We are a digital marketing agency helping businesses grow through PPC, SEO, social media marketing, and email marketing. We optimize websites for better conversions and user experience, create strategies to boost visibility, and leverage AI-driven insights to stay ahead in the digital landscape.
Get a free audit
Black Friday is exactly one month (and one day) away, and Shopify just dropped a batch of tools built for the rush, Google put your reviews inside your ads, and US holiday sales are forecast to pass $1 trillion for the first time. Here are the 23 updates that actually matter to marketers:
SHOPIFY
Your Black Friday prices can now kick in at midnight without you staying up to flip them. Rollouts, Shopify’s tool for scheduling and testing store changes, now handles catalogs. You can set prices and product availability per market ahead of time, switch catalogs on or off at a set date and time, test one catalog’s offer against another, and launch catalog, theme and checkout changes together. My take: schedule the whole BFCM switch now, while you still have a month to test it.
Managed Markets now sets your Standard and Express shipping rates abroad. Buyers see one simple shipping price at checkout, and Managed Markets folds part of that cost into your product prices. Buy qualifying prepaid FedEx or DHL Express labels through it, and you won’t pay for later carrier adjustments. The catch: it requires duty-inclusive pricing, and you can’t edit the rates yourself.
Checkout now shows payment methods as compact tiles instead of a list for stores offering four or fewer methods. If your conversion rate swings after the change, check your layout first before you blame the traffic.
Your store now blocks links to sites Shopify flags as malicious, and asks customers to confirm before visiting suspicious ones. Other links work as before.
AI shopping agents can now find your physical stores too. UCP is the open protocol that lets AI shopping agents work with online stores, and agents can now search by city or distance and see which stores carry the items a buyer wants. Agents only see locations you’ve enabled as a Physical storefront, so check yours.
E-COMMERCE
Shoppers treat ChatGPT like a friend on the phone, then ask the audience anyway. 16% of shoppers start product searches in ChatGPT, according to a Feedvisor survey covered by Modern Retail. Only 5% buy on the spot after an AI recommendation. PartnerCentric’s survey found that after an AI suggestion, shoppers check reviews (33%), compare prices (22.3%), search Amazon or another retailer (18.8%), and visit the brand’s site (14.8%). My take: AI gets you on the shortlist, but reviews and price still close the sale.
They still Google you, too. Similarweb data shows 93.7% of ChatGPT.com’s visitors also visited Google.com in September. AI search is an extra stop on the journey, not a replacement for it.
Your reviews just landed an ad slot. Google’s review summaries are AI-written recaps of your online reviews that appear inside your Search ads. They’re positive-only, you can’t edit them, and Google shows them only when it predicts better ad performance. They only run in English in the US, UK, Australia and India. My take: every review you collect is now ad copy you don’t control, so collect good ones.
Small traffic, big intent. SEO consultant Marie Haynes analyzed 100 sites and found ChatGPT drove just 0.62% as many sessions as Google organic. But on sites tracking conversions, 13.8% of ChatGPT visitors converted, vs. 3.02% from Google organic. Google organic still drove 27 times as many conversions as all LLMs combined.
What to do this holiday season: read your reviews across the web and see what Google’s AI could praise, and what it couldn’t. Fill review gaps on Google and Amazon. Match shipping and returns terms on your site and every retailer listing, since 33% of shoppers say these terms often or always change what they buy. And move part of your AI-visibility budget into review collection.
Maps now reads between the lines. Ask Maps, the Gemini-powered chat Google added to Maps in March, matches businesses to what people need. It draws on 300 million+ places and reviews from 500 million+ contributors. It also weighs context nobody typed, like saved places, dietary needs, how busy a place is and, for Gmail users who opt in, upcoming flights. Laura I. Abreu explains how to make your business easier to recommend.
A category won’t cut it. Relevance, distance and prominence still drive rankings. But bakery hunters may also care about hours, dietary options and seating. Fill in your Google Business Profile, your Maps listing, with attributes, amenities, photos and hours, so Google can tell when you’re the right pick.
Your reviews know things your profile doesn’t. Customers mention things no attribute covers, like being handy before an early flight or gentle with older patients. If reviews keep praising something your site barely mentions, add it.
“Flexible” answers nothing. A driving school promising “flexible lessons” still leaves learners wondering about after-work slots, weekends and start dates. Answer the deciding questions on your main service pages. No need for a page per question.
Go undercover as your own customer. Rank trackers check “Botox near me.” Customers ask for Botox that still looks natural, so search that, too. See who shows up and what they say that you don’t. And from Ask Maps, people can already book tables and start navigating, while US users can even prep a food order. Since August, Ask Maps has been rolling out in 150+ countries and territories in English, and US users can also suggest new hours by photographing the sign on your door, so keep it and your profile in sync.
DATA STORIES
Santa just joined the trillion-dollar club. The National Retail Federation (NRF) forecasts US holiday sales of $1.01 trillion for 2026. That would be the first time they top the trillion mark. If the forecast holds, holiday sales will reach $1,013.2B this year, up 4.2% from 2025’s $972.3B. That would be the fastest growth since 2021, when sales jumped 12.7% during the pandemic spending boom. Since that surge, growth has cooled to roughly 2% to 4% a year. Over the full decade, though, holiday sales have grown about 61%, from $629.4B in 2016.
Shoppers cut back in other places, but they protect the holidays. Higher prices also push totals up, so a record dollar figure doesn’t necessarily mean more items in carts. More brands will chase the same holiday shoppers, so ad costs will climb. Finish your creatives early, and give past customers a reason to buy from you first with email and loyalty offers.
OTHER UPDATES
Your Search budget may quietly drift to Display. From February 2027, Google moves Search campaigns using Display Expansion, which sends unspent budget to Display Network ads, to channel prioritization. The hidden 50% allocation goes, and High or Low priority tiers take over. Want today’s setup? Set Display to Low priority with a 50% cap.
Shoppers are already handing their carts to Muse, Meta’s AI agent for US and Canada users. Zuckerberg says 25% of people who set it up use it daily, shopping is its top use, and average purchases top $200. The catch: Sensor Tower data shows retention drops sharply two weeks after download.
Your audience’s news desk is now their feed. Pew found 58% of US adults call social media an important way to keep up with news, up from 43% in 2022, and 13% say it’s their most important source, up from 5%. Among 18 to 29 year olds, it’s 76%.
Frontier models at OpenAI now train without live internet access. After one used a DNS misconfiguration to reach the web on September 20, OpenAI moved all frontier training to an “offline world” of indexed and cached web content.
Canva trained Craft, its first in-house image model, on human-designed templates instead of photos. Craft makes up to 2K images in 30 aspect ratios with legible text. Canva Magic, its image-to-design tool, can split them into editable layers. Every user gets it in Dream Lab.
Google is now putting words in your page’s mouth. It seems to be testing AI-written descriptions in AI Overviews citation cards, the source boxes beside the answer. Brodie Clark spotted that the text doesn’t match the cited page: Google summarizes what it finds most relevant. Check your top queries to see what it says.
