🔔 Buyer Intent Just Landed in HubSpot

Buyer intent on your HubSpot record, a ChatGPT privacy feature worth a second look, auto-clipping your events on LinkedIn, Meta pulling placement controls, & Google button that lets readers pick you.

Author

Code Peddle
August 25, 2026

Hey there, Digital Marketing Rockstars! 🎸

Manmeet here, this week is about control. Who owns your data, who owns the relationship with your audience, and which levers in your stack you actually get to pull. A couple of these stories hand you more control than you had last week. One of them quietly takes some away. The trick, as always, is knowing which is which and deciding on purpose instead of by default.

In today's email:

1. Buyer intent data moves onto your HubSpot company record, no separate login required. 📈
2. A new ChatGPT privacy feature, and the data question it should push you to ask. 🤖
3. LinkedIn turns one live event into a month of short-form video.💡
4. Meta is taking the ad placement controls away, on purpose. 👀
5. Google adds a button that lets readers pick you as a preferred source. 🌐

Marketing Automation

Buyer Intent Just Moved Onto Your HubSpot Company Record

HubSpot has rolled out Company Surge signals, powered by Bombora, as a native intent signal, now in beta. It flags when a tracked company's research on your topics spikes, and it writes straight to the company record alongside your other signals. It's included in standard intent tracking, so there's no separate Bombora contract, no second login, and up to 12 topics you can choose per account.

Our Hot Take:
For most of the last decade, third party intent data lived somewhere else. A separate platform, a separate contract, and a weekly spreadsheet nobody trusted. Putting it on the company record changes what your reps can actually do with it. But a signal is only as good as the decision it triggers, and that's where most teams fumble. A surge on a topic is not a reason to call. It's a reason to ask a sharper question. Before you switch this on, sit down with sales and agree what a surge should do: which topics map to a real buying trigger, and what happens the moment one fires. Keep in mind that scoring problems are almost always field-definition problems, not algorithm problems. So pick three or four topics that match how people really buy from you, wire one into a single workflow, and watch what happens before you build ten more.

Content Marketing

ChatGPT May Soon Let You Lock Individual Chats

Code spotted in the latest ChatGPT for Android hints at a feature that would let you lock your most sensitive chats behind a PIN or a fingerprint. The locked chats would stay walled off from the rest of your history, even with memory turned on, so private queries wouldn't get pulled into future answers. It's early, it's unconfirmed, and there's no launch date yet.

Our Hot Take:
The lock button isn't really the story. What your team is already pasting into ChatGPT is. Client lists, unreleased campaign plans, contract terms, revenue figures: a lot of that goes into a shared AI tool the same way you'd jot a note to yourself, and it doesn't come back out. A privacy toggle on one app doesn't fix that, because the risk was never really the tool. It's the missing rule about what goes into it. This is the same trap as bolting AI onto a broken process and expecting magic. If the process is loose, the AI just scales the mess faster. So don't wait for OpenAI to ship anything. Pick the one place where sensitive client data flows into an AI tool most often, and write a single plain-English rule for it this week: what's fine to paste, and what never is. One rule your team actually remembers beats a policy nobody reads.

Social Media Marketing / PPC

LinkedIn Will Now Cut Your Event Video Into Highlights For You

LinkedIn added AI recommended clips and chapters for live event recordings. It scans the replay, points out the standout moments (announcements, key insights, quotable lines), and lets you extend or trim each clip before you post. It also drops chapters into longer videos so viewers can skip to the part they want. It's live for everyone now.

Our Hot Take:
Most teams treat a webinar like a fireworks show. Big build-up, one bright night, then it's gone. That's the waste. The recording is a magnet you can keep using for weeks, and this takes the tedious part off your plate, which is hunting for the good bits in a 60-minute file. Let the AI surface the moments. You still decide which ones deserve a post and what point of view to wrap around them, because that judgment is what makes people stop scrolling. Here's the move: take your most recent event recording, pull three clips, and schedule one a week for the next three weeks. Add a chapter list to the full replay so the people who want the whole thing can find their bit. One event, a month of content, almost no new production.

Meta Is Taking Away The Option To Exclude Ad Placements

Meta is telling advertisers it will remove the Placements option from ad sets. That means you'll no longer be able to opt out of specific spots like Facebook search results or in-stream ads between Reels. Meta ads expert Jon Loomer notes the option to exclude whole platforms is going too. From here, Meta's system decides where your ads run, which is another step toward its 'just give us a URL' vision of fully automated campaigns.

Our Hot Take:
Treat this as Meta saying the quiet part out loud: it wants the wheel. Sometimes handing over the wheel is fine, because the machine really is better at spreading placements at scale. But 'trust us' and 'you can't check us' are different things, and losing the toggle means you can't steer away from placements that quietly burn budget on junk. The bigger issue is dependency. If one platform you don't control is most of your pipeline, its roadmap becomes your roadmap. We saw this with a personal injury law client who leaned almost entirely on paid search. Once organic started carrying real lead volume, we cut their PPC spend by 35% in six months and the phone kept ringing. So while you still can, open your Meta placement breakdown, see where your ads have actually been showing and which placements produced weak leads, and treat that as your cue to build at least one lead source Meta's automation doesn't own.

Does Social Media Work for Small B2B Businesses?

SEO

Google's New 'Preferred Sources' Button Lets Readers Pick You

Google is expanding personalization across Search, Discover, and News. The piece that matters most for marketers is an embeddable Preferred Sources button you can put right on your pages. When a reader clicks it, your site gets added as a preferred source and they land back where they left off, instead of getting dumped into Google's settings. Preferred sites show up more often in Top Stories and can earn a 'preferred' badge in AI Overviews and AI Mode. More than 600,000 sources have been selected so far, up from 345,000 in May.

Our Hot Take:
The feed usually decides who your audience sees. This is one of the few levers that flips that, so your reader decides instead. It's worth grabbing, because a reader who picks you as a preferred source is a reader the algorithm has to keep showing you. If you added the older Preferred Sources badge earlier this year, check whether this new button replaces it or needs a fresh embed. Then put the button where your loyal readers already are: your newsletter footer, your best-read posts, your thank-you pages. Don't scatter it everywhere. Put it in the two or three spots where people who already like your work will actually click. That's how you turn a one-time visit into a standing invitation.

Recommended Readings

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Tip of the Week

Pick one automated system in your stack that you haven't looked under the hood of in a while. A bid strategy, a lead-scoring model, an AI tool your team leans on. Spend twenty minutes this week checking what it's actually doing on your behalf. Control isn't about switching automation off. It's about not letting it run in the dark.💡

Summary:

Here is the quick recap.

  • Marketing Automation: Bombora buyer intent now lives on your HubSpot company record, so agree with sales what a surge should trigger before you switch it on. 📈

  • Content: A ChatGPT lock-chat feature is only rumored, but the real fix is a simple rule for what client data your team feeds any AI tool. 🤖

  • Social: LinkedIn will auto-clip your event recordings, so turn one event into a month of short-form. 💡

  • PPC: Meta is removing placement and platform exclusions, so check your placement data now and build a lead source Meta doesn't control. 👀

  • SEO: Google's new Preferred Sources button lets readers pin you, so swap the old badge and place it where your fans already are. 🌐

Meme of the Week