Xtreme Freelance https://xtremefreelance.com Xtreme Freelance team - Expert WordPress Developers Wed, 13 May 2026 21:19:51 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 Valuable Tips to Help Your Social Marketing 455 – Interesting Articles This Week https://xtremefreelance.com/valuable-tips-to-help-your-social-marketing-455-interesting-articles-this-week/ Thu, 14 May 2026 12:59:00 +0000 https://xtremefreelance.com/?p=24508 Valuable Tips | Interesting Articles This Week

WordPress 7.0 RC2 Released — Community Prepares for Major Launch

The WordPress project has released Release Candidate 2 for version 7.0, marking the final stretch before stable release. Key highlights include package management improvements, continued Gutenberg refinement, and performance optimizations. The official WordPress news blog emphasizes the community-driven nature of the release process with contributors across dozens of timezones collaborating. The WP Briefing podcast continues to track all major developments.

Source: wordpress.org/news

Contact Form 7 Freezes New Features — What WordPress Users Should Do Next

One of the most widely installed WordPress plugins, with millions of active users, has frozen new feature development, creating uncertainty for site owners who depend on it for critical business workflows. The WPBeginner team outlines alternative form solutions and migration paths, recommending Forminator and Gravity Forms as proactive replacements for teams currently evaluating their options.

Source: wpbeginner.com

WPVibe Review: The Best WordPress MCP Server for AI Assistants?

Hands-on review of WPVibe’s AI capabilities integrated directly into WordPress via a Model Context Protocol server. The evaluation covers how AI assistance can streamline content creation, plugin management, and site optimization within the WordPress admin environment. Early testing shows promise for reducing manual workflows, though questions remain about API reliability and data privacy for production sites.

Source: wpbeginner.com

WP Tavern #212: How Web Accessibility Boosts Traffic, SEO, and Revenue

Anne Bovelett joins the WP Tavern podcast to discuss the economic case for web accessibility in WordPress. Research cited shows up to 23% increases in organic traffic for sites that implement accessibility improvements. The conversation bridges the gap between compliance checkbox mentality and genuine user-centered design, with practical guidance for WordPress site owners looking to improve both inclusivity and search rankings simultaneously.

Source: wptavern.com

WP Packages is Working the Way Open Source Should

The official WordPress blog profiles the WP Packages initiative, highlighting how it exemplifies best practices in open source collaboration. The piece discusses dependency management improvements, versioning workflows, and how the system makes it easier for plugin and theme developers to maintain compatibility across the WordPress ecosystem. It’s a technical deep-dive that signals where WordPress core tooling is heading.

Source: wordpress.org/news

How to Check If Your WordPress SEO Is Actually Working

WPBeginner publishes a practical guide for site owners who have implemented SEO plugins but aren’t sure whether their efforts are producing results. The walkthrough covers ranking tracking, core web vitals monitoring, indexation checks, and content gap analysis. Includes recommended free and freemium tools that integrate with WordPress without requiring technical expertise.

Source: wpbeginner.com

Introducing Universally: Translate Your Entire WordPress Site with AI in Minutes

A new WordPress plugin leverages AI to handle site translation end-to-end, aiming to replace manual multilingual workflows that typically require developer involvement. The WPBeginner review tests the plugin across multiple language pairs and evaluates translation accuracy, layout preservation, and performance impact. The plugin targets both small business owners and enterprise users managing multilingual content inventories.

Source: wpbeginner.com

WP Tavern #210: The Interconnected WordPress Ecosystem, Partnerships and Trust

Zach Stepek reflects on the evolving nature of partnerships in the WordPress ecosystem, from hosting providers to agencies to product companies. The conversation explores how short-term profit-driven thinking has damaged trust in certain vendor relationships, and what sustainable partnership models look like in practice. A candid discussion about the business dynamics that shape the WordPress commercial ecosystem.

Source: wptavern.com

Sam Altman Testifies in Musk vs. OpenAI Trial — $175B Raised, Tesla Acquisition Attempt Exposed

Altman testified for multiple days in the ongoing federal case, describing OpenAI’s formation, transition to for-profit structure, and the “blip” that briefly removed him as CEO in 2023. Key revelations include approximately $175 billion in external investment raised, Musk’s attempts to steer the organization toward Tesla acquisition, and internal board conflicts over AI safety governance. The testimony has surfaced tension between OpenAI’s nonprofit mission and its commercial development.

