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 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, […]
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, […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Google will shut down three long-running Google Groups forums for advertising developers early next year as it moves all technical support into official channels. Driving the news. Google will stop responding to new posts on Jan. 28. The forums will stay online as read-only archives until later in 2026, when Google plans to disable posting […]
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued an all-hands “code red” to improve ChatGPT – a move that could delay the company’s advertising plans – according to an internal memo obtained by The Wall Street Journal. Driving the news. Altman told employees the company must urgently improve ChatGPT’s personalization, speed, reliability, and ability to handle a wider […]