Petra Labs is coming to San Francisco 🚀 !! We've spent the last year hosting some of the best GTM / Growth events in NYC with leaders from OpenAI, Ramp, Four Seasons, Superpower, and more. From November 17 - 24 we're bringing our Marketing Leaders Event Series to SF, and we already have an incredible set of partners lined up that we're co-hosting with. If you want to attend, or even if you just think we should meet, I'd love to see you when I'm there. Reach out!

We're partnering with Chief Longevity Officer to bring together 100 of the most influential people in consumer health, biotech, and AI in NYC. Already joining us on October 29th are leaders from OpenAI, NVIDIA, ŌURA, Function Health, Superpower, and more. Outside of being an incredible place to meet innovators at the cutting edge of their fields, it'll just be a really good party. We'd love to have you there if you're building, influencing, or investing in this space. Request your spot here, capacity is limited:

It's better to build in NYC than SF Enterprise is here. Commercial talent is by far here (and most of them were already working harder than 9-9-6). Have never had an issue convincing an SF engineer to move here. NYC is the capital of the world.

Petra Labs now supports tracking at scale for Instinct and Muse. 20% of holiday e-commerce traffic this year is projected to come from AI agents, which puts this Black Friday and holiday season on track for the highest agent-driven shopping we’ve ever seen. Models change, competitors change, and most importantly - your customers' behavior changes. Petra Labs ensures that you're staying ahead of the competition every step of the way. DM me if you want to see how you can start driving revenue from Instinct, Muse, and everywhere else your customers are discovering you. Capacity is limited.

You should be automating +$10M ARR with AI. Skill issue if you can't get it to work. 1// Signals: What digital footprints indicate that your buyer is ready to purchase? Find and scrape them. 2// Unified database: Every one of these signals feeds into a table that: (A) De-dupes (B) Enriches: company, phone number, email, coworkers, etc. (C) Scores: High value (invest more in a sequence), mid value (invest some), high-volume plays (self-explanatory) 3// Launch sequences: custom set of actions based on the signals and enrichments you gather in step 2. The more high-value, the more tokens you should spend on customizing the outreach and the more $ you should spend on the outreach. Every single day there are hundreds of thousands of signals that your buyers leave online that tell you they are ready to purchase. Every day you leave them on the table and one of your competitors takes action instead. Start with one signal, and one sequence, and build your way up from there. Paste this screenshot into Claude if you need help building a v0.

ChatGPTs UTM tags are back ⚡ As The Attribution Company... we got a bit nervous for a second. Heres everything were seeing along with some other fun updates from the OpenAI side: What happened: --> Thu Oct 8, about 2pm PT: ChatGPT stopped adding utm_source= to its links, and the referrer went with it. --> Oct 9 to 14: attributable ChatGPT traffic ran about 50% below baseline across the sites our attribution models cover, bottoming at -67% on the morning of Oct 14. --> Oct 14: OpenAI confirmed the bug. Oct 15, about 2am PT: the fix started rolling out. What this looks like to an attribution model: 1// Our models picked up an abnormality with the usual flags we have in place. We saw global decreases in ChatGPT referred traffic, increases in direct, no changes to AI visibility, no changes to branded organic, and no changes to referral traffic from other models... 2// ...Direct, branded organic, AI visibility, citations, and referred traffic are all complex pieces of the same puzzle. The way that they move, or dont move, in tandem tells us so much about the impact of AI revenue on a given brand. Most of the time, we see changes in real world data that arent actually reflective of a brands performance in AI search. Being able to combine this with data on how the models behave yields much better insights. 3// 🐣 Easter egg 🐣 : For those who pay very close attention to slide 3, youll notice that branded organic clicks dropped right when the referrer tags started coming back. This is unrelated to the bug, and actually caused by a slight increase in OpenAIs propensity to cite owned media over earned and social, leading to more website visitors arriving directly from chat as opposed to needing to arrive via Google. Where this goes from here: OpenAI has spent the year building ad measurement (ads since February, a pixel and a conversions API by spring, a self-serve Ads Manager in May, about 20 measurement partners on Oct 5), and Gemini started tagging its own links in September. A platform that sells ads needs attribution that works, and we expect that pressure to also reach the organic side. Were quite excited to start getting more data from the model providers to further increase the confidence intervals that were able to report on internally. S/o Arjun Kumar Theo Nsereko Eren Karaaslan for the quick work here.

