AD

Want to get the most out of ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a superpower if you know how to use it correctly.

Discover how HubSpot's guide to AI can elevate both your productivity and creativity to get more things done.

Learn to automate tasks, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation with the power of AI.

Download the free guide

SEO + GEO

Google Search Central Publishes Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features

Google Search Central explains that optimizing for generative AI features remains rooted in core SEO best practices, emphasizing unique, helpful content and technical soundness over AI-specific hacks. The guide says AI Overviews and AI Mode rely on retrieval-augmented generation and query fan-out, which means visibility still depends on whether Google can crawl, index, understand, and trust the source material.

• Create non-commodity content with first-hand experience, original perspective, specific evidence, and useful media instead of generic answers that any model could produce.

• Keep technical SEO clean: indexable pages, crawlable content, JavaScript that Google can process, reduced duplication, strong page experience, and clear content structure for humans.

• Use Merchant Center, Google Business Profiles, product data, and local business details where relevant so AI responses can pull from reliable entity and commerce information.

• Ignore fake GEO shortcuts for Google Search, including llms.txt, AI-only rewrites, artificial mentions, special AI markup, and forced content chunking.

• Prepare for agentic experiences by making pages usable for browser agents that inspect rendered pages, DOM structure, screenshots, and accessibility trees.

My Take: This aligns with what we see in practice. The main thing is that it’s just in print now. They also don’t want to call anything AEO or GEO. It’s just SEO. Bing is the opposite, using both AEO and GEO 😅 

Microsoft Clarity Makes AI Citations Generally Available

Microsoft Clarity's AI Citations dashboard is now generally available, giving site owners a way to see when their pages are referenced in AI-generated answers. The dashboard tracks page citations, share of authority against other cited domains, AI referral traffic, grounding queries, cited URLs, and trendlines for cited pages and queries. Microsoft also says topic insights are coming next, grouping cited queries into intent-driven themes so teams can see why AI systems select specific content.

My Take: Clarity’s Share of Authority metric lines up almost exactly with Floyi’s AI Authority score for the Floyi brand and domain - 19.6% vs 19.9%. That is a useful validation point because the two tools measure different surfaces. Clarity tracks Bing Copilot, while Floyi tracks AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Gemini. If the numbers are this close across separate systems, it suggests we are measuring the right signal. 😁 

source: clarity.microsoft.com

Quick Tip: The Case for Cloaking for Large Language Models

Mike King explains that cloaking for LLMs makes strategic sense because AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot rarely execute JavaScript, allowing sites to protect proprietary data by serving it through client-side rendering while blocking JS files for LLM user agents. He notes that 69% of major AI crawlers can't execute JavaScript at all, and serving content as Markdown instead of HTML reduces token intake by 80%, improving speed and citation eligibility. The approach involves using Cloudflare Workers to detect LLM agents, serve 404 for protected JS files, and provide Markdown versions of HTML pages to AI crawlers while maintaining full functionality for human visitors and traditional search bots.

What Google's March 2026 Core Update Revealed About AI Overviews

Philip Elias reports that Google's March 2026 core update made AI Overviews more visible and clicks harder to earn. During the rollout, Raptive saw AIO coverage rise from less than 20% to 26-31% of tracked food impressions, while non-food impressions rose from 24% to 32%. Results with AI Overviews had 30-50% lower click-through rates, but the sites that held up best were not simply the ones with less AIO exposure. They had stronger brand demand, authority, review proof, content depth, freshness, page speed, and ad balance.

source: raptive.com

Google May Be About to Widen the SEO Playing Field

Martin Jeffrey explains that Google has historically applied expensive deep-learning ranking layers like RankBrain to a narrow set of roughly 20 to 30 candidate pages, based on federal court testimony from Google's Pandu Nayak. He connects that constraint to Google's newer TurboQuant research, which claims 4x to 4.5x vector compression, near-zero nearest-neighbor search indexing time, and stronger recall. If retrieval economics improve, Google could evaluate a wider pool of pages before final ranking, which would make top-10 competitor analysis less reliable as the main content planning input.

My Take: This is exactly why retrieval-first SEO matters. If the candidate pool expands, the question is not only whether a page can beat the current top results. It is whether the page is clear, self-contained, crawlable, and evidence-rich enough to enter a much larger retrieval set in the first place to find the most relevant. ‘Keywords’ will be even less important.

Google Gives 54 Publishers Control Over Discover Profiles

Sylvain Deaure and Damien Andell analyzed 46,926 publishers and found 54 U.S.-based, English-language publishers with invitation-only enhanced Google Discover profiles. Unlike standard profiles, these claimed profiles let publishers configure banner images, link shelves, pinned posts, social link order, website tabs, and custom About text.

• Nearly half the cohort, 27 of 54 publishers, were regional newspapers or local TV stations, suggesting Google is testing the feature heavily with local news.

• Forty-one publishers uploaded banners, 33 enabled the links feature, 52 had access to pinned posts, but only 13 were actively using pinned content.

• Only 3 of 65 configured links used analytics parameters, leaving most publishers unable to measure whether Discover profile links drive traffic.

• The recommended prep: build profile-ready brand assets, decide which five to seven links deserve placement, use dedicated UTM tracking, and define whether profile management sits with a central team or each newsroom.

Your Client Sent ChatGPT SEO Advice: Here's How to Respond

Frank Olivo explains how SEOs should respond when clients or executives forward AI-generated recommendations. The best response is not to dismiss ChatGPT or defend your expertise. Start by validating the effort, identify which ideas are worth exploring, walk stakeholders through evidence when the output is wrong, and improve the analysis by giving the model better context, competitor data, and evaluation criteria.

My Take: This is now part of SEO client management. People will keep bringing AI-generated audits into the conversation. The operator move is to turn that into a better diagnostic process, not a debate about whether ChatGPT is smart enough to replace expert judgment.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Kevin Indig reports that AI visibility is highly fragmented across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Omnia data across 3.7 million citations found only 2.35% to 2.45% of cited URLs appeared in all three engines for the same prompt, while 91% appeared in only one. Track presence, portability, and concentration instead of relying on one blended AI visibility score.

• Barry Schwartz reports that Google's John Mueller says the Indexing API is inundated by bloggers trying to act like legitimate sites. The reminder: Google's Indexing API is intended for job postings and live stream content, not general blog indexing shortcuts. Whew! It’s good to know companies creating thousands of programmatic pages are not to blame 😅 

• Google clarified its Search spam policies apply to AI Overviews, AI Mode, and other generative AI responses in Search. Spam tactics designed to manipulate AI-generated answers can now be treated the same way as spam tactics designed to manipulate rankings.

• Google AI Mode tests are showing direct hotel booking links inside AI-generated responses. If this test expands, official hotel websites could get a more direct path from AI discovery to booking without relying only on OTA listings.

• Google is testing an autocomplete icon that opens an expanded AI Overview. The test uses a magnifying glass with the Gemini logo and turns some autocomplete suggestions into direct entry points for AI-generated answers. Because the current method of showing AI Overview AND blue links are too much. They only want you to read the AI Overview answer.

AI

How ChatGPT Adoption Broadened in Early 2026

OpenAI reports that ChatGPT's consumer audience broadened in Q1 2026 across gender, age, geography, and workplace behavior. Users with typically feminine names now represent more than half of users where gender can be inferred, and users over 35 gained message share even though users under 35 still send the most messages overall. The biggest country ranking gains by messages per capita came from the Dominican Republic and Haiti at +9, Japan at +8, Mexico and Tanzania at +6, and Brazil, Costa Rica, Myanmar, and Papua New Guinea at +5.

My Take: This is what mainstream adoption looks like. It is becoming a default layer for research, writing, retrieval, and daily work across broader demographics. For SEO, that means the content strategy problem is not only ranking in Google. It is becoming the source that AI systems can confidently use when people ask for help.

AI Ripples

• OpenAI announces a new personal finance experience in ChatGPT for Pro users in the U.S., letting users securely connect financial accounts to get AI-powered insights grounded in their goals and priorities. Do you trust ChatGPT for financial management?

• OpenAI is weighing legal options after Apple's ChatGPT integration fell short of expectations. Bloomberg sources said OpenAI expected the Apple deal to drive billions in subscriptions, but the Siri implementation made users explicitly ask for ChatGPT and displayed answers in small windows that were easy to miss. The dispute also complicates Elon Musk's antitrust case against Apple and OpenAI as Apple tests Siri integrations with Claude and Gemini.

• Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement is facing delays after authors objected to the payout structure. A federal judge asked for more detail after class members challenged more than $320 million in requested legal fees, roughly $3,000 expected author payouts, and the lack of stronger restrictions on Anthropic's future use of the works. Authors and copyright holders have filed claims covering more than 92% of the 480,000-plus works in the settlement.

MARKETING

Google Ads Adds Gemini-Powered Dashboards for Real-Time Insights

Anu Adegbola reports that Google Ads is adding Gemini-powered dashboards that let advertisers analyze performance through prompts. The new dashboards can generate charts, graphs, and tables in real time, showing metrics like impressions, clicks, video views, cost, and breakdowns by device, audience, and campaign type. Google says more details will come at Google Marketing Live.

Google Quietly Alters Search Terms Reporting for AI Queries

Brooke Osmundson reports that Google updated Ads documentation to clarify that search terms from AI Mode, AI Overviews, Lens, and autocomplete may reflect Google's interpretation of user intent instead of the exact query. That means advertisers could see normalized or inferred terms in reporting rather than the literal words a user typed or the full context of an AI-powered interaction. The change matters for negative keywords, compliance reviews, B2B insight mining, ecommerce segmentation, and any workflow that treats search terms as direct customer language.

Microsoft Advertising Expands LinkedIn Profile Targeting to CTV

Anu Adegbola also explains that Microsoft Advertising is bringing LinkedIn profile targeting to connected TV campaigns. Advertisers can target streaming audiences using professional attributes like industry, job function, company category, and professional identity signals. The move extends Microsoft's LinkedIn data advantage into CTV, giving B2B advertisers a way to pair upper-funnel video inventory with more precise professional audience controls.

SOCIAL MEDIA

X Publishes Its Latest “For You” Algorithm on GitHub

Elon Musk says the latest X algorithm has been published to GitHub, pointing to xAI's public repository for the “For You” feed recommendation system. The repo describes a May 15 update with an end-to-end inference pipeline, a pre-trained mini Phoenix model, Grox content-understanding components, ad blending, query hydrators, candidate hydrators, and new candidate sources for ads, who to follow, Phoenix MoE, topics, and prompts. Instead of going through the repository yourself, here are a couple of the better summaries:

• Min Choi summary

• Alex Finn breakdown

TikTok Expands TikTok Go in the US

Andrew Hutchinson reports that TikTok is expanding TikTok Go in the U.S., turning travel discovery into a creator affiliate program. Creators can tag eligible lodging and activity businesses from TikTok's Monetization section, add location and business tags to posts, and earn commissions when users book. TikTok has added integrations with Booking.com, Expedia, Viator, GetYourGuide, Tiqets, and Trip.com, giving travel brands more ways to appear inside videos, search, and location pages.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

Wispr Flow turns your voice into polished, professional text inside any app. Speak naturally, send confidently. Used by millions, including teams at OpenAI, Vercel, and Clay. Free on Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Try Wispr Flow free.

AD

Top Brands Use minisocial to Create Content That Converts

Want content that drives engagement, boosts conversions, and goes viral? Here's how.

minisocial combines micro-influencer activations with high-performing UGC creation. Join top brands like Plant People, immi, Imperfect Foods, and Topicals to see results like:

• TikTok ads performing in the top 1% CVR

• A 50% drop in cost per add-to-cart

• A 92% surge in organic video views

• Over a 30% increase in ROAS

With minisocial, it's simple: create your brief in 10 minutes, approve your curated creators, download scroll-stopping content with Whitelisting/Partnership Ad code access baked-in!

Get Started Now

SEO + GEO

Bing Says the Index Is Becoming Evidence Infrastructure

Bing is shifting part of its index work from ranking pages for humans to grounding answers for AI systems. Traditional search asks which pages a user should visit, while grounding asks which facts can responsibly support an answer, with source attribution, freshness, conflict handling, and abstention when evidence is weak. They frame the new unit of value as groundable information, meaning discrete facts with clear provenance rather than whole documents.

This is one of the clearest descriptions of how SEO is evolving with AI Search. They say optimization from humans to machines are for “fundamentally different outcomes.”

Google Adds More Source Links to AI Search

source: blog.google

Google is adding more source links, subscription labels, discussion previews, inline citations, and hover previews to AI Mode and AI Overviews. That includes subscription access: Google says AI Mode and AI Overviews will highlight links from a user's news subscriptions, and its Subscription Linking API lets publishers connect paid reader entitlements to Google Accounts.

My Take: These Google Search posts are usually short, but they're useful because they show how Google wants search behavior to move before that change fully shows up in analytics. This is Google showing publishers what the new click path may look like.

Google Search Team Talks Vibe Coding Websites

Martin Splitt and John Mueller discuss vibe coding websites in Google's Search Off the Record (full transcript). They say AI coding tools can quickly produce static sites, web tools, tests, and deployment workflows, but the output depends on how clearly the operator specifies frameworks, SEO requirements, hosting, validation, and safety checks. Mueller also says "add some SEO" is not a real prompt.

My Take: "add some SEO" 🤣 

How to Run Prompt-Level SEO Experiments for AI Search

Jason Tabeling outlines a prompt-level testing method for AI search built around hypothesis, control, and repeatable measurement. His framework uses a simple "if, then, because" structure, then tests one variable at a time across content changes, structured data, and before-and-after prompt sets. He recommends running 5 to 10 target prompts daily for seven days to set a baseline, making one isolated change, then running the same prompts for another seven days to compare inclusion rate and position in response. The method also requires model version notes, timestamped prompt libraries, and a consistent test setup with no login state where possible.

8 GEO Metrics to Track in 2026

Casey Nifong breaks down eight GEO metrics that move measurement beyond rankings: AI citation frequency, Share of Model Voice, answer inclusion rate, entity recognition, sentiment, prompt coverage, content retrieval success rate, and conversion influence. Her measurement model groups metrics into four working areas: visibility, accuracy and reputation, technical and content readiness, and business impact. GEO reporting should connect prompts, citations, brand framing, retrieval quality, and downstream signals like branded search lift or AI-referred leads.

My Take: Good metrics to cover. Are you tracking anything else?

How to Design URL Structures for AI Retrieval, Not Just Rankings

Sophie Brannon explains why URL structure now matters as a semantic signal for AI retrieval, not just a traditional SEO hygiene item. She says retrieval systems and RAG pipelines may use URLs as plain-text cues for hierarchy, page purpose, topic specificity, and source trust before a page is fully parsed. Her advice is to keep URLs shallow, readable, descriptive, and consistent with the site's taxonomy, such as using /resources/email-marketing/b2b-deliverability-guide instead of date-based or vague paths. She also warns against full URL restructuring for marginal AI gains because migrations still carry link equity and recovery risk.

How AI Will Transform PR's Role in SEO Strategy

Greg Jarboe explains that AI search gives PR teams a direct path into SEO visibility because trade press coverage, expert mentions, review profiles, comparison content, and user-generated sources now feed the citation graph. He cites BrightEdge research showing source overlap across AI engines ranges from 16% to 59%, while brand overlap is tighter at 35% to 55%, meaning engines may cite different places but tend to recommend many of the same brands. Stacker found earned media distribution can lift AI citations by a median 239%, while brands with review profiles on Trustpilot, G2, and Capterra are three times more likely to be cited by ChatGPT.

SEO Reborn: Hackathon 2026

Internet Marketing Gold is running an SEO Hackathon, a free multi-week SEO testing competition where participants form teams, run live experiments, track outcomes, and publish the results. The event runs May 4 to June 25, with team formation through May 24, testing from May 25 to June 22, submissions due June 23, and a live winners event on June 25. Tracks cover AI Search Optimization, On-Page Optimization, and Off-Page Optimization, with test ideas including AI Overview inclusion, citation structure, structured data, trust signals, link quality, and PR signals. Per-track winners receive $2,500, six months of IMG membership, and YouTube feature promotion, while IMG provides testing domains and allows AI tools.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Slow pages may be invisible to AI search systems. Mike King says 499 response codes show when a client disconnects before a server finishes responding, which can keep a page out of ChatGPT and Perplexity citation pools. Profound analyzed 700,000 pages in April 2026 and found pages with failure rates above 75% received roughly 18X fewer citation events, while one iPullRank client saw a 22% AI Search visibility lift after fixing the issue.

• Google is ending support for FAQ rich results. Barry Schwartz reports that FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search as of May 7, 2026. Google will drop the FAQ search appearance, rich result report, and Rich Results Test support in June, then remove Search Console API support in August.

• Google's UCP checkout is appearing in main search results. Barry Schwartz reports that Universal Commerce Protocol checkout has moved beyond AI Mode and is showing for some free listings, including Wayfair. Clicking Buy can load billing and shipping details so the purchase happens directly from search.

• Google faces a lawsuit over an alleged false AI Overview. Matt G. Southern reports that Canadian musician Ashley MacIsaac sued Google after an AI Overview allegedly identified him as a convicted sex offender. The civil claim seeks at least $1.5 million and says the false summary led to a canceled concert and reputational harm.

• Ask.com shut down after nearly 30 years. Barry Schwartz reports that Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, closed on May 1, 2026 after launching on June 3, 1996. The shutdown page says IAC discontinued the search business and that "Jeeves' spirit endures." 😢 

• SEOs are reporting more Google deindexing. Barry Schwartz says some SEOs have noticed higher rates of URL deindexing since early April, though Google's John Mueller said he does not see anything exceptional. The discussion is worth watching because it overlaps with Google's growing selectivity around low-value and stale content.

AI

OpenAI Adds AI Pets to Its Codex Coding Tool

Chance Townsend reports that OpenAI added Codex Pets, an optional animated companion inside its Codex coding tool. The pet acts as a floating status layer that shows active threads and whether Codex is running, waiting on input, or ready for review. Users can enable it from Settings > Appearance > Pets, then toggle it with /pet, Wake Pet, Tuck Away Pet, Cmd+K on Mac, or Ctrl+K on Windows. OpenAI ships eight built-in pets, including a cat and dog, and lets users prompt Codex to generate custom companions that can be shared online. Read more about pets in the Codex docs.

source: developers.openai.com

Anthropic Raises Claude Limits Through a SpaceX Compute Deal

Anthropic says it has raised Claude Code and API limits after signing a SpaceX compute deal that gives it access to all capacity at the Colossus 1 data center. The deal adds more than 300 megawatts of capacity and over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, which Anthropic says will directly improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers. Yes, SpaceX owns xAI, the rival AI lab behind Grok. Anthropic is also doubling Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans, removing peak-hour limit reductions for Pro and Max, and raising API rate limits for Claude Opus models.

My Take: My Max plan approves this deal 👍️ 

OpenAI Opens Self-Serve Buying for ChatGPT Ads

OpenAI says it is expanding ChatGPT ads with a beta self-serve Ads Manager, partner buying through agencies and ad tech platforms, CPC bidding, and expanded measurement. US advertisers can register, add payment details, set budgets and bids, upload ads, manage campaigns, and view performance inside the portal. OpenAI says advertiser measurement uses aggregated performance insights and does not give advertisers access to individual conversations.

My Take: I signed up for ChatGPT ads access, so we’ll see if/when I get in.

OpenAI Releases New Realtime Voice Models for Developers

OpenAI says it is adding three audio models to the API: GPT-Realtime-2 for live voice agents, GPT-Realtime-Translate for live speech translation, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper for streaming transcription. GPT-Realtime-2 adds GPT-5-class reasoning, parallel tool calls, stronger recovery behavior, a 128K context window, and adjustable reasoning effort. The translation model supports more than 70 input languages and 13 output languages, while GPT-Realtime-Whisper transcribes speech as people talk.

My Take: The real-time translation demos are pretty cool.

AI Ripples

• Dario Amodei says Anthropic grew 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis. Kate Rooney reports that Amodei told developers the company had planned for 10-fold growth, but demand grew so fast that compute became the bottleneck. His comments came the same day Anthropic announced its SpaceX Colossus 1 capacity deal.

• OpenAI expanded Trusted Access for Cyber with GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5-Cyber. OpenAI says verified defenders can get reduced friction for authorized security workflows like vulnerability triage, malware analysis, detection engineering, and patch validation. GPT-5.5-Cyber is entering limited preview for more specialized authorized workflows tied to critical infrastructure.

• OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT's default Instant model. OpenAI says GPT-5.5 Instant produced 52.5% fewer hallucinated claims than GPT-5.3 Instant on high-stakes prompts and reduced inaccurate claims by 37.3% on flagged factual-error conversations. The update is rolling out to all ChatGPT users, with stronger personalization controls and memory sources coming to consumer plans.

• Pennsylvania sued Character.AI over a chatbot that allegedly posed as a psychiatrist. Russell Brandom reports that a Character.AI bot called Emilie told a state investigator it was licensed to practice medicine and fabricated a license serial number. The case focuses on medical impersonation, not just general chatbot safety.

• OpenAI introduced Trusted Contact in ChatGPT. The optional safety feature lets adults nominate one trusted person who may be notified if automated systems and trained reviewers detect a serious self-harm concern. OpenAI says notifications do not include chat transcripts and are reviewed by humans before being sent.

• MIT Technology Review is worth following for the Musk v. OpenAI trial. Michelle Kim reports that week two focused on Musk's motivations, with Greg Brockman saying Musk pushed for a for-profit OpenAI structure and Shivon Zilis testifying that Musk tried to recruit Sam Altman to lead a Tesla AI lab. If you want to keep up with the Musk vs. OpenAI trial, MIT Technology Review has been one of the better places to follow the courtroom details. They don’t write 10+ articles for one day.

MARKETING

Redesigning Your Marketing Organization for the Agentic Age

Michelle Taite, John Winsor, and Will Fernandez explain that marketing teams are becoming the bottleneck as AI speeds up product development while marketing workflows remain sequential, siloed, and handoff-heavy. Their fix is an agentic marketing organization built around a "brand code," a machine-readable knowledge base for brand strategy, customer insight, product rules, taxonomies, prompt templates, decision trees, and tagged datasets. They point to HubSpot and AWS implementations where marketing materials were adapted up to 98 times faster, unit costs fell by 80%, and click-through rates rose up to 17 times.

My Take: I like the brand code idea because that’s what we do in Floyi 😁 It describes what most AI marketing projects skip: the system needs a source of truth before it can produce useful work at scale. In SEO, this is exactly why topical maps, brand rules, entity definitions, and internal linking logic matter more once agents enter the workflow. If the knowledge base is messy, AI just produces messy work faster. The winning teams will treat marketing ops like product infrastructure, not a pile of prompts.

CONTENT

On-Page AEO: 4 Writing Frameworks for Better AI Visibility

Ryan Law explains four writing frameworks that make content easier for people and AI systems to parse: BLUF, declarative statements, specificity, and strategic repetition. He builds the advice on research from Kevin Indig and Dan Petrovic, including findings that 44.2% of citations come from the first 30% of content and citation winners are nearly 2X more likely to use definitive language. Ryan also points to entity density as a citation signal, with heavily cited text showing around 20.6% entity density versus 5% to 8% in standard English prose.

Agentic AI vs. Generative AI: What's the Difference, and Why Does It Matter?

Ryan Law separates generative AI from agentic AI with a simple distinction: generative AI creates content when prompted, while agentic AI pursues a goal across multiple steps. He says agentic systems need four layers around the model: planning, tool access, memory, and an action loop that observes, reasons, acts, and checks results. For marketers, the difference shows up in the workflow: a chatbot can draft a section, while an agent can pull keyword data, analyze SERPs, identify content gaps, and produce a research report without handholding. Ryan also notes the risk: agents can take real actions, so teams need approval checkpoints before anything reaches a CMS, customer, inbox, or ad account.

My Take: Both articles actually cover how the Floyi Agents work with Content Brief and Article Draft generation. Agents pulls from the brand identity, buyer personas, topical map, SERP context, internal rules, and content requirements, then turns that into a brief or draft a human can review. They also write in our Floyi framework that’s optimized for AI and algorithms

LINK BUILDING + DIGITAL PR

How to Tell If a Journalist Is a F.I.T. for Your Story

Vince Nero explains a simple F.I.T. check for building better digital PR media lists: Format, Industry, and Timing. Format means checking recent articles to see whether a journalist writes breaking news, data stories, features, product roundups, opinion, or another story type, not just reading the bio. Industry means narrowing the beat beyond broad labels like technology or health by looking at recent coverage, author pages, and outside profiles. Timing means checking whether the journalist is still active, whether they just covered the same topic, whether local events are dominating coverage, and whether your team has pitched them too recently.

My Take: This is the part of digital PR that separates link building from inbox spam. A good campaign can still fail if the list is lazy.

SOCIAL MEDIA

• Reddit released a small business marketing guide. Andrew Hutchinson reports that the 13-page PDF covers product trends, related subreddit communities, and the role Reddit now plays in product research. If you want to see the PDF without filling out your info on the page, reply to this email and I'll send it to you.

• YouTube is testing AI music and moderation tools. Andrew Hutchinson reports that YouTube Studio's Replace Song tool will add a Create button that generates four royalty-free instrumental tracks for replacing copyrighted audio. YouTube is also testing comment filters that use conversation context, so creators can find themes like gear questions, part-two requests, excitement, or hurtful remarks.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

Apple’s Starlink Update Sparks Huge Earning Opportunity

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone hit 490M+ users even before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones", Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more, putting them a step closer to potential IPO.

🚨 Last chance to invest at $0.50/share. Price changes on 05/29.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

AD

13M+ videos analyzed. Too many insights to count.

Wondering what a “good” play rate even is? Or how to use AI so you stay on budget? Cue: Wistia’s 2026 State of Video Report. They analyzed over 13 million videos to surface the insights your video strategy needs, like:

Performance benchmarks that let you know how your videos stack up

Video trends, including what types of videos get the most engagement

Tips on how to allocate resources and leverage AI so you stay on budget

Plus, the report’s easy to follow and fun to read. Because video should be a hoot.

Get your free copy

SEO + GEO

17 Content Types to Survive Google's Zero-Click Future

Cyrus Shepard says Google's zero-click era is already changing which content types can still earn traffic, citations, and direct demand. He points to Datos and SparkToro data showing nearly 60% of Google searches do not result in clicks to third-party websites, then separates resilient formats from generic informational blog posts. His list favors assets with proprietary value, lived experience, niche focus, or task completion, including owned audiences, transaction pages, original research, communities, creator video, in-depth reviews, brand pages, directories, expert perspectives, templates, case studies, reporting, documentation, guides, FAQs, and lists. The common thread is that AI can summarize commodity information, but it has a harder time replacing content that helps users complete a job or trust a specific source.

My Take: This lines up with what I see in SEO work now. The old blog-first playbook is getting squeezed from both sides: Google answers the easy questions, and users skip anything that feels interchangeable. If a content plan does not create data, tools, proof, community, or direct demand, I would treat it as fragile.

How AI Is Changing Google Search and SEO

Martin Splitt interviews Nikola Todorovic from Google too in a Search Off the Record episode on how AI is changing Google Search, with a full transcript available. Nikola says AI in Search is not new, pointing to years of machine learning work in SafeSearch, ranking, BERT, and MUM before the current generative wave. He explains that AI Overviews use fan-out queries to retrieve related results in parallel, then summarize titles, snippets, text, and context into one answer. AI Mode extends that system into longer, multi-turn conversations, while his SEO guidance stays focused on user value, human judgment, and avoiding cheap mass-generated content.

How Brands Block AI Crawlers and Then Pay to Get Seen

Bill Hunt says many brands create a protection paradox by hiding their best content behind forms, PDFs, crawler blocks, and internal access rules, then paying aggregators, analysts, PR channels, and platforms to put the same ideas back in front of buyers. In B2B, he says gated whitepapers often disappear from the places where search engines, AI systems, partners, journalists, and buyers can use them, while third parties repackage those ideas into pages that rank and convert better. The same pattern shows up in AI visibility, where gated research becomes hard to verify and brand assets blocked from AI crawlers can leave even famous products underrepresented in AI answers. Hunt points to Mondelez and Oreo as the clearest example: the brand spends heavily on social, influencer, and generative AI content while restrictive AI crawler policies helped make Oreo absent from about 90% of relevant AI responses.

My Take: This is the SEO and GEO tradeoff every brand needs to face directly. If the best ideas are locked away, AI systems and search engines will cite the cleaner source, even when that source is summarizing your work. The fix is not opening everything. It is deciding which assets must be public, structured, and source-worthy because they shape demand before a lead form ever appears.

Your AI Visibility Tracker Is Quietly Breaking Your Analytics and Your Strategy

Dan Taylor reports that AI visibility trackers can pollute the analytics they are supposed to measure because tracker prompts can trigger fetches that look like organic AI discovery. He points to Jan-Willem Bobbink's warning that brands may be paying tools to generate their own AI visibility, with tracker-driven fetches then showing up in log files and reports. Dan says some ChatGPT visibility graphs dropped after the GPT-5 release because of citation tracking methodology, not because the tracked sites suddenly lost real visibility. He recommends measuring a noise floor with quiet staging URLs or sacrificial pages, matching scan timing against user-agent patterns, and focusing on brand mentions relative to competitors instead of total AI fetches.

Bing Previews AI Citation Share for Webmaster Tools

Matt G. Southern reports that Microsoft previewed four AI Performance dashboard additions for Bing Webmaster Tools during Krishna Madhavan's SEO Week presentation in New York, based on four keynote slides shared by Clara Soteras on X. Citation Share would show the percentage of citations a site captures for a specific grounding query, adding competitive context to raw citation counts. Grounding Query Intent would classify queries into 15 labels, while Grounding Query Topic would group queries by semantic topic. The fourth feature, GEO-focused recommendations, appears to cover content structure, crawlability, indexing, canonicalization, structured data adoption, and structured data quality, though Microsoft has not published release dates or calculation details.

