BrightEdge Enterprise SEO platform released new data showing distinctive patterns across major AI search and chatbot platforms and also called attention to potential disruption from Apple if it breaks with Google as the default search engine in Safari.
One of the key findings in the BrightEdge data is that traffic to websites from AI chatbots and search engines is highest from desktop users. The exception is Google Search which is reported to send more traffic from mobile devices over desktop.
The report notes that 94% of the traffic from ChatGPT originates from desktop apps with just 6% of referrals coming from mobile apps. BrightEdge speculates that the reason why there’s less mobile traffic is because ChatGPT’s mobile app shows an in-app preview, requiring a user to execute a second click to navigate to an external site. This creates a referral bottleneck that doesn’t exist on the desktop.
But that doesn’t explain why Perplexity, Bing, and Google Gemini also show similar levels of desktop traffic dominance. Could it be a contextual difference where users on desktop are using AI for business and mobile use is less casual? The fact that Google Search sends more mobile referral traffic than desktop could suggest a contextual reason for the disparity in mobile traffic from AI search and chatbots.
BrightEdge shared their insights:
“While Google maintains an overwhelming market share in overall search (89%) and an even stronger position on mobile (93%), its dominance is particularly crucial in mobile web search. BrightEdge data indicates that Apple phones alone account for 57% of Google’s mobile traffic to US and European brand websites. But with Safari being the default for around a billion users, any change to that default could reallocate countless search queries overnight.
Apple’s vendor-agnostic Apple Intelligence also suggests opportunities for seismic shifts in web search. While generative AI tools have surged in popularity through apps on IOS, mobile web search—where the majority of search still occurs—remains largely controlled by Google via Safari defaults. This makes Apple’s control of Safari the most valuable real estate in the mobile search landscape.”
Here are the traffic referral statistics provided by BrightEdge:
With Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) nearing, one of the changes that many will be alert to is any announcement relative to the company’s Safari browser which controls the default search settings on nearly a billion devices. A change in search provider in Safari could initiate dramatic changes to who the new winners and losers are in web search.
Perplexity asserts that the outcome of changes to Safari browser defaults may impact search marketing calculations for the following reasons:
“58% of Google’s mobile traffic to brand websites comes from iPhones
Safari remains the default browser for nearly a billion users
Apple has not yet embedded AI-powered search into its mobile web stack”
BrightEdge data shows that desktop usage is the dominant source of traffic referrals from AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing, and Gemini, with Google Search as the only major platform that sends more traffic via mobile.
This pattern could suggest a behavioral split between desktop users, who may be performing work-related or research-heavy tasks, and mobile users, who may be browsing more casually. BrightEdge also points to a bottleneck built into the ChatGPT app that creates a one-click barrier to mobile traffic referrals.
BrightEdge’s data further cites Apple’s control over Safari, which is installed on nearly a billion devices, as a potential disruptor due to a possible change in the default search engine away from Google. Such a shift could significantly alter mobile search traffic patterns.
Read more at BrightEdge
The Open Frontier of Mobile AI Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Tada Images
A fresh wave of publishers have signed up for generative AI startup ProRata’s revenue share program, including The Boston Globe, Vox Media and Future, as well as Fast Co. and Inc owner Mansueto Ventures.
ProRata operates Gist.ai, an AI-powered search engine that utilizes licensed content to generate answers, which launched in December 2024. Today, the company will announce a dozen more, taking the total number of publishers that license content to power its AI search engine to 500, according to the company.
Frommer’s, Homes & Gardens, The Nation, Newsday, The New Republic, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Trusted Media Brands are among those to come on board.
They join publishers that have already announced deals with ProRata, including The Atlantic, Daily Mail, Fortune, The Guardian, Sky News and Time. Gist answers search queries using only licensed content from publisher partners.
Unlike most AI deals with publishers, which offer one-time licensing payments or lump-sum multi-year contracts based on access to archives or data, ProRata pays out 50% of all its revenue to publisher partners on a recurring basis, depending on how often their content powers AI responses. ProRata’s revenue comes entirely from advertising, though the company plans to launch subscriptions in the third quarter, according to CEO and founder, Bill Gross.
Publishers can make up to 50% of the revenue paid out to publishers, with a maximum of 5% per citation. For example, if a publisher’s site is cited seven times, they’ll make 35% of the revenue share. In comparison, payout to publishers from AI startup company Perplexity maxes out at 25%.
