Latest Digital / Social Media Marketing News & Insights

​Presented by Neal Schaffer​

In this week's newsletter:

• 41% of long-form LinkedIn posts show signs of AI generation
• 96% of CMOs say they feel excited about AI at work
• Only 6% of shoppers actually buy on social media platforms: ESW survey

Hey Reader,

I might sound crazy, but I'm still bullish on SEO.

Everybody says Google is dead, clicks are dropping, why bother blogging. I look at it the other way around.

Run the math with me. Say the keywords you target used to generate a million clicks a day across everyone chasing them. Post-AI, call it 500,000. You were getting 500 of those. So your headroom went from 999,500 clicks to 499,500 clicks. That is still an enormous number of people you have not reached yet.

And while the discoverability side of search that I wrote about in Digital Threads is changing fast, the answer is the same whether someone uses a traditional search engine or AI: you need the right content to answer the query, and you need to be a trusted authority.

To me, that is what SEO has always been about. So instead of complaining about dropping traffic, I took an honest look at my past content. Could I improve it? Revise it? Add more personal experience? Add more of a perspective, or in the words of my friend Joe Pulizzi, a "tilt" on how I see digital marketing?

Then I did something about it. Every day for the past three weeks I have spent dedicated time updating one month's worth of old blog posts through that lens. Here is what happened:

And when you optimize for helpful content the way I have been, a rising tide lifts all boats. I am seeing the same lift in traffic from LLMs, and I will share those numbers once I have a clean enough baseline to trust them.

On a site that gets tens of thousands of visitors a month, a 47.7% lift from Google organic is not a trivial number. I can already see it in lead magnet conversions and inquiries.

Traffic levels will never be what they used to be, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But there is still plenty of traffic to be had, and when you do this right the smaller number is worth more, because it is far more targeted.

I will keep you posted on how this goes. And hit reply if you have gone through the same process and are seeing wins in the discoverability arena. I would love to compare notes.

OK, with that, let's get into this week's updates!

Please note: Some links in this newsletter are affiliate links. If you make a purchase through them, I may earn a small commission—at no extra cost to you.

This Week's News

How To Turn What You Know Into AI Tools People Will Pay For - Your methodology is worth more as a product than as a service, and this walks through the conversion. Kelly Sinclair breaks down how consultants are packaging their frameworks into branded AI tools clients run on their own: a messaging strategist whose bot performs voice-of-customer analysis using her method, a visibility strategist whose auditor tells clients what to stop doing. The key move is starting from the output you want and working backward to the inputs. Build one of these and your expertise stops being billed by the hour. Social Media Examiner​

AI Visibility Is A Topic-Level Game: A Study Of 50,000 Brands In ChatGPT - Winning one ChatGPT prompt tells you almost nothing, and this Semrush study with Kevin Indig proves it. Across 1,094 categories tracked January through June, only 15.2% had a clear brand owner across the five questions a buyer actually asks. Once a brand did own a topic with a five-point lead, it held first place in 90.4% of month-over-month checks. And only 21% of most-cited domains were also the most-mentioned brand. Eighty-five percent of categories are still unclaimed. Semrush​

LinkedIn Statistics: 20 Numbers That Actually Matter In 2026 - I have been teaching LinkedIn strategy at Rutgers and UCLA Extension long enough to watch the annual stat roundups get worse every year, so I built the one I actually use. LinkedIn now connects more than 1.3 billion members and earned Microsoft $17.8 billion last fiscal year. The number that should change your planning is the 5.20% average engagement rate, multiples of what Facebook and Instagram deliver for B2B. Pull the three numbers that apply to you and rebuild your Q3 plan around them. Neal Schaffer​

Can Social Media Platforms Survive The Flood Of AI Content? - Pangram's detection data puts LinkedIn at the top of a list nobody wants to lead: 41% of long-form posts show signs of AI generation, more than any other platform, with X at roughly a third. Andrew Hutchinson's read is that platforms are losing the authenticity that made them work, and Pinterest is so far the only one offering an AI off switch. Here is what nobody is naming: if four in ten posts are machine-written, obviously human writing just became the cheapest differentiator available to you. Social Media Today​

What Are Influencer Tiers, And When Your Brand Should Use Each One - When a brand tells me they want to work with influencers, I ask which kind, and the room usually goes quiet. I wrote The Age of Influence partly because that one word covers a creator with 3,000 followers and a celebrity with 30 million, and the economics are nothing alike. This breaks down all five tiers from nano to mega, what each costs, and when each is the right call. Nano creators average around 5.6% engagement, far above the mega tier. If you are budgeting creator spend for the back half of the year, start here. Neal Schaffer​

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More Recommended Reads

70% Of Top Retailers Are Invisible To Agentic Commerce, Here's Why - Reza Moaiandin audited product pages from leading retail brands and found 70% fail Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, the standard that determines whether an AI agent can complete a purchase at all. The journey from discovery to checkout is moving inside AI, which makes your website optional. His framing deserves your attention: the winners will not be the best-ranked pages, they will be whichever retailer made their products easiest for an agent to buy. Sit this out and your competitors get bought while you get browsed. Search Engine Journal​

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MCP For Marketers: What To Connect First And Why Your Data Wins - If you have been connecting MCP servers without thinking hard about what sits on the other end, this is the corrective. BrightEdge CTO Lemuel Park argues the model is not your advantage, the quality of the data you connect is. He names four traits worth demanding: high fidelity, drawn from how AI actually answers, both real-time and historical, and granular to the page and query. The payoff he flags is real, pages earning AI citations where you have no organic visibility at all. Wiring your stack into AI is becoming table stakes rather than an edge. Search Engine Journal​

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The Top Content Formats And Types That Earn AI Search Citations - Three structural moves do most of the work in answer engine optimization, and this names them without the usual hedging: question-led headings, direct-answer-first passages, and FAQPage schema that makes your Q&A pairs machine-readable. The AirOps 2026 State of AI Search Report found sequential heading structures lift citation odds by 2.8x. The rest covers interlinked pillar and spoke clusters, plus the anchor text that routes engines toward the passages worth citing. Answer engines cite what they can lift cleanly. Hubspot​

What CMOs Should Be Doing About AI Right Now - The gap in this McKinsey data should worry anyone who reports to a CMO. 96% of CMOs say they feel excited about AI at work, and 80% agreed it threatens their own job security. Only 28% see their company pursuing a real rewiring of marketing teams and workflows. Enthusiasm without restructuring is just talk. The prescription here is blunt: get your own hands on the keyboard, learn the decisions your team makes daily, then lead the change. So which number describes your leadership, the 96% or the 28%? MarTech​

Social Platforms Draw Consumers In, But Conversions Falter - Social is now the number one product discovery channel worldwide, and almost nobody wants to check out there. ESW surveyed 23,000 shoppers across 18 markets and found 62% are influenced by social platforms while only 6% prefer to buy on them. Half discover new products on social, rising to three quarters among Gen Z, yet only about a quarter of US consumers trust social checkout. The fix is designing for the handoff: discover on Instagram, validate elsewhere, purchase on your site. Audit that handoff before your Q4 campaigns lock. Social Media Today​

​Digital Threads​

Digital Threads is a practical guide for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and creators who want to grow their online presence with confidence. Learn proven digital marketing strategies, make the most of social media and AI tools, and build your brand without a massive marketing budget.

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