaigns were new to the business.
• A premium homepage placement called Spotlight uses visual-driven storytelling when consumers open the app, delivering two-times higher click-through rates versus banner ads in early testing for new products, seasonal items and limited-time offers.

Strategies & Tactics

Other news & articles you might like

• Google Search adding profile pages for websites and creators LINK

• Meta rolls out a new AI creator assistant on Facebook LINK

• TikTok Wants Viewers To Come Back For The Next Episode LINK

• Coming Soon: Connecting Google Business Profile To Google Analytics LINK

• IAS maps the back-to-school ad window you might be missing LINK

• Forrester says commerce media can fix retail media flaws LINK

🎓 Want to master the AI tools we cover every day?

MarketingShot's AI Academy has 300+ step-by-step tutorials on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and every tool that matters. No fluff — just practical workflows you can use at work.

💬 How did you find today's edition?

We read every reply — just reply to this email and let us know how we can improve!