That’s made it a no-brainer for publishers.
Execs at Boston Globe, Mansueto Ventures and Trusted Media Brands said they were drawn to ProRata’s attribution and pay-per-use model that compensates publishers based on how often they are cited in response to queries.
“We’re continuing to experiment with and adopt new models and opportunities for our brands across the AI space,” Jacob Salamon, vp of business development at Trusted Media Brands, which owns publications like Reader’s Digest, said in an email. “We appreciate the transparency, publisher credit and focus on monetization [ProRata is] bringing to the marketplace. And because ProRata aspires to help all AI search providers measure and display source attribution, it’s a partnership that will benefit all publishers in the long run.”
Unlike LLMs like GPT-4 or Claude, which generate responses from across the web and therefore make them more prone to hallucinations, Gist.ai only uses licensed content from approved publisher partners. That makes it a more controlled environment, which reduces the chance that the system pulls inaccurate, outdated or low-quality information, according to publishing execs that spoke with Digiday.
“We feel like we’ll be in good company,” said Patrick Hainault, vp of corporate business development at Mansueto Ventures.
Another benefit to publishers is that their proprietary data isn’t used to train a tech company’s large language model when signing up for ProRata’s program. Instead, their content is accessed by Gist.ai’s search engine through retrieval augmented generation (RAG), according to Hainault.
Naturally, signing publishers is a strong start, but content supply — even from large, legacy publishers — doesn’t automatically drive user demand in AI products. Gist.ai is not yet a household name or widely used search engine, so for publisher revenue-sharing to be meaningful, it needs significant user traffic.
According to Similarweb data, Gist.ai had about 36,000 desktop and mobile web visits in April 2025. Bill Gross, founder and CEO of ProRata, claimed visitors had more than doubled, with the site attracting 100,000 visitors in May.
However, the real growth opportunity for Gist.ai is not its own landing page, according to Gross — it’s the search engine’s distribution on publishers’ own sites.
In the next month, Gist.ai will be added to the sites of 10 publishers that are part of ProRata’s revenue share program, starting with B2B publication Adweek. Gist.ai will replace some publishers’ onsite search functions, or be added as an AI-powered search option for others, according to Gross. It’s free for publishers to add Gist.ai to their sites, he said.
“We call it distributed AI search,” Gross said. “We think of [the Gist.ai page] as the demonstration and proof of concept. But the real growth is going to be on all of our partners’ sites.”
Publishers have been using AI technology to upgrade their own onsite search since last year, according to previous Digiday reporting.
Publishers can choose for the Gist.ai search box on their sites to only surface their own content. They can also opt into having other publishers’ content surfaced in answers, or opt into having their content surfaced in Gist.ai search boxes on other publishers’ sites.
The idea is the Gist.ai search box can help drive traffic to publishers’ sites and vice versa, as Google Search referral traffic declines, Gross said. Publishers can also theoretically make money from this product. Answers to queries in Gist.ai on publishers’ sites will be monetized with ads, Gross said. ProRata’s revenue share model will apply to that revenue, too.
But these deals still represent money publishers hope to make, when user adoption and platform monetization of AI search engines improves. For now, notable revenue from AI companies is coming from licensing deals with big players like OpenAI.
“We’re not anticipating an immediate boon, but search is an enormous market. If Gist.ai – in part thanks to the goodwill it can leverage from publishers – can capture a meaningful sliver of the market, it will quickly become attractive,” Hainault said.
Gross said ProRata will start paying publishers at the end of June. Its ad platform launched in March, and runs ads across its publisher partners’ sites as well as on Gist.ai. ProRata has over 1,000 advertisers, ranging from Pizza Hut to Norwegian Cruise Line, Gross added. He declined to share how much advertising revenue ProRata has made.
Michelle Micone, Boston Globe Media’s chief marketing & strategic initiatives officer, said, “This pilot is all about learning and represents an opportunity to experiment with a new tool that allows publishers to be compensated for their journalism and allows us to understand user needs as search behaviors continue to evolve.”
We’ve seen lots of impressive 3D work recently but there’s something truly hypnotising about this 3D animation that sees cotton taken from the plant, turned into thread and then spun into T-shirts.
