January 23rd-January 29th // Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
In This Edition!
AI now prefers YouTube to Reddit!
Meta is spending all of its ad money on AI stuff
“The AI Accelerator is a great mix of strategy and hands-on application that will enable me to communicate the value of AI at the C-suite level while also coaching and developing marketing teams on the day-to-day practicalities. This course is a must for any marketing leader who wants to understand how to leverage AI to accelerate growth!”
Top Headlines🔥
YouTube dethrones Reddit as AI's favorite social source🔒
Source: Adweek
January 26th, 2026
Summary: YouTube now appears in 16% of large language model citations compared to Reddit's 10%, reversing the previous hierarchy where Reddit dominated AI-generated answers. The shift stems from YouTube's structured transcripts and metadata, which is text that AI models can easily parse. Reddit's fragmented thread format is harder for LLMs to process. YouTube generates roughly 18 times more AI citations than Instagram and 50 times more than TikTok, with Google AI Overviews and Gemini citing it most frequently.
Opinion: If it’s easy for AI to read and parse your content, it will, credibility be damned!
This just goes to show that AI visibility has nothing to do with credibility, accuracy, quality, views, followers, virality—it's simply about machine-readable text. The lesson is pretty clear: Winners here are companies creating detailed product walkthroughs, how-to guides, FAQs, and explainer videos with clean transcripts. Make sure your YouTube strategy includes optimized captions and descriptions; otherwise, you’ll be invisible in the future of search!
Meta Uses $196B Ad Engine to Bankroll AI
Source: AdExchanger
January 28th, 2026
Summary: Meta generated $196B in 2025 ad revenue and will spend $115-135B of it on AI this year. Meta is heavily investing in future bets, like AI glasses that generate personalized info in your field of vision, and algorithms that decide which ads to show and when. Instagram Reels watch time in Q4 jumped 30% year over year. Views of organic feed and video posts on Facebook are also up 7% due to ranking changes in what was described as the platform's largest quarterly product impact in two years. Meta is also using AI to figure out which users are most likely to be interested in an ad at any given moment, then redistributing ads to those users and sessions, generating a "nearly four times larger revenue impact" than just cranking up the ad load.
Opinion: Meta's spending $115-135B on AI this year, funded almost entirely by its $196B advertising business. Google's doing the same thing. So the two largest advertising companies in the world are both doubling down on consumer-facing AI products, funded by advertising revenue that is NOT generated from those AI products. Not every company (see: OpenAI) has that luxury.
For marketers: The platforms you're spending billions on are building the AI products that will disintermediate your customer relationships.
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: Yahoo Scout is an AI-powered answer engine built on Claude in the Yahoo Search app. Scout synthesizes information from across Yahoo's properties and the open web to provide personalized answers to Yahoo's 250M monthly US users. Yahoo wants to keep Scout free for all users and is testing ads at launch with a small percentage of queries. Answers will have inline citations and source links to help send traffic to publishers. A new Scout Intelligence Platform will also bring gen-AI to Yahoo Mail, News, Finance, and Sports.
Quick Take: Yahoo is taking a different approach than OpenAI and Google by building advertising into its AI search product from day one. Despite Yahoo's existing user base and data advantages, they’re late to the AI game, so it'll be an uphill battle to grab AI search market share from the likes of Gemini and ChatGPT.
What It Does: Google integrated Gemini 3 directly into Chrome with a side panel that keeps the chatbot available while browsing, capable of handling different tasks. A new "auto browse" feature for Pro and Ultra subscribers handles multi-step instructions like researching flights, filling out forms, and managing subscriptions. The integration also includes Nano Banana image generation, letting users generate or transform images with a prompt in the side panel.
Quick Take: Embedding AI directly into the world’s most popular browser is a surefire way to ensure Chrome remains the dominant entry point to the web, while also propping up Gemini usage. AI-native browsers from OpenAI and Perplexity just can’t compete with this kind of distribution. Google continues to masterfully thread the needle.
AI Use Case of The Week💡
The Setup: Advertisers are leery of AI-generated creative, fearing it looks fake, will hurt performance, or drive low-quality clicks. Columbia University, Harvard, Technical University of Munich, and Carnegie Mellon researchers partnered with Taboola to put these concerns to the test by conducting a live study of AI advertising performance.
The AI Solution: Researchers analyzed over 300,000 ads generating 500 million impressions and 3 million clicks across Taboola's Realize platform. They used a "sibling ads" methodology—comparing matched pairs of AI-generated and human-made ads created by the same advertiser for identical campaigns, on the same day, with the same objectives. A separate perception study asked consumers to identify whether ads appeared AI-generated or human-made.
The Results:
• AI-generated ads performed similarly to human-made ads in click-through rate (~0.65% for human vs ~0.76% for AI)
• AI-generated ads perceived as human-made achieved 1.55% CTR—the highest of any group
• Consumers thought nearly half of AI-generated ads were made by humans
• Including human faces was the single most influential factor in making ads feel authentic and driving engagement
• AI ads increased CTR without hurting conversion rates, disproving concerns about low-quality clicks
Why This Matters: The study shows that AI-generated creative can deliver efficiency and speed without sacrificing performance, if executed correctly. The key is that perception matters more than origin: Fake-looking ads underperform regardless of who created them.
Your Action: Test which AI creative attributes make ads feel authentic. Run a controlled experiment with 20-30 AI-generated ad variations that systematically test the variables that drove performance in this study: include vs. exclude human faces, lifestyle context vs. product-only shots, candid vs. posed imagery, realistic vs. stylized rendering.
Track two metrics: traditional performance (CTR, conversion) AND brand perception (run a quick 5-question survey asking viewers if the ad felt authentic, trustworthy, AI-generated). You're looking for the sweet spot where AI-generated ads perform well AND pass the authenticity test. Those specific attributes become your AI creative guidelines.
Other Notable Headlines📌
OpenAI and Meta will spend big on Super Bowl ads as they battle AI 'slop' and trust problems🔒- Adweek’s new Real Time AI Influence Index tool will track the top 7 Super Bowl advertisers, based on how they’re appearing in AI queries. Will OpenAI and Meta show up on the list?
UK To Google: Let publishers opt out of AI Overviews - UK regulators ordered Google to give publishers control over how their content is used in AI Overviews. Some say the order doesn’t go far enough.
Google brings AI Mode to Gmail and Photos - The conversational Search feature can now draw on information from a user’s Gmail account and Google Photos to create more personalized experiences, like custom travel itineraries based on past bookings or Photo memories.
Pinterest to lay off 15% of workforce in order to invest in AI - The cut equates to about 700 jobs. The savings will be redirected to AI-focused roles and teams.
eBay blocks AI shopping agents from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity - But OpenAI’s “Operator” is still allowed.
Datalinx AI raises $4.2M to fix messy marketing data - Datalinx AI automates the tedious work of cleaning and preparing marketing data for AI tools.
OpenAI plans Q4 IPO in race to beat Anthropic to market - Both companies need cash to fuel their model development. Anthropic predicts it will finally break even in 2028, two years earlier than OpenAI.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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