If you run ecommerce campaigns on target CPA or target ROAS and any of them sit at “Limited by budget,” Google’s August 17 bidding change is going to move your numbers, and we’re likely not talking about the direction you want. Starting August 17, campaigns that are limited by budget and use a target-based bid…
Alphabet’s second quarter earnings results show that Google is earning massive amounts of money but is also spending so much that it reported a negative free cash flow due to infrastructure spending. Massive Earnings Q2 2026 revenue is $119.8 billion, which is up 24% year over year. Where The Money Comes From The earnings release…
The attribution you are waiting for from ChatGPT is coming, and it is not coming to you. I ran a survey this month (it’s still open; please take it) asking whether dedicated AI visibility platforms are worth paying for, and I deliberately never asked about attribution. It showed up anyway. One consultant wrote that the…
If your local search traffic has felt off lately, you’re not imagining it. Fewer clicks. Fewer calls. Customers finding answers and moving on without ever hitting your site. That’s not a seasonal dip or a technical issue. That’s AI Overviews doing exactly what Google designed them to do. Local SEO used to be predictable. Optimize…
Anthropic announced that users on its paid plans can now teach Claude Cowork a skill by recording a walkthrough of a task, which Claude can then use to create a skill that it can subsequently use to complete the same task. It’s called Record a Skill. Anthropic tweeted: “New in Claude Cowork: teach Claude a…
So research, competitive analysis, and simply synthesizing what the client has said all fall to the wayside. They get done fifteen minutes before or after a meeting, by whoever happens to have the time to spare, if at all. The cracks start to show. Every time the client has to clue in the agency or…
To see why MCP matters to marketers, start with what’s happened to the buyer journey. Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched it fold in on itself: a category decision that used to take someone 10 steps – Google the category, click a result, compare providers, check reviews, search again, then finally narrow down…
Apple Maps ads haven’t officially launched yet, but advertisers now have a clearer view of who can participate. The newly published Apple Advertising Services policy prohibits the broad category of home services businesses, including plumbing, electrical, locksmith, HVAC, pest control, roofing, and general contracting. Apple hasn’t disclosed a launch date beyond “this summer” in the…
Every site you have ever optimized carries a record of that work, and it is more detailed than the platforms usually admit. Search systems have kept a per-domain profile for years, assembled from signals you know intimately because you spent a career shaping them. That profile is real, it is granular, and it never needed…
Thanks to Rand’s excellent research and Barry’s expletive-laden ranting, we know that Google processes over 5 trillion searches each year. Trillion. Per day, that’s 13.7 billion. Per second, 158,000. There are some sizeable and growing caveats here: That still means Google processes 2.92 billion clicks to the open web every day. It’s still a figure…