Searchers now pause, scroll and reconsider before clicking

Everything this week circles the same narrow moment: the second or two before somebody decides to give you their attention. Searchers are lingering on the results page for 21 seconds and scrolling back up to compare, which promotes your meta description from signpost to sales pitch. ABM has quietly stopped targeting accounts and started targeting named humans. Gemini has learned to skip straight to the eleven seconds of your video that matter. Email and SMS click 97% better together, as long as you know which one is allowed to interrupt dinner. And the five hooks that stop a thumb haven't moved in years. Here are your five.

1. Searchers now pause, scroll and reconsider: 46% still active on the page at 21 seconds

Eric Van Buskirk at ClickStream went through 846,000 anonymised US search sessions from February and March, using Surfer SEO's clickstream data, and watched what people's cursors were actually doing. Without an AI Overview on the page, 12% of navigational searchers were still active at the 21 second mark. With one, 46% were. Cursors sat perfectly still 44% of the time rather than 29%, and when they did move they wandered across 83% of the viewport instead of 66%. That is the shape of reading, not aiming.

The scrolling says the same thing twice as loudly. Sessions with an AI Overview involved back-scrolling 59% of the time, up from 51%, and the people who did reverse spent 47.5% of their scrolling heading back up the page, against 27% without. Somebody who scrolls up is checking something, and checking is comparison. Which quietly promotes your title tag and meta description from signpost to sales pitch, because the results page has stopped being a doorway and turned into a shortlist you're being read on. Search Engine Journal

2. ABM has quietly stopped targeting accounts and started targeting named humans

Maja Voje and Katya Tarapovskaia published a playbook in January arguing that account-level ABM has had its day, and that the version worth running now operates one person at a time: which specific human is showing intent, and who else sits on the committee around them. The machinery does the grinding. Enrichment waterfalls through Apollo, LeadMagic and Hunter, a personality read on top, then ads, email and LinkedIn built from role and signal rather than a merge field with a first name in it. Their claimed results: contact coverage up from 40% to 85%, ABM costs down 60 to 70%, win rates up more than 15%, deal cycles 30% faster, and 40 hours a month handed back to every rep.

Those figures come from people who build composable stacks for a living, so read them with the appropriate expression on your face. The unglamorous number underneath is the one that survives the squint: enrichment bought through a platform's credit system runs about $0.17 a record against $0.06 to $0.10 going straight to the same API, which at ten thousand records a month is $700 to $1,100 of pure markup. You can argue about the strategy. The invoice is harder to argue with. GTM Strategist

3. Google's video model stopped watching every frame, and got 7% better at its job

The old way of understanding a video was brute force: one frame per second, start to finish, however long the thing ran. Google's new agentic video understanding lets Gemini make its own decisions instead, loading only the segments it needs, changing frame rate as it goes, and choosing whether a given stretch is best handled as pictures, audio or transcript. On standard benchmarks that cut token usage by 88% and costs by 66% while accuracy went up 7%, with the biggest wins on the longest videos. Anything under five minutes may come back slightly slower, which seems a reasonable toll to pay.

It's already in developers' hands via AI Studio, the Gemini API and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and it will power Ask YouTube on watch pages in the coming months. Sundar Pichai says over 140 million people used that feature in June alone, which is a lot of humans asking questions of a video rather than sitting through it. The middle of your video has just become searchable: something can now find the eleven seconds that matter without watching the other forty minutes, and it will happily do that to your competitor's video too. Search Engine Journal

4. Email and SMS together click 97% better, and that 98% open rate is not an open rate

Dan Oshinsky's case study for Inbox Collective makes the case for SMS as email's short-tempered sibling rather than its replacement. Texts run around 12% click-through against email's 2 to 3%, and running both channels together produces 97% higher click rates than email on its own. He's also refreshingly straight about the statistic everyone waves at you: the 98% open rate quoted for SMS is really a delivery rate, and a handset confirming receipt is not the same thing as a person reading anything.

Worth flagging that the piece is presented by Mailchimp and the sums worked through are Mailchimp's own, $20 a month for a thousand credits up to $600 for a hundred thousand, at 153 characters a credit. The channel logic survives the sponsorship intact. SMS is for things with an expiry date (the alert, the doors close at seven, the cart abandoned at midnight) and email is for things that need a paragraph to make any sense at all. Only one of them is allowed to interrupt somebody's dinner, so pick your moment. Inbox Collective

5. Five hooks that buy you the first second of a UGC video

Alex Garcia's breakdown of UGC hooks isn't new, which is rather the point, because the mechanics of stopping a thumb haven't moved much. His five: the surprising and unordinary, an image that contradicts what the eye was expecting; the satisfying, either mesmerising texture and motion or the clean resolution of a problem the viewer recognises as theirs; verbal plus visual, a sound doing work the picture can't, the crack of a can opening under the shot of it; the relatable, a selfie or the Sunday scaries, something recognised before it's understood; and the trending format, a stitch or a green screen borrowing engagement that already exists.

There are no percentages anywhere in the piece, which is oddly restful, though he does lean on the finding that emotionally arousing images get processed faster and more vividly than neutral ones. The actual instruction is to stack the hooks rather than pick one, and it holds up because it describes attention rather than an algorithm. Formats churn every few months and someone will sell you a course on the new one by Friday. The reason a thumb stops has not changed in years. Marketing Examined

Small business shout-out

This week's shout-out goes to Team Repair, which posts children a broken gadget on purpose. Each Fixers Club kit turns up as a genuinely faulty piece of electronics, a retro games console for instance, along with the tools and a set of guided challenges to work out what's wrong and put it right. It's built for ages 10 to 14, or 8 and up with a grown-up hovering, and runs £34.99 a quarter or £120 for the year. Once the repair is done the gadget goes back in a prepaid envelope, your deposit comes back to you, and the same device gets broken again for the next child.

It came out of Imperial College London, founded by design engineers Megan Hale, Anaïs Engelmann and Oscar Jones, all three the sort of children who took things apart and mostly got them back together. More than 14,000 young people in the UK have used the kits, half of whom say they're more likely to fix something afterwards, and last October the team partnered with iFixit to reach families across the US and EU. Their founding observation is hard to argue with: we have spent years teaching children to code, and nearly 30% of Gen Z can't identify a flat-head screwdriver. Know a small business we should feature? Reply and let us know.