Wesley Castellanos
Features & opinion
Wesley Castellanos writes long-form features and opinion for the desk, focused on where the field is heading next. He works across beats and is the only reporter on staff with a standing license to argue a thesis in print. His features run long; his opinion pieces run sharp.
Meta's AI Rewrites Your Ads. Nov 20, Every Error Is Legally Yours.
Product browsing flipped on by default across existing Facebook and Instagram campaigns today. Three weeks out, revised Commercial Terms make advertisers 'solely responsible' for whatever Meta's AI creates — including features Meta switched on.
AI Overviews now sit above 88% of commercial Google searches, Semrush finds
A 12-month study of 400 purchase-intent queries shows Google's AI-written summary now covers 88% of tracked commercial keywords — and 97% weighted by search volume — leaving brand pages competing with Zapier, YouTube, and review sites for a citation slot inside the answer.
Goldman commits $500M to small-business AI — and quietly concedes most owners still can't use it
A survey released alongside the bank's new Small Business AI Institute found 86% of program graduates use AI, but only 15% have integrated it into core operations. The response is more training.
Meta's new business terms claim your website for AI training on October 30
Updated Commercial Terms taking effect in under two weeks let Meta crawl any site tied to a Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp business account and use the content to train Meta products. There is no opt-out, and small-business owners have 13 days to decide what to do about it.
NY Fed: Only 31% of small-business AI users report higher sales
A Federal Reserve survey of 5,248 employer firms finds AI adopters expect revenue growth at more than twice the rate of non-adopters — yet only 31% have translated adoption into actual sales, with the gap widest for firms wrestling with websites, social media, and ecommerce.
HeyGen Ships #1-Ranked Voice Model as Survey Finds 71.6% of Small Business Videos Never Get Posted
HeyGen's new in-house voice model debuted atop Artificial Analysis' independent leaderboard on October 9, paired with a survey of 1,000-plus small business owners showing most record video and then shelve it.
AI-using small businesses are cutting marketing spend first, Citizens survey finds
A Q4 2026 Citizens Financial Group survey of 500 U.S. business decision-makers finds 60% of heavy AI users have already cut outside marketing services — and those same owners expect revenue and hiring to grow faster than their non-AI peers.
YouTube Moves the Creator-Deal Workflow Inside Studio, With Small Brands the Clearest Winners
At Made on YouTube 2026, the company pushed Creator Partnerships into 20 countries, added a one-click code that lets brands fund paid media behind a creator video, and previewed Ask Studio — collapsing steps that used to require an agency or a Google Ads rep.
Upfluence turns Jaice fully agentic, collapsing a six-week creator program into five minutes
The Claude-and-ChatGPT-connected creator marketing agent now handles discovery, outreach, negotiation, approvals, and payouts autonomously — putting a channel that used to require headcount within reach of small B2C teams.
In a room of 35 marketers, only 11% still bet on Google search
A live poll during the 'Getting Cited' session at HubSpot UNBOUND 2026 found 71% of senior marketers expect AI assistants to be customers' primary discovery channel by 2028, with 29% already pulling dollars out of paid media to chase it.
Profound Hits $1.8B on a $180M Series D, and AI Search Visibility Becomes a Fundable Marketing Category
Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round less than seven months after the AEO startup's Series C — a market signal that getting named inside ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answers is now a distinct channel most small businesses have yet to enter.
Meta's Muse Agent Launches, and Small Merchants Face a New Gatekeeper
Meta's new personal AI agent will discover, compare, and buy on consumers' behalf across Gmail, Shopify, and Stripe's Link — turning storefront legibility into the next distribution question for small B2C businesses.
X's Original Content Rewards Program Goes Live Today, Reshaping the Small-Business Content Calendar
Starting September 8, X replaces Revenue Sharing with a program that pays creators only for original posts and uses AI-era enforcement to strip out reposts, aggregation, and minimally modified content.
AI is now the third-biggest way consumers find local businesses. Most owners are invisible.
BrightLocal's 2026 survey clocks AI-tool usage for local discovery at 45%, up from 6% a year earlier. A separate benchmark of more than 200 U.S. service businesses puts their average AI visibility score at 30 out of 100.