Oh, and then the T-shirts dance about to some off-kilter dissonant electro sounds from Gui Boratto. All that with super-smooth fabric simulation made in some of the best 3D modelling software
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Google has started rolling out interactive charts in AI Mode through Labs.
You can now ask complex financial questions and get both visual charts and detailed explanations.
The system builds these responses specifically for each user’s question.
Soufi Esmaeilzadeh, Director of Product Management for Search at Google, explained that you can ask questions like “compare the stock performance of blue chip CPG companies in 2024” and get automated research with visual charts.
Google does the research work automatically. It looks up individual companies and their stock prices without requiring you to perform manual searches.
You can ask follow-up questions like “did any of these companies pay back dividends?” and AI Mode will understand what you’re looking for.
Google uses Gemini’s advanced reasoning and multimodal capabilities to power this feature.
The system analyzes what users are requesting, pulls both current and historical financial data, and determines the most effective way to present the information.
Financial websites that typically receive traffic from comparison content should closely monitor their analytics. Google now provides direct visual answers to complex financial questions.
Searchers might click through to external sites less often for basic comparison data. But this also creates opportunities. Publishers that offer deeper analysis or expert commentary may find new ways to add value beyond basic data visualization.
The data visualization feature is currently available through AI Mode in Labs. This means it’s still experimental. Google hasn’t announced plans for wider rollout or expansion to other types of data beyond financial information.
Users who want to try it out can access it through Google’s Labs program. Labs typically tests experimental search features before rolling them out more widely.
The trend toward comprehensive, visual responses continues Google’s strategy of becoming the go-to source for information rather than just a gateway to other websites.
While currently limited to financial data, the technology could expand to other data-heavy industries.
The feature remains experimental, but it offers a glimpse into how AI-powered search may evolve.
Fox News’ The Five and Jesse Watters Primetime both attracted over 3 million total viewers during the midweek evening schedule, with the former claiming most-watched honors. Over at MSNBC, three shows recorded more than a million total viewers led by The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. Meanwhile, a new studio location has been a boon for CNN’s Kaitlan Collins as her 9 p.m. ET show was the network’s most-watched program. CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip finished a close second.
25-54 Demographic (Live+SD x 1,000)
Total Day: FNC: 193 | CNN: 64 | MSNBC: 59
Prime: FNC: 291 | CNN: 115 | MSNBC: 117
FNC: CNN: MSNBC: 4PM Cain:
232 Hunt:
83 Wallace:
101 5PM Five:
322 The Lead:
78 Wallace:
79 6PM Special Report:
269 The Lead:
88 Melber:
58 7PM Ingraham:
237 Burnett:
93 Weeknight:
79 8PM Watters:
265 Cooper:
93 Hayes:
117 9PM Hannity:
289 Collins:
110 Psaki:
124 10PM Gutfeld!:
319 Phillip:
140 O’Donnell:
110 11PM Gallgher:
199 Coates:
93 Ruhle:
83
Total Viewers (Live+SD x 1,000)
Total Day: FNC: 1.643 | CNN: 346 | MSNBC: 613
Prime: FNC: 2.919 | CNN: 553 | MSNBC: 1.022
FNC: CNN: MSNBC: 4PM Cain:
1.823 Hunt:
444 Wallace:
1.075 5PM Five:
3.425 The Lead:
459 Wallace:
1.088 6PM Special Report:
2.559 The Lead:
417 Melber:
986 7PM Ingraham:
2.608 Burnett:
477 Weeknight:
762 8PM Watters:
3.035 Cooper:
536 Hayes:
886 9PM Hannity:
2.776 Collins:
569 Psaki:
1.032 10PM Gutfeld!:
2.947 Phillip:
554 O’Donnell:
1.147 11PM Gallagher:
1.439 Coates:
265 Ruhle:
655
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From her days on Blogspot to teenage angst and Sweet Thang’s debut, artist and writer Zoe Thompson charts her self-publishing practice from its early beginnings. The creative takes us through the journey of how she initiated the independent zine and community press and what has made it what it is today, giving the crowd a sneak peek inside its latest issue, made in collaboration with designer Zoe Pulley.
WordPress interviewed a member of the newly formed WordPress AI Team who shared how AI can be integrated into WordPress, outlining a future in which the platform supports AI agents and content consumption while enabling new kinds of functionality. To achieve this, the team is focusing on developer tools that allow third-party developers and services to connect AI systems to WordPress without embedding generative features directly into core.
