Granola has 1,889 Meta ads live. Almost all of them say one of two sentences.
That is the whole trick. 1,525 of Granola's 1,672 Meta ads carry one of two body copies. One headline sits on 1,531 of them. Every one of them sends you to the same page. And in August, Granola deleted its competitor from its ads entirely.
Ramp's October 2026 AI category data has Granola as the most-purchased AI meeting notetaker, bought by 64% of the companies that buy one. This is what the ad account of a category winner looks like.
Granola ads: key findings
- 1,889 Meta ads live as of 13 October 2026, up from 1,584 in mid-September
- 2 body copies carry 1,525 of 1,672 ads (91%). 1 headline carries 1,531
- Since 1 August, zero new ads say "without bringing along a bot". 904 say "back-to-back days"
- 335 of the live ads run from creator pages, more than the 299 on Granola's own page
- 62% of October launches are creator ads, up from under 10% in the spring
- Most creator pages are tiny. Josh unfiltered has 81 page likes and runs 70 Granola ads
- Four creator programs: flat-fee Meta partnership ads, YouTube sponsorships, a $20-per-meeting affiliate program and a company-only referral
- 1,628 of 1,672 ads point at the plain homepage, with no UTM parameters
- No signup form anywhere. The only call to action is Download for free
- The download page carries an OpenAI ads pixel and a Podscribe podcast pixel next to Meta, LinkedIn, Bing and Google
How Granola pays creators
Granola runs four creator programs. Each one pays differently. Only one publishes its rates.
| Program | Who | What they get | How it is tracked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta partnership ads | 26 small creators, 5 to 6 new a month | A fee for the video and the right to run it. No per-signup pay is possible | Nothing in the link. Granola's page is attached to all 595 ads |
| YouTube sponsorships | 30 channels, 53 videos, mostly 250K to 1M subscribers in tech and finance | Per video. Tracker estimates run from about $1.3K to $21K a video | "Try Granola with one month free" links |
| Affiliate program | Creators, newsletter writers, podcasters, coaches | $20 per referred user who completes a real meeting. The new user gets the first paid month free | Personal short links on go.granola.ai |
| In-app referral | Users | The friend gets 2 months of Business. Company email only, and only if their company has no Granola workspace | Referral link in settings |
The Meta creators can't be on commission
All 595 creator ads send the click to the plain granola.ai homepage. No affiliate link. No UTM. No code.
So Granola has no way to tie a signup to Josh or to Yassi. Nobody on this roster can be paid per user. They get paid for the video and for lending their name to the ad, and Granola pays for the media itself.
The affiliate program is a separate door. It pays per meeting, not per signup, which filters out installs that never get used.
The roster runs like a draft
- Monthly cohorts. 4 creators joined in May, 5 in July, 5 in August, 6 in September.
- Fast cuts. 6 of the 26 are already off the account. George Vlasyev, MakerThrive and lukasmargerie were gone within 2 to 6 weeks.
- Few videos, many ads. The median creator video runs as about 9 separate ads. Josh unfiltered delivered 3 videos. They run as 70 ads.
- Pages built for the ads. 11 creators run from newly created Facebook pages, most with under 100 likes.
Captions does it the other way. 56 creators, one video each, dropped in batches of 15 to 18 on a single day. Granola keeps a small roster and keeps cutting it.
Who runs it
Granola's influencer marketing lead previously ran the creator and affiliate programs at ElevenLabs and SafetyWing. ElevenLabs runs the same split: a paid creator roster on top, an affiliate layer underneath.
Granola has a creator profile on Grin, the influencer platform, but no open program there. Its December 2025 growth marketing job lists paid social, search, affiliates and creators as one remit. No creator has said publicly what Granola pays.
Part 1: Two sentences
1,672 ads, 14 bodies, 3 headlines
Viktor runs 263 different body copies. Wispr Flow runs 494 headlines. Granola runs this:
| Body copy | Ads |
|---|---|
| "An AI notepad for back-to-back days. Walk in prepared, stay in the conversation, and leave with everything that mattered." | 904 |
| "Great notes from your meetings, without bringing along a bot. Granola's an AI notepad that doesn't join your meetings." | 621 |
| 12 other bodies combined | 93 |
| No body | 54 |
The headline is "The AI notepad for meetings" on 1,531 ads. "The AI notepad for meetings, no bots" is on 95, all older.
The words never move. The pictures move. 637 distinct creative groups sit behind those 1,672 ads, and 468 new ads shipped in the last 30 days. That's 15 a day. The biggest week was the one starting 5 October: 167 launches.
