The daily briefing for AI marketers, growth hackers, and operators. know the x. master the f( ). drive the y.

TL;DR — OpenAI in talks to raise US$100B from sovereign wealth funds, potentially closing Q1 2026. Company covering inferencing costs with cash rather than cloud credits. Marketers should expect faster model releases, possible pricing changes for GPT-powered tools, and continued vendor consolidation.

TL;DR — Doubao reached 100M DAU through organic distribution via Douyin and Toutiao with minimal paid marketing. Processing 50+ trillion tokens daily. MaaS commercialization exceeding expectations with high gross margins. Competitor Tencent Yuanbao spent US$828M on marketing in H1 2025.

TL;DR — AI Overviews linked to 25% drop in publisher referral traffic. Meta signed 7 AI licensing deals in December. Cloudflare's bot blocking tool became key defensive infrastructure. AI referral traffic growing but remains single-digit percentage. NYT and Chicago Tribune sued Perplexity in December.

TL;DR — OpenAI and Anthropic lured US$176.5B in VC through Q3 2025. Investors now differentiating between AI spenders and AI revenue generators. Blue Whale Growth Fund: 'We would not want to position into the AI spenders.' If AI revenues don't outpace expenses, margins will compress in 2026.

TL;DR — OpenAI is building ad formats for ChatGPT using intent-based monetization. Instead of traditional display ads, ChatGPT will make sponsored recommendations within conversations. Sam Altman tasked the team with making ads just as helpful as organic responses.

TL;DR — The December 2025 core update is causing the largest ranking swings of the year. Google confirmed smaller unannounced core updates happen continuously. UX signals like ad aggressiveness and site satisfaction now clearly influence outcomes.

TL;DR — Yoast year-end recap: Being cited in AI overviews now matters more than ranking #1. E-E-A-T is non-negotiable. Publisher deals reshaped content licensing. The shift from rankings to retrieval is complete.

TL;DR — McKinsey projects agentic commerce will generate $1 trillion in US retail revenue by 2030. Amazon is blocking AI agents from its site while Walmart, Target, and Shopify partner with OpenAI. When consumers buy through ChatGPT, OpenAI collects a fee per transaction.

TL;DR — Profound launched Workflows, a no-code automation platform for Answer Engine Optimization. Plaid, Stripe, and MongoDB are early customers using it to build content workflows and AEO reports at scale.

TL;DR — Search Console now shows YouTube and Reddit traffic. AI-powered insights suggest questions to analyze data. Google confirmed llms.txt is treated like a text file with no ranking guarantee.

TL;DR — AI platforms drive only 2-3% of organic traffic compared to Google. Teams overinvesting in AI optimization are underperforming on proven SEO tactics that still deliver measurable results.

TL;DR — Salesforce now tells customers Agentforce works best with old-school if-then automation rather than LLM reasoning. Website now promises to eliminate the inherent randomness of generative AI.