Contents

1. 1. 1. Overview: Key stories this quarter
      2. Competing platforms: TikTok rallies after brief ban | RedNote sees surge in users | Instagram launches video app Edits | Bluesky climbs to 30m users
      3. Social advertising: Moderation changes at Meta | Meta tests Threads ads | Snapchat’s Plus subscription pays off | Reddit extends paid products
      4. AI advantage: Pinterest celebrates milestone quarter | Meta expects to reach 1bn users with AI assistant

Listen to the audio edition where author Rebecca Sentance and senior analyst Lynette Saunders discuss the top stories:

1. Overview

This edition of Social Trends Quarterly is a bumper one, as unexpected developments abound and new (and old) challengers emerge in a social media landscape that seems more dynamic than ever.

The possible US ban of TikTok dominated the final weeks of 2024 and the initial weeks of 2025, and while its closure ultimately proved to be short-lived, TikTok’s future in the country is still uncertain.^[1] We take a close look at the wider impact, from moves by Snapchat and Instagram to the meteoric rise of an unexpected social media player from China.

Meanwhile, the advertising environment on Meta’s platforms may be changing significantly as the company has announced a different approach to content moderation that it says heralds “more speech and fewer mistakes”. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Threads will employ crowdsourced Community Notes instead of third-party fact-checkers – an approach seen on X, although research has called its effectiveness into question.^[2] As Meta also begins to test ads on Threads for the first time, the brand safety stakes are high on some of the world’s largest social networks.

Ways of driving revenue are an overriding theme of this edition, as Snapchat’s Plus subscription programme pays dividends, and Reddit introduces an ad format to promote AMAs by brands. Pinterest has unexpectedly enjoyed a banner quarter as a focus on AI and lower-funnel performance begin to pay off. Learn about these developments in depth, and many more, in our Social Trends Quarterly.

2.  Competing platforms

TikTok rallies after a brief ban – but continued uncertainty around its future is benefiting competitors

The biggest social media story of the first month of 2025 was the impending US ban of TikTok, set for 19 January if TikTok was unable to find a buyer. Accordingly, TikTok went dark in the late hours of 18 January – only for service to be restored just half a day later, thanks to an extension granted by the newly inaugurated President Trump.^[3]

Even though TikTok’s hiatus was brief, the uncertainty surrounding its future in the US has helped competitors like YouTube, Instagram and Snap – and it continues to do so, given that the executive order keeping TikTok online has only staved off legal action for 75 days.^[4]

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told investors in a Q4 2024 earnings call that “the overall environment of uncertainty is benefiting our business”, with advertisers and influencers alike keen to diversify their online presence.^[5] The momentum from panicked TikTok users seeking alternatives was even enough to propel an all-but-unknown (at least in the United States) app, Xiaohongshu – known as RedNote outside of China – to the top of app download charts. Given that TikTok is ultimately a Chinese-owned business, giving a leg up to a China-based competitor is likely not what parent organisation ByteDance – nor the US government – wanted from the situation.

TikTok has pushed ahead with expansion for its social commerce arm, Shop, launching in Ireland and Spain in December in what seems likely to herald a wider rollout across Europe.^[6] TikTok originally planned to expand Shop to countries like Germany, Italy, France and Spain earlier in 2024, but put the plans on hold to focus on growth in the US, according to Bloomberg.^[7] The publication suggested that TikTok may also be wary of the regulatory scrutiny that operating as an ecommerce player in Europe might entail.

TikTok Shop enjoyed a bumper Black Friday in the US, generating more than $100m in single-day sales, tripling its sales volume from Black Friday 2023 and seeing a 165% increase in shoppers year-on-year across Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend.^[8] It serves to illustrate the market that TikTok will lose if it is ultimately pushed out of the US – but also the opportunity that merchants who are just becoming established on the platform will miss out on.

Chinese app RedNote sees surge of international users amid TikTok chaos

A Chinese social commerce app called Xiaohongshu (which translates to “little red book” and is known as RedNote in overseas app stores) has been a surprising beneficiary of the TikTok uncertainty.

