Do you remember Friendster? The early-2000s social networking platform has now returned roughly 24 years later with a whole new gimmick: Users can only connect with real-life friends. The founder of the new Friendster, Mike Carson, is promoting the relaunched social media platform as being free of any ads and algorithms. But, that’s not all…
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…
Last year, DJI’s Mic Mini was one of our favorite microphones for content creators. It just got a sequel — though you may have to wait to see it. The miniature microphone array is back in the form of DJI Mic Mini 2, first spotted by The Verge. It’s available now in most markets around…
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…
I’ve never been a Nintendo person. And yet, I’ve never been this completely captured by one of its games until the company’s latest release, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. My rapturous attention to it is equal parts FOMO and genuine amazement at the unhinged ways people are playing this game. It’s taken over my timeline…
Omegle is in the ground, and Thundr is dancing on its grave. Since Omegle’s demise in late 2023, the internet has been introduced to a number of Omegle alternatives, from the tame to the explicit. Thundr is a random video and text chat service that’s emulating Omegle the most in 2026. Think of it as…
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…