The debate around llms.txt has become one of the most polarized topics in web optimization. Some treat llms.txt as foundational infrastructure, while many SEO veterans dismiss it as speculative theater. Platform tools flag missing llms.txt files as site issues, yet server logs show that AI crawlers rarely request them. Google even adopted it. Sort of. […]
Google Shopping API migration deadlines are approaching, and advertisers who don’t act risk disrupted Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. What’s happening. Google is sunsetting older API versions and pushing all merchants toward the Merchant API as the single source of truth for Shopping Ads. Advertisers can confirm which API they’re using in Merchant Center Next […]
New data from BrightEdge shows how finance-related queries perform on AI Overviews, identifying clear areas that continue to show AIO while Google is pulling back from others. The deciding factor is whether the query benefits from explanation and synthesis versus direct data retrieval or action. AI Overviews In Finance Are Query-Type Driven Finance queries with […]
AI has quickly risen to the top of the corporate agenda. Despite this, 95% of businesses struggle with adoption, MIT research found. Those failures are no longer hypothetical. They are already playing out in real time, across industries, and often in public. For companies exploring AI adoption, these examples highlight what not to do and […]
I recently spoke with Jesse Dwyer of Perplexity about SEO and AI search about what SEOs should be focusing on in terms of optimizing for AI search. His answers offered useful feedback about what publishers and SEOs should be focusing on right now. AI Search Today An important takeaway that Jesse shared is that personalization […]
SEO died as a traffic channel the moment pipeline stopped following page views. Traffic is either down for many sites, or its growth nowhere near reflects growth rates of 2019-2022, but demos and pipeline are up for brands that shifted from chasing clicks to building authority. What you’ll get in today’s memo: Why traffic and […]
With new updates in the search world stacking up in 2026, content teams are trying a new strategy to rank: LLM pages. They’re building pages that no human will ever see: markdown files, stripped-down JSON feeds, and entire /ai/ versions of their articles. The logic seems sound: if you make content easier for AI to […]
Search has changed dramatically, including local search. Search engines and AI systems now incorporate semantic understanding to generate citations and results. To gain semantic understanding, they need to know which topics appear in the content and how they relate to one another so that they can identify your areas of authority. For brands with multiple […]
Social Marketing Trends The data you’ve been missing! Need a new plan? Discover how marketers plan to change their social activities in the 17th annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report. It reveals what marketers have planned for their social activities, content marketing, and more! Get this free report now and never miss […]
James LePage, Dir Engineering AI, co-lead of the WordPress AI Team, described the future of the Agentic AI Web, where websites become interactive interfaces and data sources and the value add that any site brings to their site becomes flattened. Although he describes a way out of brand and voice getting flattened, the outcome for […]