In her third annual letter, Vidhya Srinivasan, VP/GM of Ads & Commerce at Google, lays out how AI is transforming shopping and advertising in 2026 — making experiences faster, more personal, and more seamless for both consumers and businesses. Key trends: Creators to commerce: YouTube continues to be a discovery hub, with creators acting as […]
As consumers lean into AI search, the industry has focused on the technical “how” – tracking everything from Agentic Commerce Protocols (ACP) to ChatGPT’s latest shopping research tools. In doing so, it often misses the larger shift: conversational search, which is changing how visibility is earned. There’s a common argument that big brands will always […]
AI search influence didn’t show up in our SEO reports or AI prompt tracking tools. It showed up in sales calls. “Found you via Grok, actually,” a new lead said. That comment stopped us cold. We hadn’t tried to rank in Grok. We weren’t tracking it. Yet it was influencing how buyers discovered and evaluated […]
When left to its own devices, there are a couple of things Performance Max is absolutely great at doing for lead gen campaigns: Driving volume. Finding the lowest-quality leads it possibly can. It’s not inherently surprising that Google is doing what’s best for Google – that is, lining its own pockets – by heavily optimizing […]
Every seasoned PPC pro carries a few scars — the kind you earn when a campaign launches too fast, an automation quietly runs wild, or a “small” setting you were sure you checked comes back to bite you. At SMX Next, we had a candid, refreshingly honest conversation about the mistakes that still trip us […]
Google is now advertising its own AI features inside Google Ads — a rare move that puts promotion directly into advertisers’ workflow. What’s happening. Users are seeing promotional messages for AI Max for Search campaigns when they access campaign settings panels. The notifications appear during routine account audits and updates It functions essentially as an […]
Microsoft today launched AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools in beta. AI Performance lets you see where, and how often, your content is cited in AI-generated answers across Microsoft Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries, and select partner integrations, the company said. AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools shows which URLs are cited, which queries trigger those […]
B2B advertising faces a distinct challenge: most automation tools weren’t built for lead generation. Ecommerce campaigns benefit from hundreds of conversions that fuel machine learning. B2B marketers don’t have that luxury. They deal with lower conversion volume, longer sales cycles, and no clear cart value to guide optimization. The good news? Automation can still work. […]
We know AI responses are probabilistic – if you ask an AI the same question 10 times, you’ll get 10 different responses. But how different are the responses? That’s the question Rand Fishkin explored in some interesting research. And it has big implications for how we should think about tracking AI visibility for brands. In […]
Let me guess: you just spent three months building a perfectly optimized product taxonomy, complete with schema markup, internal linking, and killer metadata. Then, the product team decided to launch a site redesign without telling you. Now half your URLs are broken, the new templates strip out your structured data, and your boss is asking […]
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