Performance Max has come a long way since its rocky launch. Many advertisers once dismissed it as a half-baked product, but Google has spent the past 18 months fixing real issues around transparency and control. If you wrote Performance Max off before, it’s time to take another look. Mike Ryan, head of ecommerce insights at […]
There’s a dangerous misconception in B2B marketing that video is just a “brand awareness” play. We tend to bucket video into two extremes: The “viral” top-of-funnel asset that gets views but no leads. The dry bottom-of-funnel product demo that gets leads but no views. This binary thinking is breaking your pipeline. In my role at […]
PR measurement often breaks down in practice. Limited budgets, no dedicated analytics staff, siloed teams, and competing priorities make it difficult to connect media outreach to real outcomes. That’s where collaboration with SEO, PPC, and digital marketing teams becomes essential. Working together, these teams can help PR do three things that are hard to accomplish […]
Traditional ranking performance no longer guarantees that content can be surfaced or reused by AI systems. A page can rank well, satisfy search intent, and follow established SEO best practices, yet still fail to appear in AI-generated answers or citations. In most cases, the issue isn’t content quality. It’s that the information can’t reliably be […]
Welcome to PPC Pulse. This week’s PPC updates come from both Microsoft and Google, all dedicated to more “behind the scenes” work. Microsoft announced a new Content Publisher Marketplace, where it is starting to rethink how content is compensated amid the increased use of AI. On the Google front, Google now says the standard tag […]
Welcome to the week’s Pulse for SEO: updates affect how Google ranks content in Discover, how it plans to monetize AI search, and what content you serve to bots. Here’s what matters for you and your work. Google Releases Discover-Only Core Update Google launched the February 2026 Discover core update, a broad ranking change targeting […]
As AI-driven bidding and automation transform paid media, first-party data has become the most powerful lever advertisers control. In this conversation with Search Engine Land, Julie Warneke, founder and CEO of Found Search Marketing, explained why first-party data now underpins profitable advertising — no matter how Google’s position on third-party cookies evolves. What first-party data […]
AI is no longer an experimental layer in search. It’s actively mediating how customers discover, evaluate, and choose local businesses, increasingly without a traditional search interaction. The real risk is data stagnation. As AI systems act on local data for users, brands that fail to adapt risk declining visibility, data inconsistencies, and loss of control […]
Google Search is entering an “expansionary moment,” fueled by longer queries, more follow-up questions, and rising use of voice and images. That’s according to Alphabet’s executives who spoke on last night’s Q4 earnings call. In other words: Google Search is shifting toward AI-driven experiences, with more conversations happening inside Google’s own interfaces. Why we care. […]
Most PPC teams still build campaigns the same way: pull a keyword list, set match types, and organize ad groups around search terms. It’s muscle memory. But Google’s auction no longer works that way. Search now behaves more like a conversation than a lookup. In AI Mode, users ask follow-up questions and refine what they’re […]