Gmail is clipping your emails

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✂️ Your black friday email is too heavy for Gmail, and your open rate is lying about it

A brand sends its Black Friday gift guide: 36 product tiles, a countdown timer and three hero banners. The open rate comes in 30% below last year’s. The team blames the subject line.

The subject line was fine. Gmail clipped the email.

Gmail cuts off messages at roughly 102KB of HTML and shows a “[Message clipped] View entire message” link. Everything below the cut disappears unless the reader clicks through. That usually includes the footer, unsubscribe link, physical address and open-tracking pixel. When the pixel never loads, the open never counts.

Weigh the code instead of the images

Image files don’t count toward the limit. The HTML does, including every image URL, style block, hidden mobile variant and tracked link.

Tracked links add up fastest. Take 36 tiles with three tracked links each (image, title and button) at around 250 characters per link. That’s roughly 27KB of URLs before a single word of copy, using illustrative figures.

Find where the cut lands

Send every holiday template to a Gmail inbox on desktop and mobile. If you see “[Message clipped],” scroll to the cut and note what sits below it.

Strip the weight

• Give each product tile one link instead of three.
• Cap grids at 12 products with a “see all deals” link to a landing page.
• Remove hidden mobile duplicates, HTML comments and leftover code.
• Keep finished HTML under about 90KB for a safety margin.

Protect your tests

Clipping quietly breaks A/B tests. A longer variant gets clipped more, loses more open pixels and looks worse on opens even when it sells better. Judge holiday tests on clicks and revenue per recipient.

Watch complaints on heavy sends

A reader who can’t find the unsubscribe link has one easy alternative: the spam button. Compare complaint rates on heavy and light campaigns from the same weeks.

Sometimes the lightest email wins outright. Before BFCM, agency Enflow Digital used Omnisend’s segmentation and its Claude and ChatGPT connection to find a skincare client’s most loyal buyers in minutes, then sent them a plain-text, email-only offer. 

It went to 1,676 contacts with at least four orders, excluding wholesale accounts, bounced addresses, and anyone unengaged for 180 days. That one send brought in $17,980 across 110 orders, or $10.73 per message, more than the previous month’s broad campaigns combined. You can read the full story here.

The email that looked weakest on Black Friday may have been the one Gmail never let anyone finish.

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🔍 ChatGPT expands web indexing as DeepSeek opens its search engine to developers

OpenAI and Cloudflare are expanding how ChatGPT discovers web content, while DeepSeek has opened its search engine to developers with page-level authority scores and filters targeting search manipulation.

The Breakdown:

ChatGPT Discovers Hundreds of Millions of Pages - A Cloudflare pilot covering approximately 1% of its network helped OpenAI discover and index hundreds of millions of additional pages, including useful content that receives few external links.

Cloudflare Improves Crawling Efficiency - Cloudflare's signals help OpenAI identify recently updated pages, duplicate content, and potentially harmful URLs. Website owners retain crawler access controls, and improved discovery does not guarantee ChatGPT citations or traffic.

DeepSeek Opens Its Search Engine to Developers - DeepSeek's new Search API provides access to an index it says contains hundreds of billions of pages, with results including authority tiers, relevance scores, and filters for language, publication date, and specific domains.

DeepSeek Targets AI Search Manipulation - DeepSeek says its engine filters SEO spam, GEO manipulation and low-quality AI content. Search and Fetch APIs cost $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, although its ranking and filtering methods remain undisclosed.

Both developments could change how websites are discovered and evaluated by AI search engines. Cloudflare's signals may help previously overlooked pages enter ChatGPT's index, while DeepSeek's scoring system gives developers more visibility into search results. 

👨‍💻 Quick Hits

📊 Reddit introduced AI-powered ad planning and optimization tools to forecast campaign results, recommend improvements, and automatically allocate budgets. Reddit reports 19.6% lower CPA among advertisers with optimization scores above 80%.

🏆 Instagram announced its 2026 Rings creator awards, featuring 14 judges including Donatella Versace and A$AP Rocky. Winners receive in-app recognition, custom profile features, and a physical gold ring.

🧪 Google Ads is reportedly testing an asset group A/B testing feature in Performance Max, potentially allowing advertisers to compare different creative messages, headlines, descriptions, and images within campaigns.

🛒 A Wunderkind-Cordial survey found 56% of consumers prioritize low prices, but only 25% of marketers recognize this. Consumers also favor discounts, faster checkout and email over social media.

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