5 Marketing Trends: Week of September 28, 2026
The week of September 28, 2026 has a theme, and it is not subtle. The platforms want your customers to stay put. Facebook is putting a price on link posts. Google's AI answers now show up on nearly 4 in 10 desktop searches, and a new study shows what happens to clicks when AI Mode takes over. Shoppers can buy from Shopify stores without ever seeing the store. And LinkedIn, of all places, is pulling back on AI-written posts because its members are sick of them. If you run a small business and count on people finding you online, every one of these five changes where that happens. Here is what each one means and what I would do about it this week.
What are the top marketing trends for the week of September 28, 2026? Facebook is capping link posts for some Pages, AI Overviews now appear on 39 percent of U.S. desktop searches, a study shows AI Mode cuts clicks, Google switched on AI checkout for Shopify stores, and LinkedIn swapped AI post writing for proofreading.
What you will learn
- Why Facebook is capping link posts for some Pages, and why it matters less than you think
- What it means that AI Overviews now show on nearly 4 in 10 U.S. desktop searches
- What a 1,100-person experiment found when Google's AI Mode became the default
- How to check whether Google switched on AI checkout for your Shopify store
- Why LinkedIn backing away from AI-written posts is good news for real business owners
- The two jobs every small business should focus on as platforms keep customers in place
1. Facebook is starting to charge Pages for posting links
Source: Social Media Today
If your Facebook plan is to post a blog link and hope, that plan just got more expensive. Social Media Today reported that more business Pages are seeing a pop-up telling them they are capped at two link posts per month unless they pay for a Meta One subscription. It started showing up right after Meta rolled out its Meta One for Business paid packages in mid-September, and it looks like a wider version of a test Meta quietly started back in December 2025. Publisher Pages are exempt. Your bakery, law office, or HVAC company probably is not.
Now for the part Meta will never put on a billboard. Link posts were already dying on Facebook. Meta's own Widely Viewed Content report for Q1 2026 showed that 98.7 percent of U.S. post views had no link to anything outside Facebook. Back in 2022, about 9.8 percent of viewed content carried a link. Today it is 1.3 percent. So Meta is charging for something it had already buried in the feed.
What that tells me is simple. Facebook wants you to stay on Facebook, and it wants your customers to stay there too. Stop treating your Page like a traffic pipe to your website. Post the actual content natively, the photo, the tip, the short video, and save your two links for the posts that truly need a click, like a booking page or a limited offer. If you need help rethinking what goes on your Page, that is exactly what our social media work is built around.
- Some Pages are now limited to two link posts a month without a paid Meta One plan, and the test appears to be spreading.
- Link posts were already getting almost no reach. Only 1.3 percent of viewed U.S. content included an outside link in early 2026.
- Post natively. Put the value in the post itself and give people a reason to look you up, not just a link to click.
- Spend your two links on money pages, like bookings, quote requests, or an event signup.
2. AI Overviews now show up on 39 percent of U.S. desktop searches
Source: Search Engine Land
Comscore's Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report put a hard number on something you have probably felt. In June, Google showed an AI Overview on 39.4 percent of U.S. desktop searches. In July 2025 that number was 25.8 percent. Bing is heading the same direction, with Copilot Search showing on 17.3 percent. And no, people are not searching less. Comscore counted 77 billion U.S. desktop searches in Q2, up 8 percent from two years earlier. There is more search than ever. It just ends in an answer more often.
Two findings in the report matter more to a small business than the headline does. First, YouTube and Reddit keep getting cited. For retail searches, YouTube showed up among AI Overview citations 23 percent of the time, ahead of Amazon at 14 and Reddit at 12. Second, and this one stings, being used by an AI is not the same as being credited by it. Tripadvisor was a source behind 61 percent of the lodging answers Comscore studied, but it earned a visible citation in only 21 percent. The AI read it, used it, and left the link off most of the time.
