Hey👋,
I'm Giacomo

If you’re European and spend time on LinkedIn or Instagram, chances are your feed was flooded with posts about the Bending Spoons IPO.

And rightly so.
Bending Spoons is a massive European success story. 🇪🇺

But the IPO itself was not that special.
It was not even the biggest in Europe.

Special for Italy, sure. A proud moment.
But some Italian LinkedIn commentators went as far as saying the IPO should have been aired live on every mainstream TV channel…
with the national anthem as the soundtrack.

That might be a bit too much 😅

Bending Spoons has built an amazing business.
(more on why it's the case in my post from Monday)
But its model is complex, niche, and not easy to grasp for the average person.

Specialised media like the Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore covered it extensively. And that’s where this kind of news belongs.

Let's curb the hype :)

For context,
SMG Swiss Marketplace Group, my employer, IPO’d last September.
It was the largest IPO in Europe in 2025 up to that point. Tech company.

Yet, nobody played the Swiss anthem on national TV. 😅

PS.
How many companies in this list do you know?

Infographic courtesy of ChatGPT

OpenAI is becoming an advertising company.

At Cannes Lions last month, David Dugan, the new Head of Global Ads Solutions, made the direction clear.

In just 6 months, OpenAI has built a serious ad business.

• Self-serve Ads Manager
• CPC bidding
• Conversion tracking
• New measurement tools
• Distribution partnerships
• Feed-based ads and advanced audience targeting under development

AI ads are not search ads. Not social ads.
They are not classic display either.

They sit in a strange middle ground.

On search, users show intent first and ads simply respond to it.
On social, ads interrupt attention inside a feed.

In ChatGPT, the ad appears inside a conversation that may not have started with buying intent at all.

According to Similarweb, 46% of users who opened a conversation with zero commercial intent developed buying signals by the time an ad appeared.

AI conversations don’t just capture intent.
They help create it.

That makes ChatGPT Ads feel closer to brand advertising than direct response.
But the mechanics and ad format still look like performance marketing:

• 0.68% overall CTR, up to 5.4% for top brands
• Around $60 CPM
• Around $12 CPC

Too weak for search.
Too strong for display.
Possibly closer to premium display or even podcast advertising.

And OpenAI has a clear reason to push hard on ads.
Subscription revenue alone seems unlikely to cover the massive costs.

Advertising is an obvious solution.
OpenAI reportedly expects $2.5B in ad revenue in 2026.
And even $100B by 2030!

For context, Pinterest made $4.2B in 2025.

Large advertisers are already moving in.
Including Amazon, which unexpectedly started advertising product listings on ChatGPT in June.

We are witnessing the birth of a new advertising giant!

Now the questions is:
how much budget will it pull from Google and Meta?

Source: Similarweb "Ads in AI" report
Infographic courtesy of ChatGPT

Forget SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic.
The most interesting tech IPO of the year comes from Italy.

Bending Spoons listed on Nasdaq last Wednesday.
On day one, the stock closed almost 40% above its IPO price. Better than SpaceX.

Nice debut, but that's not the point.

The real story is what Bending Spoons says about the future of work in the age of AI.

Its business model is brutally simple:

Buy popular internet products that lost momentum,
integrate them into one lean operating machine,
layoff almost everyone,
boost revenue and profit.
Repeat.

Just in the past three years they have acquired Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, AOL and many others.

Their lean machine is driven by 621 core “Spooners”,
a super team of engineers, product and monetisation specialists mostly based in Milan.

Acquired companies are cut very deeply and integrated into the Spoons machine. Evernote, for example, lost practically its entire pre-acquisition workforce.

But revenue doubled!

And that's the whole model in one sentence.

In most companies, managers ask for more people.
More headcount and direct reports to put on the CV.

At Bending Spoons, it’s the other way around.
Managers want to make their team smaller.

The end result is insane.

In Q1 2026, Bending Spoons generated around $1 million in revenue per employee.

Higher than Meta, Apple or Google.
Only NVIDIA sits above it.

And this is not just a productivity metric.

It is a warning.

You just don’t need as many people as before.

A few hundred exceptional people, supported by AI and a ruthless operating system, can now do what thousands used to do.

Bending Spoons just proved it and built an entire business model around it.

Investors loved it.

Inevitably, many companies will take note.

Source: IPO filings.
Chart courtesy of ChatGPT.

Many discussions on the zero-click trend miss an essential detail.

Last week, I showed that zero-click searches on Google have declined on desktop. The share of zero-click was lower in Q1 2026 than in 2024.

For the first time in years, the zero-click trend seems to have inverted.

But on mobile, the exact opposite happened!

And because mobile accounts for most Google searches, total zero-click searches still increased in 2026.

So, the long-term trend continues.

45% of Google searches ended with no clicks in 2016, in the US.
That jumped to 61% in 2024 and 68% in 2026!

But the desktop reversal still deserves marketers' attention.
It suggests Google search is increasingly two different behaviours.
And the zero-click phenomenon is mostly a mobile phenomenon.

This finding should inform marketing strategies and content.

Some content should be optimised for AI consumption on mobile, without any expectations of traffic.

While, other content, like deeper analysis, original research etc, should target complex desktop searches and drive clicks.

Of course, traffic will still decline in absolute terms, but it's likely it will improve in quality.

What do you think markers should do to capitalise on this trend?

Source: SparkToro
Charts courtesy of Codex

Forget about Big Tech jobs.

Be a surgeon! (in the US)
or a pilot :)

Finally someone said it out loud.