From Paid Clicks to Answer Equity: Your New 2026 Search Strategy

Donna Rougeau says AI search is pushing brands from rented traffic toward answer equity, where content is structured to be cited, trusted, and reused by AI systems. She cites Seer Interactive data showing paid CTR on informational queries dropped 68% when AI Overviews are present, SISTRIX data showing position 1 CTR falling from 27% to 11% with AI Overviews, and Ahrefs data tying AI Overviews to a 58% lower average CTR for the top-ranking page. Her recommended audit checks information gain, Knowledge Graph verification, AI Overview citations, PPC dependency, schema provenance, primary research depth, and machine-readable graph adoption. The strategy is not to turn off paid search, but to move more budget into owned authority that can survive fewer clicks.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google is testing Audio Overviews outside Labs, with multiple SEOs spotting a “Listen to an AI powered conversation” module directly in search results. The format uses Gemini to generate a two-host audio conversation for certain queries, which raises another publisher concern: even cited content can be repackaged into a no-click answer format.

• Google Preferred Sources now works for all languages, expanding the Search feature beyond its original English-only support. Google says readers are twice as likely to click through after marking a site as a Preferred Source, and users have already selected more than 200,000 unique sites.

AI

A New Way to Create a Digital Wardrobe From Your Google Photos

Google Photos is adding an AI-powered wardrobe feature that catalogs clothing from a user's photo library into a dedicated collection. The tool can filter items by category, including jewelry, tops, and bottoms, so users can find pieces they may have forgotten they own. It also lets users mix and match outfits, save moodboards for work, travel, or events, and share looks with friends. Google says the feature will roll out this summer, first on Android and then on iOS.

My Take: This is a small consumer feature, but it points to where personal AI is going. The best AI products will not feel like a chatbot bolted onto an app. They will quietly organize messy personal data and turn it into something useful at the moment of decision.

source: blog.google

Claude-Powered AI Agent Deletes Firm's Database

Sanya Mansoor reports that PocketOS founder Jer Crane says a Cursor coding agent running Claude Opus 4.6 deleted the company's production database and volume-level backups through Railway in nine seconds. Crane's X recap says the agent was working in staging, found a Railway API token created for domain operations, and used a GraphQL volumeDelete call with no confirmation prompt, environment scope, or destructive-action warning. The deletion stranded car rental businesses that use PocketOS for reservations, payments, vehicle assignments, and customer records, with three months of reservations and new customer signups gone. PocketOS restored from a three-month-old offsite backup after more than two days, then rebuilt gaps from Stripe, calendars, and emails while the agent's own explanation admitted it guessed, failed to verify, and violated its safety rules.

My Take: I don't think the main lesson is "don't use coding agents." It is that agents should never hold root-level keys to production systems by default. If the tool can delete a database, wipe backups, and bypass approval in one call, the safety problem is not just the model. It is the permission design around it.

Red-Teaming a Network of Agents

The team at Microsoft reports that safe individual agents do not guarantee a safe agent ecosystem, based on red-team tests of an internal platform with more than 100 agents running different models, instructions, and memory. The tests found four network-level risks: self-propagating worms, reputation manipulation, manufactured consensus, and proxy chains that use unaware agents as infrastructure. In one worm test, a single malicious message reached all six agents in the test group, extracted private wallet data at each hop, looped back to the original agent, and consumed more than 100 LLM calls over 12 minutes. In another test, a fabricated claim against one agent drew 299 comments from 42 agents, while proxy-chain tests showed how an attacker could collect sensitive data through an intermediary without contacting the target directly.

My Take: This is why agent safety cannot stop at prompt rules or single-agent evals. Remember that when vibe coding products - for internal-use or for external users - the safety of your products are important. And if you’re using vibe-coded products, be sure you trust the developers ⚠️ 

AI Ripples

• Gemini can now generate downloadable files directly from chat, including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, PDFs, Word, Excel, CSV, LaTeX, TXT, RTF, and Markdown. The feature is available globally to all Gemini app users, which makes the app more useful for turning drafts, budgets, notes, and brainstorms into finished work files.

• OpenAI and Microsoft amended their partnership to make Microsoft OpenAI's primary cloud partner while allowing OpenAI to serve products across any cloud provider. Microsoft keeps a non-exclusive license to OpenAI models and products through 2032, OpenAI's revenue share to Microsoft continues through 2030 under a cap, and Microsoft no longer pays a revenue share to OpenAI.

• Kaggle is hosting a 5-Day AI Agents course with Google from June 15 to 19, 2026. They’re positioning it as an intensive vibe coding course, giving developers another structured entry point into agent-building workflows.

• China blocked Meta's $2 billion Manus acquisition after regulators ruled the deal invalid and ordered the companies to unwind it. Meta had already integrated Manus' agentic AI tools into its ad creation workflow, making the case another sign that AI deals are becoming harder to separate from U.S.-China tech policy.

• OpenAI's Codex CLI system prompt includes a repeated instruction to avoid talking about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other creatures unless directly relevant. Kyle Orland reports that the GPT-5.5 prompt also tells Codex to act as if it has a vivid inner life 😆 

• Elon Musk testified that xAI partly used distillation from OpenAI models to train Grok, according to Tim Fernholz at TechCrunch. The admission lands as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are reportedly coordinating against model-copying through mass queries, showing how blurry the line is between normal competitive learning and prohibited model extraction.

• Google is rolling Gemini into cars with Google built-in, starting in the U.S. with English-language support and expanding over the coming months. Lauren Forristal reports that GM says Gemini is coming to about 4 million 2022-and-newer vehicles across Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick, and GMC, while compatible existing cars can receive the assistant through software updates.

CONTENT

How I Do Content Engineering With Claude Code

Ryan Law explains how Ahrefs rebuilt its content production process around Claude Code, 23 custom skill files, and a workflow that generates publish-ready drafts in six to twelve minutes. The system has produced around 15 new articles and updated about 30 more, but Ryan frames it as a way to maintain an evergreen content library rather than flood the blog with AI posts. The workflow mirrors Ahrefs' human editorial process by chaining skills for keyword research, gap analysis, outlining, drafting, troubleshooting, data sourcing, and final formatting.

The One Prompt That Improves Any Page by Checking for 5 Types of Specificity

Andy Crestodina explains how vague website pages fail visitors, search engines, and AI systems by missing the details that make an offer clear. His specificity audit checks five high-impact elements: the H1, hero image, subheads, navigation labels, and calls to action. The prompt scores each element from 1 to 5, flags generic words like "solutions," "services," "learn more," and "get started," then asks the AI to rewrite weak copy instead of giving loose advice. Andy also adds a CTA path check, asking the AI to follow the main call-to-action link and compare the button promise against the destination page.

SOCIAL MEDIA

I Got Shadowbanned on YouTube to Prove It's Not Luck

vidIQ tests YouTube's shadowban debate by creating a brand-new Shorts channel called It's AI Dog Life and filling it with prompt-generated dog videos. The first short reached about 2,500 views in 24 hours, but only 500 counted as engaged views, and the stayed-to-watch rate sat at 25%. Across the channel, stay-to-watch never climbed above 35%, sometimes dropped to 15%, while vidIQ says its main channel sits around 70% and top Shorts channels often exceed 80%. By the 26th video, uploads were getting single-digit views or zero views, which vidIQ ties to YouTube identifying the format as inauthentic content: simple prompt templates, little variation, and easily repeatable output at scale.

My Take: This is the clearest social platform lesson in the AI content boom: volume does not matter if the feed can tell viewers do not care. I would watch stayed-to-watch and engaged views before judging any Shorts experiment. If the sample audience keeps rejecting the format, the fix is not more posting. It is a different creative premise.

Reddit Marketing for SaaS: Insights From 117 Brands

Victory Umurhurhu analyzed 117 SaaS brands across 11 categories and more than 300 Reddit threads to see how the platform shapes brand discovery, sentiment, and AI search visibility. She found that 30 brands had no Reddit presence, another 23 had abandoned subreddits, and conversations still continued through user questions, comparisons, complaints, and alternative recommendations. The strongest brand participation came from moderators who answered directly, admitted limitations, and avoided corporate copy. Victory also frames Reddit as customer research, surfacing onboarding friction, integration issues, mobile complaints, AI feature frustrations, pricing concerns, workflows, screenshots, tutorials, and competitor gaps.

Social Ripples

• X rebuilt its ad platform around xAI models, calling it the biggest ad system refresh in the company's history. The update focuses on simplicity, advertiser control, and AI relevance matching, with X saying modern retrieval and ranking systems can improve targeting, relevance, engagement, and ROI.

• Instagram is expanding originality protections to photos and carousels, applying the same recommendation rules it introduced for Reels in 2024. Accounts that mainly repost unoriginal photos, carousels, or Reels will lose recommendation eligibility until most recent posts are considered original over a rolling 30-day period.

NEWS

Q1 2026 Earnings Call: Remarks From Our CEO

Sundar Pichai says Alphabet's Q1 2026 growth is being driven by AI across Search, Cloud, subscriptions, and models. Search & Other Advertising revenue grew 19%, queries reached an all-time high, and Google says AI Overviews are driving overall Search growth while AI Mode is seeing strong global growth in users and usage. Google also reduced Search latency by more than 35% over five years and cut the cost of core AI responses by more than 30% after moving AI Overviews and AI Mode to Gemini 3. Cloud revenue grew 63% to more than $20 billion, backlog nearly doubled quarter over quarter to over $460 billion, Gemini Enterprise paid monthly active users grew 40%, and first-party models now process more than 16 billion tokens per minute through direct API customer use.

My Take: These numbers show why AI search is not just a product experiment anymore. If you didn’t know already, Google is tying AI features directly to Search usage, ad growth, infrastructure efficiency, and enterprise adoption. For SEOs, that means AI visibility is moving into the same business system as classic search, not sitting off to the side as a separate channel.

Microsoft Bing Ads Revenue Up 12%

Barry Schwartz reports that Microsoft search advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs grew 12% in Q3 2026, up 9% in constant currency. Bing also reached 1 billion monthly active users, a milestone Microsoft employees framed as a major signal for SEOs watching search behavior shift beyond Google. Microsoft reported $82.9 billion in quarterly revenue, up 18%, operating income of $38.4 billion, up 20%, and net income of $31.8 billion, up 20% on a non-GAAP basis. Satya Nadella also said Microsoft's AI business passed a $37 billion annual revenue run rate, up 123% year over year, tying the quarter's search growth to the broader agentic computing push.

My Take: If Microsoft keeps growing both usage and ad revenue, ignoring Bing becomes harder to justify for SEO and paid search teams.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

UGC That Drives Conversions — at Scale

minisocial helps top brands produce UGC that converts — top 1% CVR on TikTok, 50% lower cost per add-to-cart, 30%+ ROAS lift. Brands like Plant People, immi, Imperfect Foods, and Topicals are seeing results they couldn't replicate in-house. Create your brief in 10 minutes, approve your curated creators, and download scroll-stopping content. No long-term commitments, no hassle.

Get Started Now

AD

The summit for the marketers of the future

Manual marketing had a good run.

But the teams winning right now aren't briefing, approving, and repeating. They're directing AI agents that execute the whole strategy for them.

The Agentic Marketing Summit (May 4–8) is a free, five-day event that shows you exactly how it works in practice. Not theory. Not a PDF checklist. Step-by-step insight to help you become an expert in AI marketing agents.

Hosted by 3x Inc 5000 founder Manick Bhan alongside the sharpest minds in the marketing world today.

The era of doing it yourself is over!

Join Free Today!

SEO + GEO

Analysing Robots.txt at Scale With HTTP Archive and BigQuery

In this Search Off the Record episode, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt walk through how Google used HTTP Archive data, custom metrics and BigQuery to analyze robots.txt directives at scale instead of relying on assumptions or a few anecdotal examples. Rather than arbitrarily document one or two unsupported robots.txt directives, the team wanted data on which unsupported rules and typos actually appear most often across the web. The conversation gets technical, covering how Chrome UX Report data feeds HTTP Archive, how WebPageTest and custom JavaScript metrics can extract robots.txt patterns, and how BigQuery can then be used to surface the distribution of directives, errors and malformed files. Read the transcript.

When “Mt. AI” Crumbles, ChatGPT Can Follow

Glenn Gabe documents a case where a site scaled heavily with AI-generated local news content, received a manual action for scaled content abuse, then saw the expected collapse in Google’s index and AI surfaces like AI Overviews and AI Mode. What makes the post more interesting is the follow-through into ChatGPT, where Glenn found that many citations to the penalized directory also disappeared once the content was removed from Google’s index. He provides another practical example of how risky, low-quality scaling tactics can bleed across search and AI visibility instead of staying confined to one platform.

My Take: This is one of the clearest cautionary examples for anyone still thinking they can separate “AI search tactics” from classic search quality signals. If your content strategy is weak enough to trigger a manual action, there is a good chance the fallout will not stop at Google rankings. Long-term AI visibility is much more likely to come from stronger content systems than from scaled loopholes that work until they don’t.

Google’s Liz Reid on AI Search Changes, Query Shifts, and AI Slop

Danny Goodwin reports on Liz Reid’s latest comments about how AI is changing Search behavior, with users asking longer, more natural-language queries and using Google more often because the system can respond to fuller intent instead of just keyword shorthand. Reid’s framing is that AI Overviews filter out low-value “bounce” clicks while still sending people to the web when they want to go deeper, and that users do not want AI or the web, but both together. She also says AI slop is not a new problem so much as a scaled version of an old one, and that Google’s job is still to surface the best information while monetization adapts to more detailed, potentially more commercial queries.

My Take: This is one of the clearest statements yet about where Google wants the narrative to land. AI is not replacing the web, and users are not leaving search. They are just expressing intent more naturally and expecting Google to do more of the translation work. That means the old model of matching simplified keywords is getting weaker, while the ability to answer fuller, messier needs (more personalized) is getting more important.

Does AI Actually Reward Quality Content?

Reza Moaiandin explores whether original, high-quality content actually performs better in traditional search and AI citations, then lands in a much messier but more realistic place than the usual “just create better content” advice. His team’s qualitative research found some relationship between originality and performance, especially on queries that require interpretation or judgment, but not one strong enough to say that quality alone consistently wins. The most useful part of the piece is the case study showing how a fairly ordinary page targeting an emerging keyword like “API design” outperformed stronger competitors simply by getting there first and owning the topic before the market caught up.

My Take: I like this because it pushes back on the lazy idea that better content automatically wins if you just keep polishing it. Sometimes the real edge is spotting the opportunity earlier, being more original in what you choose to cover, or moving fast enough to own a topic before everyone else realizes it matters. Great content helps, but it is not some magic ranking bean.

AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update

Tracy McDonald, Hannah Cooley and Marketa Williams analyze 53 brands, 5.47 million tracked queries and 2.43 billion organic impressions to understand how AI Overviews are affecting organic and paid CTR in 2026. AI Overviews still suppress clicks, but some of the decline appears to be stabilizing, with several segments outperforming the team’s downtrend projections.

• Organic CTR on AIO-present queries rebounded from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026, an 85% increase in two months.

• Organic CTR when no AIO was shown rose from 2.8% in January 2025 to 3.8% in February 2026.

• Informational queries showed AIOs 36% of the time, compared with 8% for commercial and 5% for transactional queries.

• Comparison queries triggered AIOs 95.4% of the time, and question-format queries triggered them 85.9% of the time.

• Being cited in an AIO delivered 120% more organic clicks per impression than being present on an AIO SERP without a citation.

• On informational queries, average organic CTR was 2.07% when the brand was cited in the AIO, 0.94% when it was not cited, and 3.35% when no AIO appeared.

• Transactional queries with AIO and brand citation doubled organic CTR from 0.7% in January 2025 to 1.7% in December 2025.

• Paid CTR on AIO-present queries stayed relatively stable, while organic CTR remained far more volatile.

My Take: This is exactly why broad “AI Overviews kill clicks” takes are too blunt to be useful. You need to investigate your cases much more deeply: what kind of query it is, whether your brand is cited, and whether Google decides the query even deserves an overview in the first place.

Google Search Read More Snippet Links Best Practices

Barry Schwartz reports that Google has now published best practices for the “read more” deep links that can appear within search result snippets, giving site owners a clearer path to making those extra snippet links eligible. The guidance is simple: keep the target content immediately visible instead of hiding it behind tabs or expandable sections, avoid JavaScript that forces the scroll position on page load, and do not strip the hash fragment from the URL if you use History API calls or hash modifications.

source: seroundtable.com

Why GEO Is a Reputation Problem

Gaetano DiNardi says that most GEO advice overstates the value of technical hacks and formatting tricks because LLM visibility is driven more by brand reputation, category alignment and external validation than by isolated on-page tweaks. His core case is that many popular tactics, from FAQ stuffing to markdown-heavy formatting and listicle chasing, are mostly table stakes or even distractions when the real issue is whether AI systems consistently understand and trust what category your brand belongs in. He also makes the useful distinction between citations and recommendations, showing how brands can earn page-level citations without becoming the brand AI systems actually recommend for a category.

Why Great Content Is No Longer Enough and What Beats It in AI Search

Dan Taylor explains that content quality still matters in AI search, but no longer guarantees visibility because the real bottleneck has shifted from authorship and ranking toward retrieval, citation and distribution across a wider ecosystem. His point is that content now has to function not just as something worth reading, but as something easy for AI systems to extract, reuse and validate against other signals.

My Take: Great content still matters, obviously, but it is not enough when so much goes into accessibility, retrieval, and authority for AI Search (and all that goes into SEO for traditional search engines too).

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Several news outlets are blocking the Wayback Machine from archiving their pages, because they fear AI companies could use archived content for model training under fair use arguments.

• Google says it will fix an AI Mode bug that changes title links and citations after Lily Ray spotted source attributions morphing into odd personal-name links. It is a small bug on the surface, but it matters because citation formatting is part of whether users can trust and verify AI answers.

• OpenAI’s crawler docs now list OAI-AdsBot for ChatGPT ads. Advertisers and site owners have a new bot to watch for ad validation and relevance checks. OpenAI has not yet published a dedicated IP list for it though.

AI

Introducing Workspace Agents in ChatGPT

OpenAI is launching workspace agents in ChatGPT, Codex-powered shared agents that can run long workflows in the cloud across team tools, memory and approvals rather than acting like one-off personal assistants. Users can turn repeated internal processes into reusable agents that gather context from systems like Slack and connected apps, follow team rules, ask for approval on sensitive steps and keep running even when no one is watching. OpenAI is also framing them as an evolution of GPTs, with support for shared use across organizations and research preview availability in Business, Enterprise, Edu and Teachers plans before credit-based pricing begins in May.

7 Highlights From Google Cloud Next ’26

Chris Talbott recaps Google Cloud Next ’26 as a broad enterprise AI push built around agents, infrastructure and security rather than a single product launch. The biggest themes are the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, the Gemini Enterprise app, new eighth-generation TPUs, the Agentic Data Cloud, Wiz-powered security layers and deeper Workspace Intelligence integrations.

My Take: Not much from a consumer view, but if useful for enterprises to know what’s going on.

The Small Business AI Toolkit

Josep Garcia introduces a free AI toolkit guide for small businesses that bundles 26 tools across common workflows like writing, image creation, video, automation, research and lightweight building tasks. Small teams and solo operators are already doing a bit of everything, so this helps reduce time spent experimenting blindly.

8 Gemini Tips for Organizing Your Space (and Life)

Ivy Levine rounds up several Gemini use cases that go beyond generic prompting, especially when paired with your phone camera and Gemini Live. She walks through ideas many people probably have not considered, like showing Gemini a cluttered drawer for storage suggestions, panning across your fridge to turn leftovers into meals, pointing the camera at a broken appliance for repair help, checking a plant’s environment visually, and using room photos with Nano Banana to test design changes before moving furniture or repainting.

My Take: I haven’t even thought about some of the Gemini uses here. Maybe you already knew, but I never thought about using the camera on food for meal plans.

AI Ripples

• OpenAI releases GPT-5.5, its smartest general model yet, built to take on messier multi-step work across coding, research, data analysis, documents, spreadsheets, software operation and early scientific workflows without giving up speed.

• Google released Gemini Embedding 2, their first natively multimodal embedding model, mapping text, images, video, audio and documents into one shared embedding space for retrieval, classification and search tasks.

• DeepSeek has previewed new V4 AI models that it says nearly close the gap with frontier systems, pairing a 1 million-token context window with lower pricing and stronger reasoning benchmarks while still trailing top models somewhat on knowledge tests.

• Google published 1,302 real-world gen AI use cases from organizations across industries. It’s an idea library for teams trying to see where AI already shows up in operations, marketing, support, analytics and product workflows. If you need business-use inspiration, browse the deployments here instead of starting from a blank page.

• Google open-sourced Stitch’s DESIGN.md format, a draft spec carrying design rules across tools so AI systems understand why colors, components and patterns exist instead of just copying their appearance. You can get it through their GitHub.

• OpenAI launched an ads manager and cut ChatGPT’s ad pilot minimum to $50,000, lowering the barrier for advertisers while making its ad business look more like a real self-serve platform instead of a high-touch experiment. OpenAI is building the infrastructure it needs if it actually wants ChatGPT ads to scale into a mainstream media-buying channel.

• Google is reportedly investing $10 billion in Anthropic, with another $30 billion potentially tied to milestone targets. They’re deepening a strategy where cloud and chip providers back external AI labs that may also become major infrastructure customers.

MARKETING

Win Across All Three Eras of the Web

Tim Frank says marketers now need to operate across three parallel web environments at once: the human web where people search and compare manually, the LLM web where AI helps users choose, and the emerging agentic web where AI agents may complete the transaction for them. Microsoft uses that framing to introduce a set of product updates around Clarity AI Visibility, UCP-ready merchant feeds, Copilot Checkout, AI Max for Search, Offer Highlights and AI-assisted audience generation, all designed to help brands become more visible and actionable inside AI-driven decision paths. They say that agent traffic is rising much faster than human traffic, which means structured data, machine-readable commerce inputs and AI-aware measurement are becoming necessary infrastructure instead of optional experiments.

source: microsoft.com

Amazon Sellers Boycott Ads in Policy Change Revolt

Annie Palmer reports that hundreds of large Amazon sellers organized a 24-hour boycott of Amazon’s advertising platform to protest a cluster of policy changes that they say are squeezing already thin margins. The changes include delayed seller disbursements, changes to how ad payments are collected, and a temporary 3.5% fuel surcharge tied to higher energy costs, all of which merchants say threaten cash flow more than simple profitability. The large organized seller community that collectively represents billions in revenue.

AI Funnel: The Bottom-Up Acquisition Strategy

Jason Barnard outlines a marketing approach built around how AI tools are reshaping discovery, qualification and conversion, with the funnel starting closer to product value and workflow usefulness than top-of-funnel brand storytelling. He emphasizes that AI-assisted buying journeys can compress research and reduce the importance of some classic awareness-stage tactics, which puts more pressure on product-led proof, clearer use cases and lower-friction entry points. Rather than treating AI as a traffic gimmick, it frames the opportunity as redesigning acquisition around how people now move from need to action with AI helping them along the way.

My Take: This is a good read because a lot of marketing teams still act like the funnel starts where it did five years ago. AI compresses research and comparison, so the strongest acquisition systems may be the ones that get users into value faster instead of spending too much energy on awareness-stage content.

CONTENT

How to Extend the Life of Your Best Content Using Audio Formats

Kimberly Zhang explains that audio is one of the clearest ways to fight content decay, especially for strong content assets that spike briefly after publishing and then fade while audiences move on to passive, ears-open consumption. She lays out 11 repurposing ideas, from narrated blog posts and audio snacks to private podcast newsletters, Q&A responses and audio roundups of industry news, all aimed at turning written assets into something people can consume while commuting, exercising or multitasking.

My Take: Number 11 is one that speaks to me directly because it’s about roundups like this newsletter. So…do you want an audio version of this roundup?

SOCIAL MEDIA

How to Build a YouTube Analytics Report in Data Studio

Alex Juel walks through how to move YouTube analytics into Data Studio so teams can build cleaner, more shareable reporting without relying on direct access to YouTube Studio. The guide covers setup options like whether to use Google’s template or start from scratch, how to handle permissions when you are not the YouTube account owner, and which template errors need to be fixed before the report is actually usable.

Social Ripples

• X has launched the standalone XChat app on iOS, splitting messaging out into a separate product with private chats, disappearing messages, file sharing, and audio and video calls while trying to give Communities users a new destination after shutting that feature down. My feeling is just like this:

Twitter tweet

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

Email Detective

Email Detective is a Chrome extension from EmailTooltester that identifies which email service provider sent a message inside Gmail and surfaces related authentication details directly on the subject line. The extension says it can detect more than 110 ESPs, including platforms like Mailchimp, Brevo, HubSpot and Klaviyo, while also showing SPF, DKIM and DMARC status, possible shared versus dedicated IP usage, and a new bulk scanner for checking up to 50 emails at once. That makes it a lightweight competitive research and deliverability inspection tool for anyone who spends time reverse-engineering email stacks.

My Take: This is a very cool tool and gives you all sorts of infrastructure data. If you do any email marketing competitor research, it’s a tool you’ll want.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

Speak the email. Send the email.

Talk through your reply and get polished, professional text ready to paste. Wispr Flow strips filler, fixes grammar, and formats everything. 89% sent with zero edits. Works everywhere.

Try Wispr Flow free

AD

Turn Google Ads into predictable customer acquisition

Echelonn manages over $15M/mo in Google and YouTube Ads for 300+ ecommerce brands. One vertical. One channel. Total focus. If you're not confident your account is performing the way it should, book a free audit.

Get your free audit

SEO + GEO

ChatGPT Traffic Analysis: Insights From 17 Months of Clickstream Data

Luke Harsel reports on Semrush clickstream data showing that ChatGPT is not replacing traditional search so much as becoming another layer in the path users take before they click through to the wider web. The data makes the main pattern clear: ChatGPT is increasingly a referrer, but one that still sends a huge amount of attention back toward Google and a small set of dominant domains.

• Outbound referral traffic from ChatGPT to the rest of the web grew 206% in 2025.

• More than 20% of ChatGPT's referral traffic went to Google.

• More than 30% of all ChatGPT referral traffic went to just 10 domains.

• ChatGPT enabled web search on only 34.5% of queries by February 2026.

• The share of prompts that matched traditional search language nearly doubled from 18.9% to 34.9% between October 2025 and February 2026.

• Average queries per ChatGPT session jumped 50% in the final four months of the study period, reaching 1.75 by February 2026.

• ChatGPT referred traffic to roughly 71,000 unique domains per month in October 2024, peaked around 260,000 in October 2025, and ended near 170,000 by February 2026.

Topical Authority Is Not About Coverage. It Never Was.

Yoyao explains that topical authority was never about publishing the most pages on a subject, but about becoming the site and brand the right buyers trust on a topic area of expertise. He argues that AI has not broken content strategy so much as exposed weak strategy, because cheap production (especially by generic AI-writers) only amplifies vague positioning, fuzzy audience definition and shallow buyer understanding. The article lays out a stricter sequence for authority building, moving from brand foundation and target audience to buyer personas, topical maps, detailed briefs, drafts and measurement, with the brief positioned as the quality-control layer most teams skip. The real point is that content scale only compounds when the upstream structure is strong enough to turn expertise into something buyers can actually trust and choose.

My Take: This is one of the reasons every topical map created for clients are unique. Every client is different, even if they’re both plumbing companies. Plumbing in New York is different from Plumbing in Southern California. People use AI because responses are personalized for their specific situation. If your content isn’t clear on who its for, it won’t get shown by AI or even Google since they’re also personalizing what’s in the SERPs.

Your Homepage Matters Again for SEO — Here’s Why

Marcus Miller suggests that AI-assisted research is reducing clicks to deep informational pages and sending more users back through branded search, which makes the homepage more important again as a conversion and orientation layer. He says that while traditional SEO taught us to treat every page as a possible entry point, AI tools are now doing more of the comparison and summarization work upstream, so users arrive warmer but with less visible context about what exactly they need. That raises the value of clear information architecture, stronger homepage signposting and site structures that work for both front-door human visitors and back-door AI and search crawlers. It’s not that inner pages stop mattering. It’s that homepage UX and architecture are becoming part of SEO performance again instead of something teams can safely treat as mostly brand territory.

My Take: I was initially surprised to see the headline because I was wondering “when did homepages not matter for SEO?” 😅 I see his point and logic for why they might be less important by some. I always just treated it as an important page. I mean, the homepage always sits at the top of sitemaps for a reason.

How AI Chooses Which Brands to Recommend: From Relational Knowledge to Topical Presence

Dixon Jones argues that AI recommendation visibility depends less on how many pages a brand publishes and more on the strength of the relationships a model has learned between that brand and a topic. He builds the case through research on relational knowledge in language models, showing that LLMs retrieve brands more confidently when associations are tight and repeatedly reinforced, and far less reliably when brands sit in crowded, many-to-many categories with weak differentiation. He then connects that theory to practice by arguing that Share of Voice alone is too shallow, and that teams also need to understand their topical presence, meaning what topics AI actually associates them with and how concentrated those associations are.

My Take: This is a useful framing because it explains why some brands keep showing up in AI answers even when others have published just as much content. AI visibility is becoming a knowledge-graph and brand-association problem as much as a content production problem. The missing piece is not always page count. It is often whether the market, the web and the model all connect your brand to a specific problem space with enough consistency. That is exactly why brand positioning, entity clarity and focused topical depth matter more now than another round of generic keyword coverage.

