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Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.
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In today's MarketingShot:
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🔍 YouTube tests conversational AI search 📈 AI referrals convert 3x better than search 💳 PayPal launches its own ad ID 📺 Pinterest debuts CTV ads via tvScientific 📊 AI still under 2% but growing 💡 + 6 strategies & tactics 🎁 + 7 other news & articles you might like 🧰 + 2 trending marketing tools
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FROM OUR PARTNER
85% of AI brand mentions come from off-site sources — not your website. Pages with FAQs get cited 40% more often, and 70% of cited pages were updated in the last year. The brands adapting to AEO are pulling ahead. The ones waiting are losing visibility they may not get back. What you get: - The 4 proven AEO plays used by Carta, Ramp & Webflow
- A 90-day action plan you can execute starting this week
- Real citation data showing what's actually driving AI mentions
- The exact framework top brands use to get cited, not just ranked
Get the free playbook |
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🔍 YouTube tests conversational AI search
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- YouTube is running a test of Ask YouTube, a conversational AI search tool available to Premium subscribers in the US who are 18 and older, as first reported by The Verge.
- The feature replaces keyword searches with full questions, returning a text overview, a featured video, long-form videos timestamped to relevant sections, and galleries of Shorts grouped under themed subheadings.
- When users click the search bar, YouTube shows suggested prompts such as "What caused the 2008 financial crisis?" drawn from trending searches or personal watch history, accessible through YouTube's experimental features page.
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📈 AI referrals convert 3x better than search
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- Research from Lebesgue, drawn from 35,000 eCommerce brands, shows that visitors referred by AI tools convert at nearly three times the rate of people arriving through traditional Google search traffic.
- Referrals from AI tools like ChatGPT produced an average conversion rate of 3.6%, against 1.23% for traditional search, while AI-referred visits also generated about 30% higher revenue per session.
- Lebesgue argues that AI shifts the persuasion stage to before the click, meaning brands may need stronger presence across reviews, third-party sites and forums rather than relying mainly on search engine optimisation.
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💳 PayPal launches its own ad ID
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- PayPal rolled out the PayPal Ads ID on Monday, a new omnichannel identity product built from PayPal and Venmo customer profiles, each tied to a user with a credit card attached to at least one product.
- The ID is free to any data or ad tech vendor with a commercial relationship with PayPal Ads, with no software fees, no media percentage, no CPM charges, and no costs for data consumption or token usage.
- Magnite, Rokt, Taboola and PubMatic are the initial partners, and PayPal clients can use the ID to buy any programmatic inventory through those platforms, not just media sold by PayPal itself.
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📺 Pinterest debuts CTV ads via tvScientific
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- Pinterest has rolled out connected TV advertising through tvScientific, the CTV performance advertising platform it acquired in a deal first announced in December 2025 and completed in February 2026.
- The company says pairing tvScientific's platform with Pinterest's high-intent signals delivers a 27 percent uplift in outcomes per $100 spent and a 65 percent uplift in purchases for advertisers running CTV campaigns.
- Pinterest reports more than 600 million monthly active users and over 80 billion monthly searches, signals that tvScientific by Pinterest will feed into CTV campaigns as US CTV ad spend is set to pass linear TV within two years.
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📊 AI still under 2% but growing
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- AI tools still account for less than 2% of desktop web visits in the US and Europe, according to the Q1 2026 State of Search report from Datos and SparkToro, though adoption keeps climbing steadily.
- Google recovered to 94.3% US desktop search share by March 2026, while zero-click searches fell to 22.4% in the US and 19.6% in EU/UK, the lowest levels recorded in the period.
- Claude posted the sharpest Q1 2026 gain, rising from 3.58% to 8.54% US desktop user share, while Gemini reached 16.06% and ChatGPT softened from its September peak of 37.08% to 34.80%.
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Strategies & Tactics
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> New to PPC? 7 tips to build skills and confidence fast: Pairs curiosity-driven learning with disciplined restraint—resisting shiny new features, unnecessary changes, and AI shortcuts—because consistent human judgment and clear stakeholder communication outperform constant activity in paid media.
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> The Death of the Ultimate Guide?: Create focused pages that precisely match one query and build site-level defensibility through products, tools, and brand demand, because both Google and ChatGPT now reward distinct utility over exhaustive coverage.
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> 10 lessons from real-world ESP migrations: treats email platform migration as a strategic, cross-team project with list cleanup, careful data mapping, and a 30-60 day post-launch monitoring phase to protect deliverability and revenue.
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Other
news & articles you might like
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Threads tests emoji reactions to specific words in posts
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New data: 77% use AI to shop. Nearly 1 in 3 won’t let it spend.
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Exclusive: Adobe brings agentic AI to Firefly, with Claude next
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Australia to charge Big Tech companies 2% levy unless they strike local news deals
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Advertisers are flying blind on ChatGPT ads — Adthena wants to change that
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Walmart’s expanded data offering to agencies and advertisers gets closer to self-serve
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Google Showing How Many Reviews Were Deleted
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Trending Marketing Tools
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OrcaSheets AI Reports: locally-run analytics tool that lets you query unlimited data in plain English, automate reports, and avoid cloud costs.
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CartGhost: recovers abandoned Shopify carts via AI-driven WhatsApp messages, ideal for markets where email recovery consistently underperforms.
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🎓 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.
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