After a decade of marketing “nerdification”, even Google brings us back to the fundamentals.

Marketing and SEO in the age of AI is just marketing, the way even a pratictioner from the 50s would understand.

The most underrated marketing skill in the age of AI?

Hard work!

Stop nerdify around hacks, tricks, tools, esoteric measurement methods.

Just do the work!
Old-fashioned, old-school, hands-on work.

Top quality work and top quality content will never go out of fashion.

Fewer organic clicks, more paid clicks.

With the zero-click trend growing, it's only logical that Google (and others) push their paid products.

You're losing organic clicks left and right.
Do you want to get them back? just pay 😅

And this will be true on ChatGPT as well.

Source: Datos, A Semrush Company
Chart courtesy of Codex

When people discuss zero-click search, they often miss one key detail:

Desktop and mobile behave very differently.

Last week, I showed that zero-click searches on Google have declined on desktop. The share of zero-click was lower in Q1 2026 than in 2024.
For the first time in years, the trend seems to have inverted.

But mobile did the opposite.

And because mobile accounts for most Google searches, total zero-click searches still increased in 2026.

The long-term trend continues:
45% of Google searches ended with no clicks in 2016, in the US.
That jumped to 61% in 2024 and 68% in 2026!

But the desktop reversal still deserves marketers’ attention.
It suggests Google search is increasingly two different behaviours.

On desktop, people click through more. They're more willing to research, compare, open tabs, etc
It makes sense.
Desktop is where we handle more complex searches.

Mobile is obviously different.
We're on the go and we want quick answers.
Above-the-fold AI Overviews discourage scrolling and clicks even further.

So, our content strategy should not treat "search" as a single user journey.

📱 Mobile:
Quick answers, definitions, fast comparisons.
💻 Desktop
Deeper analysis, original research, technical content.

Nothing revolutionary.

Marketing in the age AI is just "common sense marketing", where all the best practices from the 2000s of even earlier, are more valid than ever.

But it's always worth repeating,
after a decade of "nerdification" of marketing.

Source: SparkToro, Rand Fishkin
Charts courtesy of Codex

Until yesterday, I paid CHF 450/year for a Financial Times subscription.

Then I discovered Revolut Metal.

Now I pay CHF 200/year to Revolut and get the exact same Financial Times subscription included. Less than half the price!

But it doesn’t stop there.

Revolut Metal also includes:
• Perplexity Pro, normally CHF 20/month
• MasterClass, minimum CHF 120/year
• Even Tinder! which can cost over CHF 50/month
• & much more

I understand partnership economics in travel or retail.

Merchants typically share discount codes with partners.
Customers buy more, the basket size goes up, and the higher volume may compensate for the lower margin.

Plus, the merchant acquires a user who may not have come otherwise.
Everyone wins.

But with online subscriptions, I struggle to see the same logic.
There is no larger basket.
And very limited upsell.

In my case, the partnership replaced a full-price subscriber.
No upsell.
No user acquisition.

I stopped paying the Financial Times directly and now access it through Revolut.
In theory, I could be upsold and upgrade to the more expensive FT Premium.
But as far as I understand, not inside the Revolut bundle.
I’d need to give up the entire benefit.
Which I obviously won’t do.

So who is subsidising whom here?

Is Revolut paying a heavily discounted wholesale rate?
Are partners treating this as cheap acquisition?
Not in my case, for sure.

Are they betting that most users never activate the benefits?
Probably.

Revolut gets great marketing for its Metal subscription and partners never deliver the service anyway.

But if other users behave like me, the partner replaces direct revenue with a heavily discounted bundle.

Anyone from Revolut or the Financial Times who can explain how this works?
I’m genuinely curious!

Maybe Linas Beliūnas?
I know you understand Revolut very well.

Zero-click searches are declining.

March 2026 saw the lowest share of Google desktop zero-click searches in the last two years, according to Datos, A Semrush Company and Rand Fishkin.

It doesn't mean the trend is completely reversing (still 1 in 5 searches end with zero clicks), but it's a signal.

After the messy early days of AI Overviews, Google is now trying to solve an almost impossible problem:

make AI Overviews useful for users,
without damaging its relationship with publishers.

To do so, it made the following changes over the past few months:

- More sources, more prominent.
AI Overviews now surface more links, prominently called-out in separate panels or increasingly in-line within the answer.

- Different query mix.
AI Overviews used to be mostly informational. That is changing.
According to Semrush, between October 2024 and October 2025, queries triggering AI Overviews shifted:
• Commercial: 8% → 18.5%
• Transactional: 2% → 14%
• Navigational: 0.8% → 10%
Those type of searches naturally need a click.

- Difference source mix.
A 2026 study by the Washington University in St. Louis found that almost 30% of cited domains in AIO did not appear on the traditional first page of results. Social, videos and forum discussions now represent a significant share of AIO sources and links, but they rarely rank on the traditional SERP.

- More focus on commerce.
Amazon and eBay climbed the ranking of the most cited sources by LLMs.
Their links naturally drive more clicks.

What does this mean for marketing?
I wish I knew 😅.

But what's clear is that our job is becoming harder.
Now we need to do three things at once:

1. Rank in traditional search.
Very important as AI search still represents a small share of usage.

2. Be selected as a source in AI answers.
Different from number 1.

3. Be present where discussions take place.
LLMs increasingly value what real users have to say about a product or service.

It'll be interesting to see how the search landscape will look like in a year from now.