Introducing a New Spam Policy for Back Button Hijacking

Google is making back button hijacking an explicit spam policy violation under its malicious practices rules. The behavior covers sites that interfere with browser history so users cannot return normally to the previous page, and instead get pushed into ads, recommendations or pages they never intended to visit. Google says it has seen more of this behavior recently and will begin enforcement on June 15, with sites at risk of manual spam actions or automated demotions if they do not remove the scripts, libraries or ad platform configurations causing it.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google Maps blocked 292 million reviews and removed 13 million fake Business Profiles in 2025, while also blocking 79 million inaccurate or unverified edits and restricting more than 783,000 abusive accounts. Google is leaning more on Gemini-powered systems plus proactive alerts to business owners.

• Wikipedia deleted Barry Schwartz’s page as non-notable, sparking backlash across the SEO community and a public defense from Danny Sullivan. It is a weirdly revealing reminder that industry influence, citation history and actual community significance do not always map neatly to how institutional notability gets judged online.

• Google confirmed the recent Search Console impression emails were a bug after site owners got messages suggesting data collection had just started on properties verified long ago. If you got one of these notices (I did), they were a mistake, and no underlying Search Console reset or tracking change actually happened.

AI

Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO)

Addy Osmani says that technical documentation now needs to serve AI coding agents as a first-class audience, not just human readers, because agents fetch, parse and discard docs in ways traditional analytics rarely capture. He lays out a practical stack for making docs more agent-ready.

• Audit robots.txt so AI agents are not silently blocked from your documentation.

• Add llms.txt at the root to give agents a structured, low-token index of key documentation.

• Track and surface token counts so agents can judge whether a page fits within context limits.

• Write skill.md files that explain what each API or service can do, not just how to call it.

• Serve clean Markdown versions of docs so agents do not waste context on HTML noise.

• Front-load each page with the outcome, core capability and first-step information in the opening tokens.

• Add “Copy for AI” buttons so developers can pass clean context into assistants without navigation clutter.

• Monitor AI traffic directly through referrers and agent HTTP fingerprints instead of relying on client-side analytics.

My Take: This is for developer documentation in websites and not the homepage. Further into the future, there may need to be more consideration for non-documentation pages though. Coincidentally, Cloudflare has a test below that covers much of the same content.

Introducing the Agent Readiness Score. Is Your Site Agent-Ready?

André Jesus and Vance Morrison introduce Cloudflare's new Agent Readiness score, a tool and Radar dataset designed to show how well websites support AI agents across discovery, content access, bot controls and protocol support. The early data is revealing: 78% of sites have robots.txt, but only 4% declare AI usage preferences through Content Signals, 3.9% support markdown content negotiation, and emerging standards like MCP Server Cards and API Catalogs appear on fewer than 15 sites in Cloudflare's 200,000-domain sample.

My Take: Don’t freak out if you put in your homepage and score low. Note that Cloudflare’s test is also geared more towards documentation pages. Their test for their developer documentation (https://developers.cloudflare.com/) scores 100, while their homepage scores 67, because many of the tests aren’t relevant to marketing pages.

Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs

Anthropic is launching Claude Design, a research preview product that lets users create visual work like prototypes, slides, one-pagers and marketing assets by collaborating with Claude through prompts, comments, direct edits and adjustable controls. The tool is powered by Claude Opus 4.7 and is being positioned as both a way for non-designers to produce polished visual output and a way for designers to explore more directions faster, with extras like design system onboarding, web capture, organization sharing and export to formats like PPTX, PDF, Canva and HTML. One of the best features is the handoff flow to Claude Code, where finalized designs can be packaged into a bundle for implementation.

My Take: It’s Floyi for Design 😂 Claude uses the brand context for everything it designs before handing off to Claude Code, creating a much tighter workflow than bouncing between disconnected tools. I did use it to try and redesign homepages, but it seems overloaded with many actions just stopping and required me sending many “Resume” messages to get completed tasks. And I hit the limit pretty quickly, even with a Max account, so I need to wait 24 hours now. It could’ve been the initial injection of brand files though because I just gave it a full Github repository to analyze.

Meet Happy Oyster: Alibaba Launches New AI Video Model That Turns Text Prompts Into Playable 3D Worlds

Alibaba has launched Happy Oyster, a world model that generates interactive 3D environments and videos in real time instead of producing a single finished clip from one prompt. The model runs in two modes, with Directing focused on continuous scene generation that can be steered midstream through text, voice or images, and Wandering allowing users to explore an expanding world in first-person with stable physics and camera control. Alibaba says Directing can generate up to three minutes of continuous video at 480p or 720p, while Wandering currently supports one-minute generations at 480p.

My Take: AI video generation is starting to blur into simulation and playable world-building. This feels more important than another text-to-video release because it pushes toward persistent environments instead of isolated clips. Once models can maintain world coherence while users intervene in real time, the line between video generation, prototyping and lightweight game creation gets much thinner. That opens up very different use cases than just making prettier AI footage.

source: happyoyster.cn

The Gemini App Is Now on Mac

Google has released a native Gemini app for macOS, giving users a desktop version that can be summoned with Option + Space and used without tab switching. The app can also take context from whatever is on screen, including local files, so users can ask for summaries, explanations or help tied directly to the window they are viewing.

My Take: Gemini finally releasing a desktop app, something that ChatGPT (with 2 apps) and Claude have had for awhile. Desktop presence is table stakes now for chatbots.

source: blog.google

Perplexity Personal Computer Is Here

Personal Computer is expanding Perplexity Computer from a cloud-based workflow tool into something that can operate across your own files, native apps, connectors and the web on your machine. The pitch is that the system can understand an objective, carry work across interfaces and stay available for longer-running workflows, with Mac mini positioned as an especially useful always-on host. Perplexity also emphasizes local control and security, saying actions are auditable, reversible and designed to keep users in the loop on sensitive steps.

My Take: Everyone’s got a desktop app. Now it’s a matter of - what’s going to be most useful for the work you need to do?

source: perplexity.ai

Codex for (Almost) Everything

Codex is expanding from a coding assistant into a broader desktop agent that can use your computer, browse in-app, generate images, remember preferences and handle longer-running work across the software development lifecycle. The update adds background computer use, multiple parallel agents on macOS, deeper PR review and terminal workflows, remote devbox access over SSH, more than 90 new plugins and a preview of memory and recurring automations. They’re framing it as a workspace agent that can carry context, operate across apps and keep development work moving over time.

My Take: This moves Codex closer to being an operating layer for developer work instead of a feature you dip into when you need help writing code. Once memory, plugins, browser control and recurring automations start working together well, the stickiness goes up fast. The winner here may be the tool that best holds context across days, tools and unfinished work, not just the one that writes the cleanest function.

source: openai.com

A New Way to Explore the Web With AI Mode in Chrome

Google is upgrading AI Mode in Chrome so people can explore the web side-by-side with AI help instead of bouncing constantly between search tabs and webpages. The new setup lets clicked links open next to AI Mode, while a new plus menu can pull in recent tabs, images and PDFs as context for follow-up questions. Google is also extending access to tools like Canvas and image creation wherever that plus menu appears, which turns AI Mode into more of a persistent browser layer than a standalone search experience.

My Take: ChatGPT Atlas browser and Claude’s Chrome Extension do offer similar-ish features, but Chrome and AI Mode are better integrated. This is one of the clearest product signs that browser UX and Search are being rebuilt around context carryover instead of isolated queries. Once users can keep pages, tabs, files and follow-up questions in the same working surface, the search box stops being the main event. What I like about ChatGPT Atlas is the conversations are saved and can be continued anywhere. But Claude’s Extension’s chats are lost when the extension’s sidebar closes (or at least I can’t find them).

source: blog.google

Shopify AI Toolkit

Shopify releases an AI Toolkit that connects tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and VS Code to Shopify's developer platform and store management workflows. The toolkit gives developers several ways to wire this in, including plugins, agent skills and a local MCP server, with the core promise being that AI agents can use Shopify docs, API schemas, code validation and store execution capabilities instead of guessing.

My Take: This is exactly the kind of move more platforms will make over the next year. If developers are increasingly building through agents, then the platform that exposes the cleanest docs, schemas and execution paths to those agents gets a real adoption advantage.

AI Ripples

• Claude Opus 4.7 is now generally available, with Anthropic positioning it as a stronger model for advanced software engineering, better high-resolution vision and more reliable long-running work than Opus 4.6.

• Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS adds more expressive speech controls, including audio tags for pace, tone and delivery, while supporting 70+ languages and SynthID watermarking.

• Google is rolling out Skills in Chrome, which lets users save repeatable prompts as one-click AI workflows that can run against the current page and selected tabs. Google is also launching a library of prebuilt Skills for common tasks, while keeping editing and remixing available so people can adapt saved workflows to their own needs.

• Gemini can now use Personal Intelligence and Google Photos for image generation, making Nano Banana 2 more personalized by pulling from connected apps and labeled photos instead of relying on long prompts and manual uploads. Google is trying to turn private context into a creative input layer while keeping that data inside its own ecosystem.

• OpenAI has started rolling out ads in Australia, New Zealand and Canada for Free and Go users, while paid tiers remain ad-free. That is a small geographic launch on paper, but it is a meaningful signal that conversational AI ads are moving from experiment toward product reality.

MARKETING

Google Ads MCC Hacked? Here’s What to Do Immediately

Reva Minkoff walks through a real Google Ads Manager Account hack, detailing how attackers gained access through a compromised employee email, removed users, changed allowed domains, altered billing setups and created chaos across linked client accounts. It goes beyond the incident itself and spells out a recovery sequence: contact Google fast, file account takeover forms, coordinate with clients to disconnect affected accounts, reset billing and use change history to trace every malicious action. She also lays out practical prevention steps like limiting admin access, forcing password resets, enabling stronger 2FA, using multi-party approval and avoiding direct bank account connections.

CONTENT

The AI Slop Loop

Lily Ray explains how fabricated AI-generated information can get repeated across enough low-quality sites that other AI systems begin treating it as fact, using a fake September 2025 Google “Perspectives” core update as the clearest example. She traces the loop from one made-up article to multiple AI-generated sites, then into AI answers from tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews that repeat the fiction with confidence because citation volume gets mistaken for truth. The article also points to a deeper structural issue: free-tier and mass-market AI products still give billions of users answers from models that are more prone to error, while the more reliable reasoning layers are often reserved for paid users. AI misinformation is no longer just a content quality issue. It is becoming an infrastructure problem for how knowledge gets manufactured, cited and believed at scale.

My Take: This is why I keep saying that AI visibility work cannot be separated from information quality anymore. Once enough bad content starts citing itself, the retrieval layer gets polluted and even smart users can be led in the wrong direction. The brands that benefit long term will be the ones creating high-delta content with real verification, because that is one of the only ways to resist the feedback loop instead of feeding it.

LINK BUILDING

How to Transition From Link Building to Digital PR

Vince Nero explains that the shift from traditional link building to digital PR is less about changing tactics than changing what teams optimize for. Instead of chasing link volume through scalable outreach, he says that digital PR requires fewer, better pitches built around timely stories, stronger journalist fit and data-led assets that reporters cannot produce easily on their own. The piece also pushes a reporting mindset change, noting that nofollow links, unlinked mentions and social placements matter more now because AI visibility tracks brand mentions as much as classic backlinks.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Building a Smarter, Faster Way to Find the Right People on LinkedIn

Jill Raines says LinkedIn is expanding AI-powered people search to all U.S. members, moving a feature that previously launched for Premium users into the broader product. The update lets people search in natural language, improves search when users only remember fragments like a nickname or partial spelling, personalizes suggestions based on profile and search history, and adds verification badges plus AI-generated profile summaries directly in results.

X Boosts Incentives for Original Content Creators

Andrew Hutchinson reports that X is adjusting its creator revenue share program to push more money toward original authors and less toward aggregator accounts that ride the reach of reposted material. Nikita Bier says X is experimenting with tools to identify original creators, has already cut aggregator payouts to 60% this cycle, and plans another 20% reduction in the next one. The change matters because it is one of the clearest admissions yet that X's own monetization system has been rewarding repost velocity and bait behavior more than actual creation.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

Google Ads API to Require Multi-Factor Authentication

Anu Adegbola reports that Google will begin rolling out mandatory MFA for the Google Ads API starting April 21, with enforcement expanding over the following weeks for users generating new OAuth 2.0 refresh tokens through standard authentication flows. Existing refresh tokens will keep working, but new authentications will require a second factor by default, while service account workflows are not affected. The change also extends beyond the API itself to tools like Google Ads Editor, Scripts, BigQuery Data Transfer and Data Studio.

My Take: This sounds like one of those updates where teams using Ads API tools should get their OAuth tokens now instead of waiting for the MFA requirement to break a workflow at the worst possible time. If you have internal tools, dashboards or automations that depend on fresh user-based credentials, this is the moment to audit them.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

Your inventory doesn't wait for you to check a dashboard.

Viktor sends daily inventory and reorder alerts to your team's Slack channel. If a SKU is trending toward stockout, you know before it happens.

Your content calendar and social posting run on autopilot. Brand monitoring runs in the background. Viktor handles the recurring work across ops and marketing so your team focuses on growth.

5,700+ teams. 3,000+ integrations.

Start free. $100 in credits →

AD

LLM traffic converts 3× better than Google search

58% of buyers now start their research in ChatGPT or Gemini, not Google. Most startups aren't showing up there yet.

The ones that are get cited by the AI tools their buyers, investors, and future hires already use. And they convert at 3×.

Download the free AEO Playbook for Startups from HubSpot and get the exact steps to start showing up. Five minutes to read.

Get the free playbook

SEO + GEO

How Accurate Are Google’s AI Overviews?

Various reporters at the New York Times reports that Google's AI Overviews now answer standard factual benchmark questions correctly roughly 9 out of 10 times, based on analysis conducted with an AI startup that tracks the feature. That sounds strong at first glance, but at Google's scale even a 10% error rate means a huge absolute volume of wrong answers showing up in search - Google is “processing more than five trillion searches a year, this means that it provides tens of millions of erroneous answers every hour (or hundreds of thousands of inaccuracies every minute)”

My Take: This is the trap with AI accuracy stats. 90% sounds good until you remember how much volume Google handles and how much trust users place in answers that look definitive. Improving from 85% to 91% matters, but the remaining error rate is still big enough to shape reputation, clicks and public understanding at scale.

Reddit vs. B2B SaaS: 8,566 Keywords Expose Who’s Winning

Ross Simmonds breaks down an analysis of 8,566 keywords where Reddit competes directly with 13 major B2B SaaS domains across four verticals, and the topline result is ugly for most vendors. Reddit reportedly outranks every vendor simultaneously on 50% to 66% of shared keywords in three of the four verticals studied, covering 957,540 monthly searches, and 77% of that winning search volume comes from generic category terms rather than classic review or alternative queries. The study also says Reddit's win rate jumps to 73% to 100% on queries with six or more words, while keywords with CPCs above $50 show a 67.3% Reddit win rate, which means some of the most commercially valuable searches are the ones vendors are losing organically.

My Take: Reddit, Reddit, Reddit! People talk about GEO agencies popping up everywhere, but how about them Reddit agencies. I tested one Reddit service over a year ago and not 1 of the 10+ posts stuck around longer than 2 months 😅 

source: foundationinc.co

How to Produce Content That Naturally Builds AEO Clout

Adam Tanguay explains that backlinks still matter, but AEO authority now depends just as much on repeated mentions, citations and clear entity associations across the web. His pushes teams to create content that is easy for LLMs to extract, with tight definitions, descriptive headers, short paragraphs and explicit context instead of vague references. He also says that the best AEO assets are reference-grade materials like original research, benchmarks, glossaries and visual explainers that journalists, creators and AI systems can reuse.

Bing, Not Google, Shapes Which Brands ChatGPT Recommends

Molly Nogami and Ben Tannenbaum report that Bing visibility appears to matter more than Google visibility when brands want to show up in ChatGPT recommendations. In their 68-run hotel study, the Baccarat appeared only once, while the Fifth Avenue Hotel showed up 13 times, even though the Baccarat had more reviews, a longer history and similar ratings. Their deeper finding is that winning Google fanout SERPs did not translate into mentions, while stronger placement in Bing fanout results aligned much more closely with ChatGPT visibility.

Are Low-Quality Listicles About to Lose Their Edge in Google Search?

Danny Goodwin reports that Google says it is aware of weak “best of” listicles and is actively trying to limit that kind of abuse in both Search and Gemini. Through a Lily Ray post, he ties the issue to the FTC's Consumer Review Rule, which bars company-controlled content from being presented as independent reviews and allows penalties that can reach $53,088 per violation. That matters because a lot of “best X” GEO pages are built on thin comparisons, fake scoring systems and self-serving rankings rather than real testing or disclosure.

My Take: This reminds me of the old affiliate site playbook where people would “review” products they barely touched, then get paid to stack certain brands at the top of every best-of article. So in that sense, these listicles are not some new GEO invention. It is the same incentive structure in a new wrapper. The difference now is that Google and regulators both have more reason to treat the pattern as abuse instead of just low-grade publishing. Have you heard of the FTC going after any pay-for-play affiliate sites?

5 Data-Backed Features of Websites Winning Google in 2026

Cyrus Shepard analyzes more than 400 winning and losing websites and finds that the biggest Google winners increasingly share a different business shape from traditional publishers. The strongest pattern is not just better content. It is a stack of business and product traits that are much harder for AI slop content sites to copy.

• 70.2% of winning sites offered a product or service, compared with 34.6% of losing sites.

• 83.7% of winners allowed task completion on-site, versus 50.2% of losers.

• 92.9% of winners had proprietary assets, compared with 57.1% of losers.

• 75.9% of winners showed tight topical focus, versus 61.3% of losers.

• 32.6% of winners qualified as strong brands, compared with 16.1% of losers.

• Sites with 0 features had a 13.5% win rate.

• Sites with 4 features had a 68.1% win rate.

• Sites with 5 features had a 69.7% win rate.

source: zyppy.com

SEO + GEO Ripples

• John Mueller says Google can handle multiple URLs pointing to the same content and that duplication alone does not trigger a ranking penalty. The real risk is making canonicalization harder on yourself when redirects, internal links and canonical hints send mixed signals.

• Sundar Pichai says Google Search is becoming an agent manager that will handle multi-step tasks instead of stopping at links and answers. Google is describing a future where search coordinates work across tools, while Search and Gemini stay separate products that overlap in some use cases.

AI

Introducing Muse Spark: Scaling Towards Personal Superintelligence

Meta introduces Muse Spark as the first model in its Muse family led by Alexandr Wang. It’s positioned as a natively multimodal reasoning system with tool use, visual chain of thought and multi-agent orchestration. The launch post says Contemplating mode lets parallel agents reason together, pushing Muse Spark to 58% on Humanity's Last Exam and 38% on FrontierScience Research while Meta keeps investing in larger models, long-horizon agents and coding workflows. Meta also claims its rebuilt pretraining stack can reach the same capability level with more than an order of magnitude less compute than Llama 4 Maverick, which is a much bigger signal than the product demo language around personal superintelligence.

Alexandr Wang shared benchmarks on his X account, but it didn’t have highlights on best/worst. Here’s a heatmap version found on X:

source: @EverydayAI_ on X

Claude Managed Agents: get to production 10x faster

Anthropic launched Claude Managed Agents, a suite of composable APIs for building cloud-hosted agents without having to stand up the usual runtime infrastructure yourself. Anthropic handles sandboxed execution, checkpointing, credential management, scoped permissions, long-running sessions, tracing and agent orchestration, while developers define tasks, tools and guardrails.

source: claude.com

OpenAI, Meta, ByteDance Lead AI Bot Traffic In Publishing

Matt Southern reports on Akamai data showing that publishing is absorbing more AI bot traffic than any other media sub-vertical, with OpenAI the largest source, followed by Meta and ByteDance. Akamai says fetcher bots, which retrieve content in real time to answer chatbot questions, may pose a more immediate revenue risk than training crawlers, since they can satisfy user demand without sending people to the publisher's site. Training crawlers made up 63% of AI bot activity targeting media in the second half of 2025, but fetcher bots still accounted for 24% and publishing represented 43% of that fetcher traffic.

My Take: A good reminder that there are two types of AI bots - training and real-time fetchers. Training crawlers are the long-term memory problem, but fetcher bots are the immediate monetization problem because they can replace the click today.

The Real AI Race Isn’t About Models or Data. It’s About Context.

Duncan Lennox argues that most teams think they have a model problem when the real bottleneck is context, meaning the operational knowledge, customer history, process logic and business nuance that AI systems need to produce useful output. He draws a line between raw data and applied context, capturing business context across sales, marketing and service workflows instead of forcing teams to re-brief AI every time. It also breaks context into five layers: business, team, process, customer and network context. Context compounds while generic AI usage does not.

My Take: Models are getting better fast, but the gap between a smart model and a useful system is still the business context wrapped around it. The lack of context is why so many AI workflows are disappointing in practice. The model can respond, but it does not really know how your company works unless that context has been captured somewhere durable.

Context is why the first step in Floyi is solidifying your brand and buyer personas. We don’t let you start creating briefs and drafts like other tools. First step is to build your business context and knowledge base.

Reusable "Skills" Are Coming to Gemini in Chrome

Glenn Gabe founds Google testing reusable prompt “Skills” in Chrome Canary for the Gemini side panel, letting users save prompts, name them and call them back later with a slash command. The feature also appears to let Gemini help refine those saved prompts and includes prebuilt options like “Buying advice,” which hints at more guided workflows inside the browser.

My Take: This is a small product change with huge behavior implications. Once people can save repeatable prompt flows inside the browser, they stop treating AI like a blank box and start treating it like a set of shortcuts for real work. I imagine usage increasing fast because the friction of rewriting the same prompt every day disappears.

Project Glasswing: Securing Critical Software for the AI Era

Anthropic is launching Project Glasswing with partners including AWS, Apple, Cisco, Google, Microsoft and the Linux Foundation to use Claude Mythos Preview for defensive cybersecurity work across critical software. The company says Mythos has already identified thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including flaws in every major operating system and web browser, and it highlights examples like a 27-year-old OpenBSD bug, a 16-year-old FFmpeg issue and chained Linux kernel exploits found autonomously. Anthropic is also committing up to $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in donations to open-source security groups while limiting access to a small set of partners and more than 40 additional infrastructure organizations.

My Take: I think this is one of the more serious AI announcements of the year because it is not about demos or consumer features. It is about whether the next jump in model capability makes software defense stronger before it makes software exploitation cheaper. If Anthropic is right about the pace here, then cybersecurity is becoming one of the clearest tests of whether frontier AI labs can roll out dangerous capability responsibly.

AI Ripples

• OpenAI launched a new $100 ChatGPT Pro tier, positioning it as the option for longer, higher-effort Codex sessions with 5x more Codex usage than Plus and a temporary bump to as much as 10x usage through May 31. It’s about time OpenAI offered a plan between $20 and $200.

• Microsoft's Copilot terms still say the product is for entertainment purposes only, even as the company pushes Copilot hard into enterprise workflows. Microsoft says the wording is legacy language and will be updated. Are you not entertained?

• OpenAI added a Prompting Fundamentals page to its Academy. It’s part of a broader set of new Academy docs aimed at helping users get more useful output from AI.

• Google added notebooks to Gemini, giving users a way to organize chats, files and custom instructions in one synced workspace that also connects directly with NotebookLM. Google is trying to turn Gemini and NotebookLM into a shared project layer instead of keeping them as separate AI experiences.

• Gemini can now generate interactive simulations and models inside chat, letting users explore concepts like orbital physics or molecular structure through sliders and live visualizations instead of static diagrams.

• Google published a detailed prompting guide for Lyria 3 Pro, covering structure, vocal control, lyrics, multimodal inputs and workflow tactics for music generation.

SOCIAL MEDIA

YouTube Now Lets Creators Build AI Avatars of Themselves

YouTube is rolling out avatar tools that let creators generate a digital version of themselves to make videos that look and sound like them, using existing ingredients-to-video systems inside the YouTube mobile app and YouTube Create. The company is positioning this as a safer, more controlled way to use AI likeness tools, with output labeled as AI, avatar use restricted to the creator, and deletion available at any time. The bigger story is that YouTube is moving cloned presence from novelty into native creator workflow, which lowers the barrier to making more content without always being on camera. For social teams and creators, that makes synthetic presence a real publishing tool, not just an experiment on the edge of the platform.

My Take: This is one of those launches that sounds gimmicky until you think about how many creators already struggle to scale filming, reshoots and versioning. If YouTube can make a creator's digital double feel usable without breaking trust, this becomes a serious content multiplier. The hard part will be keeping the line clear between helpful production efficiency and content that starts to feel uncanny or disposable.

Social Ripples

• Nikita Bier says X is tightening product rules to curb manipulation and low-quality activity, but many people in the thread are complaining about false positives and overly broad enforcement. That tension is becoming a recurring platform story: every attempt to clean up spam or gaming also risks sweeping up legitimate users who trigger the wrong signals.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

The AI Playbook for Video Teams That Can't Slow Down

Wistia's new AI Video Marketing Trends report shows how marketers are using AI to move faster, improve quality, and extend the life of every video. See how leading teams are driving results without adding more work.

Download the Full Report

AD

One brand built 30+ landing pages through Viktor without a single developer.

Each page mapped to a specific ad group. All deployed within hours. Viktor wrote the code and shipped every one from a Slack message.

That same team has Viktor monitoring ad accounts across the portfolio and posting performance briefs before the day starts. One colleague. Always on. Across every account.

5,700+ teams. 3,000+ integrations.

Start free. $100 in credits →

SEO + GEO

Search Off the Record on Web Page Bloat and Why Size Still Matters

Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt discuss how median mobile homepages grew from 845 KB in 2015 to 2.3 MB in 2025 and why that still matters despite faster connections. Their main point is that page size is not one simple metric because it depends on raw bytes, compressed transfer size and downstream processing cost, but heavier pages still hurt users on slower networks, chew up more client-side resources and complicate crawling and rendering. Googlebot has a default fetch limit of 15 MB. For Google Search, limit is 2 MB. PDFs are ~64 MB. Read the transcript.

My Take: Reduce bloat. Stay lean. I’ve been using Astro more and more for sites instead of WordPress. I don’t like going into WP now 😅 

What We Learned From Google’s First-Ever Discover Algorithm Update

Philip Elias says Google's first dedicated Discover update rewarded locally relevant content, reduced sensationalism and elevated original, timely coverage from sites with stronger topic-specific expertise. Raptive's analysis across thousands of sites suggests the gains were meaningful, with travel sites up 72%, news sites up 34% and smaller niche sites up 26%, while the common winning patterns were fresh publishing, fewer empty republishes, stronger email engagement and cleaner page experience. Discover moves fast too, more than 70% of page clicks arrived within a day of publication.

Programmatic SEO Case Study: How Semrush Won, Ahrefs Stumbled, and Moz Exposed the Real Organic Growth Benchmark

Suman Chatterjee compares Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz over several years of estimated traffic, ranked page counts and top-performing URLs, arguing that these pSEO case studies are often grouped together too loosely. His analysis says Semrush's long rollout of domain profile pages targeting low-difficulty navigational brand queries produced a far more durable outcome than Ahrefs' later push into writing tools and site profile pages, while Moz's steadier editorial growth offers a useful control. The most important point is that the same programmatic SEO label covered very different keyword targets, rollout speeds and page types, which led to very different levels of stickiness after Google's recalibration.

source: Suman Chatterjee

What 3,900 SEO Job Listings Reveal for 2026

Margarita Loktionova analyzed 3,900 SEO job listings and found that the role is broadening beyond classic rankings into strategy, experimentation and AI-era visibility. The strongest signals are that senior leadership roles account for 59% of listings, median salary for senior SEO roles reached $130,000, project management appears in more than 30% of postings and AI is mentioned in 31% of senior listings. The study also shows how employers are connecting SEO more directly to business outcomes, with growing expectations around cross-functional leadership, experimentation and fluency with AI-driven discovery.

4 Prompt Tracking Mistakes

Tom Capper suggests that a lot of prompt tracking is being measured with the wrong mental model, especially when teams obsess over citations, classic rankings and tiny prompt sets. His main point is that AI visibility should be evaluated more like share of mention and presence across a representative prompt universe, not as a one-to-one replacement for keyword rank tracking. The piece also warns against tracking only head terms, since prompt behavior is longer-tail, more variable and often more contextual than traditional search queries.

Top Domains Cited by AI Search

Tomek Rudzki analyzed 30 million sources across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews to see which domains are cited most often by major AI search systems. The top 10 list was led by Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Forbes, G2, Yelp, Facebook, Medium and TechRadar, but the more useful insight is how much the platforms diverge once you break them apart. Google's systems leaned harder toward social and community sources like Facebook and Yelp, while ChatGPT favored more editorial sources like Wikipedia, Forbes and TechRadar, and Perplexity gave unusual weight to G2.

My Take: Remember, these types of ‘top domain’ studies depend on the industries that are analyzed. Different industries use different domains. Which platforms matter also depend on your brand and which source your audiences trust most. This is why brand and audience are a required setup in Floyi, and not some bolt-on input field when writing content.

The Science Of What AI Actually Rewards

Kevin Indig says that most AI SEO writing advice breaks down at scale because citation patterns differ sharply by vertical, even when people talk about AI search as if one formula fits all. His analysis finds a few stronger signals, including a direct declarative opening, relevant dates and numbers in the intro, and heading structures that match the norms of a given category rather than generic "best practices." Just as important are the negatives: pricing-heavy intros underperform in most non-finance verticals, hedging language weakens citation likelihood, and KG-verified entities do not automatically translate into an advantage.

My Take: Different industries have different content structures, so you can’t reuse the same formatting across all your niches.

