Hey👋,
I'm Giacomo

Google Search is growing faster than YouTube.

For three consecutive quarters, Search & other ad revenue has outgrown YouTube Ads.

YouTube has long been Alphabet’s growth darling, often outgrowing Search.
It made sense: a newer product, huge ad inventory, lower monetisation.

Not anymore.

And this is mostly because of AI.

AI Overviews unlocked completely new, incremental ad placements within Google Search. Ads can appear within and below AI Overviews with one placement not excluding the other.
Then there are ads in AI Mode too.

Meanwhile, YouTube faces a saturation problem.

I remember when ads were sporadic.
Now virtually every video has one or more: two pre-rolls, often followed by mid-rolls.

Sometimes I use a VPN to browse from the US.
The ad pressure there is insane.

Not by coincidence, Performance Max increasingly favours Search over YouTube.
When I started testing it in 2021, Search accounted for less than half of impressions and clicks. The rest came mostly from Display and YouTube.

Today, our campaigns serve almost exclusively on Search.

I’m not sure what Google’s strategy is.
On one hand, YouTube’s ad inventory is clearly saturated and growth is slowing.
On the other, “Subscriptions, platforms & devices”, which includes YouTube Premium, keeps growing at the same or a higher pace than Search.

In 2025, subscriptions accounted for 33% of YouTube total revenue.
(In Q4 2025, Sundar Pichai said YouTube had surpassed $60B in annual revenue, of which around $40B from ads).

I guess the subscription share will grow further.

I wouldn’t be surprised if users frustrated with YouTube ads were increasingly switching to Premium, moving revenue from one bucket to another.

Personally, I’m a heavy YouTube user. I have been since 2007, I love it.
Living in a small market like Switzerland, I’m still okay with the current number of ads. But for how much longer?

Are ads or subscriptions more profitable?
If anyone in the comments knows the answer, I’d be very interested to discuss it further!

Welcome to conversational ads.

Users can "Ask ChatGPT" about an ad they’ve just seen.

That single button shows why ChatGPT Ads are a completely different beast from search, display or social ads.

It's not just another ad placement,
it’s an entirely new advertising experience.

Sure, it’s very early days.
The feature doesn’t work well yet.

But the direction is clear.
Brands won’t merely show up inside conversations. They’ll take part in them.

Users can ask about prices, compare options, clarify features and potentially take action without ever leaving ChatGPT.

If OpenAI gets this right, ads could create value within the user journey instead of disrupting it and hoping for a click, how it usually happens on display and social.

The upside is insane.

OpenAI’s advertising targets look insane too.
But given the potential value of conversational ads, they may be less unrealistic than they appear.

I’m looking forward to seeing ChatGPT Ads become a fixture in media plans!

Zero-click searches are finally going down.

Hurray!

But wait a second…

Why is my organic traffic still falling?

Because fewer zero-click searches don’t necessarily mean more clicks to your websites.

Users are still clicking, yes.
They’re just not clicking on your results.

AI Overviews may answer many questions without users clicking anywhere.
But many users do keep exploring, especially on desktop.

The problem is where they go next:
Google Images, Google Maps, YouTube, Flights, Hotels, even AI Mode.

In the EU+UK, the share of desktop searches that stayed within Google’s ecosystem nearly doubled:

From 11% in January 2024
To 20.4% in June 2026.

Meanwhile, zero clicks declined.

The two trends move in the exact opposite direction!

And this shift is considerably stronger in the EU+UK than in the US, despite EU regulations targeting Google’s anti-competitive practices.

The zero-click narrative is missing half the story.
Google doesn’t need to stop users from clicking.
It only needs to ensure those clicks never leave Google.

Source: Datos, A Semrush Company, The State of Search reports Q12025-Q22026

Zero-click searches on Google are going down.

Good news for marketers!

Or is it?

Because in the EU/UK, zero clicks and paid clicks on desktop have been moving in almost opposite directions.

Zero clicks share fell, paid clicks' rose.

So where are all those "recovered" clicks going?

To ads. 😅

Want your traffic back?
No problem.
Just pay!

Source: Datos, A Semrush Company, The State of Search reports Q12025-Q22026

Forget AI Overviews.

Google itself is stealing your clicks.

When AI Overviews appear, many users find the direct answer satisfactory and leave without clicking anything.

The zero-click trend has been discussed extensively here and across marketing publications.

But there’s another trend that should concern marketers even more.

Users do click.
They just don’t click on your website.

They go to other Google-owned properties.
Google Images, Google Maps, Flights, Hotels, YouTube, even AI Mode.

Despite all the recent EU regulation, Google is keeping an increasingly large share of searches within its own ecosystem.

In the EU/UK, the shift has accelerated sharply over the past 8–10 months.

In January 2024, 11% of desktop searches led users to remain on Google or visit another Google-owned property.

By June 2026, that share had reached 20.4%.

Nearly double.

Meanwhile, zero-click searches declined.

And that’s the concerning part.

Users are still clicking, engaging and researching.