As the mid-January TikTok ban deadline loomed, TikTok users carried out contingency planning by establishing themselves on other platforms in case TikTok went away for good. Many looked to YouTube or Instagram – both places where short video has a ready home, although each has a different environment and focus to TikTok. Snapchat also went out of its way to court TikTok ‘migrants’ (sometimes called ‘TikTok refugees’) with a ‘Find Your Favorites’ campaign to “spotlight [its] growing creator community”, launched four days ahead of the deadline.^[9]

But few commentators would have predicted a mass migration to a Chinese social commerce app that had made few moves to court a global audience. RedNote got its start as an app where Chinese people travelling overseas could share reviews of international products, before its creators realised that it was being used by Chinese residents with no travel plans to gain information about overseas goods that they sourced through friends and relatives. RedNote’s founders developed an ecommerce arm for the app that enabled users to buy products directly, but it maintained a strong social community of users sharing in-depth information and reviews about what they had bought.

The app has since broadened in size and scope – it has a noticeable impact on the travel market,^[10] with mainland Chinese tourists flocking to spots recommended on RedNote. RedNote is prized for its authenticity, a quality it shares with TikTok. Its similarities to Instagram and Pinterest have also been noted (RedNote is home to both static imagery and videos, and has a Pinterest-board-like curation feature). However, its shoppability is unlike anything found in the west – even TikTok, although TikTok is pushing far more heavily in that direction with TikTok Shop.

While RedNote has become a force to be reckoned with in Chinese social commerce, until recently the app offered some English-language translation, but no other foreign languages. Nevertheless, US TikTok users began recommending RedNote as an aesthetically pleasing alternative, leading to a mass influx in January 2025. Reuters, citing data from SimilarWeb, reported that the number of daily active users in the US soared from 300,000 in the week commencing 6 January to 3.4 million the following Monday.^[11] The app also topped download charts in the UK^[12] and Ireland,^[13] and gained new users from a wide range of countries.

Tales of Chinese and US users sharing jokes and crossing cultural boundaries dominated headlines, although the impact on RedNote’s existing userbase was not all positive, as a flood of English-language content by and for TikTok users drowned out the app’s regular content. RedNote was spotted urgently hiring for new team members to moderate the influx of English-language posts.^[14] A new ‘Translate’ button was also quickly added.

All of this could lead to RedNote becoming a more prominent international social media player – or it could prove to be a flash in the pan. Much of this depends on whether the TikTok ban is reinstated, since most users were content with the app before it seemed like it might disappear. The novelty may also wear off if TikTok ‘refugees’ decide they will have an easier time adapting to a western app – or as Chinese users tire of TikTok-ified content and begin to push back more firmly.

However, if RedNote decides to use this event as a springboard to internationalise its app even further and expand into new markets (or potentially create an international spin-off app as TikTok itself was spun off from Douyin), we may be hearing a lot more about the platform in future.

Instagram reveals plan to launch video-editing app Edits as TikTok goes dark in the US

“There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and no matter what happens, we think it’s our job to create the most compelling creative tools for those of you who make videos – for not just Instagram, but for platforms out there – as we can.”^[15]

This was how Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the advent of Edits, a video-editing app from Instagram. The significance of the announcement’s timing – on the same day that the ban on TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps came into force – and wording was immediately apparent: Instagram was looking to swoop in and offer an alternative to CapCut, the threatened video-editing app owned by ByteDance.

Although TikTok and its sibling apps have since been restored to app stores, Instagram has pressed ahead with news and previews of Edits. Notably, the app, originally announced for February, is now not slated to be available until March.^[16] Mosseri also stated that, “The first version is going to be incomplete, so please be patient”^[17] – which suggests that Meta may well have expedited development on Edits in order to be able to announce the app in time for TikTok and CapCut’s ban.

CapCut has stolen a march on competitors in the ‘prosumer’ software space by being accessible, easy to use and affordable, while still creating a polished end result. At a time when marketers are expected to do more with less – and social video is more important than ever – this gives it huge appeal, as does its ready integration with TikTok.

