Meta AI Will Now Compare Your Ads to Your Competitors

Meta shipped a batch of AI tools aimed at small businesses last week, and one piece of it is going to matter around here more than the rest.

You can now hook Meta AI up to your Facebook and Instagram accounts, your ad account, and your Google Workspace, meaning Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Once it's connected it's working off your actual numbers instead of handing you the same generic marketing advice everybody else gets. Reach, saves, shares, comments, profile visits, which ad sets are producing, which creative has gone stale. Then it'll write the whole thing up as a report or a spreadsheet or a slide deck if you want one, and you can tell it to run the same report every Monday without you asking again.

The part I keep chewing on is the benchmarking. You can ask it to line your organic performance up against other brands in your category, using their public posts and public engagement, and have it tell you where you're behind and what looks like it's causing the gap.

Owners have been doing this by hand forever

Every owner I've sat down with in Toledo has done some version of this already. You're on your phone Sunday night scrolling the competitor two towns over, wondering why their post about nothing pulled 300 comments and yours pulled four. You just never had a way to turn that into an answer. Now you can ask, and it'll actually go look.

Here's the part nobody at Meta is going to tell you. Public engagement doesn't say a thing about whether that competitor is making money. I've worked with shops sitting on a big following that couldn't fill next week's schedule, and quiet little pages booked out three weeks solid. Comments aren't revenue. So take the comparison as one input and go check it against what's actually on your calendar.

What it won't do

It won't run your ads. Meta AI drafts the recommendation and you make the call. That's on purpose, and honestly it's the right call, because a lot of what it flags is going to look right and still be wrong for your margins.

Meta's also got two other things with confusingly similar names, so don't get them mixed up. Meta Business Agent is the customer facing one that messages people and books appointments through WhatsApp and Messenger. Meta AI Business Assistant lives inside the ad tools. The thing I'm talking about here is plain Meta AI, on meta.ai and the mobile and desktop apps.

On money: Meta says you can get started free, and later on there'll be a paid tier called Meta One. They haven't published pricing or said where the free limits stop. So try it, but don't rebuild your Monday around it until you know what it costs.

The Google Workspace piece

I'd connect Facebook, Instagram, and the ad account, and leave Gmail alone until you've got a specific reason to turn it on. Your ad data is marketing data. Your inbox is everything else, customer complaints, employee stuff, whatever your accountant sent you in April. There's no rule saying you have to connect all of it at once, and you'll get most of the value off the first three.

How I'd use it this week

Ask it one narrow question. Not "how's my marketing doing." Something like: which five posts in the last 90 days brought me the most profile visits, and what did they have in common? Then go pull the numbers yourself and see if the answer holds up before you change anything about how you post.

That last step is the one everybody skips. AI is good at spotting a pattern and confident about patterns that aren't really there, and it has no idea that your March numbers were weird because you were closed for a week.

The bigger shift is worth sitting with for a second. The analysis part of marketing used to be the thing a small shop couldn't buy. You either hired somebody or you guessed. Now the analysis is basically free and shows up in seconds. What's still expensive is knowing which of those recommendations to throw out, and that's judgment about your own business that no tool is going to have.