You lost even before the clicks

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🥺The Battle For Your Traffic Is Being Lost Before Anyone Clicks.

Google's search agents now synthesize answers before the user reaches any page. The user sees the answer, sees the cited sources, and clicks only if they want more depth. Citation comes first. The click is downstream of it. Most brands are optimizing the second step while losing the first.

Two Metrics. Most Teams Only Measure One.

Citation rate is the percentage of relevant AI queries where your brand gets surfaced in the answer, regardless of whether the user clicks. Most accounts sit at 5-15% on queries where their content ranks well in Google. Citation rate predicts next quarter's traffic. Traffic rate confirms last quarter's citations.

Run The Audit Today

Pull your top 50 buyer queries and run each through AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. For every query, track three things: how often your content gets cited, how often a competitor gets cited instead, and how often the engine answers without citing anyone.

The pattern that surfaces tells you whether you have a citation problem, a competitor problem, or a content structure problem. Each has a different fix.

Restructure Content For The Citation Moment, Not The Click

Content optimized for clicks prioritizes the headline and the hook. Content optimized for citation prioritizes the cleanly extractable claim that an AI engine can lift without ambiguity.

Every key piece needs 3-5 standalone claims built for extraction: specific numbers, named frameworks, definitional sentences, comparison statements with named alternatives. These get cited. Long narrative prose does not.

The Citation Is The Funnel Now

On June 17th, Chris Long, co-founder of Nectiv, breaks down what changed at Google I/O 2026, what it means for B2B visibility, and how to build the workflows that get you cited in AI search. You can secure your free spot here.

The team obsessing over click-through while citation rate sits at 8% is solving the second problem before the first one is named.

Together with Modash

Your influencer picks are costing you launches.

Not the content. Not the brief. The roster.

You can nail the strategy, brief the creators perfectly, and still watch a launch flatline. Because the problem isn't execution. It's that the wrong people are on your roster, and you won't know it until the numbers come back empty.

On June 11th, Modash is running a free 3-hour session with the brand-side teams who've cracked this. 

Cadence Melendez, Influencer Marketing at Moroccanoil, Brooks Miller, EVP of Creator Marketing at Edelman, and Eric Ford, formerly Global Communications at L'Oréal, are sharing exactly how they build rosters that move product, not just impressions.

→ The selection signals Edelman uses to separate creators who shift perception from those who just rack up views
→ Why your highest-reach creators are often your lowest-trust ones, and how L'Oréal's team handles that tradeoff
→ How Moroccanoil evaluates creator-brand fit beyond niche and audience size, and why most teams skip it 

You'll leave knowing exactly which creators don't belong on your list, and what to do about it before it costs you.

Can't make it live? Register anyway and get the recording in your inbox within 24 hours.

📈 Google and OpenAI expand advertiser tools

Google and OpenAI announced new advertising features aimed at giving marketers more control over testing, optimization, and campaign management. The updates highlight how both companies are evolving their ad platforms as AI becomes a bigger part of digital marketing.

The Breakdown:

Performance Max gets new experiments - Advertisers can now test entire asset groups, compare seasonal and evergreen creatives, evaluate individual assets, and measure the impact of AI-generated content before rolling changes out broadly.

Testing goes beyond a single KPI - Google is also introducing support for multiple success metrics, while bringing conversion lift studies and experiments together under a centralized Experiments hub.

One placement can show several advertisers - OpenAI has started testing ad units that display multiple relevant advertisers within a single sponsored placement, using a second-price auction model to determine visibility.

More markets and campaign tools launch - OpenAI is expanding ad targeting into the UK, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico while adding features such as budget conversions, bulk editing, custom CPM bidding, and campaign cloning.

Both companies are moving beyond basic AI-powered advertising. Google is giving marketers more confidence to test creative changes before spending budget, while OpenAI is steadily building the infrastructure needed to turn ChatGPT into a more mature advertising platform.

👨‍💻 Quick Hits

📸 Instagram has rolled out profile grid rearranging, allowing users to drag and reorder posts on their profile. The feature helps creators highlight key content and customize profile presentation without reposting content. 

🎬 Instagram is expanding Post View Ads in Reels to all advertisers globally. These ads appear after eligible organic Reels (60+ seconds), giving brands a new way to reach highly engaged Reels viewers.

📦 Delivery flexibility matters more than ever. 58% of shoppers will consolidate deliveries, 40% accept slower shipping, and 68% are more likely to return after a fast refund, highlighting convenience, reliability, and easy returns as key loyalty drivers. 

🔎 Google is testing Search Profiles, dedicated Search pages for creators and publishers that showcase articles, videos, and social posts. Users can follow profiles to see more content in Google Discover, helping brands build direct audience relationships. 

💃Events

🔥 BreakingSilos 2026 Is the Only Event Built Entirely Around How Marketers Win in an AI-Driven Buyer Journey

Today | Virtual Event | Free

30 sessions. 70+ practitioners. Zero vendor pitches. Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder, SparkToro; Bogdan Babiak, CMO, SE Ranking; and Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search at Wix, are among the speakers showing exactly how AI shapes brand decisions and what marketers need to build to control that.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.

🔥 The Workflow That Replaced Manual AI Use at Bitly, Udemy, and Chime. Shown Live for the First Time.

June 11 | Virtual Event | Free

Three marketing teams at three different scales all made the same decision. Stop prompting manually and build a system that runs itself. June 11, Tyler Roehmholdt, Bridget Nelson, and Nicholas King are on stage, showing every layer of what they built and where to start.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.

That’s a wrap for today! Tell us your thoughts about today's content as we line up more Shorts! And don’t hesitate to share this with someone who’d adore it. 🥰