Thinking of verifying your LinkedIn account so you can get that coveted blue checkmark badge? You may want to hear this first. One observant anonymous user is warning other LinkedIn users that the Microsoft-owned social network for professionals utilizes a third-party verification service that, in turn, shares users’ data with other companies. Inc highlighted a…
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…
The internet has fallen in love with Punch, the 7-month-old macaque who clings to a stuffed animal for comfort. So when a video (since deleted) surfaced showing him being dragged across the ground by another monkey inside his enclosure at the Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan, people online panicked. Clips spread rapidly across social media…
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…
Breaking news: There are gay people in positions of power in Silicon Valley in 2026. That not-so-surprising fact is the center of Wired‘s latest cover story, which hit the internet Thursday. The internet immediately reacted, in part thanks to some, uh, unusual imagery that accompanied the article. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be…
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…
Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, has been under investigation in France, California, the UK, India, and Brazil for allegedly creating non-consensual intimate images, including images that depict minors. Now, it’s facing yet another investigation, this time in Ireland. On Tuesday, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced that it had opened an investigation into Musk’s X,…