AI & Data
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Cover story · E-CommerceMost storefronts bar the shopping agent from the cart. The rule they use does not bind.
We read the robots.txt of twenty large US storefronts and asked each one for its homepage twice, once as a browser and once as an agent. The blocking is real, the enforcement sits somewhere else entirely, and the feed underneath never expires.
SectionE-Commerce
Reading time~7 min
01 · Editor’s picks
This week’s picks
02 · Explore by channel
Editorial channels, one operator perspective.
0112 articles
AI & Data
Targeting, attribution, the data behind AI ads. The new fundamentals.
Browse channel0211 articles
PPC
Performance Max, Advantage+, paid social. For people who run the campaigns.
Browse channel034 articles
SEO
Core updates, AI search, technical SEO. What’s actually moving rankings.
Browse channel048 articles
MarTech
Stacks that earn their keep, and the ones quietly subsidized by venture money.
Browse channel056 articles
E-Commerce
Conversion, checkout, the AI shopping behavior reshaping retail funnels.
Browse channel064 articles
How-To Guides
Step-by-step playbooks you can run on Monday. Tested in real accounts.
Browse channel075 articles
Data & Research
Original analysis and the numbers behind the trends: sources shown, claims checked.
Browse channel085 articles
Digital Marketing
The cross-channel picture: strategy, maturity, and the tool stack that ties it together.
Browse channel091 article
CRO
Conversion rate optimization: landing pages, checkout, and the experiments that move revenue.
Browse channel03 · The latest
Recent articles
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Sep 132026
MarTech
Direct marketing can be a legitimate interest. Behavioral advertising is where that stops.
Both the EU and the UK say in their own operative texts that direct marketing may rest on legitimate interests. Neither says it about advertising built on tracking, and the line between them is a balancing test almost nobody writes down.
Sep 132026
E-Commerce
Most storefronts bar the shopping agent from the cart. The rule they use does not bind.
We read the robots.txt of twenty large US storefronts and asked each one for its homepage twice, once as a browser and once as an agent. The blocking is real, the enforcement sits somewhere else entirely, and the feed underneath never expires.
Sep 132026
PPC
Reddit ad prices rose 40% in a year. The efficiency claims are from 2025.
Two Reddit documents describe the same year. The audited one says the price of ads rose 40%, and the marketing one sells a 17% lower cost per action, measured in split tests that ran in 2025.
Sep 132026
Data & Research
Your retail media network says it measures incrementality. Ask which method.
Incremental sales is the metric buyers ask for most, and about two-thirds of networks say they supply it. The industry’s own standard lists four methods behind that one word, and only one of them is an experiment.
Sep 52026
Data & Research
Most audit findings are assertions. These six leave evidence.
The paid media audit is sold on percentages, and chased to their sources most end at another agency blog. Here are six failures you can prove inside your own account in an afternoon, and the arithmetic that separates a finding from an assertion.
Sep 52026
E-Commerce
ACP and UCP are converging. The merchant work underneath was never the argument.
Roundups frame agentic commerce as a standards war between OpenAI and Google. Read both specifications and OpenAI’s retreat from Instant Checkout, and the two rails are converging on one journey, asking merchants for the same feed at a cadence the spec never demanded.
Sep 52026
PPC
Google’s 7% and the independent 16% never measured the same advertisers.
Two migration dates are circulating with the wrong campaign types attached. Google’s 7% and the independent 16% come from different verticals, baselines, and years, and the question worth testing is whether the added volume was ever new.
Sep 52026
SEO
The watermark counts the words Claude chose. It does not say who wrote the page.
Claude’s newest models weave an invisible mark into their text, with no documented opt-out. In Anthropic’s explanation the mark measures one thing, how many words the model chose: faint on a proofread draft, loud on prose it wrote end to end.
Sep 52026
PPC
ChatGPT Ads reached Poland with the personalization switched off.
The 31 markets that went live on August 24 are exactly the EEA plus Switzerland, the territory OpenAI carved out of personalization. Polish buyers get a contextual product with a 65 PLN daily floor and a CPC figure that is a suggested bid, not a market rate.
Sep 52026
How-To Guides
The 30-conversion rule is real. It just answers a different question.