Source: theverge.com

OpenAI Safety Committee Formally Delayed Model Releases Twice

Dr. Jeremy “Zico” Kolter, chair of OpenAI’s safety and security committee, testified that the committee has formally requested delays on two model releases. Kolter outlined the safety governance structure including the safety systems team, preparedness team, alignment team, and model policy team. The disclosure comes amid ongoing scrutiny following the dissolution of the superalignment and AGI readiness teams, and raises questions about internal tension over release timing.

Source: theverge.com

Anthropic Connects Claude to Legal Tools — DocuSign, Box, Thomson Reuters Integrated

Anthropic announced expanded integrations allowing Claude to connect directly to legal industry applications. The AI assistant can now review contracts, surface case law, and draft documents across DocuSign, Box, Thomson Reuters, and Harvey. The move signals intensifying competition in the enterprise legal AI market, with both Anthropic and OpenAI targeting law firms as a high-value vertical with existing workflows that map well to LLM capabilities.

Source: anthropic.com

Gallup Partners with Simile.ai on Synthetic Response Research

Polling firm Gallup has begun researching whether AI-simulated survey responses can supplement traditional methodology. The partnership with Simile.ai aims to independently validate synthetic response methods. Gallup clarifies the goal is to deepen understanding of human behavior, not to replace probability-based sampling — a careful distinction that reflects the industry’s active navigation of where legitimate AI-assisted research ends and genuine methodology concern begins.

Source: theverge.com

Google Announces Googlebook — The Official Post-Chromebook Laptop

Google has announced the Googlebook as the official successor to Chromebooks, positioning it as an AI-native, cloud-first operating system with deep integration across Google’s AI services. The announcement represents Google’s most significant hardware platform evolution since the original Chromebook launch, signaling a full commitment to device-level AI assistance. Early specifications suggest competitive pricing targeting both education and enterprise buyers.

Source: theverge.com

Google “Aluminium OS” Leaked — 16-Minute Video Reveals ChromeOS Successor

A 16-minute leaked video reveals Google’s development of “Aluminium OS” as a successor to ChromeOS aimed at education and enterprise markets. The operating system appears cloud-first and lightweight, with premium hardware partnerships signaled by the unusual branding choice. The leak suggests Google is serious about reclaiming the low-cost computing market it created with Chromebooks, competing directly against affordable Windows laptops and Chromebooks already in market.

Source: theverge.com

Gemini’s Latest Updates Are All About Controlling Your Phone

Google’s latest Gemini updates for Android focus on giving the AI assistant deeper system-level access — controlling apps, managing autofill across apps, and handling tasks that previously required manual user input. The updates align with Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” strategy of integrating AI directly into the OS layer rather than as a separate application. The comparison is unfavorable to Google in some respects: Gemini still requires more explicit user prompting than Apple Intelligence.

Source: theverge.com

The 9 Biggest New Features in Android 17

The Verge rounds up the most significant changes coming in Android 17, based on announcements from Google’s I/O conference. Key features include enhanced lock screen widgets, improved gesture navigation, a redesigned notification shade, and deeper Gemini integration throughout the OS. The update also includes performance improvements for mid-range devices, addressing a long-standing criticism that Android OS updates primarily benefit flagship hardware.

Source: theverge.com

Startup Funding Rebounds in Q1 2026 After Two-Year Slump

TechCrunch reports that global startup funding rebounded strongly in Q1 2026, marking the first quarter of year-over-year growth after two consecutive years of decline. AI-related startups accounted for 62% of total deal volume, with infrastructure and developer tools commanding the highest valuations. Early-stage deals bounced back faster than late-stage, suggesting investor appetite for risk is returning at the seed and Series A levels after a prolonged pullback.

Source: techcrunch.com

AI’s Electricity Appetite Is Becoming a Grid Problem

MIT Technology Review examines the growing tension between AI data center power demands and existing electrical grid capacity. Data centers now represent the fastest-growing segment of commercial electricity consumption in multiple US regions, with utilities beginning to delay new AI facility approvals until transmission infrastructure can catch up. The article explores the nuclear and renewable energy deals being negotiated by major tech companies to secure long-term power for AI operations.

Source: technologyreview.com

Meta AI App Now Has “Live AI” — Point Your Camera and Ask

Meta has released a feature in its AI app that allows users to point their camera at something and receive AI-generated responses in real time, without taking a photo first. The feature represents a shift from screenshot-and-ask interactions to continuous visual AI assistance. Meta also expanded its Muse Spark voice model for natural conversation within the app, competing directly with Google Lens and Apple’s visual lookup features.

