Google’s Ads Product Liaison, Ginny Marvin, recently interviewed Product Manager Tal Akabas for her Ads Decoded podcast. I always love when product managers share behind-the-scenes details; you inevitably learn more than what is shared in official blog posts or launch communications. While much of the episode focused on new channel prioritization, it revealed several tactical…
Most discussions about getting noticed in AI search still focus on gaining citations through structured content, clear entity definitions, and proper permissions inside robots.txt files. However, I have recently been looking into a much more basic problem that happens well before any of those standard steps, even though digital publishers almost never talk about it.…
Few things waste a boardroom meeting like defending Google Analytics 4 figures that don’t align with the store-reported numbers. It erodes trust and leaves everyone with an incomplete, misleading picture, and over the past 12 months I’ve found it harder to get GA4 to do the job it’s set up for. It’s challenged me and…
After a good quarter, the question I hear most from CEOs is some version of “We have another $100,000. Where should it go?” Most of them already have an answer. It’s usually more of whatever worked last quarter, which tends to mean paid search, because paid search has the cleanest dashboard. Sometimes that’s the right…
Imagine a buyer asks an AI assistant which supplier fits a particular problem. Your business makes the shortlist. The buyer discusses the alternatives, checks a concern, then opens Google and searches for your company. They visit and buy. Depending on the attribution setup, Google may receive the credit. The assistant need never have sent a…
Treat your 2027 entry-level hires as their own budget line and not part of overall headcount. The best current payroll data shows that employment in AI-exposed jobs is shifting, with fewer junior hires rather than layoffs. Most marketing budget discussions are looking somewhere else. In July, I argued that chief marketing officers should fund five…
OpenAI has shared how its ChatGPT advertising system interprets conversations, selects relevant ads, and keeps ad serving separate from organic answers. The technical breakdown explains how a dedicated language model coordinates ad selection as a user’s needs develop across messages. It also describes why an ad can win an auction and still never appear. OpenAI…
I remember the first time I saw national news networks using Twitter as a source of news and checking in with people to hear what they thought. To me, that was a moment when social media became mainstream and started to feel normal for the wider public. Having been on Reddit for 20 years, I’ve…
Every time you use a website like Google or ChatGPT, your browser and a collection of backend services have a long and surprisingly candid conversation about what you asked for. That conversation sits in plain sight in the Network tab of Chrome DevTools, a single F12 away, and most people never look at it. I…
DeepSeek has opened access to its own search engine through a public Search and Fetch API. It returns an authority score for every result and says it filters out SEO spam, GEO manipulation, and low-quality AI content. That is a significant release for SEOs. The announcement on Oct. 17, 2026 came alongside an update to…