This is a programming note that I will be not be posting here for the next several days. I am not exactly sure how long it will take and when I will be back at 100% but I am expecting it to take at least several days.

Yep, more of the same – the Google Search ranking volatility remains heated. Many are asking when we will see an officially announced Google core update. But it has not been announced yet.

Robby Stein, VP, Product at Google Search, was interviewed by Zain Kah on Google AI Search features. While most of the conversation are items we already know, he did say a few interesting things that I want to pull out.

Google is testing a larger header image for the Google Discover publisher header images. It looks a lot more magazine-type and style.

Google Ads is rolling out Google AI voice models as a new asset optimization feature for your video ads. This is for your existing Performance Max video ads.

Google seems to have a bug with the Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console. The date selector appears to be acting a bit weird, where it doesn’t let you select the before or after date.

If you’ve been in marketing long enough, you’ve probably lived through a few identity crises. First, we were channel experts. Then, we became integrated marketers, growth marketers, and performance marketers. Somewhere along the way, someone added “AI” to everyone’s job description and called it a day. Now, we’re entering the era of the full-stack marketer. From where I sit — particularly as a me

See why optimizing category pages and building authority beats spinning unique descriptions for large, similar product catalogs. The post How Do You Fix Thin Content Across Similar Ecommerce Product Pages? – Ask An SEO appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

At a moment when the internet feels like a constant stream of bad news alerts, many people online have found a surprisingly gentle escape: Pokémon Pokopia . Even if you’re not a gamer, it’s hard to miss. I don’t own a Nintendo Switch — let alone the new $500 Switch 2 — and yet cute clips from Pokopia keep appearing on my feeds anyway. Thanks to my algorithm, I’m vicariously living through them. H

How to Decide Between Traditional SEO and AI Search AI search is dominating the conversation right now. Every marketing leader is hearing the same thing: “What’s our AI strategy?” Your instinct might be to move fast, reallocate budget, start optimizing for generative search, and get ahead of the curve. But before you rewrite your entire roadmap, there’s a critical question worth asking: should yo

Welcome to DEV, your fortnightly feast of WordPress workflows, web wrangling, and weird findings. As always, we’re serving up release rundowns, roadmap revelations, and resource recommendations to keep your WordPress world well-oiled and wonderfully workable. Stick around to the end to see the cutest sashimi dinner ever. In today’s edition: The memory of #WPMom lives on: The Kim Parsell Scholarsh

As keyword targeting continues to evolve, you may be wondering if exact-match keywords still matter. Learn how machine learning and NLP have shifted SEO from simple synonyms to complex semantic clusters. See the data behind how Google and Gemini interpret the meaning of your content.

Buying AI capabilities to drive marketing is easy. Enabling marketing teams to actually use it independently, decisively, and at scale is far harder. The main culprit? Humans. Marketing teams have always had the same elusive goal: to move at the pace of the consumer. Responding to each customer’s needs in real time, delivering the relevant message at the right moment, and optimizing customer life

Are you wasting time chasing every new AI tool that drops, only to feel more overwhelmed and less productive than before? Wondering which tools deliver real efficiency gains? In this article, you’ll discover video and image generation platforms that let you produce multi-asset content faster by handling more of the pipeline in one place. What […] The post appeared first on Social Media Examiner

A hardcover book printed in 1925 is almost indistinguishable from one printed yesterday. It’s easy to think not much has changed. But book publishing isn’t about printing, and it’s a useful metaphor for the systems changes we’re seeing all around us. The book publishing system was based on scarcity. A successful bookstore was perfect. It had exactly the right number of books — more wouldn’t fit,

Official WordPress AI Experiments plugin enables users to get advance access to AI features right now. The post WordPress Releases Updated AI Experiments Plugin appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Bluesky, the popular alternative social media platform that rose to prominence following Elon Musk’s acquisition of X, is looking for a new CEO to guide it through a growth phase. In a post on Bluesky’s website , Bluesky’s now-former CEO Jay Graber announced that she was stepping down from the role. Graber noted that she’s stepping back to build new products, not leaving Bluesky.

