Business Growth and Digital Marketing News & Tips 10-27-26

The tools, tips, news and advice you need to grow your business.

Most business owners can tell you their revenue. Fewer can tell you what that number means for the decision in front of them: whether to hire, how much to sell next year, or when to pull back on spending. The financial statements every company produces are built to report what already happened. Every company needs them, but they were never designed to say what to do next.

Sanctuary’s founder learned this the expensive way, and he had fewer excuses than most. He trained as a CPA. For years the agency’s revenue grew, and the company hired and spent to match it. Then clients left in ways nobody had planned for, and profit stayed flat while salaries rose. Together they showed the growth wasn’t what it looked like. What follows is how Sanctuary built an operating model around the numbers that actually drive its decisions, and why revenue turned out to be the wrong scoreboard.

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What you need to know:

Publishers Put AI Overview Click-Through Near One Percent

At the Digiday Publishing Summit, attendees cited roughly a 1% click-through rate from the AI Overviews section, a 274% rise in publishers’ paid search budgets over three years, and a 40% increase in customer acquisition and traffic from optimizing articles for AI.  Read More →

Google Expands Agentic Commerce Tools Before The Holidays

AI performance insights in Merchant Center are now generally available in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the U.S., showing how a brand’s share of voice compares with others across AI Mode and AI Overviews, and Google says merchants adopting core feed best practices see “an average 5% increase in conversions the following month.” Read More →

Cloudflare Adds A Disallow AI Training Setting

Cloudflare’s new “Disallow AI Training” option blocks model training while keeping search indexing intact, implemented through Disallow rules for Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended, with Microsoft’s robots.txt support targeted for early 2027. Read More →

Google Broadens Its Mediapartners-Google Crawler Guidance

Google rewrote the documentation so that crawling preferences for the Mediapartners-Google user agent now “affect various ad-related Google products (for example, Google AdSense and Google Ad Manager),” replacing wording that named AdSense alone. Read More →

Google Adds Ad Experience Metrics To The CrUX Report

Four experimental metrics — Ad Count, Ad Density, Ad Weight: CPU and Ad Weight: Network — are now available through the CrUX API, the CrUX History API and Chrome DevTools’ Ad panel, with BigQuery support planned but undated. Read More →

Three PPC Priorities To Focus On In 2027

Search Engine Land argues AI Max is already migrating some search campaigns with Dynamic Search Ads set to join the same framework in 2027, and that bidding to a form submission gives “a very incomplete picture of success” when some leads become opportunities worth tens of thousands of dollars. Read More →

Marketers Use AI Search Worries To Argue For Bigger Budgets

The IAB revised its annual growth estimate upward from 9.5% to 12.3% with CTV spending projected to rise 15.6%, while 61% of U.S. consumers said they had used an AI assistant for shopping research or decisions in the past three months and 44% of buyers named adapting to changing search habits as their top investment challenge. Read More →

LinkedIn Details Company Targeting In Campaign Manager

LinkedIn published a four-step framework for its Companies Hub: upload company lists or connect a CRM, use the dashboard to find engaging accounts filtered by engagement level and job seniority, target by engagement stage, then track follow-up campaign engagement to gauge where an account sits in the purchase journey. Read More →

LinkedIn Puts Numbers Behind Thought Leader Ads

LinkedIn says 71% of decision-makers find thought leadership more effective than conventional ad approaches, and that B2B marketers reported 1.6 times higher engagement with Thought Leader Ads than with single-image promotions. Read More →

LinkedIn Tests A Connections-Only Network Tab

Chief product officer Hari Srinivasan said LinkedIn is trialing a Network tab showing updates exclusively from direct connections and follows — “the people you have explicitly connected or followed” — positioned partly as a counter to engagement pods that inflate post stats. If it ships, reach depends on who actually follows a client’s brand and executives, so grow employee and executive connection bases now instead of relying on algorithmic distribution to strangers. Read More →

Facebook Limits Unpaid Pages To Two Link Posts A Month

Meta expanded a test capping non-paying Pages at two link posts per month — “You can share up to 2 links per month on your Page unless you subscribe to Meta One” — with publisher Pages exempt, while Meta’s own Q1 2026 report showed just 1.3% of U.S. post views included external links, down from 9.8% in 2022. Read More →

IAB Study Finds Creator Citations Shift AI Recommendations

The IAB’s “The Creator Signal” study of 2,200 respondents aged 16 and up, surveyed in May 2026 across five countries, found 56% favor AI recommendations that cite creator or influencer reviews and 80% are comfortable relying on AI for product recommendations, though 66% of boomers prefer recommendations without creator sources. Read More →

Anthropic Publishes Prompts That Tighten AI Writing

Anthropic released six prompting techniques, including two “Writing Density” prompts aimed at mannered prose — the short version is simply “Please remove all mannered prose” — plus prompts covering formatting in chat and preferring targeted edits over whole-file rewrites. Read More →

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ADVERTISING

What PPC Needs From Your Landing Pages

PPC and web design tend to operate in their own lanes, and that’s usually fine — until a beautifully designed landing page quietly underperforms a paid campaign and nobody can figure out why. More often than not, the ad did exactly what it was supposed to do. The page just wasn’t built with paid traffic in mind. Let’s look at what to fix before that happens. Read More

ADVERTISING

Why Your Social Posts Are Showing Up in AI Search Results (And Why That Matters)

Your potential customer isn’t just searching for your company anymore on Google. They’re looking at Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI search engines. Instead of getting articles that are ranked in Google’s system, they’re getting direct answers on manufacturers/services near them. The uncomfortable question you have to ask yourself: is your company even in the equation? The content you are producing online has a greater impact than you’re thinking. Read More

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