On our last webinar with Ross Hudgens, one of the attendees asked us how controllable AEO actually is. The landscape has changed a lot over the last 2 years, but here's our take on where it stands today.

For one night, we’re taking New York 100 years into the future If we looked back at 2026 from the year 2126, what parts of healthcare, technology & the human body would suddenly feel primitive? Bringing together ~100 founders, scientists, investors, operators & tastemakers for one unforgettable night in Williamsburg Expect a genuinely good party + many visceral surprises from the future In partnership with my good friends over at @petra_labs @sfakkawi @rvmie_ Luma linked below xx

Perks of being a Petra Labs customer: You will always have a second home in SoHo Now that Leily has made her trip to NYC, we can officially say we've met the whole Four Seasons team in person!! Other perks include: 1// Massive increases in AI Search performance 2// Access to our dinner reservation system - we can get you any res you want in NYC 3// Your competitors will see decreases in AI-referred traffic that they can't explain 4// Unlimited merch 5// The first ever custom-built attribution models for AI Search

Sad reality: A small set of CPG / DTC brands will use this rise in Instinct / Muse to take advantage of price-insensitive consumers. When you're selling to a real person, you can't just double your price overnight. You need better branding, a ton of ad spend, premium photography, an expensive website, etc... All of the things that signal "premium" to a real person. It's a whole effort Selling to agents is completely different. The entire concept of brand and performance marketing as a lever to raise price is non-existent. And when the consumer is price-insensitive and **specifically instructing the agent to look for premium products**, we've seen evidence that **Price-point itself** is used as evidence to justify the product being premium. If your brand relies on holiday / gift shopping surges, you might be able to double your prices overnight and actually get an **increased rate of recommendation** from AI personal assistants. (assuming your on-site content is set up right, your offsite mentions describe you in the right way, and you have a small but positive set of reviews, etc.) Pricing strategy as a whole for DTC brands I think will need to get re-solved in the next 5-10 years.

What you see in your citation data is not your fate. Just because your competitors are publishing 300 AI-generated listicles doesn't mean you need to do the same to outrank them. On our last webinar with Ross Hudgens, we showcased a real client case study from one of our earliest customers where we actually changed the entire citation landscape in their industry over the course of a year, and how their competitors started copying us shortly after (with limited success).

Optimizing for Google is not the same as optimizing for ChatGPT. At Petra Labs we classify the differences into 3 main buckets: (1) Google takes into account different inputs than LLMs (2) The output format is very different (e.g. sentiment matters in LLMs) (3) Users engage with these platforms differently