The AI assistant race moved too. ChatGPT still handled about half of AI prompt volume in June, but that is down from 70 percent in January. Gemini climbed to 30 percent and Claude to 11. Translation? Your customers are spreading out across more AI tools, so showing up in only one of them is not a plan. If you have never looked, check your AI search visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity this week. It takes an afternoon.
- Nearly 4 in 10 U.S. desktop Google searches showed an AI Overview in June 2026, up from about 1 in 4 a year earlier.
- YouTube and Reddit are two of the most cited sources in AI answers. No video presence means one less door into those answers.
- Being a source and being cited are two different things. Tie your business name tightly to your facts so the credit follows the content.
- ChatGPT's share is shrinking as Gemini and Claude grow, so test your visibility in more than one assistant.
3. A new study shows what AI Mode does to your clicks
Source: Search Engine Land
Researchers ran a randomized experiment on 1,100 U.S. Chrome users and pushed some of them into Google's AI Mode for a week. The share of searches that led to an outside website dropped by 18.8 percentage points. Those users also ran almost one fewer Google search session a day. Clicks to news sites fell. Clicks to Reddit fell by 21.2 points. Search Engine Land covered the paper on the 23rd, and it is the cleanest look we have had so far at what an AI-first Google does to the rest of the web.
Here is the twist I did not expect. People did not like it more. The AI Mode group reported lower satisfaction, lower trust in Google, and less sense of control. About 34 percent gave negative feedback, against 29 percent positive. And the share of them who wandered off to Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Yahoo went up by 11.2 points. Fewer clicks for websites, and no clear win for the searcher either.
Now the fair caveats, because I am not going to oversell this. The study forced AI Mode as the default, which is not how most people use it today. Before the test, AI Mode made up only 0.6 percent of these users' searches. The run lasted seven days and the sample skewed younger and highly educated. Still, the direction is hard to ignore. If Google keeps pushing AI Mode forward, the click you used to count on gets rarer. That is why generative engine optimization is about being named inside the answer, not just ranking underneath it.
- When AI Mode became the default, outside clicks dropped 18.8 points in a randomized test of 1,100 users.
- Searchers were less satisfied, trusted Google less, and were more likely to try other search engines.
- The test forced AI Mode on people, so read it as a warning about direction, not a forecast of your exact traffic.
- Measure leads and calls, not just sessions. A mention inside the answer can still send a customer your way.
4. Google switched on AI checkout for Shopify stores by default
Source: Search Engine Land
If you sell on Shopify, check your settings today. Google is notifying eligible Shopify merchants that shoppers can now buy their products directly inside AI Mode and Gemini, without ever landing on the store's website. It runs on the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard Google built with partners like Shopify. And this is the part that caught people off guard. For eligible stores, it is turned on automatically. One Google Ads specialist asked what he had to do to enable it, and the answer was nothing.
Eligibility right now means a U.S.-based store selling to U.S. customers, a valid Merchant Center account, and products synced into it, usually through Shopify's Google and YouTube channel. You keep the customer and the order. But the checkout is not your checkout. Shopify says certain checkout blocks, product bundles, custom pixels, and client-side Google Analytics tracking do not carry over. So if your reports start showing sales you cannot trace, this may be why.
Google is not the only one doing this, either. The same week, Meta's new Muse assistant announced a Shopify tie-in that lets it buy from Shopify stores on behalf of its users. The trend is plain. The AI is becoming the storefront. Whether that is good for you depends on your margins and how much you lean on the upsell inside your own site. Either way, it should be your call, not a default somebody else picked for you.
- Eligible U.S. Shopify stores can be enrolled in direct checkout across Google AI Mode and Gemini automatically.
- Find the switch in Shopify under Sales channels, then Agentic. Opting out keeps you visible, but buyers finish on your site.
- Bundles, custom pixels, and client-side GA tracking are not supported in the AI checkout, so expect gaps in your data.
- Clean up your Merchant Center product data now. It is fast becoming the first thing AI shopping tools read.
