DTC1002: AI PDP Readiness, Effective CGC Briefs, and Moltbook Search Surge

Good morning,

Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:

• ✅ Make Your Site More AI-Friendly With These Tips
• 📚 Writing Effective Creator Generated Content Briefs
• 🤖 Searches Are Exploding For This AI Social Media Platform

You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: Genox USA, Drift Peptides, and UPPAbaby. 👋

‍🚨 Even If You’re Confident About Sales Tax, It’s Worth Verifying

In the early days of growing your brand, sales tax feels straightforward.
A few filings. One state. All good.

📈 As you scale, things get more complex, but many founders assume they’re still covered.

Your ecommerce platform may calculate and collect the tax.
What’s easy to miss is everything that needs to happen before and after that.

📊 Anrok analyzed thousands of growing brands and created a simple, free resource that takes the stress out of sales tax:

• ✔️ Confirm Shopify, WooCommerce and other platforms actually do
• ✔️ Verify what’s still on you as a merchant
• ✔️ Sanity-check when automation makes sense

Even if you’re sure your setup is solid, this guide gives you clarity—and peace of mind.

➡️ Bookmark it for whenever you need to double-check with confidence, or pass it along to your finance or ops teams as an easy resource to help stay aligned as your business grows.

‍✅ Tips To Make Your Site More AI Friendly  

AI is already shaping how consumers discover and choose products.

If your site isn’t AI-readable, you’re invisible in more places than you think.

AI tools don’t “browse” like humans. They scrape, summarize, and recommend based on clarity, structure, and trust signals.

That’s why the Pilothouse team recommends treating AI readiness like a CRO checklist.

If AI can’t understand your site, it won’t recommend your product.

Use the checklist below to make your site easy for AI tools to crawl and easy for customers to convert.

1️⃣ Product Information & Differentiation

Make sure your site includes:

• Clear product names and categories
• Explicit sections for:
  • Who this product is for
  • Who it’s not for
• Key USPs and benefits listed upfront
• Simple comparisons to alternatives or competitors
• Use cases written in plain language (never implied)

Make it obvious what you sell and why it’s different.

2️⃣ Readability and Speed

Structure matters more than clever copy.

• Clear, descriptive section headers
• Bullet points over long paragraphs
• No hidden or gated core information
• Consistent naming across PDPs, collections, and packaging

3️⃣ Reviews and Social Proof

Real feedback builds trust with buyers and algorithms.

• Reviews on PDPs and across the site
• Mixed sentiment (not just 5-star reviews)
• Reviews that explain real usage and outcomes
• Avoid vague, or paid testimonials

4️⃣ Trust and Authority

Remove friction before it becomes a question.

• FAQs on PDPs to handle objections
• Ingredient or material breakdowns
• Clear shipping, returns, and guarantees
• A simple, believable brand story

Trust signals help AI validate your brand.

The takeaway?

The brands that win won’t chase hacks, they’ll optimize for clarity, trust, and structure.

So go through this checklist and update what’s missing.

Make your site the product AI recommends when customers are researching.

‍🎧 How To Write Creator Briefs That Actually Perform

Creator Generated Content isn’t plug-and-play anymore.

In this episode, Aves breaks down how to actually write effective CGC briefs, why most brands misuse creators, and how bad briefing decisions quietly tank performance on Meta.

This is a tactical breakdown based on real audits, real spend, and real mistakes Aves sees every week across DTC ad accounts.

What we cover:

• Why CGC is the wrong tool for testing net-new concepts
• How intention and funnel placement should shape every brief
• The difference between over-scripting and under-briefing creators
• A clearer way to translate product benefits into creator language
• Why these types of hooks are taking off on Meta right now
• How in-house creator systems unlock faster learning and lower risk

▶️ Watch the full episode on YouTube.

🎧 Or listen here on Spotify.

Searches for ‘Moltbook’ have been climbing rapidly since it launched at the end of January.

What is this?

Moltbook is a new social media network for AI, founded by tech entrepreneur Matt Schlicht.

It has a similar layout to Reddit, but it uses agentic AI to perform tasks on a user’s behalf.

The website claims to already have over 1.5 million AI agent users, 110,000 posts, and 500,000 comments.

‍🖼️ Having trouble scaling creative output? LVMH, Estée Lauder, Mercedes, and L’Oréal trust Darbyon to create static and video assets for paid ads, social content, and website assets. Use DTC26 and enjoy a FREE trial. *

‍📥 Got a B2B Biz?

Join dozens of B2B companies finding demand-gen success through our niche community of 150k brand leaders and founders this year. Talk to our team to learn more.

Have you heard our latest podcasts?

• 🔮 TWBERP 71: Predict Your 2026 Email Revenue
• 🪥 How Suri Sold 5,000 Toothbrushes With In a Week
• ⚡ AKNF 581: Meta Ads Aren’t About Targeting Anymore
• 🛍️ Ad-venturous 39: Bundles Aren’t Discounts. They’re Strategy
• 🔍 TWBERP 70: Diagnose A Drop in Email Revenue
• 💀 How Fan Bi Revives Dead Brands with 30 Days Cash Left

Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.

Please note that items in this newsletter marked with * contain sponsored content.