Microsoft's Playbook: Stop Being Invisible to AI
Top Insights
Microsoft's Playbook: Stop Being Invisible to AI
Microsoft Advertising dropped a technical guide on Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization. The core shift: "The goal is no longer traffic. It's influence." AI systems don't rank pages anymore. They reason through product data and decide what deserves recommendation.
Key Insights:
- Completeness beats cleverness: Products with more filled-in fields rank higher, period. Most brands already have the data AI needs. It's just buried in systems that aren't machine-readable.
- Your live site is the final exam: Even perfect feeds fail if AI agents can't navigate your checkout. Broken infrastructure means lost sales when agents try to complete purchases autonomously.
- Trust signals are now ranking factors: Verified reviews, third-party certifications, and consistent claims establish the credibility AI weighs when deciding who to cite.
Jevons Paradox and Why the AI Jobs Panic Is Overblown
Box CEO Aaron Levie is reframing the whole "AI is coming for your job" panic. He builds his case around 'Jevons Paradox'...a 19th century finding that when coal became more efficient to use, demand didn't drop. It skyrocketed.
Same thing happened with marketing. In the 1970s, a few hundred thousand people worked in PR, advertising, and design. Today it's in the low millions: a 5x increase. How'd that happen when Figma, Google Ads, and automation made the work way more efficient? Actually because of those efficiencies. Marketing went from something only Coca-Cola could afford to something every barbershop runs.
Levie's prediction for AI: today's jobs become tomorrow's tasks. AI handles the pieces, humans pull it all together. We'll simply expect more from the work, and way more people will be doing it.
🚀 Two $100+ million copywriters discovered what REALLY drives conversions - 5 simple building blocks arranged in a specific order. This framework is so powerful that beginners are generating 5-figure profits with it. And you can learn the full system in just 33 minutes.
Discover All 5 'Copy Blocks' Now
Prompt of the Week
This Week's Feature: Breaking the Rules
Every industry has an invisible rulebook: pricing strategies everyone follows, ad styles everyone copies, funnels everyone builds. Most businesses play by these rules and get predictably average results. But the biggest wins? They come from the outliers who deliberately break the rules everyone else is afraid to touch.
This week's featured prompt is your contrarian intelligence analyst. It hunts down "Black Swan" competitors in your industry who are scaling fast by doing the exact opposite of what's considered "best practice."
Then it reverse-engineers their rule-breaking strategies and translates them into actionable experiments you can run in your business today.
Here's the Full Prompt:
You are an elite Contrarian Market Intelligence Analyst and Growth Hacker. Your specialized skill is identifying "Black Swan" competitors and outliers—companies that are achieving massive success (scaling, high ROAS, viral growth) by deliberately violating the standard "best practices" and "rules" of their industry.
Your goal is to conduct a deep-web research session to find these outliers for the user's specific business context, analyze exactly which rules they are breaking, and explain why it is working.
# THE CONTEXT
In every industry, there is a "Status Quo"—a set of agreed-upon rules regarding pricing, ad creative, funnel structure, tone of voice, and offer construction. Most businesses follow these rules and get average results. The biggest wins often come from "Pattern Interrupts"—strategies that do the opposite of what is expected.
# INPUT DATA
### MY BUSINESS
Industry: [INSERT YOUR INDUSTRY]
Business description: [INSERT BRIEF DESCRIPTION]
Target audience: [INSERT AUDIENCE]
Geographic focus: [INSERT REGION]
Offer/product type: [INSERT OFFER TYPE]
Other Crucial Info: [INSERT ANY OTHER CONTEXT]
# INSTRUCTIONS & CHAIN OF THOUGHT
## PHASE 1: ESTABLISH THE "STATUS QUO"
Before finding the rule-breakers, you must define the rules. Based on the "Industry" and "Offer Type" provided:
1. Briefly list the top 3-5 "Unspoken Rules" or "Best Practices" everyone usually follows in this space (e.g., "Always offer a free trial," "Use professional corporate blue branding," "Keep videos under 30 seconds").
## PHASE 2: DEEP WEB SEARCH (THE HUNT)
Use your browsing capabilities to search for anomalies. Do not look for "best companies." Look for:
* "Controversial [Industry] brands"
* "Disruptive startups in [Industry]"
* "Why [Industry] advice is wrong"
* "Case studies of unconventional [Industry] marketing"
* Competitors running "ugly ads," "long-form copy," or "high-price offers" in a low-price market.
* Forum discussions (Reddit, X/Twitter) where users are talking about a brand doing something weird but effective.
## PHASE 3: ANALYZE THE OUTLIERS Select 3 distinct examples of companies or offers that are succeeding by breaking the rules identified in Phase 1. For each, analyze:
1. The Entity: Name/Website.
2. The Rule Broken: What specific "best practice" did they ignore?
3. The Strategy: What did they do instead? (e.g., "Instead of a polished video, they used a grainy iPhone selfie video," or "Instead of a low-ticket tripwire, they went straight to high-ticket").
4. The Evidence of Success: Mention traffic estimates, ad scale, revenue reports, or social sentiment that proves this isn't just a gimmick, but a scaling strategy.
## PHASE 4: STRATEGIC SYNTHESIS Translate these findings into actionable advice for the user.
Suggest 3 "Rule-Breaking Experiments" the user could run based on the data found.
# OUTPUT FORMATTING
-Use Markdown for clear headings and bullet points.
-Tone Analytical, direct, and strategic. No fluff.
-Citations: Provide links to the companies or case studies found.
# EXECUTE Acknowledge the user's business context and begin the step-by-step analysis now.
Tool to Try
Remotion lets you create videos programmatically using React - turning code (written by you or any chatbot) into motion graphics, animated explainers, data visualizations, and dynamic video content at scale.
AI Tool Highlights:
🧩 Build videos like a React app: Use reusable components and web tech like CSS, Canvas, and SVG to create motion graphics you can actually maintain.
🎛️ Parameterized video variants: Feed in data to change on-screen content, layouts, duration, and more, perfect for personalized ads, local promos, and mass A B testing.
🖥️ Remotion Studio preview workflow: Preview your compositions in a browser-based studio while you iterate, so you can move fast without exporting drafts all day.
🚀 Serverless rendering with Remotion Lambda: Render videos on AWS Lambda for speed and scale, and only pay while you are rendering.
▶️ Embed videos in your product with Player: Drop a Remotion video into any React app and even customize content at runtime, great for interactive demos and personalized previews.
🧱 Build your own video editor UI: Use Remotion’s timeline tooling and guidance to create multi-track, drag-and-drop editing experiences on top of the Player.
One More Need-to-Know News Story
Davos 2026: Four AI Themes Dominating CEO Conversations
At this year's World Economic Forum, AI conversations moved beyond chatbot comparisons to focus on real-world business impact. Enterprise adoption is maturing as companies shed their FOMO and get selective about which AI tools actually deliver value.
Agentic AI remains the buzzword to watch, with Prosus already running 30,000 agents...though most still require human oversight. Perhaps most surprising is the rapid rise of physical AI, from robotics to autonomous vehicles, which consulting firm EY predicts could dwarf agentic AI within six years.
Mind Fodder
Thanks for reading.
Until next time!
The AI Marketers
P.S. Help shape the future of this newsletter – take a short 2-minute survey so we can deliver even better AI marketing insights, prompts, and tools.
[Take Survey Here]
