⚖️ End of “Winner Takes Most” Search

Today’s Insights

Feature

Monday.com’s latest results confirmed what we already know: customer discovery is changing.

During its latest earnings call, Monday explained a drop in “volume because [Google is] experimenting with AI on top” as experiments like AI Overviews shift traffic flows.

Some investors have linked this traffic uncertainty to the 30% drop in the company’s share price since the announcement.

Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, put numbers behind the trend:

• Google: 18x harder to get traffic than a decade ago

• OpenAI: 750x harder

• Anthropic: 30,000x harder

Prince is arguing that crawlers for AI Search extract massive volumes of data, add real server costs on websites, and send little traffic back.

He argues that if AI platforms profit from collecting content, they should also pay.

Zooming out

If searches are no longer mostly funneled to the top few Google results and instead, users are able to consider more options, that weakens the “winner takes most” search dynamic.

_{*Backlinko estimated that Google’s first organic search result had an average CTR of 27.6%.}

Monday themselves said they are shifting budget to YouTube. In fashion, companies like Garage are turning store associates into content creators, paying them to post on social media. And in fintech, PayPal is advertising a six-figure role dedicated to building its CEO’s personal brand.

SEO may no longer be the predictable acquisition channel it once was but it may push brands towards more innovation and experimentation to win customers.

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🌐 Google Ads could soon phase out manual language targeting

By year-end, Google may automatically detect and target user languages for search campaigns. Manual controls are expected to still be available for all other campaign types.

🎯 Meta to remove more detailed targeting options in Ads Manager

Meta are reportedly notifying some advertisers that next year ad sets with targeting options which are no longer available will stop delivering. Meta officially announced they were consolidating targeting options in June.

📌 Instagram is thought to be developing ‘Picks’ to connect friends through shared interests

Picks will let users select their favorite movies, TV shows, music, books, and games. Instagram will then compare those choices with their friends’ lists and highlight which friends share similar interests.

🤖 Ahrefs CMO warns that new AI search tracking tools are overestimating accuracy

Tim Soulo says no company has access to real user prompts from AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. He claims that most tools rely on “synthetic prompts” which can be indicative, but limitations should be acknowledged.

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