AI search changed how people find you, click on you, and convert. Here’s what the Q1 data says and how to build your Q2 plan. The post 3 AI Search Changes Every Marketer Needs A Plan For In Q2 appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Google Ads is set to enhance the viewer experience of Performance Max video ads with an innovative asset optimization feature. Leveraging advanced AI voice models, this update aims to infuse video ads with realistic voice-overs, ultimately enhancing user engagement and ad performance. Why we care. Advertisers who don’t actively opt out by March 20, will have their video ads automatically enhanced

OpenAI is updating its privacy policy with new details on ads, data usage and upcoming features across its products, including ChatGPT. The update was shared with ChatGPT users and outlines how advertising will work inside ChatGPT — and what data advertisers can and cannot access. Why we care. OpenAI’s update makes it clear that user privacy is a top priority: personal chats, histories, and detai

Google has confirmed that Google Marketing Live 2026 will take place on May 20, when the company is expected to unveil its latest updates across advertising, AI, measurement and campaign automation. The date surfaced in an email received by PPC News Feed owner Hana Kobzová from the Accelerate with Google program, which invited participants to submit entries for the Google Ads Impact Awards. Accor

AI tools now generate 45 billion monthly sessions worldwide — about 56% of search engine volume, according to a study by Graphite.io CEO Ethan Smith. The analysis combines web traffic and mobile app usage across major AI tools and estimates AI activity equals 56% of global search usage and 34% in the U.S. Much of this growth is occurring in mobile apps such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, a

A study of U.S. workers finds 14% report “brain fry” from AI overuse. Marketing had the highest rate at 26%. The post Marketers Report Highest Rates Of AI ‘Brain Fry,’ Report Finds appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Liz Reid, Google’s head of search…

Like many people, you’re worried about losing your job to AI. Where do your “old school” PPC skills fit as AI agents take over more of the work? Relax. It’s not that binary. The focus is shifting toward data and strategy. From the outside, it looks like media buying is being automated away. But let’s set the record straight: it isn’t. The role is shifting (again). I’ve been working in PPC for ove

Publishers are losing ground with younger audiences as creators, video, and platform-native content reshape how news is discovered and trusted. The post appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

If unoptimized images are quietly dragging down your site’s speed and search rankings, ShortPixel is one of the more practical fixes in the WordPress plugin directory. Here’s a closer look at what it does, how its credit system actually works, and whether it’s the right fit for your setup. The post ” ” first appeared on WP Mayor .

OpenAI has begun testing ads in ChatGPT for a limited set of U.S. users, with placements clearly labeled as sponsored. The platform’s internal economics suggest it’ll be available to everyone sooner rather than later. When it does, advertisers will have access to a rare new channel for demand capture. But advertisers should enter this space with their eyes wide open. For ChatGPT advertising to be

Discover how AI visibility to eligibility marketing is reshaping strategies in fast-changing digital advertising. The post How AI Is Reshaping Who Gets Recommended: Marketing In The Eligibility Era appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger interviewed Google’s head of Search, Liz Reid, on Google’s progression of AI into Search. It felt like a very candid interview that is worth listening to. In short, Liz is still not sure if Gemini and Google Search will ever fully converge or not.

Google is testing a new widget for the Google Discover feed where you can follow news publishers and/or topics. It is called the “home follow widget.”

Google added “Trending posts & discussions” title under What People Are Saying section within Google Search results. It also has those favicons at the top, which I don’t think is new but it is all part of the package.

There are a number of complaints that the Google Search Console bulk data export to BigQuery is not working. The issue seemed to have started several days ago and is still not working today.

Google has sent notices to some advertisers asking them to confirm whether their campaigns contain European Union political content. The deadline to confirm is by March 31, 2026.

