OpenAI Begins Testing Ads In ChatGPT For Free And Go Users
OpenAI is testing ads inside ChatGPT, bringing sponsored content to the product for the first time. The test is live for logged-in adult users in the U.S. on the free…
How AI Changes Marketing Budget Spend
In paid media, many advertisers default to budgeting by ad platform, with a percentage to Google Ads, a percentage to LinkedIn Ads, etc., largely based on habit. Now, AI technology…
Why Your SEO KPIs Are Failing Your Business (And How To Fix Them)
Most SEO teams believe they need more data to report success, but what they actually have is metric debt, at least that’s what I keep seeing. The accumulated cost of…
7 Insights From Washington Post’s Strategy To Win Back Traffic
The Washington Post’s recent announcement of staffing cuts is a story with heroes, villains, and victims, but buried beneath the headlines is the reality of a big brand publisher confronting…
How to Build AI Citations — Whiteboard Friday
Step 2: Analyze the citations for each prompt Once you’ve got a short list of prompts, let’s say you’ve got up to 20 prompts that you’re working with to begin…
Google Revises Discover Guidelines Alongside Core Update
Google revised its “Get on Discover” documentation following the lauch of the February Discover core update. On its documentation updates page, Google said it added more information on how sites…
90 Days. 1 Plan. Improved Local Search Visibility
A 90 Day Plan to Prepare Every Location for AI Search AI is changing how consumers discover and choose local brands. For multi-location businesses, visibility is no longer decided only…
Microsoft’s Publisher Marketplace, Google Tag Update, Multi-Party Approvals – PPC Pulse
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…
Discover Core Update, AI Mode Ads & Crawl Policy – SEO Pulse
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…
Is Google Finally Cracking Down On Self-Promotional Listicles?
Jump straight to examples of affected websites. Over the past year, one of the most common tactics for gaining visibility in AI search has been for companies to publish “listicle”…
What 1,000 Businesses Reveal About Marketing Growth in 2026
Learn The Signals Shaping Marketing, Efficiency, and AI Planning As 2026 rolls on, many teams find themselves adjusting how they approach overall business and marketing growth. What is the most…
Google Shows How To Check Passage Indexing
Google’s John Mueller was asked how many megabytes of HTML Googlebot crawls per page. The question was whether Googlebot indexes two megabytes (MB) or fifteen megabytes of data. Mueller’s answer…
Google Releases Core Update Targeting Discover Feed
Google has launched a core update specifically for Discover, rather than Search more broadly. The February Discover core update began Feb. 5 for English-language users in the…
Google’s February 2026 Discover Core Update | Google Search Central Blog | Google for Developers
Thursday, February 5, 2026 Today we’ve released the February 2026 Discover core update. This is a broad update to our systems that surface articles in Discover. Our testing shows that…
The Shift From Search Sessions To Decision Sessions
This one started with a question from Adorján-Csaba Demeter, a subscriber in Romania, who asked how big the behavior change could be after Google’s AI Mode Personal Search launch, and…
Is Your Internal Linking Helping Or Hurting Topical Authority?
Today’s question is about understanding internal linking and how it can help or hinder a search engine’s perception of a page’s topical relevance and authority. “How do you technically assess…
How to Choose the Best Prompts to Monitor Your AI Search Visibility
Now that Ahrefs users can track AI visibility for the exact queries they care about, many people are wondering which terms they should monitor. After all, conversing with AI is…
Why Off-Page SEO Still Shapes SERP & AI Visibility in 2026
How Links, Mentions, and Authority Influence Rankings and AI Discovery Authority and presence across the web continue to play a central role in search visibility, even as AI-driven experiences reshape…
Google Search Hits $63B, AI Mode Ad Tests Detailed
Alphabet reported Q4 2025 revenue of $113.8 billion, beating Wall Street estimates and marking the company’s first year above $400 billion in annual revenue. Google Search grew 17% to $63.07…
Google’s Mueller Calls Markdown-For-Bots Idea ‘A Stupid Idea’
Some developers have been experimenting with bot-specific Markdown delivery as a way to reduce token usage for AI crawlers. Google Search Advocate John Mueller pushed back on the idea of…
How To Get Into Model Training Data
There has never been a more important time in your career to spend time learning and understanding. Not because AI search differs drastically from traditional search. But because everyone else…
AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%
Back in April 2025, we found that AI Overviews reduced clicks to top-ranking content by 34.5%, despite Google’s statements to the contrary. Since then, AI Overviews have rolled out to…
The Real SEO Skill No One Teaches: Problem Deduction
Most SEO failures are not optimization failures. They are reasoning failures that occur before optimization even begins. In enterprise SEO escalations, the pattern is remarkably consistent. Teams jump straight to…
The PPC Skills That Won’t Be Replaced By Automation
The best PPC specialists aren’t just campaign managers. They’re business consultants who happen to use paid advertising as their primary tool. As automation handles more tactical optimization, the value of…
Using AI For SEO Can Fail Without Real Data (& How Ahrefs Fixes It)
This post was sponsored by Ahrefs. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. If you’ve ever run into the limits of solo AI or manual SEO tools,…
Google Updates Googlebot File Size Limit Docs
Google updated its Googlebot documentation to clarify information about file size limits. The change involves moving information about default file size limits from the Googlebot page to Google’s broader crawler…
Google’s Crawl Team Filed Bugs Against WordPress Plugins
Google’s crawl team has been filing bugs directly against WordPress plugins that waste crawl budget at scale. Gary Illyes, Analyst at Google, shared the details on the latest Search Off…
WordPress Publishes AI Guidelines To Combat AI Slop
WordPress published guidelines for using AI for coding plugins, themes, documentation, and media assets. The purpose of the guidelines, guided by five principles, is to keep WordPress contributions transparent, GPL-compatible,…
GSC Data Is 75% Incomplete
Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free! My findings this week show Google Search Console data is about 75% incomplete, making single-source GSC decisions dangerously…
Why SEO Roadmaps Break In January (How To Build Ones That Survive)
SEO roadmaps have a lot in common with New Year’s resolutions: They’re created with optimism, backed by sincere intent, and abandoned far sooner than anyone wants to admit. The difference…