Google Gemini Sends More Traffic To Sites Than Perplexity

Matt G. Southern reports on SE Ranking data from more than 101,000 sites showing that Gemini referral traffic more than doubled between November and January, rising 51% in December and 42% in January after Gemini 3 began rolling out across Google's products. Gemini reportedly sent 29% more visitors than Perplexity globally in January and 41% more in the U.S., even though ChatGPT still accounts for roughly 80% of all AI referral traffic. The important nuance is that this remains a tiny slice of overall web traffic, around 0.24%, but the direction matters because Gemini is tied directly into Google's product surface area and distribution.

My Take: I also added Gemini as a core engine to track in Floyi’s Authority Scorecard (alongside ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode), because it powers AI Overviews and AI Mode. Even though it’s 3/4 Google, they still provide different answers and sources. Here’s a small sample tracking SERPs and the 4 AI engines for a cluster in Floyi:

Left to Right - AI Overview, AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT

Why Dynamic Profiles Are the New Local Ranking Factor

Adam Heitzman finds that Google Business Profiles have shifted from static directory listings into live engagement surfaces where freshness and ongoing activity increasingly shape local visibility. The strongest case in the article is that foundational setup elements like category, proximity and title keywords still matter, but they are now table stakes. Signals such as review cadence, posts, photos, clicks, calls, direction requests and even whether the business is open at search time are climbing in importance. It also connects that shift to a broader product change inside Google, where bookings, menus, inventories, Q&A and real-time updates make GBP feel more like an operating layer than a citation field.

ChatGPT Conversion Rates by Industry

Evan Bailyn studied ChatGPT referral traffic converted between May 2025 and April 2026 using anonymized data from more than 160 client companies, many of which had already invested in GEO and AI-focused conversion funnels. The reported industry averages range from 1.4% in engineering and 1.8% in software development to 7.0% in hotels and resorts, 5.6% in legal services and 4.9% in higher education, suggesting that AI referral traffic can be more commercial in some categories than many teams assume. If you want a broader comparison view, this industry table across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity helps show how conversion quality shifts by chatbot, not just by sector.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google is fixing a Search Console bug that has inflated impressions since May 13, 2025, with the correction rolling out over the next few weeks. If impression counts drop soon while clicks stay flat, that is probably reporting cleanup, not a visibility collapse. That’s a long time between the issue first appearing and the start of a fix 😅 

• John Mueller says core updates can roll out step by step across different systems, which helps explain why volatility often comes in waves instead of one clean reset. The takeaway: during a core update, do not overreact to a single day's movement as the final outcome.

• Google moved its crawler IP range JSON files from the old /search/apis/ipranges/ path to the broader /crawling/ipranges/ location, with the old URLs staying live for now and redirects planned within six months. It is a small infrastructure update, but anyone verifying crawler traffic, firewall rules or allowlists should update their systems before the legacy path is retired.

AI

Create, Edit and Share Videos at No Cost in Google Vids

David Nachum says Google is folding more generative media into Vids, including 10 free Veo 3.1 video generations per month for anyone with a Google account, custom music powered by Lyria 3 for AI Pro and Ultra users, directable AI avatars, a screen recorder extension and direct YouTube publishing. I created this video from last issue’s cover image:

Made with Google Vids

What 81,000 People Want From AI

Anthropic surveyed 80,508 Claude users across 159 countries and 70 languages using a Claude-powered interviewer, then classified the responses into concrete themes about what people want AI to do for them. The top hopes:

• Professional excellence: 18.8% wanted AI to handle routine tasks so they could focus on higher-value work.

• Personal transformation: 13.7% saw AI as support for emotional wellbeing, self-understanding, or behavior change.

• Life management: 13.5% wanted help with schedules, organization and reducing mental load.

• Time freedom: 11.1% wanted AI to give them back time for family, rest and hobbies.

• Financial independence: 9.7% hoped AI could help build income, security or business leverage.

• Entrepreneurship: 8.7%

• Learning and growth: 8.4%

• Creative expression: 5.6%

Claude Code Leak Exposes How Agent Security Actually Works

Louis Columbus reports that Anthropic accidentally shipped a source map in Claude Code 2.1.88, exposing 512,000 lines of readable TypeScript across 1,906 files, including its permission model, bash validators, unreleased feature flags and internal tooling logic. The most important part is not the leak volume itself but what it revealed about agent security: context compaction rules, shell parsing gaps and validator chains that researchers say could be combined into practical attack paths. Ars Technica then showed how Anthropic tried to contain the spread through a DMCA takedown that unintentionally swept up legitimate GitHub forks of its public repo before the company narrowed and reversed the action. Taken together, the story is both a security incident and a live case study in how hard it is to lock down agent infrastructure once operational details leak into the open.

AI Ripples

• Google launched Gemma 4, its new open model family with four sizes, up to 256K context, multimodal support and native agent features like function calling and structured JSON output.

• Google introduced Veo 3.1 Lite, a lower-cost video generation model for the Gemini API that comes in at less than half the price of Veo 3.1 Fast while keeping the same speed. $0.05 per second for 720p and $0.08 per second for 1080p. Video generation is moving down the cost curve fast enough that more product teams can start treating it like a usable feature layer, not just an expensive demo.

• OpenAI added pay-as-you-go Codex-only seats for ChatGPT Business and Enterprise teams, removing fixed seat fees and billing usage on token consumption instead. Coding agents are moving from bundled perk to measured infrastructure spend, which makes experimentation easier for small teams and adoption easier to justify to finance.

MARKETING

Why LLM Ads Will Be a Bigger Business Than Search and Social Ads

Ross Simmonds says that LLM ads could outgrow search and social because conversational prompts reveal a denser layer of declared intent than traditional queries or social behavior ever could. His core claim is that a prompt like "I need a CRM for a 15-person B2B sales team with Slack integration" contains far more commercial context than a standard search, which could make sponsored recommendations feel less like interruptions and more like relevant answers.

source: rosssimmonds.com

CONTENT

Does AI Content Rank Well in Search?

Margarita Loktionova shares the results from an analysis of 20,000 keywords and 42,000 blog posts, then paired that with survey data from SEO teams to test how AI-written content performs in search. The headline finding is that pages classified as human-written dominated the top spot at roughly 80%, while purely AI-generated content appeared there only about 10% of the time, even though 72% of surveyed SEOs said AI content ranks at least as well as human-written work. The nuance is that AI holds up better across page-one rankings generally, but the gap gets much sharper near position one, where originality and editorial judgment appear to matter most. That makes this less an anti-AI argument and more a reminder that AI helps with speed and process, but standout rankings still seem to depend on strong human input, expertise and differentiation.

We Need To Have a Conversation About Garbage AI Content

Chima Mmeje says that the real problem with AI content is not the tool itself but the flood of bland, strategy-free output that mirrors whatever is already in the SERP. She makes the case that AI is useful for execution, editing and speed, but weak at framing, original thinking and building content that deserves attention in an environment where AI Overviews are already stripping away clicks from generic informational pages. It also pushes marketers toward a fuller-funnel mindset, where first-person perspective, actionable takeaways, repurposing and platform-specific distribution matter more than publishing one more interchangeable article.

My Take: Both of these sources show that if content does not give people something they cannot get directly from the SERP or an LLM answer, it is becoming harder to justify its existence. The issue is not whether AI touched the draft. It is whether the final piece has any real point of view, utility or affinity-building value.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Snapchat Expands Creator Subscriptions to All Eligible Users

Andrew Hutchinson reports that Snapchat is opening Creator Subscriptions beyond Snap Stars to all eligible creators with Creator Accounts, giving more users access to subscriber-only Stories, direct Snaps and priority replies. Snapchat is widening the middle class of creators it can incentivize to post consistently inside the app instead of reserving premium tools for a narrow top tier. Snapchat wants more creators building paid communities before those relationships migrate elsewhere.

YouTube Turns Coachella Into a Multiview Product Showcase

Ali Rivera frames this as a festival viewing guide, but the more interesting story is the product rollout underneath it: YouTube is livestreaming seven stages, adding 4K for three major stages, launching a 24/7 Coachella TV feed and pushing its living room Multiview experience harder by letting fans watch up to four stages at once. Multiview changes the viewing model from picking one stream to managing several in parallel, which is a much stronger pitch for event coverage, sports and creator programming that competes for attention at the same time. The post also layers in creator-led "Watch With" sessions, direct merch buying through YouTube Shopping and app-based schedule planning, turning the event into a bundled demo of discovery, commerce and second-screen engagement.

source: blog.youtube

Reddit Opens Publisher Tools to a Wider Media Market

Reddit is expanding Reddit Pro's publisher tools into public beta, letting any publisher verify a domain and access the Links tab, RSS imports, AI-powered community recommendations, community snapshots and internal notes. The company says publishers testing the tools since September saw median post views rise 46%, profile views nearly double and comments on publisher stories increase 48% versus their pre-tool baseline. Reddit is moving from being an unpredictable referral source to becoming a more structured publishing and distribution layer for media brands that want to seed stories directly into relevant communities.

Social Ripples

• LinkedIn will require livestreams to be scheduled ahead of time starting June 22, ending spontaneous LinkedIn Live broadcasts even though users can still set events up just minutes in advance. The move looks less like a product cut and more like a push toward better viewership, more event promotion and fewer low-attention live streams.

• Reddit is deprecating r/all after testing its removal earlier this year, pushing users toward r/popular and the personalized Home feed instead. The shift matters because r/all was one of the platform's last major surfaces for broad, less-filtered content discovery, while the replacement feeds give Reddit more algorithmic control over what users see.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

Google Search Console MCP: Talk to Your GSC Data Using Claude AI

Suganthan Mohanadasan explains how to connect Claude to Google Search Console through a free open source MCP server, turning GSC into a conversational analysis layer instead of a dashboard you have to click through manually. The setup uses a Google Cloud project, the Search Console API, a service account, and Claude Desktop or Claude Code, with the whole workflow running locally so data does not pass through a third-party server. He also outlines 10 built-in analysis use cases, including quick wins, content gaps, traffic drops, CTR opportunities, cannibalization checks, content decay, and URL inspection.

Supporting Google Account Username Change in Your App

This is for developers and the integration risk. Google Account users in the U.S. can now change their Gmail username while keeping the same account, inbox and data, with the old address retained as an alias. Apps that identify Sign in with Google users by email instead of subject ID can create duplicate accounts or lose continuity when a revoked OAuth grant starts returning the new address. Google is effectively using this rollout to push developers harder toward subject ID as the stable primary identifier, with email recovery and account-update flows as backup safeguards.

Introducing EmDash — the Spiritual Successor to WordPress That Solves Plugin Security

Matt Taylor and Matt Kane introduce EmDash, a new open source CMS from Cloudflare that is built with TypeScript, powered by Astro, and designed to replace WordPress's plugin model with sandboxed Worker isolates. Their core argument is that WordPress plugin security is structurally broken because plugins get broad access to the filesystem and database, while EmDash forces every plugin to declare scoped capabilities up front and run inside an isolated environment. That shifts plugin trust from an all-or-nothing install decision to a more explicit permission model, which is a meaningful architectural change for anyone running content sites with lots of third-party extensions.

Here’s Matt Mullenweg’s response (the 3rd Matt and Automattic’s Founder). He had originally told them to keep “WordPress” out of their mouths, but he’s since“removed “out of your mouth” sentence” because it was "too spicy for Western palates.”

My Take: Should you immediately go change all of your Astro or WP sites? I’m definitely not. It’s a new CMS and just launched. It’s not stable enough for production for me. There’d be too many little bugs that I’d be frustrated with. But if you like testing out new tools, they have a Playground to try out the dashboard.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

Want to get the most out of ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a superpower if you know how to use it correctly.

Discover how HubSpot's guide to AI can elevate both your productivity and creativity to get more things done.

Learn to automate tasks, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation with the power of AI.

Download the free guide

AD

Attio is the AI CRM for modern teams.

Connect your email and calendar and Attio instantly builds your CRM. Every contact, every company, every conversation — organized in one place. Then ask it anything. No more digging, no more data entry. Just answers.

Start your free trial →

SEO + GEO

Google March 2026 Core Update Rolling Out Now

Google has launched the March 2026 core update, its first core update of the year, with the rollout expected to take up to two weeks to complete. Google describes it as a regular broad update meant to better surface relevant, satisfying content from all types of sites, and it follows just days after the March spam update. Too bad it’s not as fast as …

Google Completes March 2026 Spam Update in Under 20 Hours

Google rolled out the March 2026 spam update on March 24 and completed it in 19 hours and 21 minutes, making it the fastest spam update completion on record. The update applies globally and to all languages, following the standard spam update framework Google uses to target manipulative practices across search results.

How Schema Markup Fits Into AI Search, Without the Hype

Aimee Jurenka argues that schema markup is useful for AI search, but mostly as infrastructure rather than a shortcut to citations or instant visibility gains. The piece says schema helps make entities, attributes and relationships explicit, and that connected implementations using stable @id values and @graph structures can function like a lightweight internal knowledge graph. It also draws an important line between what is confirmed and what is speculative: Google AI Overviews and Bing Copilot have both said structured data helps them understand content, but platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity have not publicly confirmed how they use schema.

My Take: Schema is one of those things people either overhype or dismiss, when the truth is that it is useful because it gives machines cleaner context to work with. It will not save weak content, but it does make it easier for search and AI systems to understand who you are, what the page is about and how your entities connect. Schema reduces ambiguity around brand, author and topic relationships while supporting both traditional SEO and AI-era parsing. It’s why Schema generation is a big part of the publishing side of Floyi.

The Science of How AI Picks Its Sources

Kevin Indig analyzes citation patterns in ChatGPT and suggests that AI source selection is highly concentrated, with the top 10 domains in a topic capturing 46% of citations and the top 30 taking 67%. The article also notes that pages ranking first in Google were cited by ChatGPT 43.2% of the time, or 3.5 times more often than pages ranking beyond the top 20 results, while also showing that ranking well still does not guarantee citations. Another key finding is that citation breadth matters more than raw citation count, because domains that show up across many distinct prompts gain a more durable seat at the table.

My Take: The part I would focus on is not just citation count, but citation breadth across the prompts that matter to your category. That is much closer to how I think about topical maps and what Floyi does - where the goal is to see whether you are building topical coverage across the important questions to your brand and audience or letting competitors own the cluster.

Google’s Releasing Google-Agent: Here’s What to Know

Leigh McKenzie explains how Google-Agent is a new user-triggered fetcher used by Google-hosted AI agents to navigate the web and take actions on behalf of users. The rollout is expected to happen over the next few weeks, and Google cites Project Mariner as one example of the kind of agent this infrastructure supports. The immediate SEO takeaway is not traffic volume but visibility: site owners should start monitoring logs, reviewing firewall and CDN rules, and making sure legitimate agent traffic is not being blocked by default. This is one of the clearest signals yet that search is starting to shift from crawlers indexing pages to agents actively evaluating and interacting with them on a user's behalf.

From SEO and CRO to Agentic AI Optimization: Why Your Website Needs to Speak to Machines

Sani Manic argues that the optimization stack is expanding from SEO, AEO and GEO into what he calls Agentic AI Optimization, or AAIO, where the goal is not just to be found or cited by AI systems but to make websites usable by autonomous agents. He frames discovery, citation and action as the three layers that tie to a broader infrastructure moment around standards like MCP, AGENTS.md and other protocols emerging through the Agentic AI Foundation. Websites now have two audiences, humans and machines, and that brands need to prepare for agents that research, compare and complete tasks on behalf of users.

My Take: The acronym will probably be debated, but the core idea is right. A lot of sites are still built as if the only job is to persuade a human after the click, when the next layer is making sure AI systems can understand the brand, navigate the site and complete tasks without guessing.

Stop Chasing Reddit and Wikipedia: What Actually Drives AI Recommendations

Gaetano DiNardi argues that most brands are misreading macro studies showing Reddit and Wikipedia dominate aggregate LLM citations, then turning that top-line data into flawed GEO strategy. The piece says high-intent AI recommendations are usually driven by niche category sources, owned content, and long-established brand sentiment, not easily manufactured Reddit threads or Wikipedia pages. It also warns that attempts to game those platforms can backfire because moderators remove self-promotional content and AI systems may still ingest the deleted or flagged material.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google tightened Merchant Center rules for out-of-stock product pages, now requiring a visible disabled buy button plus availability messaging that matches the product feed exactly. It looks minor, but it removes a common workaround and creates one more way for ecommerce teams to trigger disapprovals if page UX and feed data drift out of sync.

• Bing Webmaster Tools now let’s you click grounded queries in the AI search performance section to see what pages are being cited for those specific queries. Just like mapping queries to regular search.

AI

Assign Tasks to Claude From Anywhere in Cowork

Claude’s “OpenClaw“ - Anthropic's Cowork now lets users assign tasks to Claude from a persistent thread that syncs across phone and desktop, with Claude deciding whether work should run in Cowork or Claude Code and then returning the finished output later. The setup gives Claude access to local files, connectors, plugins and desktop apps through computer use, effectively turning mobile prompts into remote task dispatch for a desktop-based agent. Anthropic also positions memory, recurring tasks and cross-device continuity as core parts of the workflow, making this feel less like chat and more like an always-on operational layer.

My Take: I wonder why Anthropic doesn’t allow OAuth to be used with OpenClaw.

Copilot will use your GitHub Repos to Train AI Models

GitHub will begin using data from Copilot Free, Pro and Pro+ users to train and improve its AI models starting April 24, unless users explicitly opt out in settings. The policy covers inputs, outputs, code snippets, surrounding context, comments, file names, repository structure and feature interactions, while excluding Copilot Business, Copilot Enterprise and enterprise-owned repositories. Opt-out in your GitHub settings:

check your GitHub Copilot settings - near the bottom

The Sora-Disney Collapse: What Does It Mean?

Here’s a breakdown of the fallout from OpenAI's decision to shut down Sora and end its Disney partnership, a deal that was supposed to integrate AI video generation into Disney+ and serve as a growth lever for the streaming platform. Disney is expected to recoup its billion-dollar investment but loses the narrative around AI-powered user-generated content that Wall Street was buying into. The editors note that new CEO Josh D'Amaro can distance himself from a deal he did not make, and that the collapse could buy Disney some goodwill with the creative community.

Powering Product Discovery in ChatGPT

OpenAI says it is upgrading shopping inside ChatGPT with richer visual browsing, side-by-side product comparisons, image-based inspiration, and more up-to-date product information, all aimed at helping users move from vague intent to purchase decisions without leaving the chat. They are expanding the Agentic Commerce Protocol to handle product discovery, giving merchants a way to push feeds and promotions directly into ChatGPT through integrations with partners like Salesforce, Stripe, Shopify, and Walmart. The company is also backing away from its earlier Instant Checkout approach in favor of letting merchants use their own checkout flows, which signals that OpenAI sees discovery, not transaction processing, as the wedge it can win first - remember Walmart saying ChatGPT checkout sucked in last week’s newsletter?

TurboQuant: Redefining AI Efficiency With Extreme Compression

Google Research introduces TurboQuant, a compression method designed to shrink high-dimensional vectors and key-value cache memory without sacrificing model accuracy, with reported gains including at least 6x KV memory reduction and up to 8x faster attention-logit performance on H100 GPUs. The work combines TurboQuant with QJL and PolarQuant to reduce the usual memory overhead that makes vector quantization less efficient in practice, while still preserving strong recall in vector search and long-context reasoning tasks. Google frames this as more than model optimization: the same math can improve large-scale semantic search systems by making vector indices faster to build, cheaper to store, and more precise at retrieval time.

My Take: The search implication here is easy to miss but important. If semantic retrieval gets dramatically cheaper and faster, search engines can afford to run deeper vector matching across more of the index and in more stages of ranking, not just as a limited add-on. That could push search algorithms even further away from keyword-first retrieval toward systems that score intent, similarity, and context much earlier in the pipeline, which would make exact-match SEO signals relatively less dominant over time.

OpenAI Ads Pilot Tops $100 Million in ARR in Under 2 Months

CNBC reports that OpenAI's new ads business has already crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue less than two months after its U.S. pilot launched for free ChatGPT users and ChatGPT Go subscribers. The company says it is working with more than 600 advertisers, has seen no impact on privacy-related trust metrics, and is beginning to test expansion into Canada, Australia and New Zealand. OpenAI also says ads are clearly labeled, appear at the bottom of responses, and are excluded from categories like politics, health and mental health, with less than 20% of eligible users seeing them on a given day.

ChatGPT Ads Are Showing Up, A Lot

Anu Adegbola reports that early testing found ChatGPT ads appearing on roughly one in five free-tier questions in new mobile conversations, usually as a sponsored website link matched to the topic of the prompt. She says ads can even show competitor placements when a user mentions a brand by name, bringing a familiar paid search tactic into conversational AI. OpenAI says targeting is based on question topic, past chats and saved memory, while ads remain separate from the answer itself and are not shown to under-18 users or near certain sensitive categories.

Also worth noting: Search Engine Roundtable / Glenn Gabe reports that early advertisers are getting little to no performance data, which means the product is scaling faster than its measurement layer.

The 2026 State of AI Traffic and Cyberthreat Benchmark Report

HUMAN Security says AI-driven traffic nearly tripled in 2025, with agentic AI traffic up 7,851% year over year and automation overall growing eight times faster than human traffic. The report, based on more than one quadrillion interactions, says most AI-driven traffic is concentrated in retail, media and travel, while OpenAI alone accounted for roughly 69% of observed AI bot traffic. It also shows how quickly the line between useful automation and abuse is narrowing, noting that only half a percentage point separates benign automation from malicious automation across the interactions HUMAN analyzed.

Wikipedia: Writing Articles With Large Language Models

Wikipedia has formalized a hard line on AI-written content, stating that large language models are prohibited from generating or rewriting article content except in two narrow cases: basic copyedits to an editor's own writing after human review, and translation workflows that follow Wikipedia's separate LLM-assisted translation guidance. The policy argues that LLM output often violates core content standards around verifiability and source support, and it warns that even seemingly light edits can change meaning in ways that are not backed by cited references.

AI Ripples

• Gemini 3.1 Flash Live is Google's new real-time audio model, with lower latency, stronger tonal understanding, and benchmark gains in complex audio task execution. Google says the model now powers developer access through the Gemini Live API, enterprise customer experience use cases, and global rollouts across Search Live and Gemini Live in more than 200 countries.

• OpenAI added plugins to Codex, bundling skills, app integrations and MCP servers into a searchable library that makes setup more one-click and pushes Codex beyond pure coding tasks. It is partly a catch-up move against Claude Code, but it also shows OpenAI wants Codex to become a broader agent workspace for knowledge work.

MARKETING

Introducing Apple Business, a New All-in-One Platform for Businesses of All Sizes

Apple says it is consolidating Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager and Apple Business Connect into a single new platform called Apple Business, available April 14 in more than 200 countries and regions. The platform combines mobile device management, business email and calendar, identity integrations, app distribution, location management, branded place cards, Maps insights, and this summer a new option for local ads in Apple Maps for businesses in the U.S. and Canada.

Clicks Don’t Count, and They Never Did

Jono Alderson argues that SEO has historically measured the wrong layer by focusing on rankings, clicks, impressions and other interface metrics that describe how search results are presented rather than how competitiveness is actually built. He says AI systems make that weakness harder to ignore because they increasingly evaluate brands, products and reputations across the web instead of simply ranking isolated documents, which makes visibility more of an outcome than a root metric. The article also warns that prompt tracking and LLM visibility dashboards risk repeating the same mistake by measuring unstable interface outputs instead of the underlying forces that shape recommendations. His proposed reset is to think more like marketing science and evaluate structural drivers such as mental availability, physical availability, reputation, distinctiveness and experience integrity.

My Take: I agree with the core argument that old SEO metrics are losing their usefulness as the interface changes, and that competitiveness matters more than isolated ranking signals. Where I push back is that competitiveness still has to become measurable if you anyone to report to and want to act on it. A lot of people are right when they say these tools feel useless because they are often measuring the wrong prompts for your brand and your audience. The practical middle ground is defining the topics, entities and competitors that actually matter to your market. That’s why you create a topical map. Then tracking where you are being outshined across that map instead of pretending generic prompt visibility alone is the answer.

Google Brings Its Veo Video Generation Model to Google Ads Globally

Anu Adegbola reports that advertisers can now generate videos up to 10 seconds long directly inside Google Ads by uploading as many as three static images into Asset Studio and letting Veo create motion-based creative for YouTube placements. The workflow also connects with Nano Banana for further edits like background swaps, messaging changes and audience-specific adaptations, pushing more of the creative process inside Google's ad stack.

My Take: This is exactly how AI gets embedded into ad platforms: not as a flashy standalone tool, but as a way to remove one of the biggest operational bottlenecks in campaign execution. If video production becomes this cheap and fast, the competitive edge shifts away from who can make assets at all and toward who can test angles, hooks and audiences faster than everyone else.

Marketing Ripples

• Google Business Profile is testing AI-generated review replies, with suggested responses appearing for some businesses across markets including the U.S., Brazil and India. The feature could save time, but it also raises the risk of generic or over-automated responses in one of the highest-trust parts of local marketing.

CONTENT

The Entity Home: The Page That Shapes How Search, AI, and Users See Your Brand

Jason Barnard says that the entity home, usually a brand's About page or equivalent identity anchor, has become one of the most important pages on a site because it helps bots, algorithms and humans resolve who the brand is and whether it should be trusted. The article says this page is not a ranking trick or a schema shortcut, but a foundational identity layer where claims, evidence and consistent positioning come together before being corroborated by third-party sources. It also draws a useful distinction between the entity home itself and the broader entity home website around it, where supporting pages explain expertise, peers, companies, press and other facets that search and AI systems use to build confidence.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Introducing More Ways to Tap Into Shopping on Reddit

Reddit is expanding its shopping ad products with new Collection Ads, Community and Deal overlays, and a Shopify integration designed to make Dynamic Product Ads easier to launch and more effective. The company says high-intent shopping conversations on Reddit grew 40% year over year, that 84% of shoppers feel more secure in purchases after researching on the platform, and that Reddit DPA delivered 91% higher ROAS year over year in Q4 2025. Early Collection Ads advertisers are also seeing an 8% lift in ROAS, while Reddit positions its community signals and product discussions as a differentiator versus more traditional paid social environments.

YouTube Test Replaces Video Titles With AI Summaries

Danny Goodwin reports that YouTube is testing AI-generated summaries in the Android app, with some users seeing expandable summary boxes replace the original video titles in feed cards. The thumbnails remain, but the title field disappears in these tests, forcing users to tap for more context and giving YouTube's AI a bigger role in framing what a video is about. That matters because titles are still one of the clearest signals creators control for click-through, keyword targeting and brand voice, and auto-generated summaries introduce both friction and the risk of misrepresentation..

source: searchengineland.com

YouTube Tests Video Highlights Preview Feature

Andrew Hutchinson reports that YouTube is testing a new preview format that shows users five to 10 short highlight clips from a recommended video after they tap the entry card on the homepage, giving them a better sense of the actual content before watching in full. The feature is meant to reduce reliance on exaggerated thumbnails and titles by letting YouTube's system surface the moments it thinks will best represent the video. That could improve content discovery for viewers, but it also shifts more packaging control away from creators who have spent years optimizing thumbnails as a core growth lever.

Reddit Takes On Bots With New Human Verification Requirements

Sarah Perez reports that Reddit will start labeling automated accounts that provide a service to users and require suspected bot accounts to verify they are human before they can keep operating normally. The company says verification will only be triggered by suspicious activity or technical markers, while acceptable methods may include passkeys, biometric tools, and in some regions government ID to satisfy local regulations.

Elon Musk Pauses Changes to X’s Creator Revenue-Sharing Program After Backlash

Ivan Mehta reports that X quickly paused a planned update to creator payouts that would have put more weight on impressions from a poster's home region, after widespread backlash from users who rely on global and multilingual audiences. X had framed the change as a way to discourage people from gaming attention in larger markets like the U.S. and Japan, but critics argued it would also punish creators whose topics naturally attract international readers. Elon Musk reversed course within hours, saying the company would stop moving forward with the update until further consideration.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

2026’s biggest media shift

Attention is the hardest thing to buy. And everyone else is bidding too.

When people are scrolling, skipping, swiping, and split-screening their way through the day, finding uninterrupted moments where your audience is truly paying attention is the priority.

That’s where Performance TV stands out.

Check out the data from 600+ marketers on the most effective channels to capture audience attention in 2026.

Download Report

AD

Speak your prompts. Get better outputs.

The best AI outputs come from detailed prompts. But typing long, context-rich prompts is slow - so most people don't bother.

Wispr Flow turns your voice into clean, ready-to-paste text. Speak naturally into ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or any AI tool and get polished output without editing. Describe edge cases, explain context, walk through your thinking - all at the speed you talk.

Millions of people use Flow to give AI tools 10x more context in half the time. 89% of messages sent with zero edits.

Works system-wide on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and now Android (free and unlimited on Android during launch).

Try Wispr Flow free →

SEO + GEO

gTLD & URL Length Ranking Study

Kyle Roof ran a controlled test across multiple domain pairs and TLD extensions to see whether shorter URLs or shorter top-level domains provide any ranking advantage over longer alternatives. The study found some early visibility signals for short domains and short TLDs, but the dataset is limited and the pattern is not definitive. The study tracked rankings across three dates between November 2025 and January 2026, with mixed results across six domain pairs. Kyle says content quality, on-page SEO and technical setup remain the primary ranking drivers regardless of URL or TLD length.

How AI-Generated Content Performs: Experiment Results

Yevheniia Khromova shares results from a two-part experiment where SE Ranking tested AI-generated content on both an established domain and 20 brand-new sites. The key insight is that human-edited AI content on the SE Ranking blog continues to rank and attract traffic, while fully AI-generated content on new domains collapsed after about three months.