SEO professionals don’t agree on much. But over the past decade, we’ve come together around the conviction that Google has abused its dominant position, that it systematically favors its own products over better alternatives, and that something must be done to create fairer competition in search. In 2022, the European Union passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a sweeping regulation designed to c

When I started running a multi-author WordPress blog, I learned something important: readers develop favorite writers. But when they type an author’s name into your WordPress search box, nothing shows up, even if that author has published many posts. This happens because the default WordPress search feature does not include author names. Even if the content exists on your site, readers simply can

If you’re not in the trenches of search every single day, it’s hard to know how seriously to take answer engine optimization strategy. There are two dominant camps right now: those who see generative AI as the most disruptive shift search has ever experienced, and those who argue that AEO (or GEO ) is simply an extension of traditional SEO. Predictably, the truth lives somewhere in the middle — a

If your organic traffic is down but impressions are up, AI is likely citing your content without sending clicks. If both are down, you’re being ignored. Either way, the search behavior your marketing strategy was built on has changed, and waiting for traffic to rebound isn’t a strategy. This is the reality you’re facing in 2026. According to KEO Marketing: 73% of B2B websites saw significant traf

John Mueller from Google said you can block a complete TLD, top-level-domain, using the link disavow tool. He said it is not something Google documents because “Given how big of a hammer it is, I don’t know if it’s something we should really suggest in the docs.” How does it work. All you need to do is use the syntax “domain:abc” in the disavow file. John posted this one Bluesky saying : “If you’

Endless, unlimited and more. These are building blocks of capitalism. Starbucks knows that they can’t get you to drink three coffees every morning, but their stock price is built on the idea that they can continue to get more customers and make more money from each one. The Wedding-Industrial complex is built on the simple idea that your wedding should cost the same as your best friend’s wedding

Google’s John Mueller shared the Disavow File Domain Directive which disavows entire Top Level Domains (TLDs) but cautioned about using it. The post Google: You Can Disavow Entire TLDs Like .

Most people fail on Reddit because they write comments like ads. Reddit eats ads for breakfast. It’s better to follow a Reddit comment framework that has been proven thousands of times to get engagement and increase visibility and awareness. The winning move? Be useful first, be human, then casually exist as a company. Below are 10 proven comment frameworks we see working every single day for our

Indonesia just announced a ban on social media for anyone under 16, following a similar ban in Australia . On Friday, Indonesia’s minister of communication and digital affairs, Meutya Hafid, said in a speech shared online that the ban will begin on March 28. The rationale, according to a translation by the New York Times, is due to perceived threats of pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud, an

A suite at a New York Knicks game costs more than $30,000. Is that a donation to the team? Why do we differentiate between the money spent on a Super Bowl ticket and the check we write for a worthy cause? Does calling it a “donation” make it more valuable or less valuable to us? Fundraisers can fall into the trap of believing that they’re asking for a favor or begging for a donation.

Google’s head of Search described how multimodal LLMs help Google understand audio and video, and discussed a direction for subscription-aware search. The post Google’s Liz Reid Says LLMs Unlock Audio And Video Indexing appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Over the past decade, the online gambling industry has undergone a remarkable transformation driven by technological innovation, shifts in consumer behaviour, and regulatory developments. As the sector matures, key themes such as the integration of cutting-edge gaming experiences, enhanced responsible gambling measures, and the strategic deployment of demo versions—including free-to-play slots—ha

Some organizations and marketers thrive on the uninformed consumer. They seek out people who don’t know, and who aren’t particularly good at decision making. Others do their best work when the customer knows what’s up and is making an informed choice. Are you closing the sale or opening it? If your prospects knew everything you know, would they choose you? When marketers sign up for the iterative

Google updated AI Mode recipe search results to change how it displays recipes and to send more traffic to recipe blogs The post Google Updates AI Recipe Results To Send More Traffic appeared first on Search Engine Journal .