They’re just increasingly doing it inside Google’s ecosystem, without ever reaching external websites.

My chart covers desktop only, where users are generally more likely to perform longer research sessions and click to external websites.

I don’t have equivalent mobile data, but I suspect the trend there is even stronger.

What to do then?
I’m open to suggestions in the comments!

Source: Datos, A Semrush Company, The State of Search reports

Last week, I published one of my most successful posts.

It took me almost eight hours to write.
My whole Sunday.

Eight hours for ~600 words??
Yes indeed.

The post was about the disappearance of the CMO title.

The idea came from the TLDR Marketing newsletter, which linked to an article by State of Brand.

As I checked the article’s sources, one claim caught my attention.

It said WHOOP had hired former Nike CMO Nicole Graham.
The link pointed to another marketing newsletter, CMORoom, which made the same claim.

But there was a problem.
Nicole Hubbard Graham is Nike’s current CMO.
She never moved to WHOOP.

WHOOP had actually hired Dirk-Jan van Hameren, Nike's CMO before Graham.

A small mistake.
But repeated across three reputable marketing publications.

Then it got more interesting.

I asked Gemini to fact-check the claim.
It confirmed it was correct, citing those same publications as reputable sources.

ChatGPT Pro (not Plus) did the opposite.
It traced the story to WHOOP’s official announcement and caught the error immediately.

But this isn’t about which AI is better.
It’s about what happens when the internet repeats the same mistake often enough.

This is why a LinkedIn post can take me a full day.
Writing doesn’t take eight hours.
Fact-checking and research does.

This time, the effort was rewarded with tens of valuable comments from CMOs and marketing practitioners around the world.

Other times, I spend eight hours on a post that nobody reads.

But that's ok, because I still enjoy the process.
The research, the thinking, the writing.
Doing things properly, not merely for the sake of doing something.

I'm very confident that my efforts will be rewarded in the long term.
Maybe not with likes and followers but with valuable connections, speaking engagements, and job opportunities. In fact, it's already happening.

Because AI has made output a commodity.
But the process behind an output still isn't.
And smart people can tell the difference.

Happy Sunday everyone!

So long, old money.

This year, self-made fortunes hit a record share of billionaire wealth.

Good news?

Not for me.

Back when billionaires were corrupt bastards born into old money, I had the perfect excuse not to be one.

I'm not a corrupt bastard, let alone born into old money.
No point in even trying to become a billionaire.

But now,
you don’t need political connections anymore, you don't need to inherit great fortunes.

Anyone can become a billionaire.
Even good people!

So, no more excuses my friends.

If I'm not a billionaire, it’s my own fault.
I should have worked harder instead of scrolling through another TikTok video.

Happy Friday, future billionaires!

Chart by The Economist

Good luck measuring this customer journey 😂

Source: Datos, A Semrush Company "How AI is reshaping customer journeys"

CMOs are an endangered species.

And marketers themselves are to blame.

Only 36% of Fortune 500 companies use the CMO title in 2026.
Down from 49% in 2025.
And 55% in 2024.

This does not mean companies have stopped believing in marketing.

Quite the opposite.
They are moving it under broader commercial leaders.

At UPS, marketing now sits under the Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer.
At Microsoft, the CMO moved into a broader commercial organisation.

CEOs are not abandoning marketing.
The opposite. They realised it is too important to sit in isolation.

And honestly, that makes total sense.

Corporate marketing has long struggled to prove its impact on revenue and growth. So teams built increasingly sophisticated ways to prove their value.

Complex attribution.
Marketing mix modelling.
Endless dashboards.

The measurement improved, but the connection to revenue did not.

Too often, metrics defended marketing’s narrative instead of serving the business.

Meanwhile, many CMOs controlled only one of marketing’s traditional 4Ps: promotion.

Product sat with the CPO or CTO (think of tech companies).
Pricing with strategy.
Distribution with sales.

The CMO was expected to deliver growth without controlling most of its levers.
No wonder some manufactured impressive metrics just to survive!

But that model was bound to break.

CEOs are now absorbing marketing into broader Commercial, Revenue or Operating functions, bringing the 4Ps under one chief.

The irony?

While large corporations may be retiring the title, high-growth challengers still recruit the people who held it.

WHOOP just hired former Nike global CMO Dirk-Jan van Hameren.
Food-Tech unicorn NotCo had hired former Burger King CMO Fernando Machado, who has since left and joined Chipotle as Chief Brand Officer (not CMO!)

In large corporations, marketing can become a political exercise.
At scale-ups, growth and top-line revenue is survival.

So,
the title may be endangered,
but great marketers who understand more than just promotion or manufactured metrics are definitely not.

Sources: Forrester CMO Tenure 2026 study; UPS, Microsoft, WHOOP and NotCo press releases.

Asking, "How many ping-pong balls fit in a Boeing 747?" during an interview is absolutely pointless unless the job actually requires someone to calculate how many ping-pong balls fit in a Boeing 747 on the spot.

Mark Horstman, The Effective Hiring Manager.

Really loving this book