Nobody online wants to be polyester right now. That is not a compliment. According to the Gen-Z lexicon, something “polyester” is a way of saying it feels cheap, mass-produced, low-effort, or inauthentic. It might look polished at first glance, but underneath the sheen, something about it feels artificial. A generic influencer brand can be polyester.…
True-crime fandom no longer wants to watch from the sidelines; it increasingly wants in on the case. Consider the recent lineup: TikTok helped pull the Menendez brothers back into the national conversation decades after their convictions. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s defamation trial became daily social media programming. Luigi Mangione developed an intense internet fandom…
On Aug. 4, a Nike customization trailer pulled up outside Gamma Phi Beta at the University of Alabama. Inside were sneakers, fleeces, and other gear that members could personalize with sorority details. Outside, three videographers waited to capture the results. The event brought 150 women through the trailer, according to Campus Launch, the sorority-marketing agency…
By the time you read this analysis, the realization that the NY Jets will not be winning the big game this season has hit us all. That is both old and new, much like the concept of email campaigns, but this time, tied to paid media in “search.” But first, a big thank you to…
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…
Instagram has a new logo. Well, sort of. The familiar gradient camera icon on your phone isn’t going anywhere. Instead, Instagram has redesigned the handwritten wordmark that appears at the top of the app, giving it its first update in a decade. View this post on Instagram “The wordmark at the top of the app…
Instagram has a new logo. Well, sort of. The familiar gradient camera icon on your phone isn’t going anywhere. Instead, Instagram has redesigned the handwritten wordmark that appears at the top of the app, giving it its first update in a decade. View this post on Instagram “The wordmark at the top of the app…
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…