How To Leverage AI Ad Placements For Stronger PPC Performance
This month’s Ask the PPC question about AI ad placements is near and dear to my heart. We’ve seen ads begin showing up on AI surfaces since 2024, and yet,…
AI Companies Are Selling Heartwarming Ads – They’re Racing To Automate Your Job
OpenAI wants you to know that its technology helps you figure out what to cook for dinner. Google wants you to feel the warmth of a family settling into a…
Community That Drives AI Visibility
AI search doesn’t pick brands at random. They cite brands with trust signals across multiple channels. Are you building brand proof in the places AI actually looks to validate mentions?…
The Reddit Earnings Story Most Marketers Missed
I was walking over to take the stage at SMMW 2026 in Anaheim, California, last Thursday, listening intently to Steve Huffman, founder and CEO of Reddit, talk about the last…
What They Are and How to Use Them
When a new article goes live on the Ahrefs blog, I drop the URL into Claude and run /linkedin-pipeline. It pulls the article and generates three to five distinct LinkedIn…
New AI Search Links, Core Update Winners And Losers
Welcome to the week’s Pulse: updates affect how links appear inside AI search results, which types of sites gained or lost visibility in the March core update, and how Google’s…
4 Writing Frameworks for Better AI Visibility
Here are five time-tested writing frameworks that will help both humans and AI understand your content (alongside the research that shows they work). Dan Petrovic wrote a great article explaining…
The Agent Runtime Wars Started This Week
The agent runtime is the new browser layer, and your website is going to be evaluated against the runtime, not against any individual model. That’s a shift web professionals have…
WordPress 7.0 Will Ship Without Real-Time Collaboration
WordPress announced that the real-time collaboration feature will not ship in the upcoming 7.0 release, citing that the current approach is not yet “robust enough” to be included. The response…
Google’s Quality Threshold Is Quietly Killing Scaled AI Content
Since we’ve been able to produce content at scale through AI, there have been graph screenshots littering X and LinkedIn, usually case studies or as part of sales materials. An…
7 Common AI Website Mistakes That Are Easy To Avoid
Y Combinator general partner Aaron Epstein was joined by Raphael Schaad, founder of Cron that was sold to Notion, to discuss common mistakes made with AI designed websites. They identified…
Google Ads Rolls Out Journey-Aware Bidding And New Pacing Controls For Advertisers
More Google Ads updates are arriving on the heels of Google Marketing Live 2026. Google just announced several bidding and budgeting updates across Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns, including…
Vibe Coding Won’t Handle Your SEO For You
Google Search Relations team members John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed vibe coding websites on a recent episode of Search Off The Record. Both found that AI coding tools could…
How Keyword Research Gets Local Businesses Into AI Search
Keyword research has an expanded purpose in the world of local SEO. The keyword intent you’re already building for clients can now feed the trust signal layer that drives local…
How Does AI Get Its Information? Training Data, RAG, MCPs, and APIs Explained
AI gets its knowledge from three distinct layers: training data, retrieval systems, and live tool access like APIs and MCPs. Each data layer has its own pros and cons, so…
How To Control AI Answer Accuracy
About a year ago, your job description changed without your permission. This on-demand session helps you catch up and take the lead. Suddenly need to track both SERP rankings and…
The ROI Problem With AI Traffic Nobody Is Measuring Correctly
Search engines were designed to do several things at once: Rank a field of options, route the user to one of them, and keep the human inside the decision so…
Google Answers If Preferred Sources Overrides Low Quality Signals
Google’s John Mueller answered a question about whether Google’s Preferred Sources feature can override standard ranking signals in Top Stories. His answer offers some clarity about how user preference can…
How To Design URL Structures For AI Retrieval, Not Just Rankings
For years, URL structure was a technical SEO checkbox. Keep it short, use hyphens, include the keyword, done. While that playbook still works, it’s increasingly incomplete. A growing share of…
WordPress Loses Marketshare. Is Astro Eroding Their User Base?
A discussion on Twitter about the many people posting that they’ve left WordPress for Astro went modestly viral, with longtime WordPress supporters explaining why they ditched WordPress for Astro. Statistics…
Bing Team Describes How Grounding Differs From Search Indexing
Microsoft’s Bing team published a framework describing how indexing requirements change when the goal is to ground AI answers rather than to rank search results. The post identifies five measurement…
Google Says AI Creative Should Help Brands Differentiate, Not Blend In
One of the more interesting moments in Google’s latest Ads Decoded podcast centered around a growing advertiser concern about AI-generated creative. As more brands gain access to the same AI…
AI Just Handed PR Its Best Opportunity In SEO & Most Teams Are Missing It
A recent Linkedin post by Jim Yu flagged that BrightEdge’s AI Catalyst team analyzed citation and brand mention patterns from prompts across Finance, Healthcare, Education, and B2B Tech in five…
What’s the Difference, and Why Does It Matter?
Everyone’s talking about “AI agents” now. But what’s the real difference between generative AI and agentic AI? And which is the best tool for saving you precious time across all…
The Whole Point Was The Mess
Semrush put out an infographic last week. The kind built to be screenshotted into LinkedIn carousels and pasted into webinar decks. Four pillars. The fourth one is called “Technical GEO”:…
Google Adds More Links & Link Context To AI Search
Google is rolling out five updates to how links appear in its generative AI Search experiences, including AI Mode and AI Overviews. The changes add subscription labels and inline links…
Is Your Small Business Showing Up in Local Search? How To See
Most small business owners have a Google Business Profile. Few have optimized it for how customers are actually searching today. Local search has split across multiple surfaces. Customers are using…
How To Test A New Bid Strategy In Google Ads
Paid search has always been a moving target. In 2026, with platforms dominated by AI and Performance Max, Google has continuously pushed the industry toward automation. Yet, the myth of…
Google Is Testing New Bot Authorization Standard
Google is testing Web Bot Auth, an experimental protocol designed to help websites verify that automated traffic is really coming from the bot or service it claims to represent. The…
OpenAI Launches Self-Serve Ads Manager for ChatGPT
OpenAI has officially launched the next phase of advertising inside ChatGPT, introducing a beta self-serve Ads Manager alongside new CPC bidding and expanded measurement tools. The update moves ChatGPT advertising…