TikTok US Deal Closes After Years Of Regulatory Uncertainty
A White House official said the US and China have finalized a deal to spin off TikTok’s US business to a consortium led by Oracle and Silver Lake, Fox Business…
A Breakdown Of Microsoft’s Guide To AEO & GEO
Microsoft published a sixteen page explainer guide about optimizing for AI search and chat. While many of the suggestions can be classified as SEO, some of the other tips relate…
Google Launches Personal Intelligence In AI Mode
Google is rolling out Personal Intelligence, a feature that connects Gmail and Google Photos to AI Mode in Search, delivering personalized responses based on users’ own data. The feature, announced…
10Web WordPress Photo Gallery Plugin Vulnerability
A security advisory was published about a vulnerability in the Photo Gallery by 10Web plugin that has over 200,000 installations. The vulnerability affects how the plugin handles image comments, exposing…
Five Things To Do That Will Increase Authoritativeness And Earn Links
The following are five things that anyone can do to establish authoritativeness and trustworthiness that can be communicated quickly and contribute to earning more links. The trick to this technique…
More Sites Blocking LLM Crawling
Hostinger released an analysis showing that businesses are blocking AI systems used to train large language models while allowing AI assistants to continue to read and summarize more websites. The…
NotificationX WordPress WooCommerce Plugin Vulnerabilities Impact 40k Sites
A vulnerability advisory was published for the NotificationX FOMO plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce sites, affecting more than 40,000 websites. The vulnerability, which is rated at a 7.2 (High) severity…
How Recommender Systems Like Google Discover May Work
Google Discover is largely a mystery to publishers and the search marketing community even though Google has published official guidance about what it is and what they feel publishers should…
Diagnosing Strategy Vs. Tactic Failures In A Google Ads Account
If your Google Ads campaigns are underperforming, your first instinct might be to dive into the platform. You may want to tweak bid strategies, clean up keywords, or adjust targeting.…
YouTube CEO Announces AI Creation Tools, In-App Shopping For 2026
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan announced the company’s priorities in his annual letter, previewing new AI creation tools, expanded shopping features, and format changes to Shorts. AI Creation Tools YouTube is…
Wix Introduces Harmony AI Website Builder
Wix announced the launch of Wix Harmony, a new AI-powered website builder that combines natural language site creation with Wix’s existing visual editor. The company introduced the product in New…
A Little Clarity On SEO, GEO, And AEO
The debate about AEO/GEO centers on whether it’s a subset of SEO, a standalone discipline, or just standard SEO. Deciding on where to plant a flag is difficult because every…
Building A Center Of Excellence
In every digital transformation I’ve consulted on, from global banks to manufacturing giants, the failure point isn’t usually the strategy. It’s the governance. Strategy defines where to go. Operations define…
What Profitable Google Ads Look Like in 2026
Google Ads’ Performance Max Smart Bidding is finally delivering real results for teams that know how to work with it. As marketers are forced to give PMax more control, many…
How to Make Every Click Count with Search Experience Optimization
If you’re adopting an SXO approach, you need to focus on metrics that truly reflect user experience. Start analyzing what users do after they land on your site: where they…
How To Control of Performance Max [5-Step Guide]
This post was sponsored by Channable. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. If you’ve ever watched your best-selling product devour your entire ad budget while dozens…
Data Shows AI Overviews Disappears On Certain Kinds Of Finance Queries
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…
OpenAI Search Crawler Passes 55% Coverage In Hostinger Study
Hostinger analyzed 66 billion bot requests across more than 5 million websites and found that AI crawlers are following two different paths. LLM training bots are losing access to the…
ChatGPT Gets Googled More Than YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok
I was mucking around on Google Trends when I discovered something curious: ChatGPT’s global search interest overtook top platforms last year, and nobody noticed. That felt impossible. For instance, YouTube…
Perplexity AI Interview Explains How AI Search Works
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…
What Actually Works (Based on Data, Not Speculation)
Most advice on ranking in AI Overviews is speculative, so we’ve analyzed millions of AI Overview responses and citations to find out what actually works. Our own research shows AI…
The Great Decoupling
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,…
How Entity Linking Can Support Local Search Success
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…
Every Marketer Says You Need “Taste”. Here’s What That Actually Means
For the first time ever, anyone can make content in seconds. With just a couple of prompts, an LLM can generate an entire blog post that you can publish on…
Why Agentic AI May Flatten Brand Differentiators
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…
Head Of WordPress AI Team Explains SEO For AI Agents
James LePage, Director Engineering AI at Automattic, and the co-lead of the WordPress AI Team, shared his insights into things publishers should be thinking about in terms of SEO. He’s…
How To Analyze Google Discover
TL;DR To generate the most value from Discover, view it through an entity-focused lens. People, places, organisations, teams, et al. Your best chance of success in Discover with an individual…
Our Top 5 Blog Posts of 2025 (And What Made Them Work)
We’re sharing the content that worked hardest for us in 2025, to give you an idea of what might work for you in 2026. And, naturally, we wanted to remind…
How Much Of Your Paid Media Budget Should Be Allocated To Upper Funnel?
Determining a budget split between upper and lower-funnel is a recurring topic in paid media. Upper-funnel campaigns (typically awareness and interest) create future demand, while lower-funnel campaigns capture existing demand…
ChatGPT Gets Googled More Than YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok
I was mucking around on Google Trends the other week when I discovered something curious: ChatGPT’s global search interest overtook top platforms earlier this year, and nobody noticed. That felt…