Teams running several European markets argue about splitting campaigns per country, and settle it with a number somebody half-remembers. Google publishes it as the sample you need to read a result, not the volume the algorithm needs, and that changes the decision.
Aug 142026
PPC
The thresholds you restructure your account around were never published.
Thirty conversions a month. Fifty events a week. Every consolidation argument in the industry rests on those numbers, and neither platform states them as structural requirements. Google says something quieter and more useful, and once you read what it actually says, the real cost of splitting a campaign turns out to be arithmetic you can do yourself.
Aug 142026
AI & Data
You put AI into the workflow. Your quality control is still a feeling.
Every team now has models writing, classifying, and summarizing at volume, and almost none can say whether the output got better or worse last month. The fix is an eval: a frozen set of real inputs, a rubric that discriminates, and a threshold. The research on how to build one is unusually clear, and unusually uncomfortable about the shortcut everyone takes.
Aug 142026
SEO
Everyone reports AI traffic from a channel grouping that does not exist.
The slide says AI traffic is up and to the right. Underneath it, some assistants send a referrer and some send nothing, the biggest AI surface of all arrives labeled as ordinary organic search, and the crawler that decides whether you get cited at all is a different bot from the one everybody blocked. Here is what is actually measurable, and what to stop claiming.
Aug 142026
PPC
Most creative tests end long before they could have concluded.
Two things break creative testing at once: the platform decides who sees what, and almost nobody runs the numbers on how much data a real answer needs. The arithmetic is not close. Detecting a 20% difference takes roughly 400 conversions per variant, and most tests are called at a tenth of that.
Aug 142026
MarTech
The platform buys whatever you last told it about. For most B2B, that is a form.
Your sales team knows which leads were worthless. Your ad account does not, because nothing ever told it. Closing that loop is not a reporting project, it is a change to the optimization target, and the hard parts are a seven-day window, a hashing spec the two platforms disagree on, and the double-counting trap nobody warns you about.
Aug 142026
Data & Research
Average ROAS stays healthy long after the next dollar stops paying.
The number on your dashboard divides all the revenue by all the spend, which describes money you already committed. The decision in front of you is about the next increment, and that return is always lower than the average and falling. Here is how to find where your curve bends, and what to do at the point the two numbers disagree.
Aug 142026
E-Commerce
The feed is the targeting. Everything else is a thin wrapper.
In Shopping and Performance Max you cannot pick keywords, audiences, or placements in any way that sticks. What decides which auctions you enter is a text file: the title, the attributes, and the labels you put on each product. Here is how the matching actually works, and the one Google rule about AI-written titles that almost nobody has implemented.
Aug 142026
PPC
Your bidding is automated. The number you feed it is not.
Google and Meta will optimize toward whatever a conversion is worth, and they take your word for it. Most accounts send the order total, which is not profit, then set a target on top of a number the business never earned. Here is what to send instead, and the refund pipeline that keeps it honest.
Aug 12026
How-To Guides
Connect Google Analytics to an AI assistant, and let it do the reporting.
The whole path, in order: the Google Cloud project, the credential, the connection, and then the part that actually pays for itself. One scheduled pull becomes a dashboard, a cohort grid the interface cannot draw, a written weekly summary, and a Slack alert that stays quiet until something real moves.
Jul 282026
AI & Data
Labeling your AI creative is the law now. That it costs you sales is a rumor.
From August 2, three separate regimes (the EU AI Act, New York’s synthetic-performer law, and Amazon’s marketplace policy) start forcing you to disclose AI-generated creative. The panic that the label tanks conversion is repeated everywhere and proven nowhere. Here is what each rule actually covers, and how to decide where a human face still earns its cost.
Jul 272026
How-To Guides
Build a Google Ads agent that can’t wreck your account.
You can run Google Ads from a terminal now: read the account, draft the change, spend the money, all in plain English. This is the build guide. Which of the four paths to use (scripts, the official read-only Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, a community write server, or the raw v25 API), what v25 quietly broke, and how to wire a write path that fails safe instead of fast.
Jul 202026
SEO
Don’t panic-bid on your own brand after the spam update.