Source: theverge.com

Why Companies Are Quietly Scaling Back AI Ambitions

Harvard Business Review profiles a trend among enterprise leadership teams: quietly reducing public AI commitments and scaling back internal expectations after two years of overpromised results. The article identifies common failure patterns, including underestimating integration complexity, overestimating staff readiness, and confusing pilot success with production viability. Authors recommend treating AI adoption as a multi-year capability build rather than a technology deployment.

Source: hbr.org

The Innovation Paradox: Why Corporate Labs Are Building Less

Fast Company examines the growing tension between short-term quarterly pressure and the long-term investment requirements of genuine innovation. Several major corporate research labs have dramatically reduced moonshot projects in favor of incremental product improvements that demonstrate clearer ROI. The article contrasts this with historical patterns — including Bell Labs and Xerox PARC — where sustained research investment produced transformative technologies decades later.

Source: fastcompany.com

Is the AI Investment Boom a Bubble? What the Numbers Say

Bloomberg Businessweek analyzes the current AI investment landscape with skepticism, comparing the funding surge to previous tech booms. Revenue multiples for AI startups remain elevated compared to historical SaaS benchmarks, but proponents argue the total addressable market is genuinely larger than previous technology shifts. The article presents both bull and bear cases, noting that the infrastructure layer (chips, cloud, networking) has clearest commercial validation so far.

Source: bloomberg.com/businessweek

Google Launches Enterprise AI Acceleration Program

ZDNet covers Google’s new enterprise-focused program designed to help large organizations integrate AI into existing workflows more quickly. The package includes implementation support, migration tooling, and access to Google’s AI specialists. It’s a direct response to Microsoft Copilot’s enterprise momentum, offering similar integration points across Google Workspace applications. Early participants report significant time savings in document processing and meeting summarization tasks.

Source: zdnet.com

Platform Algorithm Shifts Continue to Reshape Brand Strategy

Social Media Today analyzes how major platforms are continuing to move away from chronological feeds and toward AI-curated content hierarchies. Brands that invested heavily in follower-based strategies are experiencing diminishing organic reach, forcing a recalibration toward paid promotion and engagement-optimized content. The analysis recommends brands diversify platform presence, develop owned audience channels, and treat social platforms as performance media rather than relationship-building tools.

Source: socialmediatoday.com

Creator Economy Trends: What Brand Marketers Need to Know Right Now

Ad Age examines the latest creator economy dynamics, profiling campaigns from Rare Beauty, Air, and Fishwife that demonstrate new patterns in influencer partnerships. Key observations include a shift toward long-term creator relationships over one-off sponsorships, rising demand for authenticity over polish, and brands increasingly giving creators creative control in exchange for more genuine audience engagement. The article identifies metrics beyond reach that progressive brands are using to evaluate creator investments.

Source: adage.com

Global Marketing Spend Rebounds as Brand Budgets Recover

The Drum reports on the recovery of global marketing spend after two years of disciplined cuts during the uncertain economic period. Brand advertising is recovering faster than performance marketing in some categories, reversing a multi-year trend toward budget allocation that favored short-term measurable channels. The analysis notes that retail media networks and connected TV are capturing disproportionate share of the recovered budgets, creating new dynamics for traditional media buyers.

Source: thedrum.com

Brand Safety Concerns Resurfacing in Digital Advertising

Digiday investigates the return of brand safety as a priority topic among senior marketing leaders, driven by incidents involving AI-generated content appearing adjacent to inappropriate context. The article explores how programmatic advertising’s opacity makes brand safety verification difficult, and profiles a growing movement toward direct publisher relationships as a mitigation strategy. Several major advertisers have reinstated human review processes for high-visibility campaign placements.

Source: digiday.com

Why Small Businesses Are Still Struggling to Adopt AI

Entrepreneur profiles the gap between AI adoption rates among small businesses versus mid-market and enterprise companies, identifying the primary barriers as cost, technical complexity, and lack of clear use-case guidance. The article features several small business owners who successfully implemented AI tools for specific operational problems — appointment scheduling, inventory management, customer service — and draws lessons about starting narrow rather than attempting comprehensive AI transformation.

Source: entrepreneur.com

Top Branding Trends Shaping Business Identity in 2026

DesignRush identifies the branding trends gaining traction among agencies and their clients in 2026. Notable trends include the rise of anti-brand aesthetics — deliberately rough or unconventional visual identities as a response to over-polished corporate design — and the continued influence of motion design in digital brand presence. The article also covers how AI-generated design assets are creating both opportunity and brand differentiation challenges as tools become more accessible.

