JB’s Digital Update 30th September 2025

ChatGPT’s lining up ads, Facebook and TikTok still rule the news feed, email needs a champion, CRO wins come from basics not magic, and AI Overviews look great but don’t deliver clicks. This week’s update is all about cutting through hype and focusing on what actually works — and what to watch next.

OpenAI is hiring engineers to build campaign management, attribution, and integrations that look very much like the infrastructure of an ad platform. With hundreds of millions of weekly users, it was inevitable that monetisation would head this way. Think of it as search advertising repackaged in a conversational format.

For digital marketers, this could be a major shift. Imagine bidding not on keywords but on questions and answers, served to users in the flow of conversation. The opportunity is in being factual, concise, and directly helpful. The risk is that we’re still a way off seeing it in practice, so don’t overcommit yet — but start preparing use cases and testing creative concepts.

This is exactly where SEO & PPC Services come together — understanding intent and crafting messaging that earns attention. If you’d like to explore how your brand should prepare for ChatGPT advertising, let’s talk.

Pew’s latest data confirms what most of us already know: Facebook and YouTube are still the biggest sources of news for adults, while TikTok and Instagram dominate for younger users. TikTok, in particular, is now where nearly half of under-30s get news. Despite official efforts to downplay news, users treat these feeds as their daily headlines.

That has real implications. Your brand’s message sits side by side with global events, viral stories, and sometimes misinformation. This is not a place to be sloppy — credibility, clarity, and fast responses matter more than ever. If your content can’t stand up in a news feed environment, it’s vulnerable to being ignored or even distrusted.

Managing that balance is at the heart of Social Media Management. If you want to ensure your brand is present, credible, and safe in the news-driven feeds, get in touch.

It’s easy to get caught up in campaign deadlines and forget the most important stakeholder: the subscriber. Without someone explicitly protecting relevance, cadence, and consent, performance drifts downward. Over-sending and under-segmenting are still the biggest killers of email effectiveness.

Smart marketers will treat email as a relationship, not just a channel. That means auditing sends, building engagement-based cohorts, and applying a simple “why this, why now?” test before every campaign. Subscriber trust is now the scarce resource, and it will dictate whether your emails land in the inbox or the spam folder.

That’s why Email & CRM Services focus on creating programmes that protect subscribers and grow revenue. If you’re unsure whether your email programme is respecting subscribers while driving results, let’s review it together.

Crazy Egg’s checklist is refreshingly simple: compress your images, kill unnecessary scripts, simplify layouts, and track what people actually do on your pages. These aren’t glamorous fixes, but they work. Most conversion lifts come from removing friction, not reinventing the wheel.

Too many sites chase a redesign when the real problem is bloat. Every millisecond of load time, every pointless field, and every dead link chips away at your conversion rate. Work systematically: fix one friction point a week, measure, and keep stacking small gains. It’s not sexy, but it’s how compound improvements happen.

Conversion wins like these are what our Conversions & CRO Service is built on. If you’re investing in traffic but conversions are stalling, it’s time we talked.

Search Engine Land’s study across thousands of queries shows what many suspected: AI Overviews look impressive, but they don’t drive much traffic. Being cited is like ranking halfway down page one — a nice credibility boost but not a major traffic source.

The smart play is to treat AI Overview visibility as a branding channel. You want your content structured so it can be pulled in, but you don’t sell the dream internally that it’s a traffic driver. Focus on building concise answer capsules for FAQ-style queries, while still competing hard for those top blue links that actually get the clicks.

This aligns with our SEO Service, where the focus is on ranking where it counts, while still making sure clients are present in emerging features like AI Overviews. If you want to set realistic KPIs and stay competitive in SERPs, let’s chat.

That’s it for this week: ChatGPT is gearing up to sell ads, TikTok is shaping how under-30s consume news, your email list needs a protector, CRO wins come from basic fixes, and Google’s AI Overviews look good but don’t drive clicks. The through-line? Focus on the fundamentals, plan for what’s coming, and don’t chase shiny objects. If any of these strike a chord for your business, this is exactly where Belmore Digital helps — let’s talk.

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