The interview was with James LaPage, the AI engineering lead at Automattic and one of the leaders of the newly announced WordPress AI Team.
Many competitors, from private closed systems like Wix, Duda, and Shopify to open-source platforms like Drupal CMS, have various AI integrations built in. Third-party WordPress plugins such as Yoast, Rank Math, and Elementor also feature AI integration. WordPress hosts including Bluehost, 10Web, and Automattic’s commercial WordPress.com platform offer AI-powered site builder functionality. A case could be made that WordPress is late to the AI party.
James LaPage of the WordPress AI Team argues that a cautious approach was necessary due to the fast rate of changes within AI. This makes sense given that Agentic AI (AI agents that research the web on behalf of humans), is just beginning to gain adoption.
LaPage explains these realities early in the interview:
” I’ve wanted an AI team for a long time. I think right now actually was the perfect time to launch it because the …generative AI boom and the technology running and powering that boom is actually like pretty recent, and it’s changing so rapidly and only recently have we seen a lot of centralization around, for example, how these models work, how they consume information, how you interact with them, how you connect them to software.
So we’ve come to a point right now where a project like WordPress, which is massive and humongous and incredibly important on the web, is able to begin actually exploring this type of stuff because it isn’t changing from under our feet in the way that it was a year ago or two years ago.
And a good way to point that out is there was a Make WordPress post about AI two years ago that Ann published, and a lot of us had commented on it and it was really like, Yeah, this is awesome.
And as you read through those comments, you can kind of see everybody being excited but not really knowing where to push that excitement and point and say do this or do this or do this and we finally get to the point now where this team can say this is what we want to be doing and there can be real understanding of why we’re doing that and prior art in terms of how things actually work.”
LaPage was asked what an AI-friendly WordPress might look like in three years. He share a vision of WordPress as a foundational framework for AI agents, like a platform where tools, content, and interactivity are natively exposed to be dynamically interacted with and consumed.
He explained:
“I think if WordPress is able to become something that we can use AI to consume information from and build functionality for, that is a lovely spot and position it can be in. And it’s already almost in that spot. And if we can make it more accessible to AI, then I think that we are able to maintain its position on the open web as this place that you express yourself digitally.
…What I would love to see is WordPress be this platform where people continue to digitally express themselves. And I think that expression becomes more important in this era where more and more stuff will be consumed by chatbots and you’ll be speaking with AI and you’ll be doing all these different things.
Having the ability to express yourself and also be able to express yourself in ways where you couldn’t before because you couldn’t develop this crazy idea that you have in your head, or you have a crazy idea in your head, you don’t even know how to do it… Like, that type of stuff I would love to enable through the work that we do on this AI team.
So maintaining the position of yes, it’s really important to have this digital presence on the Internet. It’s very important not to subscribe only to these walled gardens, like the social media platforms and the AI chatbots, but instead have this lovely blossoming of expression on the web as WordPress enabled in its beginnings as well.
Like, this was something that it was very difficult to publish your thoughts and then it wasn’t. Let’s do it again. But let’s do it with AI.”
James LaPage went into a description of what MCP Model Context Protocol is and the role it plays with how AI can interact with and transform WordPress into like a framework for being able to accomplish a wider range of things on the web.
“So MCP is model context protocol. This is an open protocol and standard. So it’s important to focus on that. It’s a standard. It’s not a technology package that’s built in Python that you go and install. You can build things around this standard and what the standard does is define how software can expose functionality to AI, in the simplest definition.
So you have the ability to define tools which are ways that you expose, hey, you can do this or you can read this on my piece of software. You can look at the piece of software as WordPress and then you also have the method of providing those tools to the client, which is something like Claude or Cursor or another AI agent for example, that can then read those tools and use them however they want, and it’s up to the folks building the actual systems to implement the protocol properly and to build the actual agents and the tools and everything that comes with it through MCP.
So when you look at how we enable AI within WordPress and outside of WordPress, we’ve had similar needs at Automatic …and other folks in the industry have had needs to define how AI speaks to specifically in WordPress different plugins and different functionality within the core software and the Feature API is the answer to exposed features of WordPress and features of plugins in a WordPress specific way to AI.