Instagram is clearly looking to take a leaf from CapCut’s book in this regard and has announced many compelling features for its app such as multi-track editing, automatic multilingual captioning, and the ability to transform static images into video with generative AI.^[18] Adam Mosseri further revealed in a Q&A that Edits will be a testing ground for creative tools that will release to Instagram if they are successful – which is an incentive for creators and brands who want to stay ahead of the curve to use Edits.^[19]

This comes alongside news that Instagram has officially extended the maximum length of its Reels from 90 seconds to 3 minutes, to “give creators a bit more room to be creative”.^[20] As with the initial launch of Reels, Instagram is responding to prevailing trends in the social media and the influencer space as TikTok continues to set the direction of travel. Instagram also revealed that it would be moving from its signature square grid to rectangular dimensions for photos and videos – a format that more faithfully mimics the dimensions of a phone screen but is a notable departure from Instagram’s long-standing look. Instagram’s Stories were already formatted in this way, and so the change will bring greater consistency across Instagram’s content, while making it easier for those who create for other platforms (such as, say, TikTok) to cross-post or migrate to Instagram.

Should CapCut be ultimately banned in the US along with TikTok, Edits will be well-placed to snap up its users; and if not, it still offers an additional tool for marketers to create polished social video, particularly if Instagram forms a key part of their social strategy.

Bluesky climbs to 30m users as CEO raises the possibility of advertising

In the space of a single week in late January and early February, X rival Bluesky celebrated two major milestones: 30 million users, and one billion posts to its platform.^[21]

While Bluesky’s scale is still far behind that of competitors like Threads and X itself, which both enjoy user counts in the hundreds of millions, the platform has been exponentially gaining momentum since its public launch in February 2024 (following a year-long open beta). Growth has surged on a number of occasions when rivals X and Meta have made a particularly controversial move, as many users consider Bluesky, with its decentralised and ad-free setup, to be an antidote to ‘big tech’.

Bluesky’s increasing prominence has of course piqued the interest of marketers, brands and influencers, but its team have worked to keep Bluesky’s environment largely non-commercial. However, speaking at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber declined to rule out the possibility of introducing advertising to the platform one day.

She suggested that should they explore advertising, it would be much more “user intent-driven”, emphasising, “We want to keep our incentives aligned with users and make sure that we’re not turning into a model where the user’s attention is the product.”^[22] Off-stage, Graber mentioned running ads in search results as an example of a potentially less-intrusive advertising method.

Given that Bluesky’s differences from larger and more attention-driven social platforms are its main appeal, it’s understandable that the company would want to avoid jeopardising this. For now, Bluesky seems to be adequately funded by investors; however, depending on how rapidly it continues to scale, Bluesky’s team may need to determine how to walk the line between pleasing users and pleasing businesses.

3. Social advertising

Moderation changes at Meta raise questions about brand safety

Meta started off 2025 with a major change to the way that it handles content moderation and fact-checking. In an announcement promising “more speech and fewer mistakes”, Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer at Meta, stated that the company would be ending its third-party fact-checking programme and shifting to a Community Notes model – the same model currently employed at X.

Meta’s automated content moderation systems will still be in use but reserved for “illegal and high-severity [policy] violations, like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams”.^[23] “Less severe” violations won’t be proactively scanned for, and so will require a report before any action is taken; Kaplan also stated that Meta will rein in the demotion of content that may violate its community standards.

Kaplan held up X as a successful example of this model, writing: “We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context”. However, X has seen major pullbacks from advertisers driven by concerns around trust and brand safety, as Kantar revealed in September 2024.^[24] A month later, a report by the Washington Post found there were various issues with the Community Notes system, including the fact that the majority of notes are not displayed to users, often due to a lack of contributor consensus.^[25]

Speaking to Exchange Wire, Mattia Fosci, CEO of ID-less data platform Anonymised, raised concerns about the polarising effect of these loosened restrictions: “Negative emotions undermine brand trust, brand value and brand loyalty. As anxiety, anger and sadness occupy even more of our online experiences, boosted by AI-generated content and spread by bot armies, Meta’s social feeds will become a minefield for advertisers.”^[26] Conversely, however, Max Maharajh, Managing Director at digital strategy agency Be A Bear, thinks advertisers could benefit: “Conversations mean impressions, and impressions drive media value – something brands and advertisers constantly seek.”

