Social ads remain small businesses’ go-to play despite rising costs. New benchmark data from WordStream LocaliQ shows Facebook’s average cost per lead (CPL) climbed 21% year over year to $27.66. By comparison, Google’s average CPL is $70.11. By the numbers. Traffic campaigns: CTR: 1.71% average, up from 1.57% in 2024. Highest: Shopping, Collectibles & Gifts […]
Anthropic agreed to a proposed $1.5 billion settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic over claims it downloaded pirated books to help train Claude. If approved, plaintiffs’ counsel says it would be the largest U.S. copyright recovery to date. A preliminary approval hearing is set for today. In June, Judge William Alsup held that training on lawfully […]
Google AI Mode now supports new languages beyond English. The new languages include Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. This comes after Google expanded AI Mode to 180 countries and territories just a couple of weeks ago. What Google said. Google wrote: Starting today, we’re bringing AI Mode, our most powerful AI search experience, […]
Google has published exact usage limits for Gemini Apps across the free tier and paid Google AI plans, replacing earlier vague language with concrete numbers marketers can plan around. The Help Center update covers daily caps for prompts, images, Deep Research, video generation, and context windows, and notes that you’ll see in-product notices when you’re […]
In a Friday court filing, Google’s lawyers wrote: “The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline.” That line directly contradicts what Google executives and representatives have been saying for months. CEO Sundar Pichai (May, The Verge interview): “When we crawl, when we look at the number of web pages available […]
Over the past two years, AI and LLMs have stepped out of the shadows and into public consciousness. Not long ago, most people’s understanding of AI was limited to sci-fi references or the occasional nightmare about machines taking over. Now, everyone seems to be talking about it – and naturally, marketers have jumped right in. […]
AI isn’t just tweaking paid media – it’s transforming it. What was once background automation is now driving entire campaign types and reshaping how users discover brands. From incremental optimization to transformation AI has, in some ways, always been part of paid media. Smart Bidding, responsive search ads, and other machine learning tools quietly optimized […]
When Judge Amit P. Mehta issued his long-awaited remedies decision in the Google search antitrust case, the industry exhaled a collective sigh of relief. There would be no breakup of Google, no forced divestiture of Chrome or Android, and no user-facing “choice screen” like the one that reshaped Microsoft’s browser market two decades ago. But […]
Logan Kilpatrick, lead product manager for Google, said on Friday that Google’s AI Mode will be the “default” search experience for Google Search “soon.” We know Google said AI Mode is the future of Google Search, Liz Reid, the head of Google Search announced that in May 2025. And now that may be happening soon. […]
The European Commission fined Google 2.95 billion euros ($3.45 billion) for its dominance and anti-competitive ad-tech business. The EU Commission accused Google of unfairly favoring its own display advertising technology services and told Google to end these practices. What’s happening. The Commission also ordered Google to “bring these self-preferencing practices to an end” and “implement […]