Author Archives: SocialSignalCounter

Native Reels ads can lift purchase intent 5.3x

Native Reels ads can lift purchase intent 5.3x

Reels continue to surge as a go-to format for entertainment, education, and discovery. But Meta’s message to advertisers is clear: success requires native creative — not repurposed assets. Think 9:16 framing, platform-first audio, and rapid storytelling built for swipes, not scrolls. Brand advertiser takeaways (per Meta’s data): Show your brand early: Branding and messaging in […]

Google AI Mode sends traffic on 69% of transactional queries: New data

Google AI Mode sends traffic on 69% of transactional queries: New data

The narrative in SEO right now is simple: Google’s AI Mode doesn’t send traffic. If it becomes the default Google Search experience, your website will starve for clicks. There’s one problem, though: the studies claiming “AI doesn’t send traffic” focus almost entirely on informational queries. Yes, if someone wants to know what a basal cell […]

Google home page search bar upload feature goes directly to AI Mode results

Google home page search bar upload feature goes directly to AI Mode results

Google has changed its search bar on the Google home page by adding the ability to upload a file or an image, and then the user experience takes you directly to AI Mode. This is different from uploading an image and Google taking you to Google Search with image results and Google Lens features. Instead, […]

7 SEO, Marketing, And Tech Predictions For 2026

7 SEO, Marketing, And Tech Predictions For 2026

Previous predictions: 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 This is my 8th time publishing annual predictions. As always, the goal is not to be right but to practice thinking. For example, in 2018, I predicted “Niche communities will be discovered as a great channel for growth” and “Email marketing will return” in 2019. It took another 6 years. That same year, […]

Anatomy of an overambitious system shaping the future of search

Anatomy of an overambitious system shaping the future of search

Google’s Daily Hub is more complex than it first appears.  It’s part of the broader acceleration toward hyperpersonalization we’ve been seeing in recent months – Preferred Sources, Profile Pages with followable elements in Discover, Brand Profiles in Merchant Center – all converging toward a single goal: anticipating your needs before you even formulate a query.  […]

Quantifying Lost Organic Market Share

Quantifying Lost Organic Market Share

Every month, companies lose millions in unrealized search value not because their teams stopped optimizing, but because they stopped seeing where visibility converts into economic return. When search performance drops, most teams chase rankings. The real leaders chase equity. This is the Search Equity Gap – the measurable delta between the organic market share your […]

How To Maximize Paid Ads Profitability With A Strategic Landing Page Audit

How To Maximize Paid Ads Profitability With A Strategic Landing Page Audit

Your campaigns are only as strong as the pages they lead to. You can have the most targeted ads, the sharpest copy, and a budget that makes your CFO nervous. But if your landing page doesn’t deliver on what the ad promised, you’re leaving money on the table and feeding poor signals back into your […]

Why advanced semantic techniques still matter in PPC and SEO

Why advanced semantic techniques still matter in PPC and SEO

Now that anyone can use AI to generate keywords and spin up a paid search campaign in minutes, it’s easy to assume the hard work is done.  But creating structured, scalable performance still requires a genuine understanding of how search works.  Techniques like n-grams, Levenshtein distance, and Jaccard similarity give search marketers the ability to […]

Why every AI search study tells a different story

Why every AI search study tells a different story

Major SEO platforms, such as Ahrefs and Semrush, along with agencies like Seer Interactive and other leading companies, have released substantial studies that appear to offer definitive answers.  But a closer look reveals something else entirely: nearly every possible narrative about AI search impact has a “study” to support it.  The more I examined the […]