What may be most important is that advertisers have the ability to dictate what kind of content their ads appear alongside. While Meta’s inventory filter lets advertisers control the sensitivity level of the organic content their ads are placed next to, advertisers will need to pay close attention to their settings from 24 February, as Meta has changed the default setting for in-content ads from ‘Moderate’ to ‘Expanded’ – the most permissive setting for ad placements. While the Moderate inventory setting excludes “highly sensitive content”, the Expanded placement permits ads to appear next to any content that is deemed monetisable by Facebook.^[27]

If advertisers had previously selected a specific sensitivity level, this won’t have changed – but those who had been content to use the default setting may want to revisit this. Overall, advertisers will likely need to pay much closer attention to where their ads appear on Meta’s platforms from now on.

Meta tests ads on Threads with select companies in the US and Japan

When Meta’s text-based Threads platform launched in July 2023, the company was adamant that monetisation options wouldn’t be arriving on the platform straight out of the gate. However, they have been hotly anticipated ever since, given Meta’s well-established ads network and its status as an advertising giant in social media.

It appears that the time has come for this to change, with the company announcing a “limited, early test” with a small number of brands in the US and Japan.^[28],[29]

Meta’s announcement detailed that Threads can be added to existing ad campaigns on Meta’s Ads Manager “by simply checking a box”. To begin with, the ads will be image ads that appear between posts on the Threads feed “for a small percentage of people”.^[30]

In spite of some negative comments under Mosseri’s announcement post, Meta is presenting Threads users as eager to connect with businesses and with advertising, pointing out that three in four Threads users follow at least one business.^[31] Nevertheless, the company will be aware of the need to tread delicately when introducing changes that could potentially drive away Threads users.

While Meta did hold off for a little while to allow Threads to become established before rolling out advertising, the platform is still young – a little over eighteen months old – and may not yet be so entrenched in users’ lives that they won’t be willing to relocate elsewhere if Threads begins to feel too commercial. Bluesky is waiting in the wings as a still ad-free competitor; although Bluesky’s CEO has not ruled out the possibility of eventually introducing advertising. We’ve also written in a previous edition of Social Quarterly about Threads’ difficulty with finding its own identity and platform culture when it comes to influencer content – further illustrating that its offering for users is a little tenuous.

Meta has established that Threads ads will be integrated into its inventory filter brand suitability control, first introduced in 2023 and already active on Facebook and Instagram Feed and Reels. Meta Monetisation Policies, which dictate the type of content that ads can appear next to, will also apply to ads on Threads. Though marketers may not see a fully fledged launch of Threads ads this year, for those already active on Meta’s platforms, the promise of being able to expand their campaigns to new audiences in the near future will no doubt be welcome.

Snapchat’s Plus subscription continues to pay dividends with subscribers doubling during 2024

Snapchat’s subscription for premium users, Snapchat+, is continuing to prove its worth as a source of ongoing revenue for the company.

In a letter to investors that accompanied Snap’s Q4 2024 earnings, the company revealed that Q4 revenue had increased 14% year-on-year to $1.56bn thanks to the continued development of Snapchat’s ad offering and the growth of Plus.^[32] The letter revealed that total subscribers to Snapchat+ doubled over the course of 2024 – from 7 million at the beginning of the year to 14 million at its close.

‘Other revenue’ for Snapchat, which is primarily subscription revenue from Plus, grew by 131% year-on-year and has an annualised run rate of “well over $500 million” – meaning it has grown to account for roughly 10% of Snapchat’s total revenue, which was $5.36bn in 2024. Investor Richard Greenfield of LightShed Partners commented on Snap’s earnings call that Snap is “the only mobile ad platform that’s built a robust subscription business in Snapchat+”.^[33]

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel noted that the personalisation elements of Plus are a particular appeal to users, as “People really like feeling like the app is made for them”. Going forward, Snap is focused on how the core activity of Snapping can be made “more differentiated with Snapchat+ features”. He also hinted at potential price increases for Snapchat+, currently priced at $39.99 for an annual subscription in the US (the equivalent of $2.50 per month), noting that “folks have indicated that they’re getting a lot of value from Snapchat+. So that may be another avenue in terms of growing ARPU over the longer term”.

Snapchat has demonstrated with Plus that it can keep an engaged core of users coming back to the platform who value it enough to pay for a subscription, which is an impressive feat and speaks to the work that Snapchat has put in to enhance the user experience for Snapchatters.