August: the bot left the ads
For ten months the pitch was a negation. Granola is the notetaker that doesn't send a bot into your call. That line was aimed straight at Otter, Fireflies and every tool that joins your Zoom as a participant.
Then on 1 August it stopped. Not one new ad has used it since.
| Launch month | "without a bot" | "back-to-back days" | Other |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 2026 | 115 | 0 | 12 |
| May 2026 | 161 | 0 | 8 |
| July 2026 | 151 | 0 | 10 |
| August 2026 | 0 | 395 | 29 |
| September 2026 | 0 | 268 | 22 |
| October 2026 (to the 13th) | 0 | 241 | 11 |
93% of the live ads now say "back-to-back days".
The old line was about them. The new line is about you. Your calendar, your Tuesday, the five calls in a row. A challenger names the incumbent. A winner stops mentioning anyone.
The timing is not random. The rebrand landed in July: a new script typeface built from co-founder Sam Stephenson's handwriting, an earthy green, and the company's first billboards. "Being present is a power move" on Market Street in San Francisco. "Granola is not for breakfast" in New York and London. The Meta page got renamed from "Granola ai" to "Granola - AI notepad" in late August. Google search ads now read "Be present, get more done." and "Get the doing done".
Same month, launch volume went from 161 in July to 424 in August. They changed the sentence and turned the volume up at the same time.
Part 2: Other people's faces
The creators now outnumber the brand
Here is the part I didn't expect. More of Granola's live ads run from other people's pages than from its own.
| Launch month | Ads launched | From creator pages | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 2026 | 127 | 12 | 9% |
| May 2026 | 169 | 18 | 11% |
| July 2026 | 161 | 69 | 43% |
| August 2026 | 424 | 182 | 43% |
| September 2026 | 290 | 138 | 48% |
| October 2026 (to the 13th) | 252 | 155 | 62% |
26 creator pages. 595 ads in total. 335 of them live right now, against 299 on Granola's own page.
They rent the face, not the audience
Look at who these creators are.
| Creator page | Granola ads | Live | Page likes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Josh unfiltered | 70 | 60 | 81 |
| The Lavender Fix Podcast | 61 | 38 | 756 |
| Yassi X | 43 | 28 | 16 |
| audreycaprianni | 39 | 29 | 692 |
| Girl Meets Code | 34 | 30 | 95 |
| Kellycareermode | 32 | 23 | 3,723 |
| Jackie's Prof Page | 30 | 19 | 24 |
| Will Paterson | 14 | 14 | 10,612 |
Most of these Facebook pages are new and nearly empty. 16 likes. 24 likes. 81 likes. Nobody is buying their audience. There isn't one.
What Granola buys is a face, a name at the top of the ad, and a person talking to camera in their own kitchen. Then it puts its own money behind it.
And it keeps its own words. 444 of the 595 creator ads carry Granola's "back-to-back days" sentence as the caption. The creator talks. Granola writes the text under the video.
Viktor does personas in the copy: one for agencies, one for media buyers, one for SMBs. Granola does personas in the casting. A careers coach selling it as "corporate self-defense". A professor's page with a mom using it at her son's school orientation. Two women-in-engineering pages. A podcast. A designer. A saleswoman cold calling in front of the Statue of Liberty. Same sentence underneath every one.
The creators carry the fight
The brand dropped the competitor. The creators didn't.
Mpaige13's top video opens on "Do Not Buy a Physical AI Meeting Device". It runs on 23 ads. The enemy moved from bots in your call to recorders on your desk, and it's the creator who says it out loud, not Granola.
The brand page has exactly one comparison video: a whiteboard with Granola on the left and "notetakers" on the right. It names no one.
The brand line, in a creator's mouth
Josh's script doesn't say "save time". It says "losing the thread". Granola's rebrand statics say "Follow the thread." That's not a coincidence. The campaign line is written into the creator brief.
What the video looks like
| Measure | Live Granola video files |
|---|---|
| Vertical 9:16 | 54% |
| 4:5 | 37% |
| Median length | 27 seconds |
| Over 30 seconds | 41% |
| Under 15 seconds | 9% |
| Text on screen at 0.3 seconds | 90% |
| Median hard cuts per file | 4 |
Long and talky. The caption sits mid-frame in 102 of 180 files, not at the top like a TikTok title card. These read like someone telling you about a tool they use, because that's what they are.
LinkedIn: they rent the words too
On LinkedIn it goes one step further. 340 of Granola's 543 LinkedIn ads run as posts from 33 named people, and 1 has no poster. Founders, a customer success lead, a talent acquisition manager, an HR lead, sales leaders, a product designer, a VC.
