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For three years the question in every budget meeting was what AI could do for the team. Faster copy, cheaper video, fewer people.
Wrong question, and the trade body just said so with numbers.
In the IAB's September update to its 2026 Outlook Study, a survey of more than 200 brand and agency investment decision-makers, the top media challenge is now adapting to changing consumer behavior, named by 44%, with AI-driven search called out specifically. AI slop follows at 38%. Optimizing content for AI-generated answers is the biggest area of increased focus at 76%, with attention to the models themselves at 72%. Focus on using generative AI inside campaigns fell, from 78% to 69%.
Read those two together. Less attention on making things with AI, more on being visible to it, same survey, same year.
Eighty-six percent have changed, or expect to change within twelve months, how they measure media because of conversational AI. Forty-five percent say their hardest problem is comparing an AI-driven journey with a traditional one.
A polite way of saying nobody knows what a good number looks like yet. The first person in your building who defines the metric defines whether you are winning.
Today’s sponsor:
Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:
After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.
The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.
“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.
TALK ON THE MARKET
Mario Gavira, CMO of Travelier, at Phocuswright's travel marketing AI summit in London, reported by PhocusWire:
With AI, search is becoming more a branding channel; 99.5% of people who see responses in chatbots will not click on any link, so you cannot track it.
Skyscanner's chief AI officer, Piero Sierra, on the same panel: "The biggest driver of AI visibility is your general brand spend." Two operators in a category built on last-click, agreeing that the channel has stopped producing clicks. If that is true in travel it is true in yours.
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NUMBERS MATTER
43% against 14%. Forty-three percent of search professionals plan to invest in or prioritize generative engine optimization in the next year. Fourteen percent name it among their strongest result drivers, and only 9% feel very confident measuring AI visibility at all, per Search Engine Journal's State Of Search 2027 survey.
Three times the funding of the evidence. That gap closes one way or the other inside a year.
DAILY PROMPT
The full SEO Competitor Gap Analysis from the hub. It already tells the model to note the AI answer surfaces intercepting your clicks, which is the line that matters this year:
You are an expert SEO strategist analyzing the search gaps between our website and our top competitors. Attach any keyword exports, crawl reports, analytics extracts, or content inventories we have; read them directly. Where our inputs are thin or stale, research the live web: check current SERPs for our priority terms, review competitor site structures, and note AI answer surfaces that intercept clicks. Run the numbers rather than estimating where a file lets you compute them.
## Our Website Details
- Domain: [YOUR_DOMAIN]
- Primary keywords we rank for: [LIST_YOUR_TOP_10_KEYWORDS]
- Current average ranking position: [YOUR_AVG_RANKING]
- Monthly organic traffic: [YOUR_ORGANIC_TRAFFIC]
- Target audience: [YOUR_TARGET_AUDIENCE]
## Competitor Information
Competitor 1: [COMPETITOR_DOMAIN_1]
- Top ranking keywords: [LIST_THEIR_TOP_KEYWORDS]
- Estimated monthly traffic: [THEIR_TRAFFIC_ESTIMATE]
- Domain authority/strength: [HIGH/MEDIUM/LOW]
Competitor 2: [COMPETITOR_DOMAIN_2]
- Top ranking keywords: [LIST_THEIR_TOP_KEYWORDS]
- Estimated monthly traffic: [THEIR_TRAFFIC_ESTIMATE]
- Domain authority/strength: [HIGH/MEDIUM/LOW]
## Analysis Framework
Provide a comprehensive gap analysis that includes:
1. **Keyword Gap Analysis**: Identify high-volume, low-competition keywords that competitors rank for but we don't. Prioritize by search volume, commercial intent, and relevance to our business.
2. **Content Gap Analysis**: Identify content types and topics competitors cover that we're missing (blog posts, guides, case studies, comparison pages, etc.). Cite the specific competitor URLs you reviewed.
3. **Technical SEO Gaps**: Assess differences in site speed, mobile optimization, schema markup, crawlability, and indexation. State whether each finding comes from a file, a live check, or an inference.
4. **Backlink Strategy Gap**: Analyze the types of backlinks competitors have (industry directories, press coverage, partnerships) that we should pursue.
5. **On-Page Optimization Gaps**: Compare title tags, meta descriptions, header structure, and keyword optimization strategies.
6. **Quick Wins**: List 5-7 actionable opportunities we can implement in the next 30-60 days to close gaps.
7. **Long-Term Strategy**: Recommend a 6-12 month roadmap to establish competitive advantage.
For each gap, provide:
- Specific recommendation
- Estimated difficulty (Easy/Medium/Hard)
- Potential impact (High/Medium/Low)
- Timeline to implement
Format the output as an executive summary followed by detailed sections. Close with the assumptions you made and the data that would sharpen the analysis.Run it monthly with the same prompt set, so the output is a trend and not a mood. You cannot edit what the model says, so the job is the sources it reads.
CMO CORNER
Your calendar should reflect leverage, not activity.
There is a version of this week where your team spends forty hours generating content nobody asked for, and a version where it spends four hours fixing the six pages a model quotes when it describes your category.
Same people, same tools, different number at the end of the quarter. Most of the market will fund the first one because it feels like work.
We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.
TOOL UPGRADE
Three ways to measure the thing you are now being judged on:
Peec AI — best for tracking how often, and how accurately, your brand shows up in AI answers. Try Peec AI here →
Attensira — best for teams who want AI-visibility monitoring sitting next to their existing reporting, not in another tab. Try Attensira here →
Chronicle — best for turning that tracking into the one slide that unlocks the budget. Try Chronicle here →
→ We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
LEARN THIS
When 99.5% of readers never click, attribution stops being a dashboard problem: Revenue Signal Playbook. It works through which signals still tie to money when the click disappears, and how to build a board-ready story from the ones that remain.
For the leader justifying spend on a channel that will not return a clean number this year.
→ We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more on AI marketing for free. Browse our learning resources for free.
BRAND SLOP
Megi Endeladze runs Penny's Coffee Shop in Buffalo with her husband. The barista who chalked their menu boards moved away, so she made a poster with ChatGPT and had it printed for about $150, she told Business Insider. "I felt like a genius."
Then the comments. "AI Slop." "SHAME SHAME SHAME." One DM opened "Penny's customer — or I guess ex-customer now," and she lost around a hundred followers. Another account with real reach told her to take the sign down or it would post about her to the local artist community.
She was answering them at four in the morning with a three-month-old on her lap.
Your brand is a coffee shop with a bigger legal team. Nobody is auditing the output quality. They are reading a decision about who you chose not to pay.