And this is intended to almost be something that goes into WordPress core, allows plug-in developers to expose this functionality to AI within WordPress in this unified way, similar to how I explained MCP. But do it in the WordPress way allows you to plug into the capabilities and the permission callbacks and the REST API aliases and all of these different WordPress-focused things, which means you’re not reinventing the wheel on WordPress, you’re simply exposing functionality in this unified way, which then it’s up to a developer to say well, now I have this list of functionality, list of things I can do with WordPress resources, I can read with WordPress, let’s build an agent or let’s build a media generation playground or let’s build a single shot, single click button that generates a whole bunch of stuff and use that features API to do so.
And when you think about how WordPress can speak with software outside of itself and almost become that framework for the functionality that plugins bring in, the data that the database stores and custom post types and posts, then you kind of start infusing the ideas behind Feature API and MCP.”
Something that many WordPress users might not be aware of is that every user and interested party can contribute to WordPress to help shape it to be what they need it to be. Even a user who doesn’t know how to program can still influence WordPress by expressing their opinions to WordPress.
LaPage invited the wider WordPress community to get involved with providing feedback to the AI Team.
He said:
“Immediately, the way to get involved is through the make.wordpress.org/AI blog. There are several posts popping out. The most recent one as we’re recording being the hallway hangout. This probably best way to be plugged in is through the Core AI Slack, in the Make WordPress Slack. Both of those things are linked throughout the make.wordpress.org/AI site and the news announcements and everything else, so that’s how you can get involved right now in terms of contributing into the future.
A big focus of the group is to get to a very solid road map with explicit instructions and directions on how you can contribute that are likely going to be several projects that work together that we build and maintain. There’s likely going to be many other focuses around AI that we want to address, and we’re going to try to make it as clear as possible as to how you can get involved and how you can actually go and help make WordPress what it needs to be in in this AI era.
So right now, join the the core AI Slack, check out the blog posts and join the hallway hang out on Monday to really get in on the ground floor.”
Featured image/Screenshot by author
We’ve updated this guide with information on LinkedIn’s new metrics for creators.
Using LinkedIn personally is very different from using it for marketing. Fully understanding the business social media site can boost your marketing efforts, but there is a lot to learn. To help you, we’ve put together this guide.
Listen to an AI-generated deep dive of everything you need to know about marketing on LinkedIn.
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LinkedIn is the largest social network for businesses and business people and an essential site for B2B marketing.
On LinkedIn, people can connect with colleagues, industry peers and potential employers. Companies can showcase products and services, generate leads, build brand awareness and establish “thought leadership” within their industry. This professional focus makes it an ideal place to find the people who may be interested in purchasing your product.
According to LinkedIn:
These numbers are self-reported, and it’s wise to keep that in mind. For example, LinkedIn says it has more than 199 million users from the U.S. That’s two-thirds of the nation’s total population and four-fifths of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 64. Many of these accounts are businesses, not individuals, so the numbers aren’t crazy. However, all social media sites have a certain percentage of ghost accounts.
They must be doing something right: LinkedIn’s 2022 ad revenue was $5.91 billion, It is projected to reach $10.35 billion by 2027.
Culture. Every social media site has its distinct culture and jargon. The site and its users put everything in the best possible light. As a result, many posts have all the liveliness and personality of a press release. This allows businesses and leaders with distinct personas to stand out. Think twice before directly dissing the competition, though. This is best done passive-aggressively: “It’s great to see [competitor] getting back up to speed. [Product] is their best work in years.”
Jargon. As with many products, LinkedIn’s descriptions can have confusing jargon. Consider these:
Everything on LinkedIn is marketing. Ads, posts, conversations, messages, etc. are all part of your campaign and need to be focused on achieving a goal. Here are the tools the site provides.
Your digital storefront on the platform. It’s where you showcase your brand, share company updates and connect with your audience.
LinkedIn offers a variety of ad formats to reach your ideal customers and drive specific actions.
All of these can be targeted according to factors such as:
Source: LinkedIn
LinkedIn Accelerate is a specialized campaign type designed to drive specific business outcomes, such as lead generation or website visits. It offers a streamlined setup process and pre-optimized targeting options, making it a more efficient choice for businesses with clear goals.
Accelerate also has gen AI tools to generate images, videos and other content.
New campaign objectives are being added — including brand awareness, engagement, website conversions and video views. That said, standard LinkedIn campaigns have more customization options and the ability to handle complex objectives.
