Is Meta Quietly Choking Your Brand?

AI isn’t just shaking up creative development or where users check out. It threatens to fundamentally change the way people search and interact with information across the internet.

Today, we get into why that matters for e-commerce. We also look at trending threats to your Meta performance and how to make sure the drive creative volume isn’t burning out your account (or your team).

Today:

• Macro: AI Search is eating Google (and your funnel)

• Trends: 2 emerging Meta threats you need to know

• Tactics: How to fight creative fatigue with focus

• Quick Hits: Find the secret to crazy high (and cheap) engagement on Youtube

Macro: AI Search Is Eating Google

The shift is no longer theoretical. In just 12 months, Google’s share of global search usage dropped from 98% to 92.2%, while ChatGPT surged from 1.3% to 6.2%, according to Wells Fargo Securities via SimilarWeb & SensorTower.

What’s driving this? A behavioral change in how people search, and where they don’t click.

🧐 The Funnel Is Being Rewritten at the Top

AI answer engines are stealing discovery. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews now deliver responses before users visit your site.

We're entering the zero-click future, where visibility matters more than traffic. What that means…

• Traditional SEO playbooks are breaking. It’s not about backlinks and metadata anymore. The source of truth is shifting. As @theseoguy_ explains, each LLM references different databases:

  • ChatGPT: Yelp, Wikipedia, niche directories

  • Google AI Mode: Google Business Profiles

  • Perplexity: Publisher articles, Reddit, blog summaries

  Want to rank? Optimize where the bots are pulling from.

• The economic stakes are massive. As @thexcapitalist notes, this isn’t just a UX shift, it’s a threat to Google’s core monetization model.

  • If even half of Search revenue vanishes, it changes the power structure of the internet and your paid mix with it.

💡 What This Means for DTC Brands

• Your funnel is changing. Fewer people are clicking. Some never see your site. Rethink how you educate, guide, and convert without relying on traditional traffic flows.

• AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) > SEO. Instead of ranking on Google, aim to be cited by AI. Structure content with definitive answers, schema markup, summaries, and sourceable URLs.

• You’re playing on rented land again. The new landlords? OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google’s AI crawlers.

🔑 Takeaway: Build for Bots Before Humans See You

If your content can’t be cited, it won’t be surfaced.
If your brand isn’t present where the AI looks, you don’t exist.

Start here:

• Pick an LLM and search your brand/category.

• Reverse-engineer where it pulls info from.

• Optimize those platforms (Yelp, Google Biz, Reddit, etc.).

• Reformat your content to be AI-readable: bullet points, FAQs, how-tos, and trusted links.

🧠 Bonus Thought: This Isn’t Just a Funnel Shift. It’s a Civilization Shift

Sam Altman’s recent post, The Gentle Singularity, reminds us what’s really happening:

AI isn’t just helping consumers search. It’s now directing demand. Replacing the librarian and the recommendation engine. For DTC brands, this means 2 things:

1. If you wait for SEO best practices to catch up, you're already behind.

2. You’re not marketing for search anymore, you’re marketing for machine cognition.

Trends: 2 Emerging Meta Performance Threats You Need to Know About

If your Meta ad performance has recently fallen off a cliff (unstable delivery, CVR crashes, weird traffic patterns) you’re not alone.

But you might be looking in the wrong place for answers.

Creative fatigue and landing page tweaks won’t fix what’s happening here. Instead, we’re seeing two distinct but potentially related issues take down ad accounts, especially in health, wellness, and supplements.

🚨 Issue #1: Meta’s Quiet Crackdown on Health & Wellness Products

Meta is proactively limiting performance for many health and wellness brands.

Not because of content violations, but because of legal exposure related to health data collection.

The logic: when Meta’s pixel tracks purchases of health-related products, it may be handling protected medical information (PHI), which falls under strict regulation (HIPAA, GDPR, etc.). To avoid liability, Meta is quietly nerfing tracking and optimization for flagged categories.

Flagging may result in:

• Spend throttling or capping

• Optimization events failing (Meta can’t “see” purchases)

• Sudden CVR drops and volatile performance

📉 Categories Impacted (So Far)

Source: @michael_upstack

🧪 Potential Workarounds (Not Guaranteed)

• Switch to server-side tracking only — avoid browser-based PHI capture

• Set up a new Pixel — and allowlist only trusted domains

• Use a “Health & Wellness container” — a custom-compliant server-side pixel setup designed to maintain event tracking
  (More from Michael here)

These steps have helped some brands recover performance. But results are inconsistent, and Meta offers little formal guidance.

