Key Takeaways Robots.txt is a plain text file in your root directory that tells search engine and AI crawlers which pages on your site to crawl and which to skip. By guiding bots away from technical clutter and low-value pages, you make sure they spend their time on the important, high-value content that drives results. The four AI crawlers […]
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Google’s AI search box, app-building tools, and agent products will eventually converge. Pichai also rejected publisher fears that Google will stop sending traffic to the web in an interview with Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. “Through it all, we are very committed to both meeting user expectations and also […]
Google is moving Display Ads management into Demand Gen campaigns as it pushes advertisers toward more unified, AI-driven campaign structures. What’s happening. Advertisers can now manage Google Display Network (GDN) placements directly through Demand Gen campaigns whilst retaining the option to run ads exclusively on GDN if preferred. Demand Gen campaigns will continue serving ads […]
Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin recently published an extensive piece outlining more than 40 new innovations across Google Ads, Analytics, creative tooling, AI, lead generation, and measurement. While the updates span everything from conversational AI to predictive attribution, the bigger story underneath the announcements is much more significant. Google is steadily reshaping advertising around intent […]
Content must go beyond surface-level answers to stand out as AI summaries take over more basic search queries. That’s according to Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice president of Knowledge & Information, who was interviewed at Google Marketing Live 2026 by Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith. What hasn’t changed. Fox said the way to rank in AI […]
Most content meets users exactly where they are. Someone searches “best MBA programs” and gets a roundup of MBA programs. But sometimes the highest-value content challenges the query’s premise. This introduces the concept of surfacing alternatives that users didn’t know to ask about. Intentionally expanding a user’s awareness beyond their assumed path doesn’t always take […]
On Thursday, the Google Search Console link report broke. For many it showed no links at all, and for others, it showed a drop of almost 90% of the links that Google reported they had a week prior. Google confirmed the issue and decided to show old link data, while it works on fixing the […]
Across large enterprise websites, dozens of stakeholders can push live changes at any time: SEO teams, developers, content editors, product managers, PR teams, UX designers, and more. One of the biggest frustrations is discovering those changes after they’ve already impacted performance. Maybe a CMS template update quietly removes a core content component from hundreds of […]
AI has become part of nearly every industry, integrated into apps, company processes, and everyday life. As someone who’s been doing local SEO since it became a thing, I’m seeing a major shift in how people search and the answers they get. In the good old days, the average local business could rank well by […]
Google Ads reports and PPC competitor analysis can show declining performance, but not what caused it. In fast-evolving paid search, reacting to performance drops after they happen isn’t enough. You need to identify the signals behind those changes before they impact results. A competitor might increase bids on your core keywords. A new advertiser could […]
