The death of an ad, like the end of the world, doesn’t happen with a bang but with a whimper.  If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice the warning signs: click-through rate (CTR) slips, engagement falls, and cost-per-click (CPC) creeps up.  If you’re not, one day your former top performer is suddenly costing you money. Creative […]

Google Search Console’s performance report is stuck and has not shown an update in the main report since Sunday, October 19th. Google confirmed the issue and said it will catch up. What it looks like. As I said on the Search Engine Roundtable, before Google confirmed the issue, the performance reports for all Search Console […]

On episode 329 of PPC Live The Podcast I speak to Jack Hepp, founder of industrious Marketing LLC, discussing the fallout and what it took to bring him back to feet after he got fired from his first PPC job. The big f-up: fired from his first agency job Jack’s defining career moment came just […]

Following OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT Atlas, software company Search Atlas flagged a major issue: the AI-powered browser can interact with websites in a way that looks indistinguishable from real human users, including clicking on paid advertisements. Why we care. Businesses running digital ad campaigns could unknowingly pay for clicks generated by AI agents, not real […]

Google today celebrated the 25th anniversary of its ad platform, first launched as AdWords in 2000. Now known as Google Ads, the platform remains the backbone of the company’s revenue engine. Over two and a half decades, Google Ads has evolved from a manually managed system to a sophisticated AI-driven advertising platform spanning Search, YouTube, […]

In the early days of SEO, ranking algorithms were easy to game with simple tactics that became known as “black hat” SEO – white text on a white background, hidden links, keyword stuffing, and paid link farms.  Early algorithms weren’t sophisticated enough to detect these schemes, and sites that used them often ranked higher.  Today, […]

ChatGPT referral traffic converts worse than Google search, email and affiliate links, trailing on both conversion rate and revenue per session, according to a new analysis of 973 ecommerce sites. Why we care. AI search platforms are starting to refer meaningful traffic to retailers – but not yet sales. For now, Google (paid organic) search still […]

In mid-September, many SEO professionals began noticing unusual drops in Google Search Console (GSC) data.  Impressions were down, average positions shifted, and the number of reported queries changed overnight.  This wasn’t the result of a ranking update but a reporting change – one that redefines how we interpret GSC visibility data going forward. What happened […]

Reddit is taking four data-scraping companies to court – including AI search engine Perplexity and SEO data firm SerpApi – accusing them of illegally using its content via Google search results. The lawsuit. SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and Perplexity “devised a scheme” to scrape Reddit data indirectly from Google, then resell or reuse it to train […]

More than a decade ago, I coined the term brand SERP – the result you get when someone searches for your name or company.  I called it the “digital business card” because I saw firsthand how a messy one could cost a business trust and revenue. That idea shaped how many people think about online […]