The top 1% from Bain, Moelis, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and more, quit their jobs to come and build a generational company with us at Petra Labs. Here's why you should also join if you're a high performer at one of these companies today, bored out of your mind changing assumptions in your 9th market model this year because the client wants to see a different number. 1// Incredible product exposure. One of your core job responsibilities is to be able to point to the parts of our software and Agents platform that have your name on them. You'll sit next to a team of world-class engineers and work together every day to build product used at the highest levels by brands like Four Seasons, Rippling, and Zapier. 2// Real strategy work. We advise boards, ownership, and C-suites on how to move millions of dollars in marketing spend. The combination of our software's data, human analysis, and attribution models enables our customers to deploy marketing dollars more efficiently, and you will directly interface with these senior executives who rely on your expertise and analysis to drive revenue growth. 3// Early-stage building. Our best operators want to start their own companies. Petra Labs is one of the fastest growing seed stage companies today (we added $1M ARR just last week), and you'll get an unrivaled first-row seat at what it looks like to truly take something from -1 to 100 at a world-class level. We have the best growth team, the best product team, and the best operating team, and we get our hands dirty every day turning nothing into something. 4// Extreme ownership. You will not be micro-managed. We literally don't have the time for it. Your core job responsibilities comprise 60% of your day-to-day work. The other 40% is on you. Figure out where the problems are that interest you the most, and go and figure them out. 5// First-class team. At most tech companies, non-technical staff are second class citizens. At Petra Labs - you ARE the product. As a result, our S&O team carries in every part of our org. They contribute to our research papers, help define our ICP, prepare investor materials, attend sales dinners and conferences, contribute to our product roadmap, and more. 6// You'll have the most fun you've ever had at work. We've built an incredible culture of honesty, camaraderie, team events, and LOTS of laughter. 7// We move fast. The interview process is 3 rounds and you can have an offer in hand in as fast as 1 week post-application. If you are sitting in an elite high-finance, investing, or consulting role today, come and see for yourself what it's like to have skin in the game. There is no other job in New York City that will give you the level of learning and excitement that you can get at Petra Labs. Offering $10-25K for successful full-time referrals. Apply today.

Thanks to the kind folks at @petra_labs for sponsoring today's edition of my newsletter, Context Window. They've got a great event next week on the playbook they use to win AI search for brands like Four Seasons, Zapier, Rippling, and more. Deets:

High-value content (like long-form research studies) are a massively un-tapped AEO strategy. While content like this may not get cited as much as a listicle on a per-query basis, these types of sources get cited across **a way higher number** of diverse queries across branded, informational, and transactional user intents.

X is the worst performing channel we have. Everyone who hears about us from here ends up cutting the call early once they find out how much we charge. So, next week I'm going to showcasing an in-depth walkthrough of how we build AEO strategies for our clients so that you can DIY it at home. The start-ups we work with generate millions of $ from AI Search, RSVP here to see how we do it:

Unlike traditional Google search, AI chatbots talk about how they feel about your brand. We've even seen evidence that on purely transactional queries (e.g. "best [x] product"), LLMs will start talking about employee glassdoor reviews on your company!

We added $1M ARR last week alone. Here are our highest conversion rate channels and what we've learned through a lot of trial and error. Free game!! 1// In-person events. The best channel we have in terms of conversion rate / ROI. We used to host our own events (just Petra Labs inviting people) and struggled to get great attendees. We then shifted to outsourcing the hardest part (getting ppl to show up) to trusted partners. We've had a lot of success partnering with vertical-specific influencers (s/o @andruyeung @RosenZone @taykcrane) and having our investors source on our behalf (@jerseejess BEST early stage investor there is!). We've hit a good flow and now average 2-3 dinners per month. 2// Referral / channel partners. This is a tricky one and for most start-ups it ends up being a massive time drain and they stop investing in it. It was the same for us at the beginning too. But, we did a few things that I think turned the tide: -> Shift away from other "businesses" that are in the same boat as us. We've found absolutely 0 success getting other companies to send their own customers our way. And in reverse, theres a REALLY high bar for me to hit up one of my customers and ask them to go spend money on someone else. -> Focus more on people who have networks that they don't have vested interests in. E.g. actual customers of ours, prospects in our pipeline that like us but aren't ready to convert yet, influencers who have a lot of reach and can make good money sending people our way, etc. -> Automated follow-up reminders. Basically have a claude-built system that makes sure these relationships stay warm. 3// Posting on LinkedIn + daily connections. Every day I send out cold connection requests to people in my ICP. And then I leave it, and don't message them. Through this method, I've added about 2000+ followers over the last year alone in my core ICP. Then, you let the content engine rip. Daily / weekly posts about: research, customer case studies, company culture + success, hot takes in your industry, etc. Eventually, they'll reach out to you. Takes time, but it's totally free, and when the call request comes in, we convert at 30%+ rates and only lose on price / being too expensive.