5. LinkedIn backs away from AI-written posts
Source: Social Media Today
LinkedIn pulled its AI post rewriting tool last month, and this week it replaced it with something smaller on purpose. The new Post Proofreader, for Premium members, suggests edits to a draft you already wrote and shows every change with tracking so you decide what stays. It fixes your language. It does not write your ideas for you. And LinkedIn is pretty open about why.
The members are fed up. When LinkedIn added a way to report AI slop last month, people used it more than one million times in under three weeks. Earlier this month the option expanded to comments. That is a platform telling you, about as loudly as a platform ever does, that its users can smell machine-written content and do not want it in their feed.
For a business owner, this is good news. What works on LinkedIn is the stuff AI cannot fake: your experience, your opinion, the story from last Tuesday's job. Use a tool to catch typos if you like. But write the post yourself, the way you actually talk. Same rule on your website. The content that earns trust with people is the same content that gets cited in AI search, because both reward something only you could have written.
- LinkedIn replaced its AI post enhancement tool with Post Proofreader, which suggests edits instead of rewriting your post.
- Members reported AI slop more than one million times in under three weeks. Your audience notices.
- First-hand experience and a plain, real voice are the advantage now. Do not hand them to a generator.
- Use AI for proofreading and cleanup, then read it back and make sure it still sounds like you.
The through line for the week
Put the week side by side and the pattern jumps out. Facebook wants to keep people off your website. Google's AI answers are showing up on nearly 4 in 10 desktop searches, and a controlled test says clicks fall when AI Mode takes over. Shopping is moving inside the AI. And LinkedIn is pushing back on content that sounds like nobody in particular wrote it. Every platform is trying to hold on to your customer a little longer, which means fewer of them will wander over to your site on their own.
So where does that leave a small business? Two jobs. Be visible where the answer happens, which means being named, cited, and easy for an AI to describe correctly. And sound like a real person when you get there, because that is the one thing the machines keep proving they cannot copy. Start with our breakdown of how GEO works if you want the full picture, and catch up on last week's trends roundup if you missed the Meta placement and AI Max changes.
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What are the top marketing trends for the week of September 28, 2026?
The top marketing trends for the week of September 28, 2026 are Facebook limiting some Pages to two link posts per month without a paid Meta One plan, Google AI Overviews reaching 39 percent of U.S. desktop searches, a study showing AI Mode cuts outside clicks, AI checkout for Shopify stores inside Google, and LinkedIn replacing AI post writing with a proofreading tool.
Is Facebook really charging businesses to post links?
For some Pages, yes. Following the launch of Meta One for Business, some Page managers report being limited to two link posts per month unless they pay for a subscription. It expands a test Meta started in December 2025, and publisher Pages are exempt. Link posts already get very little reach, so posting content natively matters more than ever.
How often do Google AI Overviews appear in search results?
According to Comscore's Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report, Google showed an AI Overview on 39.4 percent of U.S. desktop searches in June 2026, up from 25.8 percent in July 2025. Bing showed Copilot Search on 17.3 percent. Overall search volume still grew, so people are searching more but getting more answers without clicking.
Does Google AI Mode reduce traffic to websites?
A randomized study of 1,100 U.S. Chrome users found that making AI Mode the default cut the share of searches leading to an outside website by 18.8 percentage points. Participants also reported lower satisfaction and trust. The test forced AI Mode on users for seven days, so it signals direction rather than predicting any single site's traffic.
How do I turn off Google AI checkout on Shopify?
In Shopify, go to Sales channels, then Agentic, and turn off direct checkout. Your products can still appear in Google AI Mode and Gemini, but shoppers will be sent to your own website to finish buying. Eligible U.S. stores with a connected Merchant Center account may have been enrolled automatically, so it is worth checking now.
Bernie is the owner and Chief Cheese of Strategy and Engagement at B2The7, a Louisville, Kentucky digital marketing consultancy that helps small businesses get found on Google and inside AI search. Before B2The7 he built brand and digital programs at Papa John's and Confluent Health. He writes this roundup every week for busy owners who do not have time to track twenty platforms themselves.
