Most people do not wake up one day and decide they are done with a product category. They leave when the workflow starts to feel like work. Think about something mundane. Planning a trip, picking a new doctor, comparing two insurance options, deciding which grill to buy, figuring out what to do in a new…
Researchers published the results of a study showing how AI search rankings can be systematically influenced, with a high success rate for product search tests that also generalizes to other categories like travel. The name of the research paper is Controlling Output Rankings in Generative Engines for LLM-based Search and the approach to optimization is…
Choosing the right pay-per-click (PPC) ad network is a core strategy impacting the success of your advertising program. Each network reaches distinct audiences, offers different ad formats, and suits different campaign objectives, from capturing high-intent search demand to driving awareness through video and social feeds. With AI-powered automation now embedded across most major platforms, understanding…
Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free! AI-SEO transformation will fail at the alignment layer, not the tactics layer. 25 years of transformation research, spanning 10,800+ participants across industries, reveals that the gap between successful and failed initiatives isn’t technical skill. It’s organizational readiness. What you’ll get: Why AI SEO…
In January, I wrote about the birth of agentic commerce through both Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), and how this could impact us all as consumers, business owners, and SEOs. As we still sit on waitlists for both, this doesn’t mean that we can’t prepare for it. UCP fixes a real-life problem…
Information retrieval systems are designed to satisfy a user. To make a user happy with the quality of their recall. It’s important we understand that. Every system and its inputs and outputs are designed to provide the best user experience. From the training data to similarity scoring and the machine’s ability to “understand” our tired, sad…
The middle is where your content dies, and not because your writing suddenly gets bad halfway down the page, and not because your reader gets bored. But because large language models have a repeatable weakness with long contexts, and modern AI systems increasingly squeeze long content before the model even reads it. That combo creates…
This month’s Ask a PPC explores a common advertiser question: Why budgets sometimes overspend even when a target ROAS or target CPA is in place. Understanding this behavior requires separating two concepts that are often conflated: budgets and goals. While they work together, they serve very different functions within auction‑based ad platforms. In this post,…
I recently wrote about an unconfirmed Google algorithm update that rolled out in mid-January 2026, which negatively impacted the organic search visibility of dozens of major brands. For most of the impacted sites I analyzed, the impact was disproportionately targeted to the company’s blog, or another folder containing informational articles and resources. That same organic trajectory…
This post was sponsored by No Fluff. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. When ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity mention a company, these large language models (LLMs) are deciding whether that business is safe to reference, not how long it has existed. Most business leaders assume one thing when they don’t show…