A new report puts a number on exactly how bad the content traffic problem has gotten.

AI crawlers hit beehiiv publishers 448 million times last month. Visitors sent back: 58,000. That's not a rounding error. That's AI systems reading everything your writers produced, summarizing it for their users, and keeping those users inside their own product. beehiiv's 2026 Enterprise Report documents this directly: AI crawlers now hit its publishers more than twice as often as traditional search crawlers, and they almost never hand traffic back. Meanwhile, 68% of Google searches already end without a click, and AI Overviews have cut click-through rates roughly in half, from around 15% down to about 8%. If your business depends on blog posts or newsletters to generate leads, that funnel is quietly draining. The owners who are holding up are leaning into owned-audience tactics, things like email recommendation networks and lead magnet automation, where the reader is already yours and no algorithm sits between you and them. If you're still betting on search traffic, this report is worth an honest look.

Meta just put a shopping assistant in a pair of glasses, and it can walk into a competitor's store and buy something cheaper in real time. At Meta Connect 2026, Meta announced Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 glasses starting at $449 and expanded Muse, its personal AI agent, with shopping integrations at Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Ulta, Wayfair, and others. The glasses have cameras. Muse can look at a product on a shelf, find a better price somewhere else, and complete the purchase through Shop Pay or PayPal without the user touching a phone. Shelly Palmer's framing is useful here: this is a wearable point-of-sale terminal that compresses the entire buying journey, discovery, comparison, checkout, into a single conversation the shopper never has with you. For small business owners who sell physical products, the question is whether your product data (pricing, availability, specs) is accurate and structured enough for Muse to find and evaluate you at all. If it isn't, you're invisible to a whole new category of shopper before they even walk in the door.

Tools Worth a Look

Railway: Spin up a free cloud virtual machine with no account required; also adds request tracing and OpenCode AI coding directly inside Cloud Agents. For technical founders or developers who want low-friction cloud experimentation. Free tier available, paid plans vary.

Trending on GitHub

paperclipai/paperclip: An open-source app for managing AI agents at work, the kind of thing teams are reaching for when they want to run multiple agents without building everything from scratch. (2,109 stars today)

mattpocock/skills: A collection of practical skills for working developers, pulled straight from a working .agents directory. (583 stars today)

obra/superpowers: A framework for giving AI agents a defined set of abilities and a structured approach to building software with them. (468 stars today)

anthropics/skills: Anthropic's public library of skills that Claude agents can be given to extend what they can do. (189 stars today)

anthropics/claude-plugins-official: Anthropic's official, curated directory of high-quality plugins for Claude Code. (83 stars today)

More Headlines

OpenAI hired Patreon's co-founder/CTO, Head of Product, and Head of Engineering, and they're announcing what they're building next week. Worth watching if you monetize content or run a creator-adjacent business.

YouTube is rolling out AI draft feedback, auto-generated titles and thumbnails, and a conversational music discovery feature across Studio and YouTube Music. Useful for small business owners who publish video content and want more help on the production side without adding headcount.

Amazon blocked Meta Muse from shopping on its platform while still running its infrastructure on Amazon's own Graviton chips. The agentic shopping wars are going to get complicated fast.

Gallup data shows even daily AI users are worried about AI. Useful context if you're pitching AI-assisted services to skeptical customers or employees.

Slack support is moving to Salesforce Standard Success Plan at your next billing cycle, replacing the previous support channel with an AI-powered Help Agent.

-Scott

SmartOwner is published (almost) daily by the team at DigitalTreehouse. Want AI consulting or automations for your business? Reply to this email.