Kres Labs Journal
Growth Marketing Insights
Frameworks, benchmarks, and operational tactics from building growth systems for scaling businesses. Written for founders, marketing leaders, and operators who care about unit economics.
Agentic Commerce Readiness: What Changes When an AI Agent Builds the Shortlist
Assistants now retrieve, compare, and eliminate options before a buyer sees a result. The five-layer Agent Readiness Score, where ACP and AP2 actually fit, and the sequencing error that has most teams building the last layer first.
Read the guide →The Search Console Generative AI Report: Measuring Visibility Without Clicks
Google now separates AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions into their own Search Console report — with no clicks, no CTR, and no queries. Why the two reports do not reconcile, the four-source Visibility Ledger, and the two metrics impression-only data actually supports.
Read the guide →Context Engineering for Marketing Teams
Prompt engineering has a ceiling and most marketing teams have already hit it. The Context Layer Stack, the Context Debt Ratio formula for measuring whether your AI workflow actually saves time, and why example-led context beats a twenty-page brand book.
Read the guide →Generative Ad Creative Testing: How to Run Paid Media When the Platform Builds the Variants
Meta and Google now generate ad creative inside the ad account — but the arithmetic of statistical significance did not change. The concept-vs-execution split, the creative read threshold formula, and why platform-reported winners are not experiments.
Read the guide →AI Ad Creative: What to Control When Meta and Google Automate the Rest
Ad platforms now generate the creative, choose the audience, and set the bid. The Creative Control Stack — what to hand over, what to gate — and why the Variant Ceiling means shipping more AI-generated ads usually makes performance worse.
Read the guide →August 2026 Ranking Volatility: How to Tell a Real Algorithm Hit From a Reporting Artefact
Trackers spiked August 1–3 but Google has not confirmed an update. Four diagnostic checks to run before making a single change — isolate Discover, verify GA4, spot the seasonality, and check the Search Status Dashboard.
Read the guide →AI Crawler Access: Which Bots to Allow, Block, or Charge
On 15 September 2026 a large slice of the web flips to permission-by-default for AI crawlers. The Crawler Exchange Rate — why training, retrieval, and agent bots deserve opposite policies — the Google-Extended trap, and a five-step access audit.
Read the guide →AI Agents for B2B Marketing: Workflows, Stack, and ROI
AI marketing agents plan, execute, and optimise workflows — not just draft. What separates an agent from automation, the workflows worth handing over first, a four-layer deployment stack, and the honest reason most agent projects fail to produce ROI.
Read the guide →Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): How B2B Brands Get Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews
GEO earns citations inside AI answers, not rankings on a results page. The five-lever GEO Stack, the Princeton research behind it, directional benchmarks, and a 90-day sequence to earn AI citations.
Read the guide →AI Search Attribution: Measuring Traffic From ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini
Most AI-assistant traffic is logged as "Direct". The four-layer attribution stack — citation monitoring, log detection, referrer grouping, and self-reported capture — that makes the channel reportable.
Read the guide →CAC Benchmarks for SaaS in 2026
Definitive 2026 CAC reference — segmented by ACV tier, channel, and region. Payback benchmarks, historical trend data, and levers that reliably move CAC.
Read the guide →How to Calculate LTV:CAC Ratio
The complete 2026 guide to unit economics — formulas, industry benchmarks, worked examples, and the levers that actually move the number.
Read the guide →More Cornerstone Guides Coming Soon
We publish long-form operational guides — not thought-leadership fluff. Next up: CAC benchmarks for SaaS, marketing automation vs CRM, and how to structure a growth marketing pod.
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