Daily active user (DAU) growth has continued at a steady rate as well, up 9% year-on-year to 453 million in Q4 2024.^[34] Growth has been much greater in the rest of the world (up 17%) than in North America (down 1%) or Europe (up 4%)^[35] – which shows that Snapchat is breaking into new markets, even if its core (and most lucrative) market of North America is ebbing. Snapchat’s challenge will therefore be to show advertisers how it can help them reach new audiences while maintaining a strong experience for its returning userbase.

Reddit expands paid products to include AMA promotion, with Sephora as early beta tester

During CES 2025, Reddit released new internally conducted research that positioned conversations as the “new influencer”, asserting that, “[With consumers] overwhelmed by online choice and AI-generated content … back-and-forth, bidirectional conversation is shaping a new landscape of decision making to bring back confidence to buying”.^[36]

At the same time, the company announced several new releases, including a new AMA (Ask Me Anything)-oriented ad format, AMA Ads. The AMA Ads product incorporates features that had already been added to organic AMAs, such as a dynamic ‘Remind Me’ button; along with trackable RSVPs and promotion of AMA sessions from within Reddit Ads Manager.^[37]

Sephora has been an early beta tester of the new format, holding an AMA with its in-house experts, the Sephora Beauty Directors, at the beginning of December. Sephora targeted “relevant interests, communities and keywords to find the audience that would be most interested” in asking questions about gifting, skincare routines, makeup advice and more, and reportedly drove more than 1,000 RSVPs during the critical holiday period thanks to its ad promotion.

Reddit has also added a new product to its suite of business tools: Reddit Pro Trends, a social listening tool for Reddit that enables businesses to track “virtually any” keyword or phrase, such as a brand name, product name, a category or a viral trend, via a conversation feed and a list of top communities. Reddit also offers more than 100,000 preset ‘smart’ keywords and keyphrases that are “contextually intelligent” and come with additional insights such as conversation volume and related keywords.

These offer a potential goldmine of customer insight for advertisers in showing which topics users are most engaged with and the questions they are asking, which will point towards opportunities to engage consumers and satisfy those queries. Reddit Pro Trends also feeds into Reddit’s AMA Ads by offering inspiration for potential AMA discussion topics.

Reddit is continuing its strategy of positioning itself as an antidote to an internet landscape saturated with AI by emphasising its USP of in-depth human advice. With that said, it also hasn’t held back from integrating generative AI into Reddit – such as with Reddit Answers, a new product that Reddit has been testing since December in which users can pose queries to an AI-powered conversational interface and receive answers summarised from Reddit.^[38]

In theory, there are gains in terms of speed and convenience as long as the information produced by the conversational interface is accurate and trustworthy. However, Reddit may need to be careful how much it directs its users away from the discussion forums that form the core experience of Reddit – the element that it is most keen to trumpet the benefits of to investors and advertisers.

4. AI advantage

Pinterest celebrates a milestone quarter with more than $1bn revenue, credits ‘core’ AI competency and ‘lower funnel focus’

Pinterest had a banner fourth quarter in 2024, bringing in more than $1bn in revenue for the first time and recording the highest ever number of monthly active users at 553 million. Announcing the results, CEO Bill Ready said that it showed the company’s strategy is “paying off”.

“People are coming to Pinterest more often, the platform has never been more actionable, and our lower funnel focus is driving results for users and advertisers,” he stated.

Pinterest might be seen as something of an ‘also ran’ alongside bigger titans like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, but it’s worth paying attention to what makes the platform distinctive. For one thing, much has been made of TikTok’s push into social commerce with TikTok Shop, but Pinterest has had shoppable Product Pins (originally called Buyable Pins) since 2015.^[39],[40] The company has also poured a considerable amount of time and development into visual search, leveraging its massive catalogue of images to help users find items similar to products they’re interested in and directing them towards ways to buy.

As Pinterest proclaims on its Ads page: “People use Pinterest to find new brands and ideas, so ads are actually useful.”^[41]

But what has Pinterest been doing most recently that has pushed the platform to, at least by its own standards, new heights? For one thing, Pinterest has invested considerably in AI, which Ready referred to as a “core competency” during Pinterest’s Q4 2024 earnings call.^[42] Pinterest uses first-party data signals from its users’ searching and curation actions to inform its ‘Taste Graph’, which powers Pinterest’s recommendations. It can be thought of as similar to TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, which is regarded as a major factor in TikTok’s huge popularity.

