Why your brand isn’t making the AI recommendation set
We’ve been flooded with generative engine optimization (GEO) advice over the last couple of years – from checklists for AI citations to signal frameworks and technical guides explaining how to structure content for large language models. Most GEO advice converges around the same idea: If you want to be visible in AI-generated answers, you need to […]
Why good content still loses in Google Search
Create helpful, high-quality content, and you’ll rank. That’s been the prevailing wisdom in search for over a decade. But “create great content” was always an incomplete recommendation. It treated one input in a multi-layer ranking system as the entire strategy. Content can be well researched, technically accurate, and aligned with search intent, and still struggle […]
Why Your SEO Work Isn’t Getting Implemented (The IT Line Of Death)
I recently spoke with an SEO who, along with his entire team, had just been laid off. The company was rapidly losing organic traffic, leadership was frustrated, and from their perspective, nothing was being done to fix it. The SEO saw it very differently. They had submitted more than 1,400 tickets over the previous 18 […]
How to eliminate the skepticism tax in marketing data
Marketing teams often operate with a hidden skepticism tax. Because they don’t fully trust their data, they spend enormous amounts of time cleaning spreadsheets, reconciling conflicting reports, and second-guessing both attribution models and AI outputs. The result is slower execution, weaker alignment across teams, and decisions built on uncertain foundations. Take branded search. It often […]
Google Research’s ALDRIFT: AI Answers That Do More Than Sound Plausible
Google Research published a paper that studies how to make generative AI systems produce answers that do more than sound plausible. The researchers say that their ALDRIFT framework “opens exciting avenues” for moving beyond answers that merely have a high probability. The paper, titled “Sample-Efficient Optimization over Generative Priors via Coarse Learnability,” examines a problem […]
The next era of link building is citation optimization
Link building has to evolve. For years, SEOs measured visibility through keywords, rankings, links, and click-through traffic. Those things still matter. But the return signal has weakened, especially at the top of the funnel. The bigger shift is how your prospective customers solve problems. Buyers* no longer have to compress a question, constraint, fear, or […]
Lessons Learned From Adobe’s 2026 Q2 AI Traffic Report
The sign on AI-referred traffic conversion flipped. I’m not sure if enough of us have noticed. Twelve months ago, visitors arriving at U.S. retailers from AI assistants converted at roughly half the rate of visitors from other channels. In March 2026, they converted 42% better. Same channel. Same stores. Different year. Adobe Analytics published the […]
HubSpot Stock Crashed 19% – What It Means For Partner Agencies
On Thursday, May 7, 2026, HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan announced that the company was changing how it charges customers for AI agent features. Instead of charging for compute usage regardless of outcome, HubSpot would switch to outcome-based pricing. Customers would only pay when an AI agent actually resolves a support ticket or delivers a useful […]
How To Measure SERP Visibility When Rankings Aren’t Enough
Rank #1 and still invisible? It happens more than you’d think. That’s why this SEO webinar is key. Organic Visibility Isn’t What It Used to Be SERP features, local packs, knowledge panels, featured snippets, shopping ads, now dominate significant portions of the page. For certain intents and verticals, even the top organic result sits below […]
Google Ads adds Gemini-powered dashboards for real-time insights
Google is bringing Gemini into Google Ads dashboards, aiming to make data analysis more interactive, visual and accessible. What’s happening. Google Ads is rolling out a new Dashboards feature that lets advertisers explore performance data using charts, graphs and tables, powered by Gemini. Users can customise views simply by typing prompts, with the dashboard updating […]