Marketing Letter - 👀 What Content Is AI Citing?

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the digital marketing newsletter that knows this feel:

FR.

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ What Content Is AI Citing and Why? 👀
→ Why TikTok Still Matters For Marketers 👀👀
→ Was Google Spending Your Ad Dollars On Competitor Traffic? 🚨👀👀👀🚨
→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this week's video, I break down the concept of parasite SEO, a simple yet powerful strategy to boost visibility using established platforms. I discovered this method while coding and found it highly effective for driving traffic with minimal investment. I’ll walk you through the key steps and considerations to make it work for you. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, this approach can elevate your online presence. Tune in!

​YouTube​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ How’s this for a Search bug— Google was, for a short time, auto-generating site links that would actually recommend competitor landing pages in ads. AKA ad dollars were spent funneling traffic to competitors. Great system you’ve got there, Google. No notes.

→ Google Ads API v19 just dropped and includes new features and upgrades like:

- added support automatically generating enhanced video assets for Performance Max campaigns
- removed all feed-related entities from the Google Ads API
- Demand Gen ads now support 9:16 portrait image assets

And more, too

→ SimilarWeb’s 2025 SEO Benchmarking Report promises to be "the ultimate guide to understanding what ‘good’ actually looks like in your SEO industry" by analyzing key SEO data across "10,000 websites in 10 industries" and draws some interesting conclusions.

→ If you’re interested in Chegg suing Google over AIOs, here’s a great breakdown by a former commercial litigator turned online travel publisher. TLDR; “The transition to AI Overviews ‘all but completes Google’s evolution from a search engine to an answer engine that publishes answers to user’s queries. Its formerly symbiotic and complementary relationship with publishers has now become overwhelmingly parasitic and competitive.” Absolutely worth a read, fwiw. If you’re a nerd about this stuff, here’s the full complaint.

AI Insight 🤖

→ A new survey by Gartner takes a close look at how marketing organizations are using GenAI for Marketing Campaigns. Here are some interesting data points:

- only 27% of CMOs report that their marketing organization has limited or no GenAI adoption in marketing campaigns
- of those who have adopted GenAI, 77% use it for Creative Development Tasks
- 47% of CMOs report a large benefit from adopting GenAI for evaluation and reporting in their campaigns

Lots more, too. Best to stay up to date on the state of the union.

→ Here’s an AI & B2B-oriented strategy on “leveraging AI-optimized data analysis, combined with AI agents, to enable buyers more effectively in a market defined by complex buying journeys and large, defensive buying groups.”

→ This “in-depth analysis of 40,000 AI search engine responses and 250,000 sources” examines what content AI cites and why. ChatGPT cited fewer sources than Perplexity and Gemini, but "still showcases a unique blend of sources, including UGC and affiliated domains."

→ FYI— OpenAI has expanded its Deep Research feature, which is super impressive, to all paying ChatGPT users.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ Speaking of AI, here’s an interesting one: Instagram Tests AI-based Tasks via DMs. You’ll be able to use a “Create Task” function in your DMs to make AI agents take simple actions.

→ This “From Storytelling to Sales” report, focusing on Scandinavian businesses, finds that TikTok delivered the strongest short-term ROI of all media channels for 11/15 of the participating brands, and that there was also significant long-term ROI for 7/15 brands. A key finding? "Advertisers using TikTok as an always-on channel, rather than in campaign bursts, saw the greatest effects and an overall higher ROI from their TikTok investment."

TLDR; Brands are underinvesting in TikTok, which is "a powerful driver of short-term sales."

→ According to Sensor Tower's 2024 Digital Market Index, "TikTok became the first app to reach $6 billion in IAP revenue for a calendar year," as consumers spent "a staggering $6 billion on in-app purchases in TikTok (including Douyin in China)." The Top 5 for In-App purchase revenue is rounded out by YouTube, Google One, Disney+, and Tinder (lol).

→ If any of you are on the LinkedIn newsletter grind, there's now an analytics page that displays article views, new subscribers, email sends, and email open rate. For articles, you can now see impressions, engagements, and article views.

→ Some good news for YouTube viewers and advertisers who prefer not to annoy people— YouTube's mid-roll ads are getting better about interrupting your videos. As of May 2025, "ads will be inserted in more natural places like pauses or transitions, reducing interruptions."

Also

→ For any of you doing ecommerce, this U.S. Retail Ecommerce Sales Q4 2024 chart has some interesting info. For example, "Ecommerce accounted for 16.4% of total U.S. retail sales in Q4 2024, up slightly from 16.3% in the prior quarter" and "ecommerce growth continues to outpace brick-and-mortar."

​

Jacky Chou​
Founder of Indexsy
hello@indexsy.com
Let's Connect on Twitter👇

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