And here they write their own copy. "I broke up with my AI notetaker." "I stopped taking notes in meetings. This 20x'd my output." "My best thinking happens in coffee meetings. My worst note-taking happens after. (Three kids.)" "If you're in a Customer Success role use Granola. I've had 8 calls today with 3 more to go."
Meta: Granola's words, someone else's face. LinkedIn: someone else's words and face. Granola's own LinkedIn page runs the other 202, mostly a "Try for free" single image with the back-to-back line.
The statics are the brand campaign
The static ads are where the agency work lives. "Follow the thread." A watch on a wrist: "Start the note. Follow the thread." "Stay present wherever the deal happens." And one that tells you where this company is going: a pixel-art mouth eating the Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini logos, under "Feed your AI agents. Six months, in one go." It's an ad for Granola's MCP. Your meeting history as context for every other AI tool you use.
Part 3: One page, one button
1,628 ads, one URL
1,628 of 1,672 ads go to granola.ai. The homepage. No landing pages per persona, no UTM parameters, no quiz. A handful go to granola.so and granolai.ai, which both redirect to the same place, and 9 go to the App Store.
The Google ads look like they have landing pages. Display paths like /note/taker, /notepad and /meeting/minutes. They're display URLs only. The click lands on the homepage too.
The homepage H1 is "The AI notepad for back-to-back meetings". Under it: "Notes, actions and memory. Without a meeting bot." So the bot line didn't die. It moved off the ad and onto the page, where only people who already clicked read it.
No form. A download.
Every button says "Download for free". There is no email field anywhere on the site. You get a .dmg, an .exe or the App Store, and the account gets created inside the app.
That's why there's no "no credit card required" line anywhere. There's nothing to ask a card for. The page says "Unlimited meeting notes for free" and that's the whole offer.
The download page is the conversion page. It's noindex, and it's where every pixel fires. The download link carries an installer experiment flag and an Amplitude ID, so the click is stitched to the person inside the app. Attribution lives in the product, not in the URL. That's how you get away with one landing page and zero UTMs.
| Plan | Price |
|---|---|
| Basic | $0 |
| Business | $14 per user per month |
| Enterprise | $35 per user per month |
Two growth loops behind the ads
The referral gives a new user two months of Business. But only with a company email, and only if their company doesn't already have a Granola workspace. It's a land-and-expand loop. Every referral is a new company, never a second seat.
The affiliate program pays $20 per referred user who completes a real meeting, and the new user gets their first paid month free. It recruits creators, newsletter writers, podcasters and coaches. Not signups. Meetings.
Seven pixels on the download page
Meta, LinkedIn Insight, Microsoft UET, Google Ads, Amplitude with session replay, and Podscribe, which is podcast-ad attribution. Plus one more: the OpenAI ads pixel. Granola is set up to measure ChatGPT ads.
Google: the brand line, on repeat
312 Google ads. 186 of them are video. The search copy is pure brand: "Get the doing done" on 138 variations, "Notes that actually go somewhere." on 58, "Good notes make good decisions" on 48, "Be present, get more done." on 45. They run in the US, the UK and across Europe.
No price. No comparison. No "best AI note taker" bidding war in the copy. The same voice as the billboards.
Wispr Flow is coming
Wispr Flow, bought by 94% of dictation buyers on Ramp, now runs 210 ads to its own Notetaker. 45 launched in August. 157 in September.
In October it started naming Granola. "Less Granola. More Flow." 48 of its 182 LinkedIn ads name Granola, and the offer covers the rest of your Granola subscription plus 2 bonus months.
Three weeks earlier, none of them said the name.
Granola's ads mention Wispr zero times.
What actually makes this work
Granola didn't grow on ads. Its founders say so: word of mouth through VCs and founders, around 70% weekly retention. $125M Series C at $1.5B in March. The ads came after the product had already won.
So the account isn't built to convert strangers with clever funnels. It's built to make one sentence feel like it's everywhere, said by people who look like you, in a voice the company controls.
Two sentences. One page. Other people's faces. 1,889 ads.
Most teams do the opposite. They test 200 messages through one brand page. Granola tests 26 faces through one message.
Break down your own market
Every Granola ad is on the Granola ads page. Compare it with Viktor's 263 bodies, Wispr Flow's creator machine, Perplexity, ElevenLabs and Claude, the other winners on Ramp's list. The rest are in the ads library. If you want the same read on your own competitors, Sprites does it for any advertiser.