The Replay Economy Is Here
🔁 Why attention is now valued in seconds, not actions, AI overviews are moving deeper into High-Value search, and more!
Howdy readers 🥰
In this newsletter, you’ll find:
🔁 The Replay Economy
🔍 AI Overviews Are Moving Deeper Into High-Value Search
🏆 Ad of the Day
If you’re new to ScaleUP, then a hearty welcome! You and 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers have reached the right place. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!
Together with Lindy
You are not behind on ideas. You are behind on speed.
You know the drill. Competitor research scattered across tabs, unfinished messaging docs, late briefs, and creative that misses the angle. That chaos is not annoying; it is expensive.
Lindy AI CMO is a suite of powerful agents that ship beautiful marketing campaigns quickly.
Drop in your website, and agents study your competitors, extract angles, draft messaging, create briefs, and generate launch-ready assets, then organize everything in Airtable for a clean approval flow.
- Cut campaign prep from 10 to 14 days down to 1 to 2 days.
- Generate 30 to 80 on-brief variants per angle to accelerate testing.
- Reduce rework and increase weekly experiment volume without extra headcount.
Teams running agent-led workflows consistently ship 2 to 3 times more weekly tests with the same headcount.
🔁 The Replay Economy
For years, brands optimized for visible engagement. Likes. Saves. Shares. Comments.
Those were the signals we believed the algorithm cared about. That logic is breaking.
Instagram is no longer prioritizing what users declare. It is prioritizing what they reveal. Replays have quietly become one of the strongest indicators of interest because they expose something harder to manipulate: hesitation.
A replay usually happens when the brain is not finished processing. Something felt incomplete. Slightly unclear. Worth another look. That extra second of attention is exactly what the platform wants, because it signals real cognitive engagement, not performative interaction.
This is the replay economy.
Why replays outperform traditional engagement signals
Explicit actions are easy to game. Replays are not. You can prompt a comment. You can bait a save. You can manufacture shares. You cannot easily manufacture someone watching again.
From the platform’s perspective, replays mean longer time on feed, higher attention density, and stronger confidence that the content deserves distribution beyond followers. That is why reach is increasingly allocated based on the time held, not the number of buttons pressed.
Attention is now priced in time.
Why most brand content kills replays
Most teams over-optimize for clarity. They explain too much, too cleanly, too fast.
Perfect resolution removes the need to look again. Once the brain fully understands, it exits. Polished content often performs worse because it closes the loop immediately.
Rewatchable content does the opposite. It leaves a small gap.
Not confusion. Not chaos. Just enough unresolved detail to trigger a second pass. A visual moment that does not fully register.
A demo that raises one quiet “how.” A loop that lands slightly off. That hesitation is the signal.
Designing for hesitation, not virality
The brands winning in the replay economy are not louder. They are more deliberate.
They engineer subtle friction that slows the thumb without demanding action. Over time, this trains the algorithm to trust the account, not just the post. Replay-heavy content compounds reach because the system learns that this creator consistently holds attention.
That is how organic growth becomes cumulative instead of hit-driven.
Why does lived experience accelerate replay behavior
One of the fastest ways to create replays is to show something that feels real, not rehearsed. Lived experience naturally includes micro-moments that are imperfect, which invites a second look.
Some teams intentionally diversify their content inputs to increase this effect. Using creator-led footage from different perspectives introduces variability that polished brand content lacks.
Platforms like Insense make it easier to source this kind of replay-friendly, authentic content at scale without overproducing every asset. You can book a free strategy call by December 19th to get $200 towards your first collab!
The real shift
The feed is no longer an engagement contest. It is an attention confidence market.
Instagram rewards content that makes the brain pause just long enough to look again. In the replay economy, seconds beat signals.
🔍 AI Overviews Are Moving Deeper Into High-Value Search
A refreshed Semrush study analyzing millions of keywords shows how Google’s AI Overviews shifted throughout 2025. The data captures volatility in rollout, changes in search intent, evolving SERP layouts, and unexpected click behavior.
The Breakdown:
1. Volatile but Deliberate Expansion - AI Overviews appeared on 6.49% of keywords in January, surged to nearly 25% by July, then stabilized at 15.69% by November, suggesting aggressive testing followed by controlled scaling.
AI Overviews tend to show up on queries that already skew toward no clicks. But when the same keywords were compared before and after AIOs appeared, click rates slightly increased, and overall zero-click rates declined over time.
2. Shift Beyond Informational Search - In January, over 91% of AIO-triggering queries were informational. By October, that share fell to 57%, with commercial, transactional, and navigational queries rising steadily.
AI Overviews now commonly appear alongside People Also Ask, Reddit and forum discussions, YouTube videos, and Related Searches. Google Ads at the bottom of AIO SERPs jumped from under 1% earlier in the year to around 25%.
AI Overviews are no longer confined to low-risk informational queries and are increasingly layered into monetized SERPs. At the same time, Google maintains that optimizing for AI search is no different from traditional SEO, with its leadership reiterating that building strong sites and useful content for users remains the core strategy.
🏆 Ad of the Day
What Works:
1. Pure, Not Loud - “Pure plants. Pure gut.” feels almost casual, like something you’d say to a friend. It doesn’t try to convince you, it just states a simple truth and lets your brain fill in the rest.
2. Calm Credibility - The bottles look serious without being scary. There’s enough structure to feel legit, but nothing that screams science experiment, which matters when people are already tired of gut jargon.
3. Relief, Not Results - The testimonial talks about feeling lighter and settled, not a miracle before-and-after. That’s how real gut wins show up in life, quietly, which makes the story easier to trust.
This ad works because it respects how tired people are of fixing their gut. It doesn’t promise a new you, it promises fewer bad days, and that feels honest.
Advertise with Us
Wanna put out your message in front of over 50,000 best marketers and decision makers?
We are concerned about everything DTC and its winning strategies. If you liked what you read, why not join the 50k+ marketers from 13k+ DTC brands who have already subscribed? Just follow this.
At ScaleUP, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. If you'd like to stay in touch, be sure to follow us EVERYWHERE🥰
Thanks for your support :) We'll be back again with more such content 🥳