💨 Issue #2: Pixel Poisoning by Bad Actors

The second issue is even more insidious, and it may be exacerbating the first.

Several operators (including Ash Melwani, CMO of Obvi) have reported malicious domains appearing in their Events Manager, including spam and adult sites.

This is not a bug. It's a black hat sabotage tactic.

Competitors (or trolls) add your Meta pixel ID to their shady sites, triggering Meta’s compliance alarms — and potentially flagging your account as risky, especially if you're in a sensitive vertical like supplements or pregnancy.

Even after these domains are blocked, the damage may linger. CVRs remain low. Optimization stalls. Scaling becomes impossible.

🔧 What You Can Do (So Far)

• Audit your Pixel in Events Manager

  • Look for unfamiliar or suspicious domains

• Block all unverified domains

  • Use domain-level allowlisting to isolate your pixel

• Consider setting up a new Pixel + ad account

  • Anecdotal reports suggest this can help reset reputation — especially if paired with server-side tracking

This tactic is still under the radar. But it’s spreading, particularly among wellness, supplement, and beauty brands.

🧠 Takeaway: If Performance Tanked Without a Clear Cause, Look Deeper

Not every Meta performance drop is creative fatigue or audience saturation.
If you’re in H&W and your numbers suddenly broke, you may have been flagged, poisoned, or both.

Action steps:

• Audit your Pixel → Check for domain contamination

• Evaluate your category → Are you in Meta’s H&W crosshairs?

• Consider proactive reconfiguration → New pixel, allowlist, server-side setup, and alternate domains

None of this is guaranteed. But for some brands, these fixes have been the difference between a dead ad account and a return to scale.

Tactics: How to Fight Creative Fatigue With Focus.

If ad fatigue is killing your Meta performance, don’t just throw more assets at it.
Learn how to audit what’s working, recycle what’s not, and inject fresh ideas that actually scale.

We all know the playbook: Creative volume + creative variation = scale on Meta.

But here’s what that really means in practice: You’ll burn time and budget on dozens (hundreds?) of creatives just to find the one that lands.

If only 5% of ads drive meaningful results, most brands are spending 95% of their effort on creative that doesn’t scale.

Here are some tips to help fix that (without burning out your teams or blowing your budgets).

♻️ Part 1: Resurrect, Don’t Replace

If an ad fatigues — or flops early — that doesn’t mean it’s trash. Ben Radack has found consistent success with a strategy he calls the “Lost Ads” campaign:

Why it works: Meta still sees those creatives as familiar, but the new cost constraint forces efficiency. It won’t overspend, but it will hunt for cheap conversions — and sometimes, it finds them.

This strategy has a double benefit:

• You extend the shelf life of proven creatives (even if they’re fatigued)

• You salvage some of the sunk costs from the creative that underdelivered the first time

📊 Part 2: Build a Creative Audit Loop That Actually Works

Managing paid creative at scale often means running dozens of ads — yet many teams can’t clearly say:

• What angle is working

• What offer is driving clicks

• Or why one ad beat another

Taylor Lagace of Kynship agency recommends a full-spectrum creative performance report every two weeks, including:

• PECS metrics: Performance, Engagement, Conversions, Settings

• Angle + Offer naming: to spot recurring themes in winners

• Thumbstop ratio: Who’s actually pausing to watch? (Target: 25%+)

• Sustain rate: Who sticks with your story? (Target: 88%+ to 95%)

• CTR: Who’s ready to take action? (Target: 1%+)

The point isn’t to document for documentation’s sake. The point is to build judgment, so each new creative concept is informed by the ones that came before it.

Creative reporting isn’t just a data dump. It’s your pattern recognition engine.

🧬 Part 3: Escape the Creative Recursion Trap

One of the risks of high creative output is simply recycling the same ideas and concepts over and over again. Not because your team is lazy, but because they’re trapped inside the brand’s own mental model.

As Eric Seufert puts it:

Break the doom loop:

• Hiring external strategists or freelancers to pitch fresh concepts

• Running creator-driven tests with unconventional story angles

• Building a prompt system or swipe library that injects randomness and surprise

Creative tools and AI can help scale outputs. But without net-new inputs, you’re just polishing the same old ideas.

🧪 Takeaway: “Make More Ads” Is Only Step 1

If your winners are dying faster than you can replace them, don’t panic.

Zoom out. Reframe.

Ask yourself:

• Are you throwing out ads too soon?

• Are you testing enough ideas, or just minor iterations?

• Do you know why something worked, or are you guessing?

• Is your team stuck in a creative loop they can’t escape?

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