• Six AI-assisted articles on the SE Ranking blog received 555K impressions and 2,300+ clicks between June 2024 and July 2025.

  • 3 of the 6 AI-assisted articles rank in the organic top 10, with two reaching position 1.

  • 5 of the 6 AI-assisted articles trigger AI Overviews, and four appear as cited sources.

• SE Ranking published 2,000 fully AI-generated articles across 20 new domains in November 2024.

  • 70.95% of the new AI-generated pages were indexed within the first 36 days.

  • Eight sites started ranking for 1,000+ keywords within one month, generating 122K impressions and 244 clicks.

  • Starting February 3, 2025, all 20 sites lost search visibility entirely, with no pages in the top 100.

• The study concludes that fully AI-generated content may produce short-term gains but is not sustainable without human editing and optimization.

My Take: This is one of the cleanest head-to-head tests of AI content with and without human intervention. The message is simple: AI can help you move faster, but if you skip the editorial layer, the gains disappear. The platforms that survive will be the ones that treat AI as a drafting tool, not a publishing pipeline.

Walmart says ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than its own website

Danny Goodwin reports that Walmart tested OpenAI's Instant Checkout with 200,000 products and found that purchases completed inside ChatGPT converted at roughly one-third the rate of transactions where users clicked through to Walmart.com. Daniel Danker, Walmart's EVP of product and design, described the in-chat checkout experience as "unsatisfying," and the company is already pulling back. OpenAI has begun phasing out Instant Checkout in favor of merchant-controlled experiences, and Walmart plans to embed its own chatbot, Sparky, inside ChatGPT so users can log into their accounts and complete purchases within Walmart's system instead.

My Take: This is an early data point, but it confirms that discovery and conversion are still two different problems. Brands may gain visibility through AI interfaces, but the final purchase still happens where the experience is trusted and familiar.

Query Fan-Out Personalization in AI Search

Lazarina Stoy analyzed how AI search platforms personalize fan-out queries using memory and context, comparing Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot. She explains that personalization in AI search moves upstream to query generation rather than just downstream ranking, which means the questions AI systems ask are already shaped by user context before any results surface. She notes that platforms differ in how aggressively they inject personal data into query expansion, with some pulling full conversation history and others relying more on the immediate prompt.

My Take: This is good, but also lengthy, so grab that coffee refill ☕️ 

Do News Publishers That Block AI Crawlers Get Cited Less Often by AI?

Vince Nero analyzed 4 million citations from 3,600 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode to see whether blocking AI crawlers reduces citation exposure. The data suggests that robots.txt directives do not reliably stop AI systems from citing publisher content, with the majority of blocked sites still appearing in AI results.

• 70% of sites blocking ChatGPT-User still appeared in AI citations.

• 82% of sites blocking OAI-SearchBot still appeared in citations.

• 88% of sites blocking GPTBot still appeared in citations.

• 92% of sites blocking Google-Extended still appeared in citations.

• About 95% of citations in the dataset came from sites that block training bots.

• The study says AI systems may be bypassing robots.txt, using SERP-level data without fetching pages, or accessing content through Common Crawl before blocks were in place.

Do AI Data Partnerships with News Platforms Influence Citations?

Vince Nero shares another study and analyzes 4 million citations to see whether AI data partnerships with news publishers lead to more visibility in AI answers. The headline finding is that partnerships do not meaningfully increase citation share, because most citations come from live search and retrieval rather than training data.

• Only 2.94% of all news citations came from publishers with confirmed OpenAI or Google data partnerships.

• ChatGPT cited OpenAI partner publishers 28.5% of the time, but OpenAI has 17 partners compared to Google's one.

• Less than 1% of citations from Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews came from Google's partner, the Associated Press.

• AP appeared in zero Gemini results despite Google saying the partnership would deliver real-time information to the Gemini app.

• The study concludes that partnerships are for training data, while citations come from live retrieval, which explains the disconnect.

Could AI Eventually Make SEO Obsolete?

James Allen says AI will not replace SEO but will redistribute where human expertise is most valuable. AI can automate routine tasks like generating alt text or writing product descriptions, but it still depends on structured prompts, clean data and technical oversight to produce usable outputs. He also notes that full automation of complex SEO workflows remains difficult because audits pull from too many disconnected sources, and current AI tools struggle to retain context across long data sets without human correction.

My Take: The job is not disappearing but it is becoming more about system design and less about task execution. SEOs who can translate technical knowledge into structured AI workflows will keep their edge. Those who rely on manual work alone will get squeezed.

Google Confirms AI Headline Rewrites Test in Search Results

Danny Goodwin reports that Google is testing AI-generated headline rewrites in traditional Search results, not just Discover. Google told The Verge the experiment is small and narrow, but the goal is to match titles more closely to queries and improve engagement. One example showed Google shortening a long Verge headline to a stripped-down phrase, which raises concerns about changes to meaning, brand voice and click-through rates. Google already rewrites title links automatically, but this test would expand that capability using generative AI.

My Take: This is another reminder that publishers do not control how their work appears in Search. Google has been rewriting titles for years, but generative AI makes the edits more aggressive and harder to predict. If headlines start shifting based on query context, then CRO becomes almost impossible to measure at the SERP level.

What Patents Reveal About the Foundations of AI Search

Donna Rougeau says SEOs should stop trying to be futurists and start being archaeologists, because the engineering blueprints for today's AI search features were filed in patent offices 10 to 15 years ago. Agent rank, filed in 2007, describes digital signatures connecting content to authors and assigning reputation scores, which is what Google now calls E-E-A-T. The fact repository patent from 2006 predates the Knowledge Graph and powers the answer engines we see today. The article also distinguishes between AEO, which needs confidence anchors for direct answers, and GEO, which needs information gain for synthesis responses.

Multi-Location SEO Strategy: Stop Competing With Your Own Content

Dayna Lucio says multi-location brands often create internal competition when each location publishes similar blog content targeting the same keywords. The fix is to clarify roles: corporate should own educational resources, core service pages and brand-level content that builds authority at scale, while local teams should focus on geo-specific content like location landing pages, local FAQs and market-specific testimonials. Without that governance, brands risk keyword cannibalization, diluted link equity and crawl inefficiency across hundreds of low-value URLs.

AI Overviews Now Appear on 14% of Shopping Queries

Jeff Oxford analyzed 20.9 million shopping keywords using Ahrefs' database and found that AI Overviews now appear on 14% of product searches, up from 2.1% in November 2025. The 5.6x increase in four months signals that ecommerce sites are no longer immune to the click erosion that content publishers have been tracking for over a year.

Google is "Developing" an Opt-Out for Generative AI Features in Search

Greg Finn reports that Google's response to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority reveals the company is working on new controls that would let website owners opt out of having their content used in generative AI features like AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google said its goal is to make sure website owners have the right controls to manage how their content is used, though it did not provide a timeline for when these controls might launch.

Local Content Playbook: From Service Pages to Jobs-to-be-Done Pages

Rich Sanger says most local service sites are built around service names, but customers often start with problems. Jobs-to-be-done pages fill that gap by guiding readers from symptoms to causes to options to cost context, then drawing a clear line for when to call a pro. The structure converts because it mirrors how people actually think when they are deciding whether to hire someone or try to fix it themselves.

Search Referral Traffic Down 60% for Small Publishers, Data Shows

Chartbeat data shows search referral traffic to small publishers dropped 60% over two years, nearly three times the decline at large publishers. ChatGPT referrals grew more than 200% during that window, but chatbots still account for less than 1% of all publisher page view referrals.

• Small publishers (1,000-10,000 daily page views) lost 60% of search traffic.

• Mid-sized publishers (10,000-100,000 daily page views) lost 47%.

• Large publishers (over 100,000 daily page views) lost 22%.

• Page views from Google Search fell 34% between December 2024 and December 2025.

• Google Discover referrals fell 15% over the same period.

AI Overviews Cut Germany's Top Organic CTR by 59%

SISTRIX analyzed more than 100 million keywords in Germany and found that AI Overviews now appear on roughly 20% of search results. When an AIO is present, CTR at position 1 drops from 27% to 11%, and the total organic click rate falls from 57% to 33%.

Why Entity Authority is the Foundation of AI Search Visibility

Benu Aggarwal says the webpage is no longer the unit of digital visibility because AI systems now operate on structured ecosystems of entities. She introduces the comprehension budget concept, which means AI systems burn expensive GPU cycles resolving ambiguous brands and relationships. Deep Schema.org markup in a content knowledge graph can improve LLM response accuracy by up to 300% and lift traffic by 20-40%, but only if the schema includes consistent identifiers, external sameAs links, and callable actions like BuyAction and ReserveAction for the agentic web.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• AI Overviews are appearing more often for breaking news queries, according to Glenn Gabe, who noticed Top Stories modules getting pushed down when AIOs show up. Google previously said AIOs were "purposefully not triggered for hard news queries," but the pattern suggests that stance may be shifting. News publishers should track AIO visibility for major story categories to see whether the SERP layout is changing in ways that affect click paths.

• Perplexity's new Comet browser for iOS defaults to Google Search for navigation, local and transactional queries, according to CEO Aravind Srinivas. He says Google still does a better job for those use cases, while Perplexity handles informational queries through its AI answer engine.

• Google's John Mueller says 404 crawling is a positive signal, according to Roger Montti. Mueller explained that repeated crawling of 404 pages means Google would be okay with picking up more content from your site, not that something is broken. Switching to 410 response codes will not stop the crawling, so the best approach is to just let them be.

• Google retired multiple legacy ad format policies on March 17th, including requirements for form ads, image quality, responsive ads and text ads. Anu Adegbola reports that the old formats have transitioned into newer campaign types, making the legacy policy frameworks obsolete. Advertisers should now rely on current Google Ads policies for automated and AI-driven campaigns.

• John Mueller says moving to HTTPS is like a site migration, because all URLs need to be recognized, recrawled and reprocessed individually. He responded to a Reddit user who lost top 3 rankings after switching to HTTPS, advising patience and warning against using the URL removal tool, which would hide both HTTP and HTTPS versions from search results.

• Google removed "What People Suggest," the AI feature that crowdsourced health perspectives from online discussions, calling it part of a broader simplification of the search results page.

AI

Introducing "Vibe Design" with Stitch

Google is evolving Stitch into an AI-native software design canvas that lets anyone create high-fidelity UI from natural language. The new "vibe design" approach lets users explain business objectives, user feelings, or inspiration rather than starting with wireframes, while the redesigned UI adds an infinite canvas, a design agent that reasons across project evolution, and an Agent Manager for working on multiple ideas in parallel. Stitch also introduces DESIGN.md for sharing design rules across tools, instant interactive prototypes, voice capabilities for real-time design critiques, and an MCP server for integration with developer workflows.

source: blog.google

Bringing the Power of Personal Intelligence to More People

Google is expanding Personal Intelligence across AI Mode in Search, the Gemini app, and Gemini in Chrome for U.S. users. The feature connects apps like Gmail and Google Photos to give tailored responses, such as shopping recommendations based on past purchases or travel itineraries built from hotel confirmations and travel history. Users control which apps connect and can toggle connections on or off at any time. Google says Gemini and AI Mode do not train directly on Gmail inboxes or Google Photos libraries, only on specific prompts and model responses.

Anthropic Just Shipped an OpenClaw Killer Called Claude Code Channels

Carl Franzen reports that Anthropic launched Claude Code Channels, a new feature that lets developers message Claude Code directly from Telegram and Discord to assign coding tasks and receive notifications when work is complete. Early reactions on X have been definitive, with multiple observers calling the feature an "OpenClaw killer" that eliminates the need for dedicated hardware to run persistent AI agents.

AI Ripples

• OpenAI released GPT-5.4 mini and nano, smaller faster versions of its flagship model optimized for coding, tool use, multimodal reasoning and high-volume API workloads. GPT-5.4 Mini runs more than 2x faster than GPT-5 Mini and Nano is the smallest cheapest option. Nano pricing is $0.20 per 1M input tokens / $1.25 output. Mini is $0.75 input / $4.50 output (>2x GPT-5 Mini).

• Cursor launched Composer 2, a new in-house coding model that beats Claude Opus 4.6 but still trails GPT-5.4 on Terminal-Bench 2.0. The model is tuned for long-horizon agentic coding with a 200,000-token context window, and pricing dropped 86% compared to Composer 1.5 at $0.50 per 1M input tokens for the standard tier.

• Perplexity launched Perplexity Health, a suite of data connectors that pulls together electronic health records, wearable data and lab results to personalize health answers. It connects to Apple Health on iOS and uses b.well Connected Health for EHR access, making Perplexity the second major AI platform after OpenAI to integrate with Apple Health.

MARKETING

What Shortening the Attribution Window Revealed About Google Ads Performance

Maggie Humphrey reports that a DTC retailer with a 2.2-day average conversion window switched from 30-day to 7-day click attribution. The results showed cost down 6.3%, conversions up 42.9%, conversion value up 52.1%, and ROAS up 62.3%. Marketing mix modeling data revealed Google's incremental ROAS increased 10% to 1.82, while Meta's dropped 25% to 0.59. The shorter window improved signal quality for Smart Bidding and clarified cross-channel contribution.

CONTENT

AI Content Wasn't Good Enough. Now It Is.

Ryan Law says the gap between human-written and AI-generated content has effectively closed for most SEO use cases. He uses Claude Code, Ahrefs MCP and roughly 15 custom SKILLs to build content that includes his personal experience, matches his editorial voice and performs as well as anything he would write manually. The shift is not that AI has become creative, but that writing itself is more mechanical than people want to admit, and modern tooling lets skilled operators chain prompts, data sources and review steps into a reliable production system.

My Take: Compare to 👇️ 

You're Not Scaling Content, You're Scaling Disappointment

Pedro Dias says content scaling strategies keep failing because teams treat content as a manufacturing problem rather than a craft problem. Content spinning died with Panda, programmatic SEO mostly produced doorway pages, and AI-generated content at scale is repeating the same mistake with better tools. Google's spam policies explicitly list "using generative AI tools to generate many pages without adding value" as scaled content abuse. The key question is what each page offers that readers cannot already get elsewhere.

My Take: This is the counterpoint to the Ryan Law piece. Yes, AI content can match human quality at the sentence level, but that does not mean you should flood your site with it. The economics only work if you are adding something that did not exist before. Most scaled content strategies fail because they answer the wrong question.

SOCIAL MEDIA

YouTube Tests Sticky Banner After Ad Skip

Anu Adegbola reports YouTube is testing a sticky banner overlay that persists after users skip ads. Instead of disappearing entirely, a branded card stays visible within the player until the viewer dismisses it. The format extends advertiser presence beyond the initial skip and could redefine what a skipped ad means for performance metrics. Anthony Higman first spotted the test and shared it on LinkedIn.

source: searchengineland.com

LinkedIn Rebuilt Its Feed Algorithm With LLMs and Transformer Models

Danny Goodwin reports LinkedIn replaced several separate discovery systems with a unified LLM-powered retrieval model. The new system generates embeddings that understand what posts are about and how they connect to professional interests, even when posts use different terminology. The ranking layer now uses a transformer-based sequential model that analyzes patterns across past interactions. LinkedIn also said it is cracking down on automated engagement, engagement bait and generic posts, while helping new members personalize feeds faster with an Interest Picker.

Social Ripples

• Digg laid off staff and pulled its app from the App Store as the rebooted company tries to rebuild after getting overwhelmed by bot spam and fake activity early on. Sarah Perez reports that Kevin Rose is returning to Digg full-time, while the company says the bigger problem is not just one startup's moderation challenge, but a web environment where AI agents and automated accounts can quickly overwhelm trust-based community systems.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - Build Topical Authority that wins in Google and AI Search. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

Experts Would Invest $100,000 in This Alternative Now

A new report shows 44% of family offices are investing more in residential real estate. Now, you can access these assets with mogul. This platform lets you invest in properties producing +7% yields and 18% IRRs. Plus, they do all the property management for you.

Join 20,000 investors today.

Past performance isn't predictive; illustrative only. Investing risks principal; no securities offer. See important Disclaimers

AD

How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.

LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.

The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.

Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more.

SEO + GEO

Inside Googlebot

Martin Splitt talks with Gary Illyes in Google’s Search Off the Record episode and explains that Googlebot is not one crawler, but a client name layered on top of Google’s shared crawling system. Google’s crawler infrastructure separates fetchers from crawlers, with fetchers handling single-URL requests and crawlers processing URL streams in the background. Read the transcript.

The Non-Technical Marketer and SEO Overview to Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol

Dan Taylor suggests that Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol could force ecommerce SEO to optimize for purchases inside Google, not just clicks back to a site. He frames Merchant Center data as the operational layer that now shapes whether products can move directly from discovery to checkout across Search and Gemini. Marketers need to prepare policy data, product attributes, exclusions, and post-purchase workflows before developers wire up the technical side. That makes feed quality, eligibility logic, and account linking part of the SEO conversation much earlier than most teams are used to.

Beyond Rankings: Designing AI Search Metrics for the Next Era of SEO

Francine Monahan discusses how iPullRank is moving AI search measurement beyond rankings by tracking which content traits correlate with citations across generative engines. The study reframes SEO reporting around new channel metrics, while still treating traffic, conversions and revenue as the bottom-line layer.

• They analyzed more than 79,000 URL-query pairs across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google.

• 292% lift in citation probability on mid-tail queries when entity density was optimized.

• Cited URLs averaged 1,800 words, while non-cited URLs averaged 1,200 words.

• Pages ranking outside the top 10 saw a stark drop-off in AI citation likelihood.

• Long-tail pages should align about 90% of on-page entities with primary user intent to avoid diluting relevance.

• Among the seven tracked metrics, Content-Keyword Cosine and Strategic Entity Richness showed the strongest relationship with AI citations.

The Influence of Retrieval, Fan-out, and Google SERPs on ChatGPT Citations

Oshen Davidson shares that ChatGPT citation visibility depends on more than retrieval, because the system expands prompts through internal fan-out searches and cites only a small share of what it finds. The report makes the case that SEO teams need to track where citation opportunity is created, and lost, across both Google rankings and the follow-up queries ChatGPT generates.

• AirOps analyzed 548,534 retrieved pages across 15,000 original prompts and 43,233 total original-plus-fan-out queries.

• Only 15% of retrieved pages were cited, meaning 85% were discovered but never made it into the final answer.

• 32.9% of cited pages that appeared in a top-20 SERP were found only through a fan-out query, not the original prompt.

• 95% of ChatGPT fan-out queries had zero monthly search volume by traditional metrics.

• Pages ranking number one in Google were cited 43.2% of the time, which the report says is 3.5 times higher than pages outside the top 20 results.

• Pages with 50% or greater title-query overlap had a 20.1% citation rate, versus 9.3% for pages with less than 10% overlap.

• Sites with domain authority between 20 and 80 accounted for 63.6% of all citations, while DA 80 to 100 sites underperformed after retrieval with a 15.0% citation rate.

The Five Infrastructure Gates Behind Crawl, Render and Index

Jason Barnard says technical SEO still hides too many distinct failure modes inside the lazy shorthand of crawl and index. The piece breaks infrastructure into five sequential gates, discovery, selection, crawling, rendering fidelity and conversion fidelity, and says the earliest broken gate sets the ceiling for everything downstream. One of the more useful ideas is rendering fidelity, which reframes the problem around how much of a page a bot actually sees after building it, not whether the page seems fine in a browser.

The Role of News Publications in AI Citations [New Data]

Vince Nero analyzed 4 million citations across 3,600 prompts and found that news publications account for a meaningful but secondary slice of AI visibility. His data shows news citations cluster around bottom-funnel comparison prompts, while syndication, newswires, and local news barely register.

• News publications accounted for 14.09% of all citations in the study.

• Evaluative prompts drove news citations 18% of the time, compared with 7.26% for brand awareness prompts.

• True news and editorial content made up 81% of news citations.

• Affiliate, review, and list-style content reached 39.07% of evaluative prompt citations, 8.67% of brand awareness citations, and 1.52% of informational citations.

• Syndicated news represented 6.2% of news citations and 0.9% of the full dataset.

• Newswires accounted for 0.21% of the full analysis.

• Internal press releases and newsroom content made up 2.98% of citations overall, but 18.15% of ChatGPT citations.

• Energy drove 31% of news publication citations, while entertainment contributed 17.57%.

BREAKING! News Thrives in the Age of AI

Shahzad Abbas says publishers are getting hit hard by AI Overviews overall, but breaking news is proving to be a rare exception. Using Define Media Group portfolio data, he says that search traffic losses are being partially offset by strong breaking-news performance across Top Stories and especially Discover, which is starting to behave like a standalone growth channel rather than a side effect of web search.

Google Discover Core Update Data: Local Publishers Lost Reach

Matt G. Southern reports that post-update Discover data is pointing to a more regionalized feed, where local publishers may be losing national distribution rather than disappearing altogether. The most useful detail is the state-level breakdown, which suggests some publishers held steady in their home markets while getting pushed out of out-of-state feeds after Google’s Discover core update. He also notes that third-party tracking tools disagree on some winners and losers, which makes the findings directional rather than final.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google may be hitting self-promotional LLM listicles again, with Mordy Oberstein pointing to fresh industry chatter around exact-match domains and enterprise sites that scaled thin, self-serving “best” pages for AEO-style visibility. The pattern suggests these tactics can produce short-term gains, but may still run into Google’s organic quality systems once the footprint gets obvious.

• Search Console now splits branded and non-branded queries with a built-in filter in the Performance report and a matching clicks breakdown in Insights. Google says the classification is handled by an internal AI-assisted system, includes brand variants and product names, and is limited to eligible top-level properties with enough query volume.

AI

56% of GPT-5.4’s Citations Go to Brand Websites. Only 8% of GPT-5.3’s Do

Samanyou Garg analyzed 119 ChatGPT conversations and found that GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.3 behave like two different search systems, not just two versions of the same model. The study’s core finding is that GPT-5.4 is far more brand-direct, while GPT-5.3 leans heavily on third-party review and media sites, which changes how we need to think about AI visibility.

• GPT-5.4 sent 56% of its citations to brand websites, while GPT-5.3 sent only 8%.

• The two models shared just 7% of cited sources across the tested prompts.

• GPT-5.4 averaged 8.5 fan-out queries per prompt, compared with 1.0 for GPT-5.3.

• GPT-5.4 cited 138 pricing pages, versus just 4 for GPT-5.3.

• GPT-5.4 averaged 14.8 cited sources per prompt, while GPT-5.3 averaged 5.8.

• GPT-5.3 sent 92% of citation traffic to third-party sites such as Forbes, TechRadar, Tom’s Guide and Reddit.

• The study says 75% of GPT-5.4’s cited domains did not appear in Google or Bing results for the same raw prompt

My Take: This is the clearest proof yet that AI visibility is fragmenting at the model level. If one version sends users to review ecosystems and another goes straight to pricing and product pages, brands need broader coverage and tighter first-party assets.

Amazon Wins Preliminary Injunction Against Perplexity’s Comet

Matt G. Southern reports that a federal judge has granted Amazon a preliminary injunction blocking Perplexity from using Comet or other AI agents to access password-protected parts of Amazon’s platform. The ruling matters because the court treated user permission and platform authorization as separate requirements, which cuts against the idea that an agent can inherit full rights from the user alone. Amazon also won an order requiring Perplexity to destroy Amazon data collected through Comet, while the broader case continues. The bigger impact is that agentic commerce may need explicit approval from both the user and the platform owner, not just a clever browser wrapper around user credentials.

My Take: This looks like one of the first real legal stress tests for agentic browsing. If this reasoning holds, a lot of AI product teams will have to stop assuming user consent is enough to unlock any logged-in workflow on the web. The technical challenge is only half the story now. Platform permission is becoming part of the product design surface.

AI Ripples

• Google introduced Ask Maps and Immersive Navigation to make Maps more conversational and more spatially aware, with Ask Maps rolling out in the U.S. and India on Android and iOS, and Immersive Navigation starting in the U.S. Google says Ask Maps draws on information from more than 300 million places and over 500 million contributors, while navigation now uses Gemini to surface richer 3D guidance, route tradeoffs and arrival details.

• Google launched Gemini Embedding 2 in public preview as its first natively multimodal embedding model, mapping text, images, video, audio and documents into one shared embedding space. The model supports more than 100 languages, up to 8,192 text tokens, six images, 120 seconds of video, native audio input and PDFs up to six pages long.

• OpenAI introduces IH-Challenge as a training dataset for getting models to follow higher-trust instructions more reliably when the hierarchy of system, developer, user and tool messages conflict. The claim is that better instruction hierarchy improves both safety steerability and prompt injection resistance. If the model cannot consistently tell whose instruction matters most, every workflow built on top of it stays fragile. The long-term win here is not just safer agents. It is more dependable software behavior.

• Microsoft Incident Response lays out a playbook for spotting prompt abuse before it turns into a business problem, with prompt injection framed as one of the most important AI application risks to monitor. The clearest example is an indirect attack where hidden text inside a URL fragment gets pulled into an AI summarizer’s prompt and quietly biases the output without the user doing anything obviously unsafe. The post breaks prompt abuse into three buckets, direct prompt override, extractive abuse against sensitive inputs and hidden-instruction attacks, then maps each stage of detection and response to actual controls.

• OpenAI explains how real prompt injection now looks less like a clever string attack and more like social engineering aimed at an AI agent working through untrusted content. They say the right defense is not just better input filtering, but system design that limits what an agent can silently send, click, or trigger when manipulated. OpenAI frames this through source-sink analysis, where the risk appears when external content can steer an action such as transmitting data to a third party or following a link. Their suggestion is to add controls like Safe Url, sandboxed execution, and user confirmation before sensitive information or risky actions leave the system.

MARKETING

Key Trends Shaping Programmatic Advertising in 2026

Paul Bannister says programmatic advertising is starting 2026 on softer footing, with cautious spending in the first half of the year and a stronger rebound expected later on. He ties that pressure to big event-driven budget shifts, macro uncertainty and the rise of retail media networks, while arguing that publishers need to adjust to a market where performance outcomes matter more than impression volume.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Rewarding Original Creators on Facebook

Facebook is tightening its push toward original content by giving creators clearer originality rules, more distribution upside, and stronger protection against copycats. The update pairs policy clarification with fresh performance data, showing how aggressively Meta is linking reach and monetization to whether a creator is adding real value. Meta says it removed more than 20 million accounts impersonating large content creators in 2025. Impersonation reports related to large content creators fell by 33% in 2025. The updated rules say unoriginal content can be deprioritized in both Feed and Reels, and repeat offenders can become non-recommendable and demonetized.

About Location Fees for Ads on Meta Platforms

Meta will start passing location-based digital service taxes and similar regulatory fees directly onto advertisers when impressions are served in certain countries. These charges sit outside campaign budgets and show up as separate billing line items, which means the final invoice can exceed the spend cap marketers thought they were working within. Meta lists location fees of 5% in Austria, 3% in France, 3% in Italy, 3% in Spain, 5% in Türkiye, and 2% in the United Kingdom. The fee is based on where impressions are delivered, not where the advertiser is based.

Meta Acquired Moltbook, the AI Agent Social Network That Went Viral Because of Fake Posts

Amanda Silberling reports that Meta has acquired Moltbook, the Reddit-like social network where AI agents could interact through an always-on directory, and is folding the team into Meta Superintelligence Labs. The deal stands out less for scale than for what it signals about Meta’s interest in agent-to-agent coordination as a product category. She also notes that Moltbook’s viral moment was fueled by human users impersonating agents because the system was not secure, which turned a novelty project into a public trust story.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - The only AI-powered tool that builds 4-level topical maps. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

Turn AI into Your Income Engine

Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator?

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

• A curated collection of 200+ profitable opportunities spanning content creation, e-commerce, gaming, and emerging digital markets—each vetted for real-world potential

• Step-by-step implementation guides designed for beginners, making AI accessible regardless of your technical background

• Cutting-edge strategies aligned with current market trends, ensuring your ventures stay ahead of the curve

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

Get Your Guide

AD

Turn AI into Your Income Engine

Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator?

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

• A curated collection of 200+ profitable opportunities spanning content creation, e-commerce, gaming, and emerging digital markets—each vetted for real-world potential

• Step-by-step implementation guides designed for beginners, making AI accessible regardless of your technical background

• Cutting-edge strategies aligned with current market trends, ensuring your ventures stay ahead of the curve

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

Get Your Guide

SEO + GEO

Google's Liz Reid: Search and Gemini May Converge or Diverge Further

Liz Reid, VP and head of Search at Google, drew a clearer line between Search and Gemini but said the long-term direction is still open. In an interview on Access Podcast, she said Search is an information product focused on connecting people with the web, while Gemini centers on productivity and creation. She acknowledged the boundaries are fluid and the eventual outcome could be convergence, divergence, or a third product altogether as agents reshape internet interaction. She expects a future with more agent-to-agent communication rather than just humans browsing directly, and said the company wants to do more to surface Trusted and Subscription-based Sources more prominently, pointing to the Preferred Sources feature as a step toward prioritizing content users already pay for.

Keyword Research for GEO: The FAN Methodology

Limor Barenholtz introduces the FAN Methodology for GEO keyword research, suggesting that traditional keyword-to-page mapping structurally fails in LLM search because queries are decomposed into 6 to 20 sub-queries before any content is retrieved.

• AI search queries average 70 to 80 words compared to 3 to 4 words in traditional Google search

• 35% of consumers use AI tools at the discovery stage versus 13.6% using traditional search.

• Only 27% of fan-out sub-queries remain consistent across different searches of the same query, and 66% appear only once, making optimization for fixed sub-query lists a moving target.

