Community | University 

Μay 18, 2026

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Google Analytics Adds AI Assistant As Default Channel Group
   (Marketers no longer just analyze data. Now they ask the data questions)

2. YouTube adds chapters and title cards for CTV viewers
   (YouTube optimizing CTV features means TV is officially becoming interactive internet content.)

3. Amazon’s new Alexa+ powered feature can generate podcast episodes
   (Soon your smart speaker will have stronger content output than most media companies)

The Growth joke of the day

SEO teams watching AI assistants answer everything directly:
“Love the innovation. Hate the click-through rate.” 💀

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Google’s New AI Search Guide Calls AEO And GEO ‘Still SEO’

  Google published a new documentation page to help websites optimize for generative AI features in Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode.

• Creator content drives brand success on Snapchat
  Snapchat published a new report on the rising power of creator marketing in the app. The study covered how incorporating creator content into promotions can help to improve favorability and consumer response.

• Apple’s Siri revamp could include auto-deleting chats
  The Siri relaunch is widely seen as Apple’s big chance to reestablish its relevance in artificial intelligence. As part of that effort, company executives will argue that they’re taking a more privacy-friendly approach than most other AI companies, Gurman said.

• Research repository ArXiv will ban authors for a year if they let AI do all the work
  ArXiv, a widely used open repository for preprint research, is doing more to crack down on the careless use of large language models in scientific papers.Although papers are posted to the site before they are peer-reviewed, arXiv (pronounced “archive”) has become one of the main ways that research circulates in fields like computer science and math, and the site itself has become a source of data on trends in scientific research.

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT for personal finance, will let you connect bank accounts
  OpenAI has partnered with the financial connection service Plaid to manage the account connections. Users can connect to over 12,000 financial institutions, including Schwab, Fidelity, Chase, Robinhood, American Express, and Capital One.

  _____________________________________________________________

People

• OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman takes charge of product strategy
  OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman is officially taking the reins of the company’s product strategy, according to Wired.This seems to solidify an already-existing change, with Brockman overseeing OpenAI’s products on an interim basis while the company’s CEO of AGI deployment Fidji Simo is out on medical leave.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• It Works Until It Doesn’t: AI Content Strategies That Backfire
  Over the past few years, I’ve watched AI content creation tools rapidly gain adoption across the SEO/GEO industry. These tools offer the promise of leveraging AI to automate content creation, reduce headcount, cut costs, and scale output.

• Google-Agent: The Web’s New Visitor Just Got An Identity
  Google-Agent is the user agent string for AI systems running on Google infrastructure that browse websites on behalf of users. When someone asks an AI assistant to research a product, fill out a form, or compare options across websites, Google-Agent is the thing that actually visits the page.

Stop babysitting dashboards. Ship from Slack. Touch grass.

700+ teams have Viktor reading their Google Ads every morning.

Your media team opens Slack at 8am. There's a cross-platform brief in #growth: Google Ads spend vs. ROAS, Meta CPA by campaign, Stripe revenue by channel. Viktor posted it at 6am. Nobody asked for it.

Last week, one team's Viktor caught a spend spike at 2am on a broad match campaign and flagged it in Slack: "CPA up 340%. Recommend pausing and shifting budget to the top two performers." That would have burned $3K by morning. The media buyer woke up to a problem already handled.

Your strategist reviews spend trends. Your account manager checks revenue attribution. Same Slack channel, same colleague, before anyone's first coffee.

Google Ads, Meta, Stripe. One message. No Looker, no Data Studio. Anomaly detection runs around the clock. Cross-platform reporting runs on autopilot.

5,700+ teams. SOC 2 certified. Your data never trains models.

"Viktor is now an integral team member, and after weeks of use we still feel we haven't uncovered the full potential." — Patrick O'Doherty, Director, Yarra Web

Start free. $100 in credits →