Google’s pitch for AI-powered bidding is seductive. Feed the algorithm your conversion data, set a target, and let it optimize your campaigns while you focus on strategy.  Machine learning will handle the rest. What Google doesn’t emphasize is that its algorithms optimize for Google’s goals, not necessarily yours.  In 2026, as Smart Bidding becomes more […]

Shopify powers more than 6 million live ecommerce websites, supported by a robust app ecosystem that can extend nearly every part of the customer journey.  Anyone can develop an app to perform virtually any function.  But with so many integrations to choose from, ecommerce teams often waste time testing add-ons that promise revenue gains but […]

Preferred Sources in Top Stories has expanded globally: it’s now available for English-language users worldwide, and we’ll roll it out to all supported languages early n…

Google’s Nick Fox, the SVP of Knowledge and Information at Google, said in a recent podcast that doing optimization for AI search is “the same” as doing optimization and SEO for traditional search. He added, you want to build great sites, with great content, for your users. More details. This came up in the AI […]

We celebrated a major milestone in June: the return of SMX Advanced as an in-person event. It was our first since 2019. More than a conference, SMX Advanced 2025 was a reunion. Search marketers from around the world came together to connect, exchange ideas, and learn the most current and advanced insights in search. But […]

Google Search Console seems to have fixed the weeks long delay with the search performance reports. For the past few weeks, we had 50+ hour delays for these reports, but as of the past several hours, the reports seem to be up-to-date. Now up-to-date. If you go to the search performance report, you should just […]

Google Ads launched VTC-optimized bidding for Android app campaigns, letting advertisers toggle bidding toward conversions that happen after an ad is viewed rather than clicked. Previously, VTC worked as a hidden signal inside Google’s systems. Now, it’s a clear, explicit optimization option. The shift. Google is shifting app advertising away from click-centric logic and toward […]

Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, admitted that Google “for sure messed up” by underinvesting in AI and failing to seriously pursue the opportunity after releasing the research that led to today’s generative AI era. Google was scared. Google didn’t take it seriously enough and failed to scale fast enough after the Transformer paper, Brin said. Also: […]

Google has updated its JavaScript SEO basics documentation to clarify how Google’s crawler handles noindex tags in pages that use JavaScript. In short, if “you do want the page indexed, don’t use a noindex tag in the original page code,” Google wrote. What is new. Google updated this section to read: “When Google encounters the […]

The SEO industry is entering its most turbulent period yet. Traffic is declining. AI is absorbing informational queries.  Social platforms now function as search engines. Google is shifting from a gateway to an answer engine. The result is a sector running in circles – unsure what to measure, what to optimize, or even what SEO […]