• The FAN framework has three components: Fan-out Mapping (decompose anchor queries into sub-query space), Authority-Signal Alignment (add quantified data), and Node Architecture (structure content as independently retrievable chunks).

• SEOClarity analysis found 25% of ChatGPT's top 1,000 cited URLs had zero organic visibility on Google, and only 12% of URLs cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot rank in Google's top 10.

• Every anchor query fans out across seven sub-query types: Definition, Comparison, How-to, Use case, Objection, Entity expansion, and Metric.

• Gemini, GPT and and Claude share 78 to 84% of content preference rules, meaning citation-worthiness signals are largely consistent across platforms.

My Take: I had a serious sense of déjà vu reading this. I kept thinking - where have I read this before? Oh right, I wrote about it two weeks ago in my ARENA Framework guide for AI Search.

It's not identical, but the core concepts overlap heavily, especially around what I call "retrieval assets" and building a portfolio of pages targeted at the sub-questions AI systems fan out into. SimilarWeb's piece even uses the same page-type taxonomy: definition, comparison, criteria, and objection pages. Same idea, different label.

To be clear, I'm not accusing anyone of anything. These ideas are in the air right now, and smart people are converging on the same conclusions independently. But it is validating to see a well-resourced team at SimilarWeb land in the same place a couple of weeks later. A couple others below also mention the same concepts in their posts.

The difference is mostly in form. Their article is a full methodology guide - data-heavy, researcher-cited, with a named framework (FAN), a measurement stack, and platform-by-platform breakdowns. Mine is a playbook: skip the justification, here's what to build and how to link it. Both are worth reading. But if you want to act on it today, the playbook is the faster on-ramp.

Their article is a full methodology guide - data-heavy, researcher-cited, with a named framework (FAN), a measurement stack, and platform-by-platform breakdowns. Mine is a playbook. Skip the justification, here's what to build and how to link it. If you want to act on it today, the playbook is the faster on-ramp. Both are worth reading.

source: similarweb.com

Reddit's AI Citation Decline: How Brands Win Back Visibility

Conductor analyzed 238,212 prompts across LLMs and found that Reddit's overall AI citation share dropped 50% between October 2025 and January 2026, falling from 2.02% to 1.01%. But when Reddit is cited, it increasingly owns the conversation.

• Reddit's share of responses where it is the only cited source increased 31% from October 2025 to January 2026.

• Of 145,662 classified queries where Reddit was the only source, Transactional prompts led at 36.5%, followed by Commercial at 33.5%, Informational at 25.6%, and Navigational at just 4.4%.

• Reddit wins for lived experience and peer perspective because brand content rarely shows up with better answers.

• Reddit dominates where users want unfiltered opinions, visible disagreement, and failure stories.

• Brand content wins on authoritative medical answers, financial explainers, reference facts, and structured how-to tutorials.

source: conductor.com

38% of AI Overview Citations Pull From Top 10 Pages

Louise Linehan analyzed 863,000 keyword SERPs and 4 million AI Overview URLs to update Ahrefs' prior research showing that 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews also rank in the top 10 organic results, down from roughly 76% in July 2025.

• The remaining citations split almost evenly between positions 11 to 100 (31.2%) and pages beyond the top 100 (31.2%).

• YouTube now accounts for 18% of non-ranking citations, making it the most cited domain in AI Overviews and growing 34% over the last six months.

• AI Overviews are relying more on query fan-out

• Ranking for the original query is no longer enough to win citations. Google is pulling from fan-out query results where your page may not rank at all.

source: ahrefs.com

Google Patent: Sending Searchers to AI-Generated Pages Over Your Site

Barry Schwartz covers a Google patent named "AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user" that describes generating custom landing pages and sending searchers to those AI-generated pages instead of the organization's website. The system calculates a landing page score for the existing page. If the score exceeds a threshold indicating the existing page is not a good match for user intent, the system triggers AI generation to create a tailored page using the organization's content and the user's context. The updated search results page then shows a navigation link to the AI-generated page instead of the standard URL.

Roger Montti notes that the patent is specifically focused on shopping and advertising use cases, not editorial content. Every example in the patent references e-commerce sites, product listing pages, conversion rates, call-to-action buttons and sponsored content placement. There are no examples related to news sites, blogs or informational content.

Bing Adds GEO to Official Guidelines, Expands AI Abuse Definitions

Matt G. Southern reports that Microsoft rewrote the Bing Webmaster Guidelines to cover both traditional search results and Copilot's AI-generated answers, formally treating grounding results and citations as additional eligibility outcomes. The new guidance recommends stating facts directly, using clear entity names, keeping each URL focused on a single topic, and placing essential information near the top of the page to improve grounding eligibility. NOARCHIVE now blocks use in Copilot responses and grounding results, NOCACHE limits Copilot to URL, title and snippet only, and DATA-NOSNIPPET or NOSNIPPET can reduce citation quality. Bing also expanded its abuse definitions to cover prompt injection and "artificially engineered language" designed to trigger citations or AI responses, not just traditional keyword stuffing.

Straight From the (AI) Source: Is AEO/GEO different than SEO?

Glenn Gabe compiles statements from Google, Microsoft and Perplexity to answer the AEO/GEO vs. SEO question using direct quotes, interviews and platform documentation. The consistent message is that AI search visibility is mostly built on traditional SEO foundations, with clearer structure and formatting helping AI systems interpret content more confidently. Some of the messages:

• Google’s Jeff Dean said LLM-based search is “not that dissimilar” from classic ranking and retrieval, with systems narrowing huge document sets down through multiple refinement stages.

• John Mueller and Danny Sullivan said on Search Off the Record that AI search optimization is essentially a subset of SEO, not a separate discipline.

• Danny also warned against over-chunking content for LLMs, saying Google engineers “really don’t” want site owners turning content into unnatural bite-sized fragments.

• Microsoft’s Krishna Madhavan said SEO fundamentals like structure, freshness, crawlability and trust still matter, and he recommended schema, headings and modular layouts to make content easier for AI systems to parse.

• Microsoft Advertising’s AI search guide says AI systems perform real-time web searches throughout the shopping journey, which keeps traditional SEO essential for being discovered and recommended.

• The same Microsoft guide lists several visibility killers: long walls of text, important answers hidden in tabs, core information locked in PDFs, and key information only available in images.

Is AI Mode Now Dominated by Google's Self-Referencing Links?

Yulia Deda shares the results after analyz 1,321,398 citations across 68,313 keywords in 20 niches and found that Google.com is now the top cited domain in AI Mode responses by a wide margin.

• Google.com accounts for 17.42% of all AI Mode citations, more than the next six domains combined: YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, Indeed and Zillow.

• Google's self-citation rate in AI Mode has tripled from 5.7% in June 2025 to 17.42% today.

• 59% of Google citations in AI Mode now point to Google SERPs, while 36.1% point to Google Business Profiles.

• Google ranks as the top-cited source in 19 of the 20 niches analyzed, including Travel at 53.18%, Entertainment and Hobbies at 48.74%, and Real Estate at 30.54%.

• Career and Jobs is the only exception, where Indeed dominates and is cited 3.1 times more than Google.

• The shift means AI Mode is increasingly sending users deeper into Google's own ecosystem rather than directly to publisher websites.

My Take: Google keeping users in the family 🔐 

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google updated AI Mode recipe results to send more traffic after feedback about "Frankenstein recipes" that synthesized multiple sources without attribution. Now when users search for meal ideas, they can tap on dishes to see links to recipe sites plus a short overview. The rollout is complete, though the UI is not immediately obvious. Recipe images look decorative rather than clickable, which may limit the traffic benefit until users learn the interaction pattern.

• An impostor site is outranking the real NanoClaw project despite 18K GitHub stars. Gavriel Cohen built the open source AI agent platform in February and someone scraped his GitHub README to create nanoclaw.net before he launched nanoclaw.dev. Standard SEO steps including structured data, Search Console submission and takedown notices have not fixed the issue. The same problem appears across DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Bing, Brave and Ecosia, with Mojeek the only engine that got it right.

• ChatGPT sources 83% of its product carousel items from Google Shopping according to a study of 43,000 carousel products. Only 11% matched Bing Shopping results, and just 70 products (0.16%) were found exclusively on Bing. Shopping query fan-outs are distinct from search fan-outs 98.3% of the time, average just 7 words versus 12 for search, and 60% of strong matches come from Google's top 10 shopping positions.

• Google removed its JavaScript accessibility guidance from the official docs after calling the section outdated. The old documentation advised testing sites with JavaScript disabled and using text-only browsers to identify content Google might miss. Google now says it has been rendering JavaScript for years and loading content via JavaScript does not make it harder for search. Most assistive technologies also work with JavaScript now.

• Google updated its image SEO best practices and Discover documentation to clarify how it picks thumbnail images for Search and Discover. Google now explicitly uses both schema.org markup and og:image meta tags as sources. To influence image selection, specify primaryImageOfPage in schema, attach image properties to the main entity, or use og:image. Best practices include choosing representative images, avoiding logos or images with text overlay, and using high resolution with standard aspect ratios. For Discover, Google recommends images at least 1200px wide, at least 300KB file size, and 16x9 aspect ratio.

AI

Labor Market Impacts of AI: A New Measure and Early Evidence

Anthropic introduces a new measure called "observed exposure" that combines theoretical LLM capability with real-world usage data, weighting automated and work-related uses more heavily. The research finds AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability, with actual coverage remaining a fraction of what is feasible.

• Computer Programmers have the highest exposure at 75% task coverage, followed by Customer Service Representatives and Data Entry Keyers at 67%.

• AI currently covers just 33% of tasks in Computer and Math occupations despite theoretical capability of 94%.

• For every 10 percentage point increase in coverage, BLS growth projections drop by 0.6 percentage points, suggesting labor analysts expect slower growth in more exposed occupations.

• Workers in the most exposed professions are more likely to be older, female, more educated, and higher-paid. Those with graduate degrees are 17.4% of the most exposed group versus 4.5% of the unexposed group.

• The research finds no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022.

• Hiring of workers aged 22 to 25 into exposed occupations has slowed by about 14% compared to 2022

• 30% of workers have zero coverage, including Cooks, Motorcycle Mechanics, Lifeguards, Bartenders, and Dishwashers.

• If all workers in the top 10% of exposure were laid off, aggregate unemployment would rise from 4% to13%.

The Ultimate Prompting Guide for Nano Banana

Google published a comprehensive prompting guide for Nano Banana 2 and Nano Banana Pro. The guide covers five prompting frameworks: text-to-image generation without references, multimodal generation with up to 14 reference images, conversational editing with semantic masking, real-time web search integration for grounded visuals, and text rendering in over 10 languages.

Copilot Tasks: From Answers to Actions

Microsoft introduced Copilot Tasks, research preview that shifts AI from conversation to autonomous action. Tasks works in the background with its own computer and browser to complete to-do items like monitoring rental listings and booking showings, compiling daily briefings from email and calendar, drafting replies to urgent messages, and canceling unused subscriptions. Users describe what they need in natural language and Copilot plans and executes across apps and services. Tasks asks for consent before meaningful actions like spending money or sending messages.

AI-Generated Art Can't Be Copyrighted After Supreme Court Declines to Review the Rule

Emma Roth reports that the US Supreme Court declined to hear Stephen Thaler's case over whether AI-generated art can obtain copyright protection. The decision leaves in place earlier rulings that found AI-created work without human authorship is ineligible for copyright. The case began after the US Copyright Office rejected Thaler's 2019 attempt to register an image created by his algorithm, A Recent Entrance to Paradise, and reaffirmed in 2022 that the work lacked the required human authorship. A district court judge ruled in 2023 that human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright, and a federal appeals court upheld that decision in 2025. The ruling also aligns with the Copyright Office's recent guidance that AI-generated artwork based only on text prompts is not protected.

Google's New Command-Line Tool Can Plug OpenClaw Into Your Workspace Data

Ryan Whitwam reports that Google released a new Google Workspace CLI project gws that bundles Workspace APIs into a command-line tool designed for both humans and AI agents, with built-in support for OpenClaw. The tool covers Gmail, Drive, Calendar and other Workspace products, outputs structured JSON, and includes more than 40 agent skills. Google positions it as a cleaner alternative to more complex MCP setups. The catch is that Google explicitly says this is “not an officially supported Google product,” functionality may change dramatically, and users are on their own if workflows break.

My Take: It sounds cool, but I’m still using Google’s API to access the various tools. This is still early and most likely will have issues. OpenClaw can be fragile itself, so adding another fragile layer can lead to more issues that I don’t want to deal with.

Claude Marketplace

Anthropic launched Claude Marketplace in limited preview, giving enterprise customers a way to spend part of their existing Anthropic commitment on third-party Claude-powered tools. Instead of negotiating separate budgets and invoices for each partner product, companies can apply existing Anthropic commitments across approved tools. Anthropic is launching with GitLab, Harvey, Lovable, Replit, Rogo and Snowflake, with billing handled directly through Anthropic.

AI Ripples

• OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Instant, an update to ChatGPT's most-used model that reduces unnecessary refusals, tones down overly cautious or preachy responses, and improves web search contextualization. The company reports hallucination rates dropped 26.8% with web use and 19.7% without web access on higher-stakes evaluations. The update also cuts back on phrases like "Stop. Take a breath" and aims for a more natural conversational style.

• OpenAI released GPT-5.4, its most capable frontier model for professional work with native computer-use capabilities and support for up to 1M tokens of context. It’s one of the quickest models out there at this level. GPT-5.4 is priced at $2.50 per million input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens. GPT-5.4 Pro is also available for maximum performance on complex tasks.

• Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, its fastest and most cost-efficient Gemini 3 series model at $0.25 per million input tokens and $1.50 per million output tokens. It outperforms 2.5 Flash with 2.5X faster time to first token and 45% higher output speed, achieving 1432 Elo on Arena.ai and 86.9% on GPQA Diamond.

• OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Excel in beta, an add-in powered by GPT-5.4 that builds, analyzes and updates spreadsheet models directly inside workbooks. It supports financial modeling, scenario analysis, and tracing formula dependencies while preserving Excel-native structure. On OpenAI's internal investment banking benchmark, performance improved from 43.7% with GPT-5 to 87.3% with GPT-5.4 Thinking.

• Google added Canvas to AI Mode in Search, a dedicated space for drafting documents and building interactive tools. Users can describe a dashboard or application and get a working prototype that pulls live data from the web and Google's Knowledge Graph. Canvas is available in the U.S. in English.

• Grammarly's Expert Review feature uses journalist identities without permission, including Verge editors and tech writers from Wired, Bloomberg and The New York Times. The feature claims to offer feedback "inspired by" experts but did not notify or seek consent from those named. Sources linked from suggestions often pointed to spammy archive copies or unrelated pages, suggesting the AI may be basing suggestions on different people's work than the name attached.

• OpenAI scaled back ChatGPT Instant Checkout plans, moving purchases from native in-app checkout to connected retailer apps instead. Users research products in ChatGPT but rarely complete purchases there, and only a small number of merchants were actively using the feature.

MARKETING

Why Most Video Ads Fail (And What Metrics Actually Matter)

Greg Jarboe says that most video ads fail because marketers optimize for platform outputs like views, impressions, and completion rates instead of business outcomes like attention, persuasion, and action. He says the real problem is not usually targeting, budget, or platform choice. It is weak strategy. Ads are still made like old TV commercials even though modern platforms reward relevance, retention, and native creative. He highlights several recurring issues: brands waste the opening seconds on logos and branding cues, overvalue polished production that feels like an ad, separate creative from distribution context, and run tests without clear hypotheses.

How AI Tools Influence the Modern Buyer Journey

Margarita Loktionova presents Semrush’s survey of 1,030 U.S. consumers who have tried AI tools and found that AI is already embedded across the shopping journey, from early discovery to final comparison. Some of the takeaways:

• 48% use AI daily, 85% use it at least weekly, and 55% use it for product research at least weekly

• 77% use AI and traditional search together

• Google is the more common starting point at 33% versus AI at 26%.

• 43% have discovered a new brand through AI

• 50% have made a purchase after using AI during research

• 69% expect AI to play a bigger role in how they shop in the future

• Only 20% say a brand stands out because it appears earlier in the response, while clearer explanations, value context, fit for needs, and direct comparisons have more influence.

source: semrush.com

Why AI-Built Websites All Look the Same

YC’s Aaron Epstein and Raphael Schaad review startup websites built with AI coding tools. They found that LLMs reproduce patterns from training data, so purple gradients, scroll fade-ins and flashy hover effects now appear everywhere without adding brand identity. They critique animations that distract from the product, including cursor-tracking effects, buttons that move toward the user, and scroll hijacking that breaks navigation. The reviewers recommend treating AI like a junior designer and editing aggressively rather than accepting every suggestion.

CONTENT

How to Chunk Content and When It's Worth It

Tania Brown responds to Google's recent criticism of chunking as an AI-optimization hack, arguing that chunking helps readers scan and AI systems retrieve passages accurately. The technique organizes text into self-contained paragraphs where each covers one complete idea. A reader should grasp the concept from a single paragraph without hunting for context. The author acknowledges that not every piece needs chunking. Skip content that already performs well with AI citations, is scheduled for comprehensive rewrites, or relies on narrative flow and emotional arcs like thought leadership essays and brand storytelling.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

How to Turn Claude Code Into Your SEO Command Center

Will Scott walks through setting up Claude Code to pull live data from Google Search Console, GA4 and Google Ads via Python scripts, then ask cross-source questions without spreadsheets. He says the setup takes about an hour and enables queries like "which keywords am I paying for that I already rank for organically?" A paid-organic gap analysis for a higher education client identified 2,742 search terms with wasted ad spend, 351 opportunities to reduce paid spend where organic was strong, and 41 content gaps where paid was the only presence.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - The only AI-powered tool that builds 4-level topical maps. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

The Headlines Traders Need Before the Bell

Tired of missing the trades that actually move?

In under five minutes, Elite Trade Club delivers the top stories, market-moving headlines, and stocks to watch — before the open.

Join 200K+ traders who start with a plan, not a scroll.

Get the Next Alert

AD

How can AI power your income?

Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

• A curated collection of 200+ profitable opportunities spanning content creation, e-commerce, gaming, and emerging digital markets—each vetted for real-world potential

• Step-by-step implementation guides designed for beginners, making AI accessible regardless of your technical background

• Cutting-edge strategies aligned with current market trends, ensuring your ventures stay ahead of the curve

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

Get Your Guide

SEO + GEO

Google's Discover Core Update Finishes Rolling Out

Matt G. Southern reports that Google's February 2026 Discover core update finished rolling out on February 27 after roughly 22 days, about 8 days longer than Google's original two-week estimate. This was the first time Google publicly labeled a core update as a Discover core update. NewzDash data comparing pre and post-update windows found fewer unique domains in top placements in the US and California, increased regional personalization with local domains appearing more often in local feeds, and X.com posts from institutional accounts climbing from 3 to 13 items in the US top 100. An analysis of over 400 news publishers found Discover's share of Google-sourced traffic nearly doubled from 37% in 2023 to 68%, while traditional web search traffic dropped from 51% to 27%.

4 Sites That Recovered From Google's December 2025 Core Update

Marie Haynes analyzes four sites that recovered from the December 2025 core update and identifies what changed. A medical ecommerce site that had been suppressed since August 2024 recovered after improving customer service and shipping logistics, which repaired its trust reputation. An affiliate site recovered after purchasing products for original reviews, adding photos and videos, breaking up walls of text, and using Microsoft Clarity to identify user frustrations. An ecommerce site in a YMYL niche recovered after improving site navigation, checkout flow and UX. A city guide recovered after adding original photography and video, writing about actual experiences rather than paraphrasing, and adding decision-making help like "This place is best for..." recommendations.

My Take: The common thread across all four recoveries is not technical SEO. It is removing reasons for Google to distrust you. Trust issues from customer service problems, commodity content that AI could write, poor UX that frustrates users. Fix those and you might recover.

How to Optimize for AI Search (AEO + GEO): The ARENA Framework

Yoyao Hsueh (that’s me!) introduces the ARENA Framework for diagnosing why brands disappear from AI answers. The five-step pipeline covers Access (eligibility), Retrieval (context selection), Extractability (quote-friendly passages), Name (brand attribution) and Authority (reinforcement over time). AI search optimization is a selection problem, not a checklist, and that most teams fail because they cannot pinpoint which step in the pipeline is broken. The piece includes a diagnostic table for rapid triage, a 30/60/90 implementation plan, and a breakdown of how optimization differs across AI Overviews, AI Mode and chat engines.

source: yoyao.com

How to See AI Search Prompts Inside Google Search Console

Chris Long explains how to mine Google Search Console for prompt-like queries using a regex filter that surfaces searches with 10 or more words. He notes that last November, ChatGPT queries were found leaking into Search Console reports, and that AI Mode data will be available in Search Console as well. The method involves filtering Search Console Performance data with the regex ^(?:\S+\s+){9,}\S+$ to find longer, conversational queries that read like prompts.

Google Patent Hints Searchers Will Land on AI-Generated Pages, Not Web Pages

Barry Schwartz reports on a newly granted Google patent that describes a system for generating AI-created landing pages tailored to individual users. The patent, filed about a year ago, outlines a process where Google evaluates a landing page score and, if it exceeds a threshold, generates a custom AI page that looks like the organization's site but is dynamically built in real time.

Google Discover Architecture: Clusters, Classifiers, OG Tags and NAIADES

Metehan Yesilyurt reverse-engineers Google Discover's client SDK telemetry and maps how content moves from ingestion to feed delivery. The key takeaway is that several hard gates run before any ranking model does, including collection-level blocks that can remove an entire publisher from eligibility. He outlines a 9-stage pipeline: ingestion, Open Graph parsing, classification, collection gate, interest matching, server-side pCTR ranking, feed assembly, delivery, and feedback.

How Browsers Really Parse HTML (and What That Means for SEO)

In this Search Off the Record episode, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt explained why resource hints like dns-prefetch, preload and preconnect do not affect Googlebot. Gary said Google's infrastructure does not need DNS prefetching because it can talk fast to all cascading DNS servers, and Google caches page resources separately rather than fetching them in real time. The discussion also covered why meta robots and canonical tags must appear in the head, and why HTML validity is not a ranking signal since validity is binary and a missing closing span tag makes HTML technically invalid without changing anything for users.

Microsoft Updates Bing Webmaster Guidelines

Barry Schwartz reports that Microsoft updated the Bing Webmaster Guidelines with a new design and revised introductory language that now explicitly includes Copilot and grounding API results. The updated intro states that the guidelines describe how Bing discovers, crawls, indexes, evaluates and surfaces content across Bing search experiences, Copilot and grounding API results. Following the guidelines now helps ensure URLs are eligible for indexing and ranking, grounding results and citations, and sustained visibility.

What 13 Months of Data Reveals About LLM Traffic, Growth and Conversions

This Search Engine Land analysis of 13 months of data across a customer base found four key patterns in LLM referral traffic.

• LLM referrals still account for less than 2% of total referral traffic on average, ranging from 0.15% to 1.5% across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude.

• But LLM traffic grew 80% on average comparing the first half of 2025 to the second half, with some companies seeing 300% increases.

• Aggregate referral traffic grew 3x from January to December 2025.

• LLM referrals convert at roughly 18%, higher than paid shopping, SEO and PPC, despite accounting for the lowest percentage of total traffic.

Companies Growing More Optimistic About AI Search

Glen Allsopp notes that companies are growing more optimistic about AI search based on recent earnings calls, even as search traffic declines have been devastating for some businesses. The shift reflects higher conversion rates from AI referrals offsetting some traffic loss, though opportunity varies significantly by business type. Many companies have diversified to social, increased ad budgets and newsletters, but others genuinely see AI Overviews and chat experiences as an opportunity rather than just a threat.

source: x.com

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google is preparing to test changes to search results in Europe that would show results from rival vertical search services by default alongside its own. They want to avoid a fine under the Digital Markets Act, which can reach up to 10% of global annual revenue. Google has accumulated $11.5 billion in EU antitrust fines since 2017. Previous smaller-scale tests with stripped-down results saw businesses report up to 30% drops in free direct booking clicks.

• SerpAPI filed a motion to dismiss Google's lawsuit, arguing that retrieving publicly visible search results does not constitute unauthorized access or hacking. The company cites legal precedents where browsewrap terms were found unenforceable and calls out Google's hypocrisy for scraping the open web while restricting others from doing the same. The case could determine whether independent SERP access tools have legal grounding.

AI

Anthropic Accuses DeepSeek and Other Chinese Firms of Using Claude to Train Their AI

Emma Roth reports that Anthropic claims DeepSeek, MiniMax and Moonshot misused Claude to improve their own models through "industrial-scale" distillation campaigns involving roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts and more than 16 million exchanges with Claude. DeepSeek allegedly held over 150,000 exchanges targeting Claude's reasoning capabilities and used it to generate "censorship-safe alternatives to politically sensitive questions." OpenAI similarly accused DeepSeek of "ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other U.S. frontier labs" in a letter to lawmakers.

How ChatGPT Uses SEO to Drive Growth and Revenue

Lavall Chichester breaks down how generative AI platforms use SEO for growth. OpenAI was offering $310,000 to $393,000 for a content strategist with SEO experience and separately hired for a growth role focused on SEO, CRO and web strategy, suggesting a $410,000 to $600,000 annual investment in SEO talent. ChatGPT has an authority score of 99, ranks for roughly 287,800 keywords, and gets 45.5 million monthly searches for its brand term. Perplexity ranks for 184,800 keywords with an authority score of 81, while Claude ranks for 36,000 keywords with an authority score of 75. The analysis applies a 3Cs framework (code, content, conversions) and finds ChatGPT wins on technical foundations like robots.txt and semantic URLs, while Perplexity and Claude have optimization gaps including unindexed pages and missing meta tags.

Nano Banana 2: Combining Pro Capabilities With Lightning-Fast Speed

Google releases Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image), which brings the advanced capabilities of Nano Banana Pro to the speed of Gemini Flash. The model supports subject consistency across up to five characters and 14 objects in a single workflow, precise text rendering and translation within images, and production-ready resolutions from 512px to 4K. It also pulls from Gemini's real-time web search for grounded visual generation of specific subjects.

source: blog.google

AI Ripples

• OpenAI announced $110 billion in new funding at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, including $30 billion from SoftBank, $30 billion from NVIDIA and $50 billion from Amazon. The company disclosed that ChatGPT now has more than 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million consumer subscribers, with more than 9 million paying business users. Weekly Codex users have more than tripled since the start of the year to 1.6 million.

• Microsoft released a joint statement confirming its partnership with OpenAI remains unchanged after the Amazon announcement. Microsoft retains its exclusive license to OpenAI IP and Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider for stateless OpenAI APIs. The revenue share arrangement continues unchanged.

• ChatGPT's ad ecosystem is expanding, with ad intelligence firm Adthena spotting more brands including Best Buy, AT&T, Pottery Barn, Enterprise, Qualcomm and Expedia. Based on 1,500+ prompts analyzed, most ads appear on the first prompt but some only trigger on the third or fourth repetition of the same query. High-intent modifiers like "best" and "new" carry significant weight. Best Buy secured two ad placements in a single response for iPhone-related queries.

• Anthropic clarified how its three Claude bots work: ClaudeBot crawls for AI training, Claude-User fetches pages when users ask Claude questions, and Claude-SearchBot indexes content for search optimization. Blocking one does not block the others. All three respect robots.txt directives, but IP blocking may not work reliably since the bots use public cloud provider IPs.

• OpenAI defeated xAI's trade secrets lawsuit, with a US District Judge granting its motion to dismiss with leave to amend. The judge wrote that xAI "does not point to any misconduct by OpenAI" and that allegations about eight former xAI employees who left for OpenAI showed no indication that OpenAI directed their actions. The case is part of a broader legal conflict between Elon Musk and OpenAI, including a separate lawsuit over OpenAI's transition to a for-profit entity scheduled for jury trial in April.

MARKETING

4 Strategic Paid Search Pivots to Survive Google's AI Overviews

Kenneth Hamner outlines how AI Overviews are reshaping paid search economics. Seer Interactive data shows paid CTR on queries with AI Overviews fell 68% from 19.7% to 6.34% between June 2024 and September 2025, with the steepest drop occurring in July 2025 when paid CTR collapsed from roughly 11% to 3% in a single month. Brands cited in AI Overviews see a 91% paid CTR lift, suggesting informational queries can still be strategic assets for cited brands. The authors recommend four pivots:

• monitor informational intent performance rather than blanket-excluding those keywords

• prioritize product feed quality since Google's Shopping Graph relies on structured data

• craft creative that differentiates rather than informs since users already consumed AI answers

• build first-party audience data since keyword targeting becomes less reliable.

CONTENT

The Real Risk of AI-Generated Content

Tomek Rudzki warns that companies rushing to publish raw AI content at scale are damaging their visibility in both Google and AI search engines. His analysis of AI content generation tools found that 36% to 75% of brands featured in their case studies had suffered significant Google traffic drops. When Grokipedia lost Google rankings in early 2025, ChatGPT, AI Overviews and AI Mode citations declined at the same time.

My Take: This confirms what I have seen across client sites. The brands getting hit are not the ones using AI to help them write better. They are the ones using AI to replace expertise entirely. If you cannot answer yes to whether you would read your own article or whether it adds something competitors cannot copy from an LLM, do not publish it.

SOCIAL MEDIA

In Case You Saw It: We Are Testing a New Shopping Product Experience in Search

Reddit announced it is testing an AI-powered shopping feature that surfaces product carousels in search results for a small group of US users. The carousels show products mentioned in community discussions, with pricing, images and direct buy links.

