Counting in the dark: measuring marketing channels with platforms wedged in the middle
type: NewsArticle
description: Marketing professionals can no longer reliably measure the performance of email and push notification campaigns because Apple, Google, and other platform intermediaries actively edit, summarize, or suppress messages without providing any data on their actions. The platforms have created a measurement gap that senders cannot close, as there is no API to determine whether a push notification appeared on a lock screen, an email landed in a specific inbox tab, or a human or AI assistant opened the message. This lack of transparency undermines marketers' ability to attribute results and optimize campaigns, leaving them unable to answer basic questions about their channel performance.
date published: 2026-06-11T09:05:06+00:00
date modified: 2026-06-11T18:35:14+00:00
language: en
is accessible for free: true
article body: Your push CTR is down 15% quarter on quarter on iPhones. Your email open rate has been corrupted by Apple Mail Privacy Protection for four years, your click rate is drifting downward as image prefetching spreads to more clients, and you can't tell whether the Gemini summary that Gmail now generates is preserving your subject line or rewriting it into something that doesn't drive a click. The trade press tells you Apple Intelligence is eating your push notifications. Your CSM at Braze sends you a deck about it. A deliverability vendor sends you a different deck about Gmail's AI Inbox view. Your VP of Growth wants to know what you're doing about both. The honest answer is that you can't tell whether any of these platforms are doing anything to you in particular. You don't know whether your push notifications appeared on lock screens or got bundled into a summary. You don't know whether your emails landed in the Primary tab, the Promotions tab, the Focused inbox, or the "Other" inbox. You don't know whether the user opened your message or whether their AI assistant did, and you don't know whether what either of them read was your copy or a model's reread of your copy. There is no API to find out, and the trajectory says there won't be. That's the deeper problem. The platforms have positioned themselves between you and your audience, and they don't have to tell you what they're doing. They don't. Sometimes for genuine privacy reasons. Sometimes because it makes the product better for the user. Sometimes because exposing the action of the intermediation undermines the framing that the user is being protected from senders. The reasons differ across channels and across vendors. The result is the same: a measurement gap you cannot close from the sender side. I've spent three pieces getting here. The first was about [what the four mailbox providers do to your email](https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/what-google-yahoo-microsoft-and-apple-are-doing-your-email): the inb…
publisher: Web Pulse
keywords: artificial-intelligence, ai-products, ai-tools, ai-agents, generative-ai
mentions: Apple
mentions: Braze
mentions: Gmail
mentions: Apple Mail Privacy Protection
mentions: Gemini
mentions: Apple Intelligence
citation: CreativeWork