OpenAI aims to reach $100 billion in ad revenue within five years despite still being in early testing. Its strategy relies on two pillars
TLDR Marketing 2026-04-16
News & Trends
OpenAI’s ambitious (and unrealistic?) advertising targets (2 minute read)
OpenAI aims to reach $100 billion in ad revenue within five years despite still being in early testing. Its strategy relies on two pillars: rapid growth of ChatGPT and strong purchase intent from its users that can drive higher conversion rates. It already has over 900 million weekly users and projects 2.75 billion by 2030, which would be on par with Facebook or Instagram, and ahead of TikTok. In the first six weeks of testing, more than 600 advertisers ran campaigns on the chatbot and generated over $8 million in monthly revenue. The company expects growth to $2.6 billion this year and over $100 billion by 2030 while it builds ad tools and proves it can monetize its audience.
More than 8 in 10 consumers try to avoid ads (2 minute read)
A survey by Gartner found that 81% of consumers in the US try to tune out ads and 52% actively block them through ad-free subscriptions, VPNs, or ad blockers. The backlash is strongest among younger audiences, with 24% of Gen Z saying retargeted ads negatively impact their perception of the advertised brand compared to 18% of Millennials and 16% of older cohorts. Sponsored content and non-intrusive formats generate significantly less negative sentiment than pop-ups or unskippable placements.
Strategies & Tactics
How to find your best customers via Claude (2 minute read)
Identify your highest-paying and longest-retained customers using Stripe data, then use Claude to surface shared traits and define your “golden segment”. Build a positioning framework and rewrite your messaging around what that segment actually cares about. Audit all marketing assets to align with the new positioning. Create a single ICP document that defines who to target and who to avoid. Apply it across all channels so only high-quality leads are qualified and passed to sales.
Fixing Webflow staging pages getting indexed in Google (1 minute read)
Check whether your Webflow staging domain is indexed using a site search query in Google. If it is, add the domain to Google Search Console and submit a removal request for temporary deindexing. For a long term fix, add a meta robots noindex tag to pages using custom code or Tag Manager. Then turn off Webflow’s SEO setting that claims to disable indexing but actually blocks crawling instead.
The Reddit detour distorting PPC signals (4 minute read)
Reddit is quietly distorting PPC signal quality by intercepting high-intent searches before buyers ever reach an advertiser’s page. A study of 8,566 B2B SaaS keywords found Reddit beats every vendor organically 67.3% of the time on terms with $50+ CPCs. When buyers spend days researching on Reddit before clicking an ad, Smart Bidding sees the cost without the conversion and pulls back on the exact terms producing the most qualified leads. Offline conversion tracking is the primary fix, with Google’s own data showing a median 10% lift in conversions for advertisers who import downstream outcomes using first-party data alongside click IDs.
Resources & Tools
Google adds AI Skills to Chrome to help you save favorite workflows (2 minute read)
Google is adding a new Chrome feature called Skills that lets users save and reuse AI prompts through Gemini across any web page. Instead of rewriting prompts, users can trigger saved workflows with a click or shortcut. This makes tasks like summarizing content, comparing products, or modifying recipes faster and repeatable. Google is also launching a library of prebuilt Skills that users can customize.
Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO), according to a Google Software Engineer (10 minute read)
Addy Osmani, a Software Engineer at Google, explains what Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO) is and how it applies to product documentation sites. AI coding agents already read documentation but leave almost no analytics trace, often spending only about 400 milliseconds on a page while bypassing traditional engagement metrics. A single page can often exceed an agent’s token capacity (100K to 200K), which will force truncation or hallucination. Effective AEO requires making docs discoverable, machine-readable, and token-efficient through tools like llms.txt, skill.md, and proper robots.txt access. Brands that adapt early will improve agent success rates and visibility, while those that do not risk silent failures.
SEO Tip: Regex + Search Operators (1 minute read)
You can use Regex commands with search operators in Google Search. This is a simple but powerful method for targeted competitor and SERP-based research. This could be used to identify indexing issues on your site, competitor content spread across multiple directories, and more.
Miscellaneous
You Asked, I Answered: List Growth, Email Design, and Deliverability (4 minute read)
Traditional lead magnets are losing impact in an AI-driven, zero-click world. Email list growth now comes from offering real and ongoing value that solves specific audience needs. Use both designed and plain text emails, since design builds engagement while plain text works best for personal messages. Encouraging replies improves deliverability and builds relationships while uncovering useful insights.
Your Public Record is Being Written Without You (4 minute read)
Your brand is shaped less by what you publish and more by the “public record” across AI outputs, reviews, and third-party content, often before users reach your site. In a zero-click world, decisions are driven by these aggregated signals. These can surface outdated or weak claims if left unchecked. To stay influential, audit how you appear across search and AI, identify which narratives dominate, and publish credible information that is easy to surface and cite.
Quick Links
Stop Wasting Content: LinkedIn & B2B Marketing Mistakes (4 minute read)
Most B2B teams waste good content by not reusing, distributing, or aligning it across the business.
10 Creatives on How Going In-House Changed Their Marketing Approach (8 minute read)
Moving in-house sharpens creative decisions by providing greater context and deepens accountability because teams live with the results of their work.
Google will begin punishing sites for back button hijacking in June (2 minute read)
The technique manipulates browser history to redirect users to additional content pages or pop-ups instead of letting them navigate back.
Thanks for reading, Alison Koh & Maddi Salmon