When Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said Google has “no current plans” for ads in Gemini because of concerns about user trust, he framed it as an ideological stance. But here’s what almost every tech journalist missed: Google isn’t being noble about advertising. They’re being strategic about subsidies. The real story isn’t about trust. It’s […]
When Ahrefs published their experiment testing how AI platforms handle misinformation about a fictional brand called Xarumei, the SEO community’s reaction split into two camps: those who saw it as proof that AI can’t distinguish truth from lies, and those who argued the methodology was fundamentally flawed. But both camps missed the real story. This […]
The search marketing industry is currently engaged in a ferocious debate that perfectly encapsulates our field’s greatest weakness: the compulsive need to rebrand fundamentals whenever technology shifts, regardless of whether that shift has actually happened yet. On one side, traditional SEOs argue that GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) are just “SEO […]
Most SEOs are asking the wrong question about Google’s crawl limits. They’re obsessing over whether Googlebot processes 2 megabytes or 15 megabytes of HTML — when the real question is far simpler: Is your content actually showing up in search results? A recent exchange between Google’s John Mueller and the SEO community on Bluesky cut […]
You’re publishing quality news content, yet your traffic from Google keeps shrinking. Meanwhile, some competitors seem to appear in Top Stories effortlessly. What do they know that you don’t? The answer may lie in a feature Google quietly rolled out that most publishers are either ignoring or doing incorrectly: Preferred Sources. According to Google’s official […]
The timing couldn’t be more telling. Just days after the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority opened its consultation on forcing Google to give publishers a real opt-out from AI Overviews, Google quietly announced it was “exploring” the very same idea. Meanwhile, the search giant upgraded AI Overviews to Gemini 3, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman admitted […]
The rules of search are being rewritten—not by algorithm updates, but by AI agents that think, reason, and hunt for answers across the web. Gemini Deep Research now synthesizes information across dozens of sources independently, and this is just the beginning. Google’s newly published SAGE research paper isn’t merely an academic exercise in training data […]