The June 2026 spam update set off a wave of “brands lost their own results” panic. No primary data supports it. What actually got demoted was the coupon and affiliate sludge on your brand-plus-modifier queries, and branded search is the one segment AI Overviews are making stronger.
Jul 182026
AI & Data
I shipped an AI iOS app solo in 30 days. Writing the code was the easy part.
Tymbre went from a clickable mockup to the App Store in 30 days, built by one person after hours, with AI. Here is the full product: 1,116 launch-period commits, a self-hosted core architecture in Warsaw, adversarial QA, and the lesson that the bottleneck was never the typing.
Jul 132026
AI & Data
ADAM: four pillars, five levels, and the one you’re quietly starving
AI, Digital, Automation, Measurement. Every business already runs on all four, and is fragile in the exact one nobody is watching. ADAM is a diagnostic that plots you on a 4×5 matrix, names your weakest pillar, and forces one decision per quarter. Here is the whole framework, and the free playbook.
Jul 132026
AI & Data
Claude Code can operate your ad accounts. The question is what you let it touch.
Claude Code already pulls last week’s numbers, drafts the negatives, and stages a budget change across Google Ads and Meta, wired in through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the platforms’ own APIs. Here is how the plumbing works, why Google’s own connector refuses to spend a cent, and where the guardrails still have to come from you.
Jul 122026
AI & Data
Model Context Protocol: one plug for every AI marketing tool
Model Context Protocol (MCP) turns a large language model (LLM) from smart autocomplete into an agent that can touch your CRM (customer relationship management), analytics, and ad platforms through a single standard. How the handshake works, who adopted it, and the security perimeter it opens.
Jul 102026
Digital Marketing
Marketing’s AI reorg is real. The layoffs aren’t.
Seventeen percent of chief marketing officers (CMOs) have cut marketing jobs because of AI. Thirty-six percent expect to within two years. The gap between those numbers is where the restructuring is actually happening.
Jul 92026
AI & Data
One agent will not run your marketing. A team of them might.
When a single AI agent hits its ceiling, the work moves to a fleet with an orchestrator on top. The 2026 problem is no longer model quality. It is coordination, guardrails, and reliability.
Jul 82026
SEO
Half your clicks are gone. Your best ones aren’t.
AI Overviews sit on nearly half of Google queries by most 2026 counts, and have cut clicks to the top organic result by 58%. The traffic that survives is disproportionately the traffic that was going to convert.
Jul 62026
Data & Research
Your best-performing channel might just be a passenger
Last-click and even a mix model can flatter the spend that only harvested demand it never created. Incrementality testing is the causal tie-breaker: geo experiments and holdout lift tests that show which dollar actually caused a sale.
Jul 52026
PPC
Performance Max isn’t a black box anymore. You’re just running it like one.
Search themes, campaign-level negatives, brand exclusions, and channel reporting quietly turned Google’s most opaque campaign type into a controllable broad-match machine. The controls exist. Most accounts still don’t use them.
Jul 32026
MarTech
Google Analytics 4 measures behavior well. It was never your system of record.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) got good at engagement, e-commerce, and prediction, and stayed bad at pretending to be a database. In 2026 the working setup reads the interface as a privacy-filtered view and moves the source of truth to BigQuery.
Jul 22026
E-Commerce
Two companies own retail media. Everyone else is a test budget.
US retail media hits roughly $71 billion in 2026, but Amazon and Walmart take nine of every ten new dollars. The channel is huge, growing fast, and more concentrated than any other in digital.
Jun 302026
MarTech
Do you actually need a CDP in 2026, or is the warehouse enough?
Packaged customer data platforms and warehouse-native, composable stacks now do most of the same jobs. The real fork is not buy vs build. It is where you put identity and consent, and how fast you need to act on them.
Jun 282026
PPC
Advantage+ reports one ROAS. It’s the wrong one to trust.
Meta made Advantage+ the default and lowered the bar to use it. The performance lift is real. But the number it reports is blended, and the control you give up is not. Here’s how to run it without fooling yourself.
Jun 262026
AI & Data
Your AI strategy is an operating-model problem, not a tool list
In 2026 the marketing teams pulling ahead with AI are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones that redesigned how the work is done, who decides, and how the payback gets proven.