Source: designrush.com

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]]> Valuable Tips to Help Your Social Marketing 454 – Interesting Articles This Week https://xtremefreelance.com/valuable-tips-to-help-your-social-marketing-454-interesting-articles-this-week/ Thu, 07 May 2026 12:56:40 +0000 https://xtremefreelance.com/?p=24495 Valuable Tips | Interesting Articles This Week

Introducing Universally: Translate Your Entire WordPress Site with AI in Minutes

Ever wished you could double your traffic by reaching international audiences who don’t speak English? Imagine if you could click a few buttons to translate your entire WordPress site into 70+ languages without hiring a developer or professional translators. Sadly, most website translation tools are either crazy expensive, painfully slow, or so poorly built that they damage your SEO the moment yo

Query intent vs. conversion intent: Why the difference matters

One of the major reasons PPC practitioners hold onto syntax-oriented keyword strategies is the disconnect between “query intent” and “conversion intent.” For years, you’ve likely relied on keywords to show you understand what your customers want and to prequalify traffic using syntax-oriented signals. As user behavior shifts to more conversational queries and AI becomes an increasingly relevant p

Bing: 1 Billion Monthly Users Are Human, Not Agents

Microsoft, during its earnings call last week, announced that Bing hit a huge milestone of 1 billion monthly active users. Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft later confirmed these “users” do not include AI agents but are real actual humans.

How To Test A New Bid Strategy In Google Ads

How PPC strategists can validate bid strategy changes using conversion value by time and CRM data instead of relying on surface-level metrics. The post appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

How China’s fragmented search ecosystem is reshaping SEO in 2026

In February 2025, the world watched as a small group of humanoid robots took the stage at the CCTV Chinese New Year show for the very first time. It was a charming performance, even if the steps were shaky and the movements were mostly limited to the arms. Just one year later, at the Spring Festival Gala, the shaky steps were gone and the humanoid robots were able to actually run and do standing

Similarweb Data: ChatGPT Ads Click-Through Rates

Similarweb published some data sharing the click-through rates for OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads. The overall CTR for ChatGPT ads are 0.68%, the top quartile is 1%, the best brands are 1.57% and the peak CTR is 5.4%.

Google Web Bot Auth: Validate Authentic Bots

Google posted new developer documentation for how to authenticate requests with Web Bot Auth. This is a “new cryptographic protocol that helps websites to validate that bots are authentic,” Google wrote.

Parents on Instagram, Facebook: Expect a big message from Meta

Amid the second phase of a high-profile child safety trial in New Mexico, Meta is announcing new measures designed to ensure teens on its platforms are subject to age-related protections. Meta announced in a blog post Tuesday that parents in the U.S. on two of its social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, will receive a notification with details about how to check and confirm their teens’ a

Product SEO: 8 Strategies That Drive Demand for B2B & SaaS

Product SEO is one of the highest-leveraged — and most overlooked — strategies in B2B and SaaS marketing. While most teams pour resources into top-of-funnel content, the pages that actually drive pipeline decisions, such as feature pages, comparison pages, and pricing pages, often go unoptimized and underperform. Fortunately, fixing that gap doesn’t require rebuilding your entire site. With the r

Unifying the search experience for real growth in 2026 by Level Agency

In February 2024, Gartner predicted that traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026. It didn’t. Google’s search revenue accelerated to 17% year-over-year growth, crossing $63 billion in Q4 2025 alone. But clicks per search are falling while query volume explodes. The pie got bigger. The slices got redistributed. And most search teams are still optimizing for the old pie. Are you still porin

Claude Code for Everyone: How to Get Started

Want to build your own custom AI tools and automations, but don’t have coding or developer experience? Curious how Claude Code can help? In this article, you’ll discover how to set up Claude Code from scratch and build your first automation today. Why Use Claude Code? The biggest misconception about AI coding tools is that […] T

The best year

Here’s an interesting thought experiment. Imagine that you would be reincarnated into the soul and body of someone on Earth, 25 years old, at random. You won’t know what you know now, you’ll simply live their life. What year would you choose? Since it’s random, it’s not about picking the best year to be among the wealthiest 1% (only a hundred-to-one chance) or even to be a US citizen (3% chance).

