The single largest AI crawler on my website over the past day was not an AI crawler. It arrived roughly 1,500 times under Common Crawl’s name; it sent back nothing, and what it wanted was my SSH keys. I went looking because of a number. Cloudflare’s CFO Told Analysts Machine Traffic Could Reach 1,000 Times…
The single largest AI crawler on my website over the past day was not an AI crawler. It arrived roughly 1,500 times under Common Crawl’s name; it sent back nothing, and what it wanted was my SSH keys. I went looking because of a number. Cloudflare’s CFO Told Analysts Machine Traffic Could Reach 1,000 Times…
Google Ads is removing campaign-level language targeting settings from Search campaigns and Search inventory within Performance Max. The change, rolling out in late September, shifts more responsibility for language matching to Google’s automated signals. For advertisers, that raises questions about how multilingual campaigns will work, what happens to existing campaign structures, and where language targeting…
Over three weeks in July, I ran a survey asking people who work on AI search visibility what they think of the platforms built to measure it. 163 responses. This is a self-selected sample recruited through my own network and its re-shares (as well as paid ads on LinkedIn and X), so it describes engaged…
Your brand can hold the number one ranking and still go unnamed when a buyer asks AI for a recommendation. What we’re seeing is the answer cites two or three brands and skips the rest, which could unfortunately be yours. Freshpet had the same challenge, and on August 20, the team that did it walks…
Google’s upcoming Smart Bidding change has sparked plenty of discussion across the PPC industry, but its impact may be more limited than some of the online reaction suggests. Beginning August 17, budget-limited campaigns using Target CPA or Target ROAS will optimize more closely toward their stated bidding target. Google also introduced a Bid Target Adjustment…
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.…