If a user types your brand name into Google or Chrome, you might reasonably assume they are about to visit your website. Google has always been a place people pass through on the way to somewhere else, but AI Overviews are changing how long that passage takes, and what happens during it. To assess these…
Agent-readiness crossed from concept to measurable infrastructure this week. On April 17, as Cloudflare Agents Week extended into its sixth day, the company shipped isitagentready.com, a public scanner that scores any website on how prepared it is for AI agents. Paste a URL, get a score, see which checks passed and which failed, read AI-generated…
When Microsoft Clarity made AI citations available to all users, it opened up a new playground for SEOs to harvest AI visibility data. Finally, we can see the exact “grounding queries” an AI engine uses to pull our content. It raises a massive question because this is a Microsoft tool: Are the insights useless if…
Google announced two new ad formats for AI Mode during Google Marketing Live: Conversational Discovery ads and Highlighted Answers. Both formats are powered by Gemini and designed to place ads more directly inside AI-generated responses and recommendation flows. According to Google, the formats will include an independent AI explainer that synthesizes information about a product…
“There is now ample evidence, collected over the last few years, that AI systems are unpredictable and difficult to control.” That’s Dario Amodei in January, writing about the technology his company sells. Compare with what’s on your LinkedIn timeline this week. Here’s the script: Schema markup ensures AI engines parse your content. The first sentence…
This post was sponsored by Victorious. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. A year into the shift toward AI search, the marketing industry is full of confident takes about the factors that impact AI visibility. But we’ve seen very little data to support commonly held assumptions. We wanted to see what…
Over the past few years, I’ve watched AI content creation tools rapidly gain adoption across the SEO/GEO industry. These tools offer the promise of leveraging AI to automate content creation, reduce headcount, cut costs, and scale output. As someone who has spent the last decade helping companies recover from Google algorithm updates, my spidey senses…
When a brand stops appearing in ChatGPT, or when its share of voice in Perplexity drops by half over a quarter, the typical response from the marketing org is to write more content. Sometimes a lot more. The thinking goes that if AI systems aren’t surfacing the brand, the fix is to feed them more…
Last week, Cyrus Shepard published an AI citation ranking factors study, and it created a lot of noise on X, LinkedIn, and a number of private WhatsApp groups I’m in. Not only the distinction between what is a factor, and what is a correlation, especially given a lot of studies in SEO and AI are…
Google quietly updated one of its Google Ads help pages with a clarification that could raise concerns for some advertisers. The updated documentation suggests that search terms shown in reporting for AI-powered Search experiences may not always reflect a user’s exact query. Instead, some reported search terms may represent Google’s interpretation of user intent. The…