Stop Paying For Leaked Codes

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Welcome to today's edition, bringing the latest growth stories fresh to your inbox.

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In Partnership with AirOps

What 400+ Sites Reveal About Surviving Google's AI Overviews

Everyone's bracing for Google Zero. Cyrus Shepard studied 400+ sites and found the ones still growing share five specific traits.

Zero-click search is real. The "SEO is dead" takes are not the full story.

Cyrus mapped what's actually driving organic growth right now, plus the 17 content types most likely to survive Google Zero. 

On July 23rd, AirOps is hosting Cyrus for a practical session on what every content team is trying to decide: what to keep investing in, what to rethink, and where AI actually helps.

You'll walk away with:

• The five traits behind sites still growing in Google
• Which content formats still earn their keep, and which are getting harder to justify
• How to turn proprietary assets you already own into content
• Where AI fits now: what to stop producing faster, what to build instead

This webinar is built for everyone, from SEO and content leaders to content directors and growth teams.

Can't make it live? Register anyway and get the recording in your inbox within 24 hours.

📊 Fix What Your Affiliate Dashboard Is Hiding

Most affiliate programs are not broken, the visibility into them is. Last-click attribution rewards whichever channel closed the sale and ignores the creator who actually built the interest. That gap quietly kills good affiliate programs before anyone diagnoses why.

Three Layers to Rebuild for a Creator Led Affiliate Program:

1️⃣ Fix Attribution
Multi-touch attribution credits every step of the journey, not just the final click. Post-purchase surveys catch the influence that never touches a link at all, like a DM, a podcast mention, or a friend's recommendation. Together these show which creators are actually driving demand.

2️⃣ Close the Leak
Shared discount codes end up on coupon sites and aggregators within days, and brands end up paying commissions to coupon hunters instead of the creators who earned them. One-use codes that expire after a single sale remove the leak entirely, and a continuous fraud engine flags self-referrals and suspicious patterns before payouts go out.

3️⃣ Build Retention Into the Product
Affiliates do not quit from laziness, they quit because nothing pulls them back. Real-time earnings, tiered milestones, and shareable personalized landing pages give affiliates a reason to keep posting instead of vanishing after one seed post.

4️⃣ Invite the Right People In
Auto-converting every customer into an affiliate bloats the roster with people who never post. Inviting only high-LTV, already-loyal customers creates a smaller program with far higher sales per affiliate.

The Takeaway
An affiliate program does not fail because creators do not work, it fails because the dashboard cannot see the truth, the codes leak margin, and nobody built a reason for affiliates to stay. Fix attribution, close the leak, and build the feedback loop, and the same channel that looked flat starts compounding.

🤖 Try Hy3, a Free Open Source Coding Agent

If you are experimenting with AI agents for automating computer tasks, Hy3 from Tencent Hunyuan is worth a look. It is currently free to run, more capable than most other open models, and reportedly on par with Opus 4.8 on several use cases, all while being about half the size of GLM-5.2, which held the top spot among open coding and agentic models until now. Paired with an agent framework like Hermes Agent, it becomes a genuinely useful way to automate tasks on your own machine.

Steps to Run Hy3 for Free:

1️⃣ Create an OpenRouter Account
Sign up on OpenRouter, the platform hosting the free Hy3 endpoint. This is the only account you need to get started.

2️⃣ Generate an API Key
Inside your OpenRouter dashboard, generate a new API key. This key is what connects your agent tools to the model.

3️⃣ Connect Your Agent Framework
Take the API key and plug it into an agent tool such as Hermes Agent or OpenCode. Point the endpoint to the free Hy3 model on OpenRouter.

4️⃣ Start Automating Tasks
Once connected, Hy3 is ready to handle coding and agentic workflows on your computer, with no cost involved at the time of writing.

The Takeaway
Hy3 is a strong signal that open source models are closing the gap with frontier closed models fast, and doing it at zero cost. If you have been holding off on trying agentic automation because of pricing, this removes that barrier entirely. Credit to Tencent Hunyuan for releasing it openly. Worth testing this week if agent based automation is on your radar.

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Have a great day, and we'll be back again with more such content 😍