Whether you call your SEO efforts a strategy, campaign, or channel, many SEO programs start strong but slowly drift. That could be in the form of reports getting routine, dashboards taking over for thinking, and moving into a mode of “doing SEO” versus challenging and building it. In many cases, there’s an initial audit, roadmap, […]
An SEO strategy is the foundation for improving organic visibility and driving conversions – whether that means owning Google’s front page or earning mentions in LLMs. A strong strategy aligns stakeholders, unifies teams, and sets clear expectations. Without one, SEO can feel scattered – a collection of disconnected tactics or endless optimizations thrown at the […]
Lawyers representing Automattic, the for-profit founded by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, sent a trademark complaint letter to WordPress developer Kevin Geary, asking him to rebrand his WordPress CSS framework, which is currently named Automatic.css, claiming that the similarity to Mullenweg’s Automattic could lead to consumer confusion. The letter caught some in the WordPress industry by […]
This post was sponsored by TAC Marketing. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. After years of trying to understand the black box that is Google search, SEO professionals have a seemingly even more opaque challenge these days – how to earn AI citations. While at first glance inclusion in AI answers […]
Microsoft has released an upgrade to Copilot, bringing what it calls “the best of AI Search” to its AI engine – Copilot. Microsoft said its Copilot responses “will now include more prominent, clickable citations and the option to see aggregated sources.” Plus, Microsoft added a new dedicated search experiment within Copilot. Prominent citations. Microsoft said […]
Grappling with innovation and changing consumer attitudes is second nature to marketers, who have already lived through many technological shifts over the past two decades. But forecasting where things are going is especially hard when it comes to modern AI, which has such unusual, non-deterministic properties. You can’t just extrapolate from the state of AI […]
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity: these are the new operating environments. Your content must be invokable inside them, or no one will see it. At SMX Advanced, I broke down how to build an AI visibility engine: a system for making your net-new facts reusable by humans and agents across synthesis-first platforms. It goes beyond publishing to […]
Local SEO includes several specific tasks geared to establishing the relevance and authority of a business within a targeted geographic area. Search engines and large language models (LLMs) like Google Gemini and ChatGPT reference many different data points to determine who will be surfaced in their respective result sets, which include AI Overviews and AI […]
It’s clear to me that the current “LLM situation” is untenable. These platforms are offering a very expensive set of products with relatively unlimited access. At the same time, you have content creators and publishers in a state of panic as decreased traffic has become the norm. Add to this that platforms ranging from Google’s […]
Google has updated its Circumventing Systems policy to include a new example explicitly warning advertisers that submitting false information during the Advertiser Verification process violates its rules and will lead to account suspension. The details: The update was added to the Circumventing Systems section of Google’s Ads policies in November 2025. It specifies that providing […]