Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free! Am I still an advisor? Or a builder? I’m having an existential moment. My work has forever changed in a way I’m still trying to understand. Six months ago, agentic vibe coding crossed a threshold. Since then, I have used AI to raise…
Google Ads has gone through a steady wave of changes over the past year. Advancements in outputs like Demand Gen and AI Max, and shifts in how users interact with search have all changed how performance shows up in the data. A new Q1 2026 benchmark report from Optmyzr, based on more than 21,000 accounts,…
Google updated its Search Central documentation to reflect that the Preferred Sources feature is now available in all languages supported by Google Search. The change clarifies global availability and introduces updated guidance for publishers looking to grow their audience through Top Stories. Preferred Sources Google’s Preferred Sources feature gives users a way to choose specific…
Google has officially expanded AI Max to Shopping and Travel campaigns as it hits one year in market. The announcement comes on the heels of its upcoming annual Google Marketing Live event on May 20th. Google noted that AI Max has become the fastest-growing AI-powered Search ads product. Both AI Max for Shopping and Travel…
Jan-Willem Bobbink shared a take on X, that AI visibility trackers are quietly breaking the analytics of brands who are paying them to track for them. It’s time we put more focus on this issue, as it is causing misalignment, misreporting, and misspending of resources and marketing budget in the clamor to be more visible…
This post was sponsored by Uberall. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. Local consumers have stopped searching the way we built our marketing around. This significant change in buyer habits has been quietly happening in the last 18 to 24 months. According to recent Uberall research into AI search behavior, an…
Every technical SEO has a version of this meeting. The migration shipped on Friday. The redirects went in. Someone on Monday noticed organic traffic had fallen off a cliff, and someone else remembered there was, in fact, an SEO on the team somewhere, and perhaps they should take a look. This isn’t the meeting anyone…
Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free! I normally write about strategy and search behavior, not labor markets. But the SEO job market is the clearest leading indicator I’ve seen of how companies are actually valuing AI skills, so I followed the data off the usual map. 946 SEO job…
The standard technical SEO audit checks crawlability, indexability, website speed, mobile-friendliness, and structured data. That checklist was designed for one consumer: Googlebot. This is how it’s always been. In 2026, your website has, at least, a dozen additional non-human consumers. AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot train models and power AI search results. User-triggered…
Money, obviously. But it’s deeper than that. Google’s market share has broadly held firm in the wake of everything AI. By held firm, I mean its share price has gone through the roof, and its AI offering is growing ever stronger. Happy, happy shareholders. Sad, sad people. (Image Credit: Harry Clarkson-Bennett) But I don’t think…