A master class in persuasion from an unlikely place
Walk down a suburban street, and you might stumble across a following sign. It’s probably messy with poor formatting and inconsistent font size. Here’s one that I saw in Houston.
Google’s Standards Haven’t Changed But AI Is Making That Harder To Ignore
Recently, Sam Sifton, who hosts The Morning newsletter for The New York Times, published a letter to his readers with an unusual subject line, “Who’s Writing This?” His prompt was a new book called “The Future of Truth,” written by Steven Rosenbaum with significant AI assistance. The Times reviewed the book and found more than […]
Gmail Content Linked To AI Mode Brand Visibility Lift
A new report from iPullRank looks at how Google’s Personal Intelligence feature influences how brands appear in AI Mode. The SEO agency analyzed 1,922 AI Mode responses and found a 46-percentage-point lift in mentions of brands seeded through a Personal Intelligence-connected account. What They Found In Personal Intelligence-connected accounts, the brands they tested appeared more […]
Google CEO On AI Overviews: ‘More Opinionated Than It Should Be’
Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged room for improvement in AI Overviews when shown a live product-query result during a Decoder podcast interview with Nilay Patel. Patel showed Pichai a live search result. Pichai called it “more opinionated than it should be” for the query. The interview was recorded after Google I/O 2026. What Pichai Said […]
How to Create a Robots.txt File: A Complete Guide for 2026
Key Takeaways Robots.txt is a plain text file in your root directory that tells search engine and AI crawlers which pages on your site to crawl and which to skip. By guiding bots away from technical clutter and low-value pages, you make sure they spend their time on the important, high-value content that drives results. The four AI crawlers […]
Social media APIs explained (in simple terms)
APIs power many of the marketing tools and apps we use every day, but they’re basically invisible to everyone but developers. So, what do you need to know about APIs as a social media user or professional? In this post, we cover everything you need to know about social media APIs to understand how they […]
Interrupting buyer journeys: The SEO strategy hiding in plain sight
Most content meets users exactly where they are. Someone searches “best MBA programs” and gets a roundup of MBA programs. But sometimes the highest-value content challenges the query’s premise. This introduces the concept of surfacing alternatives that users didn’t know to ask about. Intentionally expanding a user’s awareness beyond their assumed path doesn’t always take […]
What AI Overviews mean for SEO & website traffic
If you’re worried about what AI Overviews mean for SEO, let me remind you of the panic over featured snippets circa 2017. Remember how that turned out? At first, bloggers and SEOs bristled over these quick-glance summaries at the top of the Google SERPs, fearing they’d steal all our traffic. Eventually, however, we adapted and […]
The Outlier Video Method: Using AI to Study What Works and Create Your Own : Social Media Examiner
Social Marketing Trends The data you’ve been missing! Need a new plan? Discover how marketers plan to change their social activities in the 18th annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report. It reveals what marketers have planned for their social activities, content marketing, and more! Get this free report now and never miss […]
846,000 Google Searches Reveal How AI Overviews Are Changing User Behavior
If a user types your brand name into Google or Chrome, you might reasonably assume they are about to visit your website. Google has always been a place people pass through on the way to somewhere else, but AI Overviews are changing how long that passage takes, and what happens during it. To assess these […]