Sales Navigator helps sales professionals identify and engage with potential customers. Its key features and functionalities include:
This lets you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It has metrics and reports to help understand your audience, track content performance, measure campaign effectiveness and benchmark performance against industry standards.
Key features and functionalities:
These are similar to Instagram Stories and allow users to share short, ephemeral content directly with their network. They can include photos, videos, text, and GIFs. The key features and benefits include:
These are specialized company pages that highlight specific products, services,or brand initiatives. They offer a focused platform for businesses to tailor their content and messaging to a particular audience, increasing engagement and interaction. Showcase Pages can also help build brand awareness and credibility for your featured offering, ultimately driving leads and sales.
As an experienced B2B marketer, you already know the basics of LinkedIn marketing. Content marketing and social selling work the same everywhere. So, let’s look at things you may not be familiar with.
This is the site’s version of event marketing. It lets you connect with your audience in real time. You can do this through:
LinkedIn Live is also useful for generating leads. You can get contact information by offering exclusive content to viewers who sign up for your email list. Contests or giveaways can also increase engagement and generate leads by offering prizes or discounts to people participating in the event or sharing it with others. And you can identify potential leads by seeing who has engaged with your content, asked questions or otherwise shown interest.
Employees can be a powerful force multiplier for marketing on LinkedIn. However, they need to know how to do it. Train them on best practices for LinkedIn usage and content sharing. Also, use a content calendar to ensure they share the right content at the right time. Of course, this means one more thing for them to do. So, recognize and reward employees who take the time to do this.
This has the additional benefit of encouraging employee ownership of the brand, which can contribute to a positive company culture. Furthermore, authentic comments from employees can build trust with potential customers and improve the company’s reputation.
Joining and participating in relevant LinkedIn groups lets you build relationships, network and share your expertise. Look for groups that align with your target audience and industry. Regular participation is the best way to raise your profile.
LinkedIn introduced a new feature for enhancing lead generation efforts. Users can now select “Lead Generation” as an objective when boosting posts on their LinkedIn feed. Previously, the quick boost option was limited to reach and engagement goals.
This simplified ad setup allows businesses to set a budget, target a specific audience, and attach a lead form template to their boosted post. The feature lets companies build their contact lists and gain valuable insights into their audience. And it can transform organic content into targeted ads that generate high-quality leads.
Boosting LinkedIn posts can be a valuable tool for extending the reach of your top-performing content, while also serving as a data-gathering mechanism. This lightweight approach, however, lacks the granular targeting capabilities offered by LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager. For comprehensive campaign management, it’s essential to utilize the full suite of tools available within the platform.
LinkedIn’s new Companies feature in Campaign Manager is designed to provide B2B marketers with deeper insights into account-based marketing (ABM) performance. It is a centralized hub for viewing company-level engagement data across organic and paid LinkedIn campaigns.
It lets marketers:
Use cases include:
Companies data and functionality:
With Companies, B2B marketers should get valuable insights, refine their ABM strategies, and reach and engage audiences more successfully.
LinkedIn has rolled out several updates focusing on enhancing video presentation and discovery. They include bringing the full-screen, vertical video display format to desktop to make it more like the mobile app. The platform is also testing a larger video display in mobile and an option to display a member’s video uploads in a profile mini-view. These updates aim to make video posts more prominent and improve video discoverability.
Discovery is also a key focus, with LinkedIn now surfacing more videos in search results through a swipeable carousel. Additionally, LinkedIn is launching new video analytics, providing data on average watch time to help users understand video performance. To help users maximize video content, LinkedIn has also launched new nano-learning courses covering topics such as crafting compelling video hooks, editing, repurposing, and collaborating on video content.
These updates are significant because video content is on the rise on LinkedIn, with a reported 36% increase in watch time year-over-year. LinkedIn is actively trying to attract video creators by launching a TikTok-style vertical feed and prioritizing video content in its algorithm. By improving video presentation, discoverability, and providing analytics and learning resources, LinkedIn aims to capitalize on the growing popularity of video and encourage more users to incorporate video into their LinkedIn strategy.
LinkedIn updated its ad targeting and attribution features to help improve ad targeting and demonstrate return on investment. These updates include the Conversions API (CAPI) and Revenue Attribution Report (RAR) enhancements.
