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Your weekly guide on everything AI marketing. Covering everything from AI marketing news, tips, deep dives, events, podcasts, jobs and much more. Never miss a beat with our 5-minute newsletter.
In today’s email:
Anthropic vaults past OpenAI at a $965B valuation
Asana buys no-code agent builder StackAI for $75M
DuckDuckGo installs spike 30% as Google's AI Search lands
Plus: Altman and Olah's split-screen on the AI jobs apocalypse, The Vergecast on Google's $99 swing at Whoop, a 30-minute brand visibility workflow, and four AI Marketing tools worth exploring.
The Top 3 Stories
1. Anthropic raises $65B at a $965B valuation, eclipsing OpenAI
Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia, pushing the Claude maker's valuation above OpenAI for the first time. Run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier in May, and Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 the same day, with gains in agentic coding and honesty. The round signals the IPO is close.
Why it matters: Claude is now the connective tissue inside martech stacks from HubSpot to Asana, so Anthropic's pricing power directly shapes what marketers will pay to run agents next year. 📰 TechCrunch
2. Asana buys no-code agent builder StackAI for $75M
Asana acquired StackAI on May 28 for $75 million, framing the deal as the foundation for "the operating system for human-agent teams." StackAI lets non-engineers design, test and deploy custom agents that pull data from Salesforce, Slack and Google Workspace. Founders Tony Rosinol and Bernard Aceituno join as part of the deal.
Why it matters: Marketing teams already running campaigns and approvals through Asana now get a route to spin up their own agents without filing a ticket with IT. 📰 TechCrunch
3. Meta launches $7.99 AI chatbot subscriptions to offset its AI spend
Meta started testing Meta One Plus at $7.99 a month and Meta One Premium at $19.99 a month, the first paid tiers for its consumer Meta AI chatbot. Free users will hit usage caps. Initial rollout is in Singapore, Guatemala and Bolivia, with global expansion to follow.
Why it matters: Even Meta cannot make ad-only economics work for a generative AI product at this scale, which sets a new pricing benchmark every consumer-facing AI tool will be measured against. 📰 CNBC
More trending AI marketing news from last week
YouTube auto-labels videos it detects as significantly AI-altered.
Google's Marketing Live unveils Conversational Discovery ads inside AI Mode.
New IAB Tech Lab guidance lands for managing AI crawlers and non-human traffic.
Amazon MGM Studios launches a GenAI Creators' Fund, greenlighting three AI-built animated series for Prime Video.
Most AI agents demo well. Few ship real work.
Most AI agents can run a task. The problem is everything around it: setup, memory, context, cost, and figuring out what actually happened.
SureThing turns useful AI skills into autonomous agents with business context, persistent memory, cost-aware model selection, and a live dashboard. Paste a link, assign the work, and your agent reports back like a human teammate: what it did, what it cost, what needs your decision, and what happens next.
Built for founders, operators, and marketers who want AI to ship work, not become another tool to babysit.
Quote of the week
I'm delighted to be wrong about this, I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened."
Trending AI tools for marketers
Here are 4 trending tools to explore this week. Quick, practical upgrades to your AI marketing arsenal:
Wellows: Tracks where LLMs cite your brand and tells you why.
Vivago: Generates on-brand narrative videos from a structured creative brief.
HeyNews: Drafts publish-ready newsletters in your archive's voice.
PollyReach: Gives your AI agent a real phone number for outbound calls.
TV, podcasts & streaming
Fitbit's AI coach actually works
David Pierce and Victoria Song put the new $99 Google Fitbit Air through its paces, focused on its AI health coach. The bigger marketing story is the pricing play: Google is trying to collapse Whoop's $30-a-month subscription model into a single $99 hardware purchase, betting that "good enough AI coaching" undercuts the recurring-revenue category leaders. For brands selling AI features inside a subscription, that pricing pressure is now real and named. Watch to it here.
AI training
How to audit your brand's AI visibility using Wellows
The overview:
Wellows is an AI brand visibility platform that shows you where LLMs cite your brand and what you can do to fix the gaps.
Step-by-step:
Sign up and add your brand project
Create a project at wellows.com using your live homepage URL. Avoid marketing landing pages so the tool indexes the same content LLMs see.Set five priority prompts
Add the prompts your buyers actually type into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude when researching your category. Good prompts mirror real intent, not branded queries.Run the visibility scan
Trigger the scan across the supported LLMs. Wait until each model has been queried at least three times so the AI Visibility Score reflects model variance, not one-off output.Review the citation map
Open the citation report and find which third-party sources LLMs are pulling from. Note any high-cited domain where your brand is missing, this is your fastest fix.Pitch the gap pages
Draft one short, factual pitch per missing citation and send it to the editor or maintainer. Lead with a useful update or stat, not a press release, to clear the standard "no PR pitches" filter.
Pro tip: Re-run the scan monthly and feed deltas straight into your SEO and PR backlog, so AI visibility becomes a tracked KPI rather than a vibe.
The weekly deep dive
Why a 30% spike in DuckDuckGo installs should rewire your AI visibility plan
The numbers, properly read
US DuckDuckGo app installs rose 18.1% week on week and peaked at 30.5% on May 25, with iPhone installs up 69.9% the same day. Traffic to its AI-free search page rose 22.7%. The growth was sustained through Memorial Day weekend, when search activity usually drops, and it was a US-specific spike, tracking Google's US-only AI Mode announcement.
Why marketers should care
The audience opting out is not the casual searcher, it is the user who deliberately changes their default search engine, which skews heavily toward higher-intent, more affluent, more privacy-conscious profiles. Losing that slice to a search engine you cannot game with answer engine optimisation is a measurement problem and a demand-capture problem at once. CEO Gabriel Weinberg's framing, that Google is "force-feeding AI with no way to opt out," is now a public marketing message DuckDuckGo will lean on.
What to do about it
Treat your AI visibility plan as a two-track strategy: optimise for AI Overviews and chatbot citations, but separately invest in being findable on classic blue-link engines, including DuckDuckGo, Bing and Brave. Audit your branded search performance on each, and watch your DuckDuckGo and noai.duckduckgo.com referral numbers monthly, not quarterly. If the spike sustains past June, this becomes a board-level channel question, not a SEO-team one.
Our takeaway: GEO is necessary, but it is not sufficient, the contrarian play this year is keeping a serious non-AI search lane open while everyone else chases citations.
📖 Read the full article at Engadget
