YouTube has announced updates to the YouTube Partner Program, starting February 1, 2027. New creators will need twice the current watch hours or Shorts views to earn revenue from ads and Premium. But channels already in the program will keep their YPP status under the new entry rule. Additionally, YouTube’s help pages list a few…
Google is adding a new Ask Advisor benchmarking feature that compares your Google Analytics campaign performance with anonymized averages from similar businesses. Josh Moser, Senior Director of Product Management, shared the news in a blog post, highlighting it as one of the updates across Google Ads and Google Analytics. This new benchmarking feature runs through…
I got tired of watching the industry treat “an AI bot fetched it” and “ChatGPT said it helps” as evidence that llms.txt does anything, so I invented a standard called cats.txt: a text file in which you formally declare your office cats, their jobs, their breeds, and how often they purr. I wrote a specification,…
This month’s Ask a PPC tackles a strategy question masquerading as an execution one: “What should search campaign structures look like when AI changes how people research before they buy?” AI has created meaningful changes in how people consume information. Importantly, buyers increasingly arrive more informed and qualified, with clearer expectations shaped before they click.…
When a buyer asks AI what to choose, the answer names two or three brands and skips the rest. Freshpet is one of the brands consistently cited. Screenshot of Google SERP for [best refrigerated dog food] featuring Freshpet, August 2026 AI Overviews Consistently Cite Freshpet By Name On August 20, in this live session, Freshpet’s…
Rightly or wrongly, publisher discoverability has been taken care of by search for years. Traffic from Google was and is so valuable – and in recent times, so vast from Discover – that reach has never been a problem. Not until very recently. As behaviors, platforms and the internet morph into something less website-friendly, business…
I have dozens of conversations per week with folks in growth and marketing, ranging from directors, VPs of marketing, and CMOs to SEOs in the nitty-gritty day-to-day. Many of my conversations involve measurement. This is an increasingly challenging topic as traditional SEO metrics are breaking down with the advent of AI answers. Much of the…
Google has finally separated generative AI visibility from the rest of the data in Search Console. On June 3, 2026, Google announced dedicated Generative AI performance reports for Search and Discover. The announcement fell on my birthday, which felt briefly thoughtful until I realized the gift was all impressions and no clicks. The Search report…
For years, you could gauge local visibility by checking the map pack and a page of organic results. These have always mattered, but now, the same business details that feed them are also powering AI assistants. Instead of presenting a page full of options, an assistant responds with just a few names. This change emphasizes…
If entity mapping feels familiar, that is because you already ran this play. It is the knowledge graph conversation you were having in 2021, wearing a 2026 outfit. The vocabulary migrated almost intact: entities, not strings; disambiguation; sameAs; relationships between nodes; feed the structure; and the machine understands you. Pull a client deck from four…