This Week in M&A Issue #216

Temu has launched a new Shopify app that lets U.S.-based merchants sell directly on the Temu marketplace, opening up another sales channel for eCommerce brands looking to reach a massive, value-driven audience. With this integration, Shopify sellers can publish products, manage inventory, and handle fulfillment from just one dashboard.

The new app connects merchants to Temu’s Local Seller Program, which allows sellers to fulfill orders within their own regions. From an operational standpoint, the integration focuses on simplicity and scale. Products can be synced with a single click, inventory updates in real time to help prevent overselling, and orders and shipping are coordinated automatically to simplify fulfillment.

A single catalog sync can make products available across more than 30 Temu markets worldwide, including the U.S., Canada, the UK, Germany, Spain, and Australia. Merchants can list products across more than 600 categories, from live plants and specialty foods to books, collectibles, and more.

The experience will feel familiar to anyone who has connected Shopify to channels like TikTok Shop or Facebook, with no extra infrastructure required. The app is available now in the Shopify App Store to U.S.-based merchants only.

Temu currently ranks number 14 among the world’s largest online marketplaces by third-party GMV, and Shopify’s scale makes the partnership especially noteworthy.

For ecommerce business owners, the Shopify integration presents a relatively low-risk way to test a high-traffic marketplace that is actively evolving its model to better serve both sellers and consumers.

Amazon Sellers Gain Faster Access to Working Capital with Slope

Search has evolved. Since AI burst onto the scene, it’s not just about SEO anymore. It’s important for online business owners to understand the fundamentals of GEO and AEO, too.

But what exactly are GEO and AEO?

To make sense of these terms, here’s a simple breakdown from Jason Moccia, co-founder of TalentLoft.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization
SEO focuses on ranking in Google search results using keywords, backlinks, and on-page optimization. It drives traffic and visibility but can be crowded and heavily dependent on algorithms.

AEO – Answer Engine Optimization
AEO shifts the focus from clicks to clarity. It is designed to provide direct answers for voice search and featured snippets. Structured content like FAQs, concise responses, and schema markup helps your brand be heard, not just found.

GEO – Generative Engine Optimization
GEO is the newest layer of search strategy, aimed at AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. This approach emphasizes context, authority, and trust signals so AI can reference or summarize your content accurately. GEO is about becoming the source AI relies on when answering user questions.

How to Apply These Strategies
Think of SEO as getting found, AEO as getting heard, and GEO as being referenced.
Start by identifying the questions your audience is asking. Then, create content like blog posts, FAQs, or guides that answer those questions clearly and with supporting information. Avoid focusing solely on promoting your brand.

Thinking about buying your first online business, but not sure where to start?

In this week’s podcast episode, we’re joined by Matt Raad, an experienced digital business buyer and coach who has helped countless first-time buyers avoid costly mistakes and approach acquisitions with clarity.

We dive deep into what really matters during due diligence, including the red flags new buyers often miss.

Matt also shares which types of online businesses are best suited for beginners and why simple, proven models often outperform more complex opportunities.

You’ll also learn about beginner-friendly deal structures that can help reduce risk and protect your capital, plus practical post-acquisition growth strategies for smaller sites that don’t require massive teams or big budgets.

If you’re exploring business acquisitions or refining your buying strategy, this episode is packed with actionable insights you can apply immediately.

Cloudflare’s 2025 Year in Review shows Googlebot continues to dominate web crawling as AI bots surge in activity. The report highlights major trends in crawling, AI traffic, and search referrals that every website publisher should know.

Googlebot Leads the Pack
Googlebot once again outpaced all other crawlers, handling more than 25% of Verified Bot traffic on Cloudflare’s network. It generated 4.5% of all HTML requests, slightly more than all other AI bots combined at 4.2%. Googlebot’s dual role of crawling for search indexing and AI training makes it uniquely influential. Publishers face a challenge: blocking Googlebot’s AI training risks search visibility, leaving few options to restrict it selectively.

AI Crawlers Surge
AI-driven crawling saw explosive growth in 2025, particularly “user action” crawling, which simulates human behavior. This type of crawling increased more than 15 times year-over-year. Googlebot’s crawl volume still dwarfed other AI crawlers, including OpenAI’s GPTBot, Anthropic, and Meta. AI crawlers were the most frequently fully blocked bots in robots.txt files, while traditional search bots often faced only partial restrictions.

Crawl-to-Refer Ratios Reveal Traffic Gaps
Cloudflare measured how often bots crawl pages compared to how often they send users back. Anthropic showed the highest ratios, ranging from 25,000:1 to 100,000:1 after May, indicating heavy crawling with minimal traffic referrals. OpenAI spiked to about 3,700:1, while Perplexity remained below 400:1 most of the year. In contrast, search platforms had much lower ratios. Google ranged from 3:1 to 30:1, Microsoft hovered around 50:1 to 70:1, and DuckDuckGo stayed below 1.5:1 for most of the year.

Search Referral Traffic Remains Concentrated
Traditional search remained highly concentrated. Google accounted for nearly 90% of search engine referrals, followed by Bing at 3.1%, Yandex at 2.0%, Baidu at 1.4%, and DuckDuckGo at 1.2%. Minor shifts occurred, but Google’s dominance was largely unchanged throughout the year.

Takeaway for Publishers
AI crawling is growing rapidly, but most platforms send little traffic back. Googlebot remains essential for search visibility, making it difficult for sites to block AI crawling without sacrificing reach. Monitoring crawl activity and managing robots.txt carefully has become more critical than ever for website owners navigating the evolving AI and search landscape.

You can read the full Cloudflare report here.