Ready told investors that Pinterest has grown the number of connections on its Taste Graph by 75% in the past two years, and that in 2024 specifically, the company “leveraged cutting-edge machine learning techniques” to “increase the context window on user actions such as saves and clicks”, thereby feeding more context into the algorithm – with only a marginal increase in spend, according to Ready.

Pinterest has historically been well-suited to capturing upper-funnel inspiration, but it has had more challenges in demonstrating to advertisers that this inspiration can meaningfully convert. Ready stressed that in the past two and a half years, Pinterest has been “building a suite of lower funnel tools that captures our users’ inherent commercial intent”, and that in 2024, Pinterest’s “impressive strides” against this goal led to a 19% increase in revenue in 2024 compared to 9% in 2023. Pinterest saw particular success with its recommendations and conversions during the crucial holiday shopping period, hence the landmark Q4.

Advertisers may be less inclined to take an interest in Pinterest due to its smaller audience, but it could be argued that if the goal is conversion rather than pure reach, Pinterest’s scale matters less than its ability to produce action. Pinterest is clearly doubling down on this approach, focused on demonstrating to brands that it can drive meaningful results through an engaged audience. The company has also made much of its young userbase, with Chief Strategy Officer Martha Welsh telling Adweek’s Speed of Culture podcast that “a lot of platforms age up and out; Pinterest is actually ageing down. … The engagement is coming from gen Z”.^[43]

Pinterest’s revenue uptick shows its positive strides in this direction, and it will be worth seeing if Pinterest can keep this momentum throughout 2025 – particularly in a social media landscape that is more varied and unpredictable than it has been in some time.

Mark Zuckerberg predicts that Meta AI will reach more than 1bn people in 2025 as Meta’s generative AI investment accelerates

In comments that opened Meta’s Q4 2024 earnings call with investors, Mark Zuckerberg said: “I expect this is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant.”^[44]

Zuckerberg pointed to the fact that Meta AI is “already used by more people than any other assistant” – specifying later that Meta AI has 700 million monthly active users. While this has no doubt been bolstered by the broad reach of Meta’s portfolio of social networks, it’s an impressive figure to arrive at in just 15 months since Meta AI was first announced in September 2023.^[45]

Advertiser usage of Meta’s generative AI creative tools has also grown, with CFO Susan Li reporting that more than 4 million advertisers are using at least one such tool, up from 1 million six months earlier.^[46] Last edition we reported that many advertisers were still hesitant to use Meta’s genAI tools, and while 4 million still represents a minority of advertisers, it appears that some are pushing past their hesitancy.

Meta has experienced recent backlash surrounding its generative AI ambitions, however, following an interview in which Connor Hayes, VP Product for Generative AI on Meta, stated that he expected  Meta’s character AIs to “over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do”.^[47] While the AI profiles uncovered by users – which included a ‘proud Black queer momma of 2’ and a ‘relationship coach’ named Carter – were largely already defunct, they appeared to users to paint a bleak picture of the future that Meta envisaged. As backlash mounted, Meta spokesperson Liz Sweeney was forced to clarify that “The accounts … were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment.”^[48] Meta ultimately pulled the profiles altogether.

Generative AI has been a major cost outlay for Meta, with the company projecting 2025 expenses in the range of $114–119bn;^[49] thus, the company is under pressure to show results. Zuckerberg announced that Meta’s Llama 4 model, which is “making great progress in training”, will be “natively multimodal” with “agentic capabilities”^[50] – in other words, able to complete tasks independently, a trend that has been increasingly talked about in technology and marketing circles.

Over time, the test for Meta AI will be whether it can keep users engaged with the assistant and show that they have truly embedded it into their daily lives – rather than occasionally experimenting with it as a novelty. If they do, some of the research and inspiration queries that used to take place in search may shift towards social media. For brands, this may then present a need to monitor their ‘share of model’^[51] – representation in large language models – and perhaps make use of paid opportunities to appear within conversations. Snapchat, for example, surfaces contextual ads within its My AI chat assistant.^[52]