Latest Digital / Social Media Marketing News & Insights

​Presented by Neal Schaffer​

In this week's newsletter:

• Does AI content get penalized everywhere? The reality is far more nuanced, it turns out.
• It’s not just reels: there's more than one way to grow on Instagram.
• If you have been holding back on AI because you assume Google will punish you for it, think again.

Hey Reader,

I spent some time in Columbus, Ohio this week training a client's marketing team.

I can't say much about who they are (yes, NDAs are still a thing), but I can tell you the room was sharper than I expected, and younger. These are marketers who spend real time on TikTok and Instagram. They had also already read Digital Threads before I ever walked in, which is always a nice way to start a session.

So when I asked where they saw the biggest opportunity for their business, which sells to both other businesses and consumers, I braced myself for an answer about short-form video.

They said search and email.

That answer came from the people you'd least expect to give it. They live on the platforms everyone else is chasing, and they still looked at their own funnel and picked the two channels nobody puts in a keynote. That takes a kind of discipline I don't see often enough.

Because the question was never what's trending. It's what fits your business and actually reaches the people who need you and who you want to serve. Those are frequently two different lists.

If you want a practical version of this: take the emotion out of the decision. Sit down with every digital channel available to you, understand honestly what each one can do, and then choose the two or three that will move your business the most. Ignore how exciting they sound.

What did that exercise turn up for you? Hit reply and let me know.

Now 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

Canva Built A 90-Million-Backlink Empire. Does It Survive AI Search? - Foundation first broke down Canva's backlink empire in 2020, when the number was 4.24 million. It is now past 90 million. But the backlinks were never the moat. What Canva built is a machine that ships a page for every job a buyer wants done, then wires consistent brand language through every link it earns. Built for Google, it turned out to be perfectly shaped for AI citations years before anyone was optimizing for them. You have been counting the wrong asset. Foundation Inc.​

Google Doesn't Punish AI Content; It Punishes Bad Content (331k Pages Studied) - If you have been holding back on AI because you assume Google will punish you for it, Ahrefs just studied 331,000 pages and found the fear is misplaced. Google is not penalizing AI content. It is penalizing bad content, and the two overlap often enough to look like the same thing. Indexation does slip for very high AI pages, from 49% down to 40%. But here is the number worth sitting with: 5.3% of top-three pages are 100% AI-generated. Ahrefs​

AI Agents For Marketing Teams: What They Are And How To Actually Use Them - Ask ten marketers what an AI agent is and you will get ten different answers. Some picture a robot running the whole funnel. Others assume you need a developer and a stack of connected tools. After a year of building my own AI Workflow Flywheel, I wrote the explainer I kept wishing existed. I break down what actually counts as an agent, which marketing tasks to hand over first, and the setup that requires no code. You will stop guessing and start delegating. Neal Schaffer​

How LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, And TikTok Are Downranking AI Slop - Everyone assumes all four platforms are quietly punishing AI-assisted content. Only one of them actually is. SocialPilot went through what each platform enforces versus what the press speculated, and the answers diverge sharply. LinkedIn has confirmed reach suppression. Meta labels but does not demote. YouTube's rule is about monetization, not ranking. TikTok requires disclosure and says outright that it does not touch reach. Operating on the wrong assumption costs you either reach or output, and most teams are losing both. Social Pilot​

LinkedIn Headshot Essentials: What To Wear And How To Pose - Your headshot is the first thing anyone evaluates on LinkedIn, and after years of auditing profiles I can tell you most people get it wrong in the same three ways. In my latest post I cover what to wear and what to avoid, how to angle your body and where to put your eyes, plus the lighting and background choices that separate a professional photo from a cropped vacation shot. You do not need a studio. Book an hour, use the checklist, and replace the photo this week. Neal Schaffer​

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More Recommended Reads

How I Built An AI Social Media Coach With My Social Data - This is the most replicable AI workflow to surface this month. A Buffer team member exported her own post data, handed it to Claude along with a few brand resources for context, and had it coach her against her actual LinkedIn goals rather than generic best practice. The value is not the tool. It is that she fed the model her own performance history instead of asking it to guess. If you have ever exported analytics and then done nothing with the file, start here. Buffer​

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How To Grow On Instagram Without Reels - Instagram growth advice has collapsed into a single instruction: post more Reels. Social Media Examiner makes the case that you can build real followers and revenue without appearing on camera, and walks through the formats that do the work instead. This matters for the large group of business owners who have quietly written Instagram off because they do not want to become full-time video creators. If a channel only works when you perform, was it ever a channel you could sustain? Social Media Examiner​

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Vibe Coding For Marketers: A Beginner's Guide - Canva gave 5,000 employees a full week to explore AI and most of them could not figure out where to start. That is the honest state of things, and it is why most vibe-coding guides fail. They assume you will manage files and wrangle a terminal. Ahrefs skips all of it and shows the browser-based setup for building reporting dashboards, competitor monitors and keyword-clustering tools yourself. Fair warning, it is built around their own Letaido product. The window where this counts as a differentiator is closing fast. Ahrefs​

89% Of AI Search Demand Has No Clear Owner - Kevin Indig pulled six months of ChatGPT answer data from Semrush covering 1,094 categories, 50,000 brands and over 600,000 citations, and settled an argument the industry has run in circles on. Topical authority is real in AI search, and going deep beats going wide. The more useful finding is what remains unclaimed: 89% of AI search demand sits in categories no brand owns, and the highest-volume ones are the least decided. Category ownership is being allocated right now to whoever shows up consistently. Search Engine Journal​

The Company Page Is Dead. Long Live The Expert. - LinkedIn's 2026 algorithm update pushed more distribution toward individual member profiles and pulled it further from corporate broadcasts. Richard Stone's argument is that you should stop treating the company page as a channel and start treating it as infrastructure, a trust-verification page, while the actual reach comes from founders, engineers and subject matter experts posting under their own names. For B2B teams this reframes the job from producing brand content to editing your experts. Buyers follow people, and the algorithm has finally caught up. Agility PR​

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