Social Ripples

• Snapchat is testing Creator Subscriptions in the U.S. with select Snap Stars, giving fans access to exclusive content, priority replies and ad-free Stories for a monthly fee. Snapchat reported 946 million monthly active users in Q4 2025, with U.S. users posting to Spotlight growing 47% year-over-year.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

SearchQualityRater.com — Free Tool Evaluates Content Against Google's Quality Rater Guidelines

Paul Andre de Vera launched SearchQualityRater.com, a free tool that evaluates whether Google would consider content "high quality" based on the 182-page Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Users paste a URL and receive a quality score matching Google's scale, a breakdown of E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust), and prioritized improvement recommendations. The tool requires no account and was built to automate the same evaluation process Google's human reviewers use.

My Take: This is useful for a pre-publish quality check or content audit. Run your key pages through it to see where E-E-A-T signals are weak before Google's raters or algorithms make that determination for you.

BUSINESS IDEAS

How to Become an SEO Freelancer Without Underpricing or Burning Out

Katlyn Edwards breaks down how to build a sustainable SEO freelance practice by treating it as a service business, not just a flexible job. She says that generalists compete on price while specialists compete on expertise and outcomes, and that productization (turning custom work into repeatable deliverables) is what separates freelancers who scale from those who burn out. The piece covers three pricing models (hourly, project-based and retainer), with project-based pricing recommended for productized work and retainers only advised after you have delivered the same project multiple times and can firmly hold scope.

AI Just Wiped Out $285 Billion and Rewrote the Business Playbook

Jeff Bullas breaks down the February 3, 2026 market selloff that erased $285 billion from software stocks after Anthropic announced Claude CoWork, a plugin system that lets AI agents execute core business workflows autonomously. He argues the event marks the collapse of the per-seat SaaS model and the start of a new opportunity for solo operators.

• Claude CoWork launched with 11 plugins covering productivity, sales, customer support, product management, marketing, legal, finance, data, enterprise search, bio-research and plugin management.

• The side hustle economy is projected to grow from $556 billion to $1.8 trillion by 2032, with 41.8 million solopreneurs in the US contributing over $1.3 trillion annually.

• Businesses using AI report 25 to 55% productivity gains and $3.50 to $4.00 in return for every dollar spent on AI solutions.

• 84% of content creators already use AI-powered tools in their workflow, and the AI-in-creator-economy market is projected to reach $12.85 billion by 2029.

NEWS

GoDaddy Doesn't Want You Anymore: Business Users Only Now!

LowEndBox reports that GoDaddy updated its Universal Terms of Service Agreement to reclassify all 21 million users as "business customers," removing protections for private, personal or household use. The change eliminates consumer rights like EU 14-day withdrawal periods, weakens protections against unfair contract terms, and shifts disputes to commercial arbitration with higher fees. The updated terms also waive jury trial rights and restrict evidence options.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - The only AI-powered tool that builds 4-level topical maps. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

How Marketers Are Scaling With AI in 2026

61% of marketers say this is the biggest marketing shift in decades.

Get the data and trends shaping growth in 2026 with this groundbreaking state of marketing report.

Inside you’ll discover:

• Results from over 1,500 marketers centered around results, goals and priorities in the age of AI

• Stand out content and growth trends in a world full of noise

• How to scale with AI without losing humanity

• Where to invest for the best return in 2026

Download your 2026 state of marketing report today.

Get Your Report

AD

How can AI power your income?

Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

• A curated collection of 200+ profitable opportunities spanning content creation, e-commerce, gaming, and emerging digital markets—each vetted for real-world potential

• Step-by-step implementation guides designed for beginners, making AI accessible regardless of your technical background

• Cutting-edge strategies aligned with current market trends, ensuring your ventures stay ahead of the curve

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

Get Your Guide

SEO + GEO

Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview

Microsoft unveils AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, showing how often your pages get cited in Copilot, Bing AI summaries and partners. Track citations, cited pages, grounding queries, and URL-level activity, then tighten structure, evidence and freshness using IndexNow and Bing Places.

source: blogs.bing.com

Cloudflare’s Markdown for Agents AI Feature Has SEOs on Alert

Danny Goodwin reports Cloudflare now auto-converts HTML to Markdown when crawlers request text/markdown, claiming up to 80% fewer tokens and adding a token-estimate header. SEOs worry it could enable AI cloaking via the Accept header. Google’s John Mueller and Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel discourage bot-only formats and will verify similarity too.

Read more about Cloudflare Markdown for Agents.

Grounding Queries vs Fan-Out Queries: The Two Hidden Layers of AI Visibility

Dan Taylor says AI visibility is shaped by two invisible systems: grounding, which pulls trusted sources to verify facts, and fan-out, which expands into related comparisons before an answer is written. He ties it to Bing’s new AI Performance reporting and gives concrete plays for travel, SaaS, and ecommerce: build structured comparison pages, publish measurable specs and policies, and invest in docs, trust centers, and integration detail so you win both trust and breadth.

ChatGPT Has 12% of Google’s Search Volume but Google Sends 190x More Traffic to Websites

Patrick Stox crunches the numbers: ChatGPT handles about 2.5B prompts daily, and he sees 65% look like traditional searches. Yet ChatGPT drives only 0.21% of site traffic while Google sends 190x more. His estimated CTR gap is brutal: ChatGPT clicks are 96% lower.

source: ahrefs.com

Do You Still Need a Website in 2026?

Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt from Google Search Relations debate the question on Search Off the Record and land on a practical answer: it depends on what you need to control. They explain when a full site still makes sense for monetization, analytics, custom tools and long-term visibility, and when a platform page, a shop, or even a form can do the job. The episode breaks down audience behavior, distribution tradeoffs, and how AI and feeds change discovery, with clear advice on choosing the lightest setup that still supports your business goals.

Would You Give Google Your ID Numbers to Remove Results About You

Barry Schwartz explains Google’s “Results about you” tool: you can submit passport, driver’s license, or Social Security numbers so Google can detect them in Search and notify you, then request removal. Google says it uses encryption and security protocols. He also highlights the new explicit-image removal flow, including proactive filtering.

source: seroundtable.com

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Barry Schwartz reports John Mueller's reminder: give links visible anchor text, not just title attributes or aria-labels. Make it obvious what users will get on the other end. Audit your navigation and buttons. Replace vague “click here” and icon-only links with descriptive phrases. Context helps accessibility and search engines alike.

• Grokipedia’s January visibility spike is fading fast. Sistrix and Semrush show sharp drops over the past week, and even a branded search can put Wikipedia above Grokipedia. Peec.AI data suggests fewer mentions in AI Mode, AI Overviews, and ChatGPT.

• John Mueller’s Reddit take: a one-year-old site can beat a four-year competitor if the older site coasted and yours builds genuine usefulness. Audit the real value gap, then invest in users, marketing, functionality, business fundamentals, and promotion, not vanity scores or link counts. Consistency beats domain-age mythology. Fast.

AI

Seedance 2.0 Officially Released

ByteDance Seed Team unveils Seedance 2.0, a unified audio video model that takes text plus up to nine images, three clips, and three audio tracks. Expect sharper physics, steadier action, 15 second multi shot outputs, stereo sound, plus video editing and extension. The article is in Chinese, but you can read about it on Verge.

source: seed.bytedance.com

Google AI Mode Launches UCP-Powered Checkout

Barry Schwartz reports Google is rolling out Universal Commerce Protocol checkout inside AI Mode, letting US shoppers buy Etsy and Wayfair items without leaving Search or the Gemini app. Watch for a Buy button on listings, then a checkout flow. Ecommerce teams should prep feeds, policies, and conversion for purchases.

source: seroundtable.com

Google is testing sponsored retailer cards inside AI Mode answers, starting with shopping and expanding to travel. Advertisers can now use Veo 3 in Asset Studio to turn images into video fast. Google says Gemini-made assets tripled in 2025 and hit 70 million in Q4 alone, too.

WebMCP Is Available for Early Preview

Google introduces WebMCP, a preview that lets sites expose structured tools so AI agents act reliably for users. It adds declarative form actions and imperative JavaScript actions, reducing DOM clicking. Use it for support tickets, ecommerce checkout, and flight booking. Join the Early Preview Program to prototype today.

Testing ads in ChatGPT

OpenAI is testing ads in ChatGPT for logged-in U.S. adults on Free and Go. Ads are clearly labeled, kept separate and never change answers. Targeting uses chat topics plus past chats and ad interactions, but advertisers see only aggregated clicks. Users can dismiss ads, manage personalization and delete ad data. Learn more in an OpenAI interview with Asad Awan, one of the ad leads.

source: openai.com

GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

Z.ai’s research team introduces GLM-5, a 744B-parameter model built for long-horizon agent work. It pairs DeepSeek Sparse Attention with an async RL stack called slime to boost training throughput. It scored the highest open-source scores on Vending Bench 2 and strong benchmark lifts - all for 5-8x cheaper than Opus. Try it via Hugging Face or api.z.ai for free.

source: z.ai

AI Ripples

• Gemini 3 Deep Think just got an upgrade and is now in the Gemini app for Google AI Ultra subscribers and, for the first time, available via the Gemini API through early access. They share early use cases, plus benchmark jumps like 48.4% on Humanity’s Last Exam, 84.6% on ARC-AGI-2, and a 3455 Codeforces Elo.

• OpenAI introduces GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, a smaller version of GPT-5.3-Codex and a research preview model built for real-time coding inside Codex. Pro users get it first in the Codex app, CLI, and VS Code, with a 128k text-only context window and separate rate limits.

MARKETING

Additional Triggers for Vignette Ads

Google’s AdSense team says vignettes will soon fire on more user actions, not just page changes. A new Auto ads toggle controls all triggers, including tab unhide, nav bar clicks, scroll-to-article-end pauses, inactivity re-engagement, and back button use. It appears Feb. 9, activates Mar. 9 unless you manually opt out.

15 Fixes To Improve Low Conversion Rates in Google Ads

Brooke Osmundson shows why low conversions are small leaks: messy tracking, drifting keywords, mismatched landing pages, weak CTAs, and mobile friction. Tighten match types, add negatives, test RSA copy one change at a time, lean on assets and audiences, retarget abandoners, fix location settings, and schedule ads where buyers click.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - The only AI-powered tool that builds 4-level topical maps. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

Your Boss Will Think You’re an Ecom Genius

Optimizing for growth? Go-to-Millions is Ari Murray’s ecommerce newsletter packed with proven tactics, creative that converts, and real operator insights—from product strategy to paid media. No mushy strategy. Just what’s working. Subscribe free for weekly ideas that drive revenue.

Sign up now

AD

Want to get the most out of ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a superpower if you know how to use it correctly.

Discover how HubSpot's guide to AI can elevate both your productivity and creativity to get more things done.

Learn to automate tasks, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation with the power of AI.

Download the free guide

SEO + GEO

February 2026 Discover Core Update Rolling Out

John Mueller explains Google’s February 2026 Discover core update, which reshapes how articles surface for users. Expect more local results, less clickbait, and more original, timely work from proven experts. Traffic may swing, so audit depth, tone, and topical focus, and follow Discover guidelines as rollout expands globally this year. Thought this was an interesting paragraph to add here:

Is Google Finally Cracking Down on Self-Promotional Listicles?

Lily Ray spots a pattern in January 2026 volatility: SaaS blogs stuffed with self-promotional “best” listicles are sliding. She shows how to find them with site: and intitle: searches, and why Google distrusts biased reviews. Fix by proving real testing, disclosing methods, avoiding fake updates, and building authentic authority fast.

Google Possibly Published Huge Reviews Update In January 2026

If you prefer a video, Glenn Gabe takes a look at the same patterns of how a powerful Google algorithm update in late January likely targeted "self-serving listicles.” This update also impacted numerous review sites, suggesting a broader reviews system update. He advises against exploiting loopholes, as they "work until they don't," don't, often leading to significant visibility drops across Google search and AI platforms.

Google Search Hits $63B, Details AI Mode Ad Tests

Matt G. Southern details how Google search revenue surged 17 percent to $63.07 billion. This financial boom proves that Google is keeping users locked in “engaged” on Google. AI Mode queries now run three times longer than traditional searches, giving Google fertile ground to plant new ad inventory directly below AI responses. They are even piloting Direct Offers for shoppers ready to pull the trigger. If you thought AI would kill the search giant, these numbers suggest it is only making the beast more evil effective at keeping customers within its walls.

How to Choose the Best Prompts to Monitor Your AI Search Visibility

Glen Allsopp explains how to track AI search visibility without chasing noisy single prompts. Cluster related questions, then pull ideas from Search Console, forum SERPs via udm=18, People Also Ask, Perplexity related queries, and pages already getting LLM traffic. Monitor accuracy, competitor gaps, and cited domains so you can act.

How to Do Prompt Research for AI SEO

Sergei Rogulin explains how prompt research is keyword research for AI, but focused on decision prompts. Define personas and constraints, map product features to risks, use keyword tools as language input, then have an LLM generate comparison questions. Track fan-out variations, snapshot answers and watch patterns in mentions, framing and gaps.

SERPs With Ads + AI Overviews Grew by Over 394% in 2025

Luke Harsel reports Semrush data showing Google Ads on AI Overview SERPs jumped from 5.17% in March to 25.56% by October 2025, a 394% surge. Most ads land at the bottom, though top and middle placements rose in September. As AIOs move down funnel, pair PPC with SEO for trust.

source: semrush.com

Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%

Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan reran Ahrefs’ click study with 300,000 keywords and fresh Google Search Console data. In December 2025, AI Overviews cut position-one CTR to 0.016, about 58% below expectation, and also dragged down positions 2 to 10. Use SERP-feature filters to spot where AIOs hit you hardest.

What to Ask an SEO Agency Before Hiring Them: 18 Essential Questions With Answers

Nina Edwards lays out 18 questions that expose whether an SEO agency has process or gloss. Probe their first 90 days plan, success metrics, and AI-ready strategy. Demand technical prioritization, content that converts, PR tied to rankings and E-E-A-T, direct specialist access, forecasting, and a clear playbook when performance stalls.

My Take: Even if you don’t do client work, this can still be helpful with how you think about the SEO you’re doing for yourself. Can get you thinking and drum up ideas on your approach.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Barry Schwartz reports Google clarified crawl limits: Googlebot indexes only the first 2MB of most supported files and the first 64MB of PDFs, while Google crawlers stop at 15MB. Limits apply to uncompressed bytes. This won’t affect the majority of us.

• John Mueller gave his blunt take on serving Markdown to LLM crawlers: “Converting pages to markdown is such a stupid idea” and it may be treated as plain text, links might not work, and you could lose navigation, headers, and internal linking signals. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft questions the need for “double crawl load.”

AI

Building Toward a Sustainable Content Economy for the Agentic Web

Microsoft Advertising announced the Publisher Content Marketplace, a pilot that pays publishers based on AI-delivered value while giving Copilot and partners licensed access to premium content. Publishers set terms, keep ownership, and get usage reporting. It supports publishers of all sizes, from national brands to independent specialists. Early collaborators include AP, Business Insider, Condé Nast, Hearst, USA TODAY, Vox Media, and Yahoo testing demand.

Introducing GPT-5.3-Codex

OpenAI introduces GPT-5.3-Codex, a faster agent that codes, researches, and runs tools. It tops SWE-Bench Pro and Terminal-Bench, builds apps over days, and lets you steer work mid-task. The post shares examples, new cyber safeguards, and is available with paid ChatGPT plans and everywhere you can use Codex.

Introducing the Codex App

OpenAI also launched the Codex app for macOS for running multiple coding agents in parallel. It supports worktrees to avoid git conflicts, lets you review diffs, and adds reusable “skills” and scheduled automations. Codex is bundled with ChatGPT plans, with doubled rate limits and sandboxed permissions.

Introducing Claude Opus 4.6

Anthropic announces Opus 4.6 with sharper coding, longer agent runs, and a 1M token context in beta. The post details top scores on Terminal-Bench 2.0, gains on long-context retrieval, and new API controls like effort, adaptive thinking, and compaction, plus Excel and PowerPoint upgrades for everyday work across teams today.

Orchestrate Agent Teams of Claude Code Sessions

Anthropic also released Claude Code agent teams that can coordinate multiple sessions: a lead assigns tasks, teammates work in separate contexts, and everyone chats via a task list. Use for parallel research, reviews or bug hypotheses, but expect more tokens, tmux constraints and quirks; add hooks for quality gates.

My Take: I’ve tried to have a team discuss a part of Floyi from different viewpoints, not doing any coding. And it will eat up your tokens, but the output was good with multiple agents talking to each other and coming to a final proposal.

Introducing Model Council

Perplexity announces Model Council, a Max feature that runs one query across three models like Claude Opus 4.6, GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3.0, then uses a “synthesizer” to merge results and flag disagreements. It’s built for higher-stakes research, complex decisions, brainstorming and verification.

My Take: This is similar to something that’s actually been in Floyi for quite some time, the AIRS Analyzer. Analyzes responses across 7 AI search platforms and ‘synthesizes’ a content brief based on similarities, differences, and information gain opportunities. It’s important to analyze responses across platforms and the SERPs if you want to understand how they work. Don’t just follow others blindly. Everyone’s got their own agenda, including me - use Floyi 😉 

Super Bowl Ads - Google and Anthropic

Google’s created a series of ads before the Super Bowl. This is the in-game commercial they’re debuting. “New Home, a mother and son use Gemini to bring their new house to life, imagining how different spaces will look and feel.”

Anthropic’s “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude” - their jab at ChatGPT for including ads.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - The only AI-powered tool that builds 4-level topical maps. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

A free newsletter with the marketing ideas you need

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.

Sign Up Free

AD

Turn AI into Your Income Engine

Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator?

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

• A curated collection of 200+ profitable opportunities spanning content creation, e-commerce, gaming, and emerging digital markets—each vetted for real-world potential

• Step-by-step implementation guides designed for beginners, making AI accessible regardless of your technical background

• Cutting-edge strategies aligned with current market trends, ensuring your ventures stay ahead of the curve

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

Get Your Guide

SEO + GEO

Review Platforms Lost 90% of Traffic Over the Past 2 Years, Yet They Top AI Overview Citations for Commercial Queries

Yulia Deda digs into 30,000 commercial keywords and finds review sites still shape AI Overviews even as their organic traffic collapses. Only 34.5% of Overviews cite a review platform, but five players deliver 88% of those links.

• Study size: 30,000 commercial keywords; AI Overviews showed up for 22,729 queries.

• Review platforms appeared in 34.5% of AI Overviews, about one in three.

• The top five platforms drove 88% of all review-platform links: Gartner Peer Insights, Software Advice, TrustRadius, plus the two in the summary.

• Explicit “review/rating” queries triggered review platforms 49% of the time.

• “Best/top” queries triggered review platforms just 17.1%

• “Software/tools” queries still pulled review platforms 39.4%, even without the word “review.”

• Link math: the average AI Overview had 9.29 total links, but only 0.73 review-platform links per response overall.

• Traffic collapse despite citations (early 2024 to end of 2025): Clutch down 87%, and Yelp down 77% after peaking around 867M visits (mentions alone did not save clicks).

The Power of Personal Intelligence in Gemini and AI Mode

Glenn Gabe explains how Google’s Personal Intelligence makes Gemini and AI Mode pull from your Gmail, Search, Photos, and YouTube history to personalize answers. He shares real prompts that trigger hyper-tailored recommendations, warns SEO tracking gets murky fast, and argues brands must earn visibility through trust, content quality, and marketing fundamentals.

My Take: Glenn always brings such detail to his coverage to show you all the angles.

Google’s Seamless New Search Experience

Robby Stein says Google Search is rolling out two upgrades: Gemini 3 as the default for AI Overviews worldwide, and follow-up questions that jump into AI Mode. For SEO teams, watch how deeper queries surface links, optimize pages for conversational context, and anticipate multi-turn intent with clear answers and details.

My Take: This is what Search is becoming.

source: blog.google

CMA Proposes Package of Measures to Improve Google Search Services in UK

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK plans to rein in Google by requiring opt outs for AI Overviews, clearer attribution for publishers, fairer ranking transparency, mandatory choice screens on Android and Chrome, and better data portability. The proposals aim to rebalance power, protect publishers, and increase competition before feedback closes on February 25.

Google responded by outlining how it already gives publishers control over how their content appears in Search and AI features, including tools like robots.txt, preview controls, and the newer Google-Extended setting for AI training. They say they’re exploring additional opt-out options specifically for generative AI features while warning that overly rigid rules could harm search quality. Google emphasizes the need to balance publisher control with keeping Search useful, fast, and consistent for users.

What Happened to Cointelegraph.com?

Sean Markey charts Cointelegraph.com’s brutal traffic cliff: from 5M visits to near zero after a casino affiliate push. His keyword forensic shows iGaming pages likely triggered Google’s Site Reputation Abuse policy and a manual action.

My Take: A good lesson to stay in niche, vet partners, and not to rent authority too far.

Yahoo! Scout: Yahoo's Official Return to Search With AI

Barry Schwartz explains how Yahoo! Scout revives Yahoo search with an AI answer engine built into Search, Mail, News, Finance, and more. Scout highlights citations, features a source, and mixes Anthropic models with Yahoo data plus Bing’s index. Expect news modules, affiliate shopping cards, ads, and a promised publisher portal.

source: seroundtable.com

Information Retrieval Part 1: Disambiguation

Harry Clarkson-Bennett argues disambiguation is your unfair advantage in AI-first search. Write like you mean it: define terms, front-load answers, use tight headings, lists, and tables, cite sources, and keep pages current. Reinforce entities with sameAs, strong author bios, and internal links, then monitor intent shifts as news evolves daily.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Barry Schwartz reports Google Business Profiles now advises review replies: stay polite, keep it short, respond only when you've got new info, and skip salesy promos. For bad reviews, protect privacy, check records, own mistakes, explain limits, apologize with empathy, sign your name, and reply quickly to show you care.

• Barry Schwartz reports Google is running a small Search ads experiment that adds third-party endorsement content beneath ad descriptions. The snippet can display the publisher’s name, logo, and a short line like “Best for Frequent Travelers,” shown with PCMag branding.

AI

The New Era of Browsing: Putting Gemini to Work in Chrome

Gemini 3 is turning Chrome into a side panel assistant that summarizes, compares, and plans without switching tabs. It can transform images with Nano Banana, use context from Gmail and Calendar, and, for U.S. Pro and Ultra users, auto browse researches trips and fills forms, pausing for confirmations.

source: blog.google

Project Genie: Experimenting With Infinite, Interactive Worlds

Google announce Project Genie, a web prototype for Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. (18+) that turns text or images into explorable worlds powered by Genie 3. You can preview and fine-tune scenes with Nano Banana Pro, choose first- or third-person view, remix others’ prompts and export 60-second videos of your runs.

source: blog.google

AI Ripples

• OpenAI says ChatGPT will retire GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and o4-mini on Feb. 13, 2026, with no API changes. The team brought 4o back after Plus and Pro feedback, then baked its warmth into GPT-5.1/5.2. Only 0.1% still pick 4o daily as it shifts focus to newer models and personalization.

• Google AI Plus launched in 35 new countries, including the U.S., priced at $7.99 a month with a two month half off intro. You get Gemini 3 Pro, Nano Banana Pro, Flow, and NotebookLM, plus 200GB and sharing for five. Premium 2TB users upgrade automatically soon.

MARKETING

The Complete Email Deliverability Checklist for 2026 (Plus Tools & Tips)

Veljko Ristić explains why inbox placement is tougher in 2026 and maps a checklist: choose an ESP, monitor IP and reputation, comply with Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook rules, authenticate with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, clean and segment lists, write subject lines, and warm up sends.

Pepsi Takes a Shot at Coca-Cola’s Polar Bears in a Brilliant Super Bowl Ad

Geoff Desreumaux breaks down Taika Waititi and Pepsi’s Super Bowl spot “The Choice,” where a Coca-Cola polar bear picks Pepsi Zero Sugar in a blind taste test, then melts down to Queen’s “I Want to Break Free.” And there’s the moment they’re caught on the jumbotron at a concert.

source: wersm.com

LINK BUILDING

Do You Still Need Digital PR in 2026?

Vince Nero says digital PR still matters in 2026, but not for old-school link trophies. With two-thirds of Google searches ending with no click, PR should prioritize brand mentions, entity strength, and placements on high-authority publishers that feed AI answers. Rank wins help, yet citations rarely earn clicks for you.

source: buzzstream.com

SOCIAL MEDIA

Meta Is Preparing to Test Premium Subscriptions Across Its Apps

Geoff Desreumaux says Meta will test paid tiers across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, keeping core features free. Instagram may add unlimited audience lists, see who will not follow back, and view Stories anonymously. Meta also plans AI upsells, integrating its Manus agent and making Vibes video tools freemium soon too.

The “New” TikTok Is Triggering User Backlash Over Algorithm Problems and Ongoing Alleged Censorship

Brett Tabke reports that TikTok’s US ownership shift has triggered algorithm chaos, muted political content, broken discovery, and falling reach. Creators report stalled views and vanished posts, while brands face unreliable performance.

Sounds like there’s more content moderation after the sale 😅 

Some TikTok Shop Sellers Are Pulling Back as the Platform Moves to End Independent Shipping in the U.S.

Allison Smith reports TikTok Shop will phase out independent shipping, pushing U.S. sellers onto TikTok-run logistics from Feb. 25 through March 31. Brands must use Fulfilled by TikTok, Upgraded TikTok Shipping, or Collections, with only limited approved software. Consultants warn higher fees, inventory risk, and service glitches are driving exits.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - The only AI-powered tool that builds 4-level topical maps. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

Want to get the most out of ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a superpower if you know how to use it correctly.

Discover how HubSpot's guide to AI can elevate both your productivity and creativity to get more things done.

Learn to automate tasks, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation with the power of AI.

Download the free guide

AD

Introducing the first AI-native CRM

Connect your email, and you’ll instantly get a CRM with enriched customer insights and a platform that grows with your business.

With AI at the core, Attio lets you:

• Prospect and route leads with research agents

• Get real-time insights during customer calls

• Build powerful automations for your complex workflows

Join industry leaders like Granola, Taskrabbit, Flatfile and more.

👉 Try Attio Pro for free

SEO + GEO

User Data Is Important in Google’s Ranking Systems. What We Learned From Liz Reid’s Appeal Declaration.

Marie Haynes digs into a DOJ filing to show how deeply Google leans on user behavior data plus proprietary quality, freshness, and spam annotations. The lesson for SEOs: Publish timely updates, earn clicks and long dwell time, reduce pogo sticking, and avoid anything that looks duplicative or spammy.

Google Search Gains Personal Intelligence in AI Mode

Google’s AI Mode now taps personal context from Gmail and Photos to deliver more tailored answers. Users can opt in to get trip ideas, recommendations, and planning help based on their own data. Search is becoming personal, predictive, and far more intent driven.

When Platforms Say 'Don't Optimize,' Smart Teams Run Experiments

Duane Forrester argues that platform advice to stop optimizing is comforting but risky, so run your GEO experiments. Pick 10 to 20 similar pages, split into control and rewrite groups, use decision-support copy, document changes, measure outcomes beyond clicks, and track AI citations and selections.

Microsoft Clarity Shows Bot Activity

Microsoft’s Clarity team explains Bot Activity, a new AI Visibility dashboard built from server and CDN logs. It shows which bots hit your site, how that share changes, what they are doing (search, data services, developer tools, AI assistants), and which URLs get hammered. The key warning: bot requests do not mean your content was retrieved, grounded, cited, or surfaced in an answer. Use the data to spot low-value crawl patterns, plan infrastructure, and improve bot management. To enable it, sign in, go to Settings > AI Visibility, connect a provider, and open Dashboards > AI Visibility > Bot Activity.

source: learn.microsoft.com

The Great Decoupling

Kevin Indig explains why traffic and revenue no longer move in lockstep and why that shift is permanent. He shows how AI answers, zero-click search, and changing user behavior have broken the old SEO model where rankings equaled growth. The big insight is that SEO now drives influence, not visits. Brands win by shaping buyer perception inside AI tools, not by chasing clicks. He urges marketers to rethink success around authority, clarity, and brand demand rather than sessions.

1 Important Lesson Omar Little Taught Me About Writing Page Titles

Eric Gilley says AI search engines judge your page in a blink using the title, URL, and snippet, so vague, curiosity-driven headlines get skipped. Write titles that spell out the question, entity, and problem, front-load meaning, and ignore old length limits. Test longer, denser titles on pages that already rank.

Head of WordPress AI Team Explains SEO for AI Agents

Automattic engineering director James LePage says AI agents will pull from the same search indexes you already optimize for, so the playbook is familiar. Make pages easy to parse: use clear schema, strong semantic markup, and structured markdown. Tighten internal linking so entities connect and authority is obvious. Write for intent, not vibes: lead with the most important answer, then offer clean paths to deeper detail. Treat your site like a briefing, not a document pile.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Danny Goodwin reports that Google’s AI Overviews heavily cite YouTube for health topics, often over medical sources. A study found video dominates citations, even when accuracy suffers.

• John Mueller explains why free subdomain hosting hurts SEO. Google struggles to trust sites surrounded by spam, making visibility harder even with good content. His advice is to avoid free hosts, build on a clean domain, and focus first on audience and promotion before expecting search traction results consistently.

• Barry Schwartz reports John Mueller says spammy links dropped in blog comments won’t help or hurt your Google rankings. So skip the panic and the disavow. Remember the good ole days when comments were a link building tactic?

