Let’s go through the latest in digital marketing news, resources, tools, and jobs…

The Ultimate Guide to Social Media for Local Businesses
Miriam Ellis
Miriam goes through how to start your social media journey as a local business: from picking the right platforms to creating quality content in this guide.

The State of Social Media Engagement in 2026: 52M+ Posts Analyzed
Tamilore Oladipo
Buffer analyzed over 52 million posts across 10 platforms to discover the state of social media engagement in 2026. Here's how the data shapes up.

YouTube Introduces Interactive Quiz Option for Videos
Hana Kobzová
YouTube is rolling out a new “Add a quiz” option within the video elements section during the upload process, allowing creators to insert interactive quizzes directly into their videos.

Pinterest audit: A step-by-step guide to driving long-term ROI
Kimberly Steele
Kimberly shares how to conduct a comprehensive Pinterest audit. Follow this step-by-step guide to optimize your profile, Pins, and boards for better traffic and ROI.

Google Ads’ three-strikes system: Managing warnings, strikes, and suspension
John Horn
Google can suspend your account after three policy strikes in 90 days. John goes through how the warning system works and how to keep your ads running.

Google Ads Label: Sponsored Options In The Area
Barry Schwartz
Google introduced a new sponsored section called “Sponsored options in the area” in certain local results. 

The Quality Traffic Metric: Building a Better Signal for Google Ads, Meta, and Other Ad Networks
Dana DiTomaso
Dana goes through building a composite quality traffic metric in GTM, combining time on page with scroll depth, and deploying it as a micro conversion across Google Ads, Meta, and GA4.

The Ultimate Guide to AI Max for Google Search
Mike Ryan
Mike takes a look at 1 year of AI Max for Google Search and shows you real-life best practices from 600+ accounts on optimizing AI Max.

Measuring Content Marketing in the AI Age, Part 1: The Audience Trust Index
Robert Rose
Trust is the new currency in content marketing, but you can’t track it with attention-based metrics. Robert shares this framework to assess your most important asset.

Rethinking gated content in a world of zero-click discovery
Sara Galbiati
Sara explains when gated content works, when it backfires, and how to align it with search, digital PR, and pipeline strategy.

How to effectively govern AI use in content teams
Sarah Mitchell
AI in content is inevitable. Unmanaged AI is the real risk. Sarah goes through how CMOs can govern AI use in their teams without diluting brand trust or content quality.

Why original thinking is your competitive advantage in the AI era
Scott Gillum
AI rewards original insight, proprietary data, and firsthand experience over length and polish. Scott explains how content strategy must evolve.

X adds ‘Paid Partnership’ labels so users can more easily identify ads
Andre Revilla
X is rolling out a built-in “Paid Partnership” label that creators can apply to sponsored posts, replacing the hashtag workarounds they’ve had to rely on until now. 

Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2026
Influencer Marketing Hub
Learn how companies can leverage AI, micro-influencers, and innovative platforms to drive ROI and growth. “Short-form and long-form video lead clearly; live shopping ranks third but appears polarized by context”.

5 Influencer Marketing Tips For Success In Social Commerce
Ismael El Qudsi
Influencer marketing can fuel success in the social commerce space by helping you get the right messages to the right audiences and spurring them to buy. Ismael shares five tips. 

How creator talent agencies are evolving into multi-platform operators
Alyssa Mercante
The legacy agency model, long overdue for a reckoning, is finally being rebuilt from the ground up — with creators at the center. 

​2026 Generative AI Brand Visibility Report ​
Laurie Naspe, Sam Sheridan, Adelle Kehoe, Daniel Reid 
Similarweb's first Generative AI Brand Visibility Index measures which brands are being cited in AI responses across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity across Finance, Travel, Electronics, Beauty, Fashion, and News. Key finding: AI visibility doesn't mirror brand size or search dominance. The report includes actionable insights from Aleyda Solis, Lily Ray, Kevin Indig, and Ethan Smith.

​Is Google stealing your clicks in AI Mode? (1.3M+ citations analyzed)​
Yulia Deda, Svitlana Tomko 
Google's self-citation rate in AI Mode has tripled in less than a year: Google.com now accounts for 17.42% of all citations, more than the next six domains combined. It ranks as the top-cited source in 19 of 20 niches analyzed. Learn about it all in Yulia and Svitlana's research.

​AI chatbots and the illusion of “reading an image ” - is it worth the risk?​
Chris Green
Chris tested whether AI chatbots can actually "read" images when fetching a webpage, creating two identical test pages, one with a price offer visible only in the image. Both Gemini and ChatGPT failed to detect it. His takeaway: in typical fetch-and-summarize workflows, content that exists only in pixels may be invisible to AI.

​​Google Updates AI Mode Recipe Sites Results In Response To Backlash​
Roger Montti
Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, shared that Google is updating AI Mode to better connect users with recipe creators. AI Mode had drawn criticism for synthesizing multiple recipes into single AI-generated responses — what some dubbed "Frankenstein recipes." With this update, users searching for meal ideas can now tap on a dish to see links to the original recipe sites, along with a short overview for inspiration.​

Google publishes Universal Commerce Protocol help page​
Anu Adegbola 
Google published a help page detailing how its Universal Commerce Protocol powers AI-driven checkout across its surfaces. The documentation explains how UCP enables a native "Buy" button while keeping merchants as the seller of record, and clarifies implementation requirements, including activating the native_commerce attribute in Merchant Center and supporting Google Pay tokens.​

Google Clarifies How It Picks Thumbnails For Search, Discover​
Matt G. Southern 
Google updated its Image SEO and Discover documentation to clarify how publishers can influence thumbnail selection using primaryImageOfPage schema, main entity image property, or og:image meta tag. This is a documentation clarification, not a change to how thumbnail selection works.

Free Social Media Templates
Sprout Social
Use these free social media image templates to help improve your social media marketing. 

Link in Bio Tool for Creators 
Hopp by Wix
Create a stunning, branded link in bio that brings your content, products, and business tools together.

If you want to give me any heads up on worthy digital marketing resources to include next week, want to be featured, to sponsor, or any other feedback regarding MarketingFomo, just send me a message over here.

That’s a lot of digital marketing for this week! Until the next one, with another edition of MarketingFomo 🔭

Aleyda Solis
SEO Consultant and Wrapper of SEOFOMO & MarketingFomo and AI Marketers
Find me on X / Bluesky / YouTube / LinkedIn / Website