Conversions API:
Revenue Attribution Report:
LinkedIn is now a place for brands to leverage influencer marketing, according to The Sprout Social Index. The site offers a largely untapped opportunity for influencer marketing (only 12% of brands say LinkedIn is their preferred channel for influencers). Here’s why:
Example: Brandon Smithwrick partnered with Typeform, an online form-building software, for a LinkedIn post about how the platform enhances efficiency. The video got 380 engagements (reactions, comments and reposts), according to Sprout.
(The 2025 Sprout Social Index – registration required)
LinkedIn updated its Campaign Manager, focusing on three key areas: campaign planning and strategy, campaign creation and measurement and optimization.
The updates include a new Media Planner for forecasting campaign results, an Ads Duplication feature to streamline campaign creation, Dynamic UTMs for improved tracking, a Marketing Overview dashboard for small businesses, enhanced Measurement Insights for detailed performance analysis and an AI-driven Campaign Performance Digest for quick understanding of results.
Media Planner
Ads Duplication
Dynamic UTMs
Marketing Overview
New Measurement Insights
AI-driven Campaign Performance Digest
Polls, the least used format on LinkedIn, are getting a lot of push from the site’s algorithm, according to Metricool’s “2025 LinkedIn Study.” The report also suggests that marketers should make more use of carousels and video.
Here are the highlights:
Metricool’s 2025 LinkedIn Study is based on an analysis of 47,735 accounts and 577,180 posts between January 2023 to January 202. It is available here. (Registration required)
LinkedIn’s new Qualified Leads Optimization feature helps advertisers target high-intent accounts by aligning ad delivery with lead quality. Businesses can define lead quality through LinkedIn’s system or a CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce. Once leads are identified, their data is sent to Campaign Manager, which matches and optimizes ad delivery based on similar high-quality profiles. The tool also offers deeper attribution for pipeline and revenue impact.
LinkedIn recommends submitting at least five qualified leads every two weeks, within 30 days, for optimal results. The system takes two weeks to reach full performance. This feature applies to campaigns using the Lead Generation objective and works best for large-scale advertisers with an existing lead qualification process.
In early May 2025, Linked announced BrandLink, an expansion of what was formerly known as the Wire Program launched in 2024. BrandLink will offer video ad placements next to some of the LinkedIn platform’s most popular creator voices.
With the launch of BrandLink, LinkedIn continues to grow its investment in video. According to LinkedIn, 62% of B2B marketers believe video is most effective in reaching and influencing members of the buyer group.
Other elements of BradnLink include:
Since launching the Wire Program in June 2024, LinkedIn advertisers report:
More information on BrandLin is available on the LinkedIn website.
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LinkedIn is adding more post analytics aimed at giving frequent posters and creators a clearer picture of how their content performs and what actions it drives. The new data shows things like how a post leads to profile visits or new followers. Premium members can also see how many people click their custom profile button, which is often used to send traffic to websites or newsletters.
The added metrics provide a better sense of how content performs in terms of visibility and outcomes. Data points like “followers gained from this post” help show growth over time, while “custom button interactions” give a clearer sense of how content leads to clicks—useful for anyone tracking conversions, especially in B2B. These also open the door for more targeted testing and content tweaks, giving users a better chance to see what works and what doesn’t. Marketers see this as a step toward stronger post-level attribution, which could make the platform more appealing for ad spend.
At the same time, LinkedIn quietly removed the basic hyperlink option from profiles on May 28. Now, the only way to add an external link is through a Premium-only custom button. That might nudge more people toward upgrading, though many top creators already have free access to Premium.
If you thought the hype around AI was receding, think again. Generative AI applications have become the key battleground between marketing services companies of all stripes, from creative to strategic consulting, to media planning and buying.
The American public believes generative AI will have a negative impact on U.S. society, according to recent polling by Pew and Forrester. But advertising clients clearly think the tech is a solution to their woes. Two-fifths of CMOs are already using AI for creative automation, and 37% report using agents to manage their media spending, according to Gartner’s latest CMO survey.
Which brings us to WPP Media, and the industry behemoth’s latest attempt to recover its once-leading market position. After last week’s rechristening, the media network (formerly known as GroupM) has launched “Open Intelligence”, an AI identity solution that WPP Media’s execs say can deliver more precise, privacy-conscious targeting for clients.
At its center is a “large marketing model” that, according to Evan Hanlon, CEO of WPP data business Choregraph, provides “an accurate representation of the world that helps us predict consumer behavior.”