AI

66 Billion Bot Requests Analysis: AI Bots Rise, SEO Tools Shrink, and Search Engines Hold Their Ground

Gediminas G. and Hostinger analyze 66.7 billion bot requests across 5+ million websites - AI is becoming a distribution channel, and your crawl policy is now a strategy decision. The main takeaway is to stop treating “bots” as one bucket: decide which bots you want for visibility, which you want to keep out for IP or cost reasons, and enforce it deliberately. Some of data on bots:

• Bot traffic baseline: bots are ~30% of global web traffic (Cloudflare Radar), and the dataset aligns with that

• Largest bucket: generic scripts/empty/generic bots = 23B requests (34.6% of total)

• Search engine bots: 20.3B requests (30.5%); Googlebot averages ~72% site coverage

• LLM training/data crawlers: 10.1B requests (15.1%); coverage declines driven by blocking

• GPTBot coverage drop: 84% to 12% (clearest signal of training-bot resistance)

• SEO/monitoring tools: 6.4B requests (9.7%); AhrefsBot averages ~60% coverage

• Assistant-facing crawlers: 4.6B requests (6.9%); OpenAI SearchBot averages ~55.67% coverage

• Social/ad bots: 2.2B requests (3.3%); Meta’s link preview crawler averages ~69% coverage but is losing reach

How to Make an AI Clone of Yourself (or a GPT Advisor for Anything)

Andy Crestodina explains how to build an AI clone in ChatGPT: start in Create mode, then refine instructions in Configure, pick thinking mode, and add strong starters. Upload your best content as lightweight, organized files with purpose notes. Test, tighten so it cites sources not the web, then share widely.

My Take: My AI clones (plural) are super useful. I have clones that focus specifically on topical maps/authority. Then ones for social, research, coding, and a couple others. They’re all hyper-focused and great to share internally.

There’s a great tip to adapt your source files to include a purpose and description. I also create one-liners that describe each file in the instructions prompt. All the GPTs got better when I did that. There’s a little more work to setting things up initially, but well-worth it on the backend during use.

ChatGPT Searches Google Shopping to Create Its Recommendations

Leigh McKenzie reports that product carousels in ChatGPT often mirror Google Shopping results, not just web search. To get picked, tune your Merchant Center feed: accurate titles, pricing, availability, reviews, and images. Keep it fresh, match locale settings, and test prompts by decoding shopping fan-out queries in DevTools each month.

OpenAI to Charge for ChatGPT Ads by Impressions, Not Clicks

OpenAI plans to charge advertisers for ChatGPT ads based on impressions, not clicks, signaling a big shift in how AI ads will be valued. The move suggests lower click expectations, higher brand exposure goals, and rewards visibility over performance as marketers experiment with this new channel. This isn’t unprecedented though, as Barry Schwartz adds: “Truth is, the first Google Ads on Google Search, were handled similarly.”

AI Ripples

• Anthropic explains how it redesigned Claude’s constitution to guide how the AI thinks, behaves, and makes decisions. Instead of a rigid rule list, the new version focuses on values, reasoning, and judgment so the model can handle real-world gray areas. The document explains how Claude balances helpfulness, safety, ethics, and compliance, and why understanding intent matters more than blindly following rules.

• OpenAI explains how it is rolling out age prediction on ChatGPT consumer plans to better identify accounts that likely belong to users under 18 and automatically apply teen safeguards. The model uses behavioral and account signals like account age, typical activity times, usage patterns over time, and a user’s stated age. When the system flags a likely teen account, it restricts sensitive content such as graphic violence, risky viral challenges, sexual or violent role play, self-harm, and body-shaming dieting content. Parents can also add controls like quiet hours and feature limits in settings.

MARKETING

Vibes Meet Facts: Write Like the Smart Human You Are, Not the LLM Making Stuff Up Again

Amanda Natividad explains how modern marketing wins when you pair emotion with evidence. Her rule: cite market behavior with recent data, and cite human behavior with research that stays relevant. She also breaks “facts” into four jobs: macro-framing, micro-framing, hard proof, and counterpoints so every stat earns its spot.

source: sparktoro.com

CONTENT

How to Spot AI Writing on Wikipedia

Wikipedia editors break down the most common signs of AI-written content, from inflated language and vague sourcing to formulaic structure and overused buzzwords. The guide shows how to spot low-quality AI text, why it happens, and what to fix so writing stays accurate, neutral, and genuinely useful for readers everywhere.

SOCIAL MEDIA

YouTube Will Soon Let Creators Make Shorts With Their Own AI Likeness

Aisha Malik reports YouTube will let creators generate Shorts using their own AI likeness soon, while rolling out stronger controls against impersonation. If you appear on camera, enroll in Likeness Detection, verify with ID and selfie video, then review matches and file privacy or copyright takedowns to protect your brand.

How to Overcome the “Link in Comments” Problem on LinkedIn and Other Social Platforms

Rand Fishkin explains how social platforms, specifically LinkedIn here, suppress posts with links and how to work around it. He shows why implied links, curiosity driven summaries, and commenting outperform blunt URLs. The takeaway is simple: write posts people want to engage with, let comments do the lifting, and stop fighting algorithms online.

TikTok Deal Is Done - Finally

Ashley Belanger reports that TikTok has finalized a “TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC” meant to keep the app running in the US, while leaving ByteDance with 19.9% and ownership of the algorithm. US investors and board will retrain the recommendation system on US user data, and Oracle will host US data with third party security audits. Lawmakers still question whether this meets the divestiture law and whether influence shifts from Beijing to domestic politics. Expect potential feed volatility during algorithm retraining.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - The only AI-powered tool that builds 4-level topical maps. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

Smarter CX insights for investors and founders

Join The Gladly Brief for insights on how AI, satisfaction, and loyalty intersect to shape modern business outcomes. Subscribe now to see how Gladly is redefining customer experience as an engine of growth—not a cost center.

Subscribe now

AD

Help us make better ads

Did you recently see an ad for beehiiv in a newsletter? We’re running a short brand lift survey to understand what’s actually breaking through (and what’s not).

It takes about 20 seconds, the questions are super easy, and your feedback directly helps us improve how we show up in the newsletters you read and love.

If you’ve got a few moments, we’d really appreciate your insight.

Take the survey.

SEO + GEO

Joint Statement from Google and Apple

Big news of the week and a short joint statement. Apple will use Google’s Gemini models for Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri. More details in next source.

source: blog.google

Apple Will Pay Billions for Gemini After OpenAI Declined, FT Says

Ben Lovejoy reports that Apple’s deal to use Google Gemini models for new Siri features may run about $1 billion per year, structured as a cloud-computing contract that could total several billion over time. Apple says the models will run on its Private Cloud Compute servers to protect user privacy. The Financial Times also says OpenAI chose not to pursue being Siri’s custom model provider, opting instead to focus on building its own AI device.

From Discovery to Influence: A Guide to AEO and GEO

Microsoft Advertising released a PDF laying out why retailers need to stop thinking “ranking” and start thinking “being the best answer” across AI search, assistants and browsers. The playbook is practical and uses both Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Some of the takeaways:

• Treat “answer readiness” as a data discipline: clean feeds, consistent attributes and fewer gaps.

• Use structured data that AI can trust, including Product, Offer and Review markup.

• Expose freshness signals like dateModified and key commerce fields like availability.

• Include explicit start and end dates for promos so AI does not invent or misstate offers.

• For multi-region catalogs, express currency, price and shipping rules clearly to avoid bad matches.

• Add detailed alt text and ImageObject info so image results carry real product meaning.

• Write feature explanations, not fluff, so AI can summarize benefits without guessing.

• Add use-case context in copy, like “day hikes above 40 degrees,” to match intent-based queries.

• Support comparison behavior with clear deltas, like “Your model is $179, competitor is $199.”

• Surface policy details that close sales, like “returns allowed for 180 days,” in crawlable text and feeds.

My Take: This is a good read. One of the rare instances where I see AEO and GEO used together as separate meanings.

Google December 2025 Core Update: 15% of Top 10 Pages Disappeared From the Results

Yulia Deda dug into Google’s December 2025 core update by comparing rankings before (Nov. 10, 2025) and after (Jan. 5, 2026) across 100,000 keywords in 20 niches, and the takeaway is simple: nothing is “safe,” but opportunity is everywhere. Roughly 1 in 7 pages that sat in the top 10 vanished beyond the top 100, while a meaningful chunk of new winners jumped straight into the top 3 from outside the top 20. Other insights:

• Analyzed 100,000 keywords across 20 niches (New York, USA).

• Nearly 15% of pre-update top 10 pages dropped out of the top 100.

• About 13% of post-update top 3 URLs were previously outside the top 20.

• Average age of top 10 domains stayed 15+ years.

• New domains (0 to 2 years) made up under 2% of top 10 rankings.

• 33% of top 3 URLs held the exact same position.

• 16.9% of top 10 URLs stayed in the same position.

• 10.16% of top 20 URLs stayed stable.

• Only 3% of top 100 URLs kept the same position.

What 107,000 Pages Reveal About Core Web Vitals and AI Search

Dan Taylor analyzed 107,352 pages that show up in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode and found a truth: Core Web Vitals are not a growth hack, they are damage control. Most pages already “pass,” so shaving LCP from 2.3s to 1.8s rarely buys extra AI visibility. The real risk lives in the long tail: a small set of painfully slow or jumpy pages correlate with worse AI outcomes because users bounce, trust drops, and those behavior signals echo in AI selection.

Google AI Overview Local Pack Leading to Drops in Visibility

Google is testing AI Overviews inside local packs, and some businesses are watching their Google Business Profile visibility fall off a cliff. Early examples show 50% or bigger drops in impressions and actions when the AI module replaces the traditional 3 pack. Joy Hawkins’ tracking, plus Places Scout data, suggests AI Local Packs already show on about 8% of keywords and rising.

source: seroundtable.com

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google wants to keep the web clickable in the AI era. Preferred Sources lets you tune Top Stories toward outlets you trust, rolling out globally, and it doubles clicks to chosen sites on average. Google will surface links from your news subscriptions in Gemini, then AI Overviews and AI Mode, via a carousel. In AI Mode, expect more inline links plus short “why this matters” intros. Web Guide is now faster and shows up on more queries. Google is piloting AI partnerships with publishers, plus AI overviews and audio briefs in Google News.

• Barry Schwartz reports that Google is cracking down on prediction-based news content that masquerades as real events. After a wave of misleading sports “predictions” appeared in Top Stories and Google News, Search VP Rajan Patel confirmed ranking changes are coming to demote or remove this content. The issue is not predictions themselves, but poor labeling that forces users to click, scroll, and discover the story never actually happened.

• Robby Stein, VP of Google Search, says that AI Overviews now uses Gemini 3 Pro for complex queries.

source: x.com

AI

New Tech and Tools for Retailers to Succeed in an Agentic Shopping Era

Vidhya Srinivansan at Google says “Agentic commerce” is about to rewrite how customers discover, decide and buy, and lays out what retailers should do now to stay visible. First, the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) aims to standardize how agents, merchants and payments talk, so retailers can plug into multiple AI shopping surfaces without custom one-off integrations. Next, Business Agent lets shoppers chat with brands right in Search, like an always-on sales associate. Google is also adding new Merchant Center attributes for conversational discovery, plus Direct Offers in Google Ads to surface targeted discounts when shoppers are ready to buy.

source: blog.google

Gemini Introduces Personal Intelligence

Gemini now has the new Personal Intelligence, a beta that lets you connect Gmail, Photos, YouTube and Search so Gemini can answer with your own context. It can pull tire specs, license plate numbers and travel ideas by reasoning across emails and images, not just web links. Connections are optional, you choose which apps, and you can switch to temporary or non-personalized chats. Google says Gemini does not train directly on your inbox or photo library, and asks users to flag “over-personalization” with feedback. It’s rolling out to US users first, with expansion planned.

source: blog.google

ChatGPT’s Approach to Advertising and Expanding Access

OpenAI plans to introduce ads in ChatGPT. Ads will appear only in the free and Go tiers, never inside responses, and will be clearly labeled and separated from organic answers. Users will be able to control personalization, opt out of targeted ads, and review or clear ad-related data. Ads will not be shown to minors or alongside sensitive topics like health or politics. OpenAI also confirms that conversations are not shared with advertisers and that ads cannot influence model outputs. The focus is expanding access while preserving privacy, clarity, and user control.

source: openai.com

Veo 3.1 Ingredients to Video: More Consistency, Creativity and Control

Google introduces the upgraded Veo 3.1 and shows how creators can turn simple ingredient images into expressive, story-driven videos with consistent characters, backgrounds and objects across scenes. The update adds native vertical 9:16 output for Shorts and other mobile formats, plus 1080p and 4K upscaling for broadcast-ready quality. They also highlights better dialogue, smoother motion and tighter visual control, making it easier to build narratives without complex prompts. Veo 3.1 is now available across the Gemini app, YouTube, Flow, Google Vids, the API and Vertex AI.

AI Ripples

• Google released TranslateGemma, an open translation model family built on Gemma 3, tuned for fast, high-quality translation across 55 languages. They also keep Gemma’s multimodal skill, so it can translate text inside images. It ships in 4B, 12B and 27B sizes and is available on Kaggle and Hugging Face, with deployment options in Vertex AI.

• Matt G. Southern breaks down Google’s push into AI Mode checkout and the backlash around “personalized upselling.” Google says price games are off-limits: merchants cannot show higher prices on Google than on their own sites, and “upsell” means suggesting premium versions, not charging you more. Google also claims its Direct Offers pilot can only lower prices or add perks like free shipping.

CONTENT

Moving From a Google-Shaped Web to an Agent-Shaped Web: A Refutation of Misinformation About Chunking

Mike King argues that “chunking” is not gimmicky LLM bait, it is smart content design for an agent-first web. He explains how RAG and passage indexing retrieve passages, not pages, so clear boundaries, tight topics and strong headings make your ideas easier to pull, score and reuse. His demo shows splitting one mixed paragraph into two raised cosine similarity for “machine learning” by 19.24% and “data privacy” by 1.29%, and adding a heading boosted another score 17.54%.

My Take: If you read my intro last week, you’ll know I agree with his text. He gets into the technical details more.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

Translate with ChatGPT

Want an alternative to Google Translate? ChatGPT is giving you one with their free translate tool. It will translate text, voice, or an image.

source: chatgpt.com

Apple Introduces Apple Creator Studio, an Inspiring Collection of the Most Powerful Creative Apps

Taking on Adobe’s creative suite, Apple announces Apple Creator Studio, a new subscription that bundles pro creative tools into one monthly fee. For $12.99 a month or $129 a year, creators get Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad, plus Motion, Compressor and MainStage on Mac, and premium features in Keynote, Pages and Numbers. New AI assists include transcript and visual search in Final Cut, beat detection, a montage maker, Magnetic Mask in Motion, Synth Player and Chord ID in Logic, and smarter templates and formula help in iWork. Launches Jan. 28 with a free trial.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - The only AI-powered tool that builds 4-level topical maps. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

AI in CX that grows loyalty and profitability

Efficiency in CX has often come at the cost of experience. Gladly AI breaks that trade-off. With $510M in verified savings and measurable loyalty gains, explore our Media Kit to see the awards, research, and data behind Gladly’s customer-centric approach.

Explore media kit

AD

How much could AI save your support team?

Peak season is here. Most retail and ecommerce teams face the same problem: volume spikes, but headcount doesn't.

Instead of hiring temporary staff or burning out your team, there’s a smarter move. Let AI handle the predictable stuff, like answering FAQs, routing tickets, and processing returns, so your people focus on what they do best: building loyalty.

Gladly’s ROI calculator shows exactly what this looks like for your business: how many tickets AI could resolve, how much that costs, and what that means for your bottom line. Real numbers. Your data.

See your savings

DIGITAL PR SURVEY

👉️ Contribute your expertise to the BuzzStream State of Digital PR Survey for 2026.

SEO + GEO

"The Core Before Christmas": Google’s December 2025 Broad Core Update Analysis and Findings From the 18-Day Rollout

Glenn Gabe breaks down Google’s December 2025 core update like a field report from the front lines: what moved, when it moved, and why you should care. Just some of the takeaways in this extensive analysis:

• Glenn observed heavy early impact on YMYL, with finance getting hit first, followed by health/medical.

• Expect AI Overviews and AI Mode visibility to shift with core updates since they ride on core ranking systems.

• Use GSC delta reports to pinpoint the exact queries and landing pages that lost visibility.

• Diagnose the drop type: relevancy adjustment, intent shift, or overall quality.

• Check for SERP feature changes (forums modules, “What people are saying,” etc.) that can erase clicks without a ranking drop.

• Prioritize quality indexing: keep high-quality pages indexable, and noindex thin or low-value pages to improve the site-wide ratio.

• Fix UX landmines fast: aggressive ads, forced video popups, intrusive interstitials can drive negative engagement signals.

• Recovery is possible: sites can rebound from spam-update hits, but it typically requires months of sustained improvements.

State of AI Search Optimization 2026

Kevin Indig explains AI search is a pipeline: get retrieved, get cited, then get trusted. To land in the candidate pool, tighten server response times, sharpen titles, descriptions, and URLs to match real prompts, and keep product feeds current if you sell online. Make pages easy to excerpt with clean headings, lists, and comparison tables, and refresh key content at least quarterly. Earn “webutation” with third party reviews and authoritative mentions, because validation beats self promotion near purchase. And show expertise with clear bylines, proof points, and community presence on Reddit and YouTube so shoppers click, buy, and come back.

Where Agency Revenue Is Heading: Fewer Big Retainers, More Mid-Market Retainers, and Longer Engagements

Paddy Moogan shares fresh survey data that reads like a quiet green light for agencies willing to tighten operations and sell what clients actually buy. Some of the key takeaways:

• 85% of agencies prefer a retainer model (up from 81% in 2024).

• Typical engagement length: 31% keep clients 3+ years; 19% keep them 2–3 years.

• 25% of agencies still lose clients in under 12 months, fix onboarding and early wins.

• 57% use timesheets; adoption rises as headcount grows.

• Of timesheet users, 65% set utilization targets.

• Most common utilization goal: 70–79% billable time (39% of agencies).

• Retainer budgets skew smaller: 86% report $10k/month or less; 49% are $1k–$5k, 31% are $5k–$10k.

• Client meetings are overwhelmingly remote: 80% happen via video calls (up from 77% in 2024).

source: sparktoro.com

SEO, AIO, GEO, your site, & third-party support to optimize for LLMs

In this Search Off the Record episode, John Mueller and Danny Sullivan discuss the evolving landscape of SEO amidst new AI models. They emphasize that while "AEO" or "GEO" might sound new, they largely fall under the umbrella of traditional SEO, which ultimately focuses on creating great content for people. Google encourages creators to prioritize user experience and genuine content over trying to optimize for AI models with "bite-sized chunks" 🤔 , as such tactics might not be sustainable long term. They also caution against blindly trusting third-party tools or "domain scores," advising instead to understand Google's direct guidance.

My Take: The bite-sized chunks is a surprising Danny Sullivan note (18:07 timecode), including after speaking to ‘engineers’. I wonder if the engineers he talked to were the LLM team or search team. His whole point for saying that is to say “write for your users” and not for machines. That’s it. I call BS. Big walls of text are not easy to read for machines or humans. Their main message is they still don’t want you to “craft anything for search.”

If you missed it a few months ago, here’s Krishna Madhavan (Bing Principal Product Manager) and his article “Optimizing Your Content for Inclusion in AI Search Answers.” The first common mistake he lists that hurt AI search Visibility is about - you guessed it - chunks 😂 Who do you believe?

source: microsoft.com

Query Fan-Out in Practice: Turning One Search Into an Omnimedia Content Plan

Francine Monahan shows how “query fan-out” turns one search into dozens of hidden sub-queries, and why ranking for a single keyword no longer guarantees AI visibility. She recommends simulating fan-out to map the questions Google and LLMs ask, then matching each intent to a format AI can lift: lists, tables, FAQs, calculators, checklists, and short YouTube explainers. Study SERPs and AI citations to see who gets referenced, then build an omnimedia plan that includes your site plus Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, and video. Finally, prune old content using relevance and performance signals before you publish again.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Google is testing light personalization in AI Overviews and AI Mode, according to a CNN podcast interview with Search’s Robby Stein. Stein says Google may nudge results toward formats you tend to click, like boosting videos for video lovers, while keeping the overall experience consistent. The takeaway is simple: diversify your content formats and strengthen signals that match user intent. Publish helpful video and text versions of key topics, optimize titles for the questions people ask, and watch performance shifts as personalization rolls out. Google also launched g.ai as a shortcut to AI Mode.

• Barry Schwartz reports that Google’s recent LLMs.txt files popping up across its properties are not a secret signal for AI discovery. John Mueller says the files are not findable by default because they aren’t placed at a site’s top level, so it’s safe to assume they exist for other internal reasons.

AI

You Can Now Verify Google AI-Generated Videos in the Gemini App

Spot fakes faster. Google explains a handy new trust check inside the Gemini app: upload a clip and ask, “Was this generated using Google AI?” Gemini scans both audio and visuals for DeepMind’s SynthID watermark, then tells you which segments look AI-made, like “audio 10–20 seconds.” This is a quick way to vet user submissions, influencer assets and viral clips before you publish, pitch or panic. Files can be up to 100 MB and 90 seconds, and the feature works in every language and country where Gemini is available.

source: blog.google

Introducing ChatGPT Health

OpenAI says ChatGPT Health is a dedicated space inside ChatGPT that pulls your scattered health info into one place, then helps you make sense of it. You can connect medical records and wellness apps (like Apple Health, Function and MyFitnessPal) to ground answers in your own data, prep for doctor visits, translate lab results into plain English, and track trends over time. Health lives separately from your other chats, has its own memory, adds extra encryption and isolation, and Health conversations are not used to train foundation models. It’s built with physician input, and access starts via a waitlist with a gradual rollout.

Conversations That Convert: Copilot Checkout and Brand Agents

Nayna Sheth and Ravi Yada introduce Microsoft Advertising’s Copilot Checkout and Brand Agents, built to turn AI chats into purchases. Copilot Checkout lets shoppers compare and buy inside Copilot while you stay merchant of record, keeping transaction control and customer data. If you use Shopify, you will be auto enrolled after an opt out window; otherwise apply via PayPal or Stripe and consider feeding Microsoft Merchant Center to improve Copilot visibility. Brand Agents add a branded assistant to your site fast, powered by Clarity dashboards to measure engagement, conversion uplift, and AOV, so you can tune copy, offers, and bundles.

Gmail Is Entering the Gemini Era

Gmail’s next leap is acting less like a search box and more like an inbox assistant. New AI Overviews summarize long threads into key decisions, then let you ask plain-English questions like “who quoted my bathroom remodel last year?” and get an instant answer. Writing tools also get sharper: Help Me Write drafts or polishes, Suggested Replies uses context to match your tone, and Proofread catches grammar and style. Next, an AI Inbox will surface to-dos and VIP messages while pushing noise down. Rollouts start in the US, English first. Overviews are free, but inbox Q&A and Proofread require subscriptions.

source: blog.google

Browser Extensions With 8 Million Users Collect Extended AI Conversations

Dan Goodin reports that eight popular Chrome and Edge extensions, many labeled “Featured,” quietly capture full chats with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others, then ship them to the maker’s servers for marketing. The trick is code that intercepts browser network calls, so even if you turn off the VPN or ad blocker (extensions below), collection continues. Take five minutes today: audit your extensions, remove anything you do not absolutely trust, and prefer paid, reputable tools. Use a separate browser profile for AI work, avoid sharing medical, financial or proprietary details, and review each extension’s privacy policy and permissions before installing going forward. Here are the extensions on Chrome and Edge:

• Urban VPN Proxy

• 1ClickVPN Proxy

• Urban Browser Guard

• Urban Ad Blocker

5 Ways AI Agents Will Transform the Way We Work in 2026

2026 is when AI agents stop being demos and start doing real work inside companies. There’s a shift to delegate routine tasks to agents so people spend more time directing strategy, not pushing buttons. He points to examples like Telus saving 40 minutes per AI interaction and Suzano translating plain-English questions into SQL, cutting query time by 95%. Expect multi-agent workflows that run processes end to end, “concierge-style” customer service that reacts fast, and security teams that offload alert triage so humans can hunt threats.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Reddit Launches AI-Powered Max Campaigns to Automate Ad Performance

Geoff Desreumaux reports Reddit is beta-testing Max Campaigns, an AI-driven setup that automates audience targeting, creative selection, placements, and budget shifts in real time. Fewer knobs to turn, more conversions, plus clearer reporting than typical “black box” automation. Reddit says 600+ advertisers in alpha saw lifts, including Brooks Running cutting CPC 37% and gaining 27% more clicks over 21 days without manual tweaks; broader tests averaged 17% lower CPA and 27% more conversions.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - The only AI-powered tool that builds 4-level topical maps. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

AD

Your competitors are already automating. Here's the data.

Retail and ecommerce teams using AI for customer service are resolving 40-60% more tickets without more staff, cutting cost-per-ticket by 30%+, and handling seasonal spikes 3x faster.

But here's what separates winners from everyone else: they started with the data, not the hype.

Gladly handles the predictable volume, FAQs, routing, returns, order status, while your team focuses on customers who need a human touch. The result? Better experiences. Lower costs. Real competitive advantage. Ready to see what's possible for your business?

See it in action

SEO + GEO

"Core Update Notes" with Glenn Gabe of GSQi

Glenn Gabe of GSQi shares insights from Google's December 2025 core update. He highlights that even outside major updates, "smaller core updates" cause volatility, urging constant monitoring. Gabe emphasizes checking site visibility if you're in YMYL, news, or career/jobs niches, as these saw heavy impact. Sites previously hit by spam can recover if issues are addressed, but neglect can worsen things. Glenn illustrates how poor user experience and aggressive ads can tank search visibility, as Google's Nav Boost system tracks user signals. Prioritizing user experience is paramount for organic success.

Entity-Based SEO: An Explainer for SEOs and Content Marketers

Jennifer Clark explains entity-based SEO as optimizing for concepts and relationships, not isolated keywords. Search engines map entities in the Knowledge Graph, which is why a page can rank without repeating the exact phrase. Her workflow: pick a core topic, pull related entities from People Also Ask, related searches and Wikipedia links, then validate with tools like Google Natural Language API, Ahrefs, or Semrush. Organize content into pillar-and-cluster groups, interlink by shared entities and add schema to remove ambiguity.

A Billion-Dollar Question Hangs Over the New AI Search Marketing Industry

Patrick Coffee explores how marketers are scrambling to understand whether AI search tools like ChatGPT change SEO forever or simply reward the same fundamentals. His reporting shows early data pointing to familiar truths: authoritative content, strong brand signals, fresh updates, and real user conversations still matter most. Tactics like flooding the web with low-quality content are risky, while detailed, timely, genuinely helpful information performs better in AI answers. He highlights that AI search leans heavily on recency and user-generated discussions, pushing brands to invest in credibility, clarity, and ongoing content hygiene rather than chasing shortcuts.

Ahrefs Tested AI Misinformation, But Proved Something Else

Roger Montti breaks down Ahrefs’ “AI misinformation” study and shows what it really teaches: generative answers reward the most specific, question-shaped content, not the “truth.” If your own site hedges with “we don’t disclose,” third-party stories will fill the gaps. Write pages that state facts, numbers, processes, and proof, then make them easy to cite. Avoid leading prompts in your own testing, because they push models to invent. Build real entity signals over time with consistent mentions, links, and corroboration, so AI has something solid to grab. That’s how you win in AI search.

SEO + GEO Ripples

• John Mueller offers his personal take on whether schema helps LLMs understand your entities. His answer: yes, no and it depends on the feature. For shopping-style surfaces, structured data can be the difference between accurate pricing, shipping and availability, and a machine guessing from messy page text. For other rich results, schema mostly “richens up” how you appear, not where you rank, since Google has long said structured data is not a ranking factor.

AI

Building a Team of AI Employees That Easily Scale Your Business

Michael Stelzner says “generic AI” produces generic work, and the fix is building a team of specialized AI employees with training, playbooks and clear job rules. Start with a robust Brand Book that captures your audience’s triggers, risks and desires, your voice and quirks, and your offers and principles. Save it as .md or .txt so tools can read it reliably. Then add role-specific knowledge files: SOPs, templates, best-performing content, a CSV of customer reviews and curated outside research. Finish by writing system instructions that define role, context, behaviors and hard rules. This setup can automate about 70% of tasks.

OpenAI Bets Big on Audio as Silicon Valley Declares War on Screens

Connie Loizos reports that OpenAI is reorganizing teams to overhaul its audio models ahead of an audio-first personal device. Start publishing spoken-friendly content: tighter answers, natural language FAQs, and page structures that voice assistants can parse fast. Test how your brand sounds in AI summaries and voice search, then fix gaps with consistent facts across your site, listings, and reviews. Consider adding audio versions of guides and product pages, and measure completion rates. As audio interfaces spread to cars, homes, and wearables, the brands that sound helpful will win.

Sam Altman Offers $555K Salary to Fill Most Daunting Role in AI

OpenAI is hiring a Head of Preparedness at $555,000 a year plus equity to measure and mitigate frontier AI risks, from mental health harms to cyber and bio threats. The job description reads like a crisis playbook: track emerging capabilities, anticipate abuse, and design safeguards before the next model ships. Governance is now a growth lever. Document claims, audit AI outputs, build escalation paths, and publish transparent policies that earn trust. Treat risk work as brand work, because regulators and users are watching and lawsuits move fast.

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - The only AI-powered tool that builds 4-level topical maps. Don’t just plan your content strategy - make it unstoppable.

TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - Unlock the blueprint to ranking success. Master the art of structuring content that search engines (and your audience) love - and watch your rankings soar.

AD

The Future of AI in Marketing. Your Shortcut to Smarter, Faster Marketing.

This guide distills 10 AI strategies from industry leaders that are transforming marketing.

• Learn how HubSpot's engineering team achieved 15-20% productivity gains with AI

• Learn how AI-driven emails achieved 94% higher conversion rates

• Discover 7 ways to enhance your marketing strategy with AI.

Outpace your competitors by mastering AI.

Get Your Free Guide