An SEO crafting a newsletter with AI spotted a hallucination about a March 2026 Google Core Update and decided to publish it as an experiment to see how misinformation spreads. While search marketing industry publications ignored the fake news some independent SEOs picked it up and ran with it without first checking the factual accuracy…
Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free! Branded search inflates your return on ad spend (ROAS) by taking credit for demand you already own, and every input in the paid acquisition model is getting worse simultaneously. This week, you’ll cover: The math on how branded search distorts performance reporting across…
Every few years, the SEO industry discovers a new way to mass-produce content and convinces itself that this time it’ll work. That the sheer volume of pages will overwhelm Google’s ability to assess quality. That if you just publish enough, the numbers will carry you. It never works. It has never worked. And the people…
The beauty of live television is that absolutely anything can happen, and nowhere is that more reliably, terrifyingly true than at the Oscars. The Academy Awards like to present themselves as the pinnacle of Hollywood elegance, and yet the ceremony has an almost proud history of producing moments that range from the benignly chaotic like…
Timothée Chalamet is now a four-time Best Actor loser at the Academy Awards, adding another near-miss to his growing collection after failing to take home the trophy for his role as Marty Mauser in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. Marty Supreme, with nine nominations, did not take home any Oscars. The competition was stiff, but Michael…
The internet has spent weeks debating Timothée Chalamet’s now-viral comments about ballet and opera. The latest voice to enter the discourse: Steven Spielberg. During a live podcast conversation at SXSW on March 13, the legendary director was reflecting on the communal power of moviegoing when he suddenly shouted out two of the oldest performing arts…
I wrote a LinkedIn post on this very topic a while ago, and people seemed, at least, reasonably interested. So I thought I’d expand on it a little. It is, IMO, a very good way of framing how you can generate real value from trends. The value of our traditional (if we’re being fair, beige)…
Google Maps is launching Ask Maps, a conversational feature powered by Gemini that lets users ask complex questions about locations and receive AI-generated suggestions on a personalized map. The feature is now rolling out in the U.S. and India on Android and iOS, with a desktop version coming soon. What Ask Maps Does Ask Maps lets…
For years, communications and PR teams have warned that their budgets are under threat. In 2026, that warning has become a reality. According to industry research, budget pressure remains one of the top concerns for communications leaders, largely because executives still struggle to understand how PR contributes to business outcomes. As Katie Paine bluntly says, when…
This post was sponsored by Resolve Marketing. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. Link building has evolved. It’s no longer about sending templated emails asking how much it costs for a guest post on someone’s site (it probably never should’ve been). It’s about providing resources, data, & information that people want…