Jun 242026
E-Commerce
The referral fee is the smallest line on your Amazon bill
Amazon called its 2026 fee change slight, and for one unit it is. The real cost of selling on Amazon and Walmart sits underneath it: a stack of fulfillment, storage, and ad charges that turns a 6-15% referral into something operators put near 30-40% of gross merchandise value (GMV), and each platform hurts in a different place.
Jun 222026
Digital Marketing
Outdoor screens grew up: programmatic DOOH is now audience media
In 2026 the billboard reports back. Programmatic buys the majority of digital out-of-home, measurement moved from impressions to incrementality, and outdoor screens now compete for performance budgets, not just awareness lines.
Jun 202026
Digital Marketing
People watch connected TV. Budgets haven’t caught up. That’s the trade.
Streaming is now nearly half of US TV viewing, but connected TV still draws only about 8% of ad spend. The gap is the last piece of underpriced reach in video, if you can survive the measurement and frequency chaos to claim it.
Jun 172026
MarTech
The blast is dead. Email in 2026 runs on lifecycle and deliverability.
Gmail and Yahoo turned deliverability into the price of entry, and behavior-led flows now compound where broadcast sends stall. What actually moves email revenue in 2026, and what to distrust in the return-on-investment decks.
Jun 162026
AI & Data
How to get quoted by the machine that replaced your search traffic
Generative engine optimization isn’t SEO with a new coat of paint. It’s writing for extraction (answer-first, evidence-dense, cleanly structured) so ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Perplexity pick you as the source. This piece is built the way it tells you to build.
Jun 142026
Digital Marketing
Your affiliate program’s real cost isn’t the commission rate. It’s the incrementality.
Pay 10% on every affiliate sale and a chunk of those buyers were coming anyway. The 2026 shift is away from coupon volume toward deeper partnerships, but the number that decides whether the program pays is the one nobody prints on the invoice.
Jun 122026
MarTech
You’re not measuring a third of your conversions. Here’s the fix and its price.
Client-side tracking now loses 20-40% of events, more in Safari-heavy markets. Server-side tagging recovers a real chunk of it, but it’s infrastructure with a bill and a consent trap, not a plugin you switch on.
Jun 102026
MarTech
On June 15, one switch decides whether your conversions still exist.
Google Analytics stops reading its own ad settings and hands the entire decision to Consent Mode. If your consent management platform (CMP) wires the wrong signal, EU conversions and remarketing quietly fall off, and Analytics will still look fine.
Jun 82026
AI & Data
The ad-ops agent is real. Full autonomy is a story you’re being sold.
AI agents already run bidding, budget shifts, and creative rotation end to end. But 2026 is the year of assisted autonomy: humans on the guardrails, not off the loop. The gap between those two things is where accounts get wrecked or saved.
Jun 62026
PPC
Half your display dollar never reaches the publisher. Here is where it goes.
Independent audits keep finding the same thing: only about half of a programmatic display dollar reaches the site that ran the ad. The rest is the ad tech tax, and in 2026 the way to claw it back is structural, not another blocklist.
Jun 42026
PPC
The average LinkedIn CPC is a number that will lose you money.
Published 2026 benchmarks put LinkedIn cost per click (CPC) anywhere from $5.58 to $10.11, and as high as $15.72 in peak quarters, with cost per lead (CPL) from $15 to $350. The spread isn’t noise. It’s the whole game. Plan to the range that matches your audience, not the headline that matches nobody’s.
Jun 22026
MarTech
Automate the plumbing, not the judgment: n8n and Make
The 2026 workflow-automation choice is not really n8n versus Make. It is knowing which marketing tasks belong to a no-code canvas, which need real code, and which should stay in a human’s hands.
May 302026
Data & Research
Marketing mix modeling is back. Not to replace attribution, to overrule it.
Privacy killed the click-level view, and marketing mix modeling (MMM) returned to fill the hole. But the brands getting it right don’t run MMM instead of attribution. They run three layers, each doing the one job it’s actually good at.