In more straightforward terms, it’s an AI model filled with data drawn from consumer panels, retail media networks and CTV providers, rather than the Reddit posts behind large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
From that “foundational” system, WPP Media plans to build bespoke AI models tuned to the needs of each client, combining its model with their first-party data. Those models can then be used to aid planning and targeting efforts, enabling targeting that relies on a mix of deterministic and probabilistic signals, and supposedly granting less waste, greater returns on digital marketing investments and faster turnarounds on media decisions. The ambition is to see “every brand having a predictive model built exclusively for them,” said InfoSum boss Lauren Wetzel.
The thing is, WPP Media is far from alone – it’s one of many marketing groups offering AI-enabled, -tinged, -derived or otherwise -powered tools. This week alone:
And of course, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg unveiled plans to give marketers AI tools to create, plan and execute entire ad campaigns within its platform — an act that’s either indicative of the Facebook founder’s disregard for the ad industry’s expertise, or a grab for their lunch money, depending on who you ask.
That’s not to knock WPP Media’s AI effort. A product of parent company WPP’s ₤300 million ($403 million) annual investment in AI tech, Hanlon said the initiative involved a “Manhattan project” effort from staffers drawn out of AI unit Satalia, recent addition InfoSum, WPP Media and the holding company’s tech partners (which range from CTV firm FreeWheel to TikTok, Meta and Microsoft). Work on the initiative involved InfoSum prior to its acquisition by WPP in April, Wetzel said.
According to Hanlon, five of WPP Media’s clients have been using Open Intelligence on “relatively scaled” campaigns over the last year, as the company has developed prototypes of the tech. Hanlon claimed that Open Intelligence had been used to drive a 60% decrease in cost per acquisition for one “mobility” (industry code for a carmaker) brand; for an unnamed telecoms client, he said it had cut CPA by 15%. Hanlon declined to name the clients or provide financial specifics.
Open Intelligence is an illustration of WPP Media’s new data philosophy – something its execs hope can distinguish it with clients – in action.
It’s also an asset they hope can guard its market offer, as well as the media strategies of clients, against the changing tides of privacy regulation. Should identifiers for audience segments on CTV and the open web disappear tomorrow, Hanlon said WPP’s tool would still enable clients to segment and target consumer audiences in an effective way.
With Cannes Lions around the corner and no apparent end to CMO enthusiasm for AI solutions in sight, we should expect more companies to lean into the tech. Open Intelligence is just the latest of many holding company “bets”, as Wetzer phrased it, in play for the future of digital marketing.
“We are not going to be the last,” Hanlon said. “But we think that our early decision to take this path, to make these investments, leaves us really well situated right now to set the pace and to maintain a lead moving forward.”
The designer and animator Tristan Huschke began his creative journey not with design, but with painting. He studied for a degree in fine art working solely with oil on canvas; “during that time, I not only learned a lot about technique but also about the creative process,” Tristan says. “How to develop a personal style, engage with my work, and find a visual language that goes beyond mere decoration.” After graduating, Tristan realised he needed to take his work outside of the sometimes stuffy environments of museums and galleries; the typically elitist nature of art contended and his desire to be seen by more people. “Design provides exactly that opportunity,” Tristan says, “it has a function, is accessible, and reaches people where they are.”
In comparison to the famously slow practice of oil painting, Tristan’s work is fast-paced, digital and energetic – these very sensibilities drew him to the music scene where his practice is particularly at home. Whilst some practicalities of his work differ from painting, the ‘canvas’ structure has continued. Tristan is naturally drawn to the poster as his primary medium, using its limitations as a way to explore the capacity of his creative practice whilst offering it to a much broader audience. “My interest in posters arose from the desire to make art more accessible,” Tristan says. “I wanted my work to be present in public spaces, to reach a wider audience, and digital tools provided me with exactly that opportunity.”
Tristan’s systematic approach to form and pattern is the foundation of his practice. “What I often find fascinating is the transition between harmony and disharmony,” he says, usually creating a more subdued poster before then causing chaos. “Miles Davis once said, ‘it’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong,’” Tristan adds. As such, Tristan is meticulous in the composition and character of his posters, creating contrast with broader, bolder forms alongside delicate disruptions of type and illustration. “It creates tension that tells a story and brings the two elements into direct dialogue,” Tristan ends.
