Wednesday, May 20

🚀 Your Messaging Isn't Broken. Your Assumptions Are.

Buyers decide in milliseconds, not minutes. If your messaging leans on words like "quality" or "customer service," you're already losing them.

Join Paul Slack from Vende Digital and Grant Gooding (CEO, PROOF Positioning) for a neuroscience-backed session on how buyers' brains actually work, and what to say instead.

📅 TODAY, May 20 | 12PM CST. Reserve Your Spot →

⚡️ Today’s Headlines ⚡️

🔎 Google made its biggest change to the Search box in 25 years. The new “Intelligent Search box” aims to bring easier access to the AI search features in Google Search to Google’s users.

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💰 X is pitching advertisers on rising opportunities in the app. X is hoping to entice advertisers with its advanced AI-powered ad targeting process, the biggest update in the company’s history.

🔥 Been burned by a marketing agency before?  That’s why this month I’m making warm introductions to agencies I’ve personally vetted & trust with my own money. Let me help you find the perfect agency 100% free this week here →

📊 X is launching a new data point in its creator analytics element. The new data point provides an overview of exactly how many of a user’s followers were active in the app in the previous 24-hour period.

💡 Today’s Insight 💡

What 25,000 URLs reveal about AI search citations

🗞 TL;DR - New research analyzing 25,000+ cited URLs across AI search platforms found that listicles are the dominant content format in AI citations, especially for commercial and comparison-based queries.

💡 Insight - The reason is structural: listicles are easy for AI systems to parse, extract, and recombine into answers. Their format naturally aligns with how LLMs generate responses, aka clear sections, concise summaries, and multiple self-contained recommendations.

The study found:

• Listicles drive ~22% of all AI citations

• Articles and product pages follow behind

• Listicles account for nearly 40% of commercial-intent citations

However, intent matters more than format alone. Informational queries still favor deeper articles, while commercial queries heavily favor comparison-style content.

The article also warns against low-quality “best of” spam. AI systems increasingly prioritize useful, structured, and credible comparisons, not thin keyword-stuffed pages.

Another key insight: AI citation behavior is increasingly detached from traditional rankings. Pages can earn citations without ranking top 10 if they match the structure and intent AI systems prefer.

So, you might just want to start adding more listicles to your content plans, especially if you want to be ranked by AI search engines.

🙇 How Can I Help You This Week?

😤 Been burned by a marketing agency before? Same story I hear every week. That’s why this month I’m making warm introductions to agencies I’ve personally vetted & trust with my own money. Let me help you find the perfect agency 100% free here →

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