May 282026
AI & Data
RAG for marketing: how to ground an LLM in your own brand knowledge
Retrieval-augmented generation is how you stop a large language model (LLM) from inventing your product facts. In 2026 the work is a governed pipeline, not a prompt, and the payoff is brand-safe content and support you can actually audit.
May 262026
E-Commerce
TikTok Shop will outsell Target this year. Ninety-nine percent of sellers won’t feel it.
US TikTok Shop is forecast at $23.4 billion in 2026, bigger than Target’s or Costco’s e-commerce. But the top 1% of sellers drive about 60% of that, and half the headline stats are forecasts and second-hand claims. Read it with both eyes open.
May 222026
AI & Data
Prompt engineering is dying as a job title and growing as a skill you cannot skip
The standalone “prompt engineer” role is fading, but the competency is now baked into marketing operations. What survived is not clever wording. It is structured prompting, real context, and prompts you actually test.
May 202026
How-To Guides
Let the AI write the script. Don’t let it decide what the script does.
Google Ads scripts still earn their keep in 2026 doing deterministic, boring work: budget alerts, zero-conversion flagging, out-of-stock pausing. AI can now draft them from a sentence. The judgment about the rules is still yours, and that’s the whole point.
May 172026
PPC
Most of your retargeting is theater now. Here’s what still converts.
Third-party cookies stopped carrying your retargeting a while ago. The value moved to first-party audiences, server-side signals, and the automation layers inside Meta and Google. Here’s what to keep funding and what to quietly cut.
May 142026
Digital Marketing
60/40 was an average. You turned it into a commandment.
The most cited number in marketing came from analyzing 996 campaigns and taking the mean. It was never a law, and applying it to a three-year-old brand burning runway is how good research becomes bad strategy. The rule is real. The dogma is the problem.
May 102026
CRO
AI won’t triple your conversion rate. It’ll move it 10-30%, if you aim it right.
The average e-commerce conversion rate is somewhere between 1.4% and 2.96%, which tells you almost nothing. AI personalization is a real lever, but the honest number is a 10-30% relative lift, not the miracle in the case study. Here’s where it actually shows up.
← · From the archive
Past pieces worth revisiting.
PPC
Aug 14, 2026
The thresholds you restructure your account around were never published.
AI & Data
Aug 14, 2026
You put AI into the workflow. Your quality control is still a feeling.
SEO
Aug 14, 2026
Everyone reports AI traffic from a channel grouping that does not exist.
PPC
Aug 14, 2026
Most creative tests end long before they could have concluded.
Quote of the week
“A human who meets a wrong price argues, shrugs, or buys anyway. An agent reconciles two records, finds they disagree, and stops.
MS
Mikołaj Salecki · from Most storefronts bar the shopping agent from the cart. The rule they use does not bind.
04 · Reading now
Pick a lane
Popular right now
- 01
Direct marketing can be a legitimate interest. Behavioral advertising is where that stops.
MarTech · 8 min - 02
Most storefronts bar the shopping agent from the cart. The rule they use does not bind.
E-Commerce · 7 min - 03
Reddit ad prices rose 40% in a year. The efficiency claims are from 2025.
PPC · 5 min - 04
Your retail media network says it measures incrementality. Ask which method.
Data & Research · 7 min - 05
Most audit findings are assertions. These six leave evidence.
Data & Research · 6 min
Editor’s picks
- 01
ADAM: four pillars, five levels, and the one you’re quietly starving
AI & Data · 9 min - 02
I shipped an AI iOS app solo in 30 days. Writing the code was the easy part.
AI & Data · 13 min - 03
Direct marketing can be a legitimate interest. Behavioral advertising is where that stops.
MarTech · 8 min - 04
Reddit ad prices rose 40% in a year. The efficiency claims are from 2025.
PPC · 5 min - 05
Your retail media network says it measures incrementality. Ask which method.
Data & Research · 7 min
05 · Subscribe
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06 · The editor
MS
Mikołaj Salecki
Editor-in-chief
Writes about media, tech, and AI business for people who actually run digital. Former agency lead. Skeptic of frameworks that read better than they perform.
56Articles
9Channels
6hOf reading
2026Since
Also works as a digital consultant, helping companies with the day-to-day of their digital, from planning to shipping, over at salecki.digital.