Why AI Search Skips Your Content (And How to Diagnose Where It’s Failing) via @sejournal, @jeffrey_coyle

This post was sponsored by Siteimprove. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. Why does my content get crawled but never cited in ChatGPT or Perplexity? How do I tell if my AI visibility problem is technical or content-quality related? What actually decides whether AI picks my page over a competitor’s? The gap between appearing in an AI answer and being retrieved by an AI s

DNSSEC: The Extra Security Layer That Can Break Your Padlock

Turning on DNSSEC makes your domain more secure — but if it’s misconfigured, newer certificate validation rules can stop SSL renewals in their tracks. Hey there, You know that satisfying click when you finally turn on DNSSEC? It feels like adding a shiny new deadbolt to your domain’s front door. You’re doing the responsible thing: locking down your DNS against spoofing and hijacks, and making the

Get Involved With WordCamp US 2026 in Phoenix

WordCamp US 2026 will take place August 16–19 in Phoenix, Arizona, and applications are now open for sponsors, speakers, and volunteers. WordCamp US is the flagship gathering for the WordPress community in North America, where contributors, builders, and users come together to share ideas and help shape what comes next for the open web. Full details are available on the WordCamp US 2026 site . Sp

Daily Search Forum Recap: May 4, 2026

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. Google explained how using AI in isolation works better for them…

Google fixes Search Console’s year-long data logging issue – well, kind of…

Google said it has “resolved” an issue with logging data within Google Search Console reporting. The logging issue happened between May 13, 2025 through April 27, 2026, about 50 weeks. The resolution did not fix the past data, but it did fix the issue going forward. What Google said. Here is what Google posted : “A logging error prevented Search Console from accurately reporting impressions from

Why brand authority beats topical authority in AI search

There’s a fundamental battle happening in search right now. On one side is topical authority — the darling phrase of every SEO consultant who needs to sell more content. On the other is brand authority — something marketers have talked about for decades, while much of search treated it as optional, vague, or something the brand team could handle after the sitemap was fixed. Now AI has walked into

Our Vision for Building an Open Ecosystem for the Agent Era

For years, HubSpot invested in making our platform the best place for marketing, sales, and service teams to do their work. With AI, we’ve been building it to do the work for them – through agents that qualify leads, resolve tickets, save deals, and drive outcomes across the business. That’s why we call HubSpot an agentic customer platform. But agents don’t click through dashboards or navigate in

7 tools for doing AEO right now

The other day, I was putting together my version of a Lumascape of answer engine optimization (AEO) tools — I’m kidding, my computer doesn’t have that kind of bandwidth. Instead of mapping every tool — which would be outdated in minutes — I’m focusing on the ones I actually use to grow clients’ AI search presence. This is a deliberately short list: four tools I rely on, plus three I’m testing bef

Google Search Console Fixed The 50 Week Data Logging Issue

A month ago, Google posted that between the dates of May 13, 2025 through April 27, 2026, just about 50 weeks, there was a “logging error prevented Search Console from accurately reporting impressions.” Google updated the post to now say “This issue has been resolved.”

Ask.com Shut Down After Almost 30 Years

IAC, the owners of Ask.com, have decided to get out of the search business and shut down one of the oldest and most legendary search engines of all time – Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves. IAC wrote, “As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com.”

Google Ads Adds Use AI To Add Products

Google Ads has added a new option (although, I think Google has said this is coming) under the “add product source” section where you can select how to add products to your Google Ads account. The option reads, “Use AI to add products – beta.”

Google On AI Overviews & AI Mode Being Isolated Systems (Or Not)

Nikola Todorovic, Director of Software Engineering at Google Search, spoke about a presentation he gave at Zurich in December at Google Search Central live (I was there). He dug into it on a recent Search Off the Record named How AI Is Changing Google Search and SEO. In there, he explained how AI and machine learning have been used in isolation within Google Search.

Why AI visibility starts before search and ends with citations

The conversation has shifted. We’re spending less time optimizing for clicks and more time trying to fix the AI ROI story. AI now sits at the center of discovery, shaping what gets seen, summarized, and cited. Here’s what’s working right now, what your peers are doing, and why SMX Advanced will feel different this year. The SparkToro wake-up call: Influence happens everywhere The foundation of an

Keyword clustering: How to create a strategy for topic authority in 2026

As a content writer with over 7 years of SEO experience, I can confidently say that keyword clustering is a critical technique—even in a world where the SEO landscape has changed significantly. Keyword clustering builds authority, boosts your business’s web presence, and helps you find your audience wherever they are in their buyer’s journey. But what is keyword clustering, and how does it work?

Contact Form 7 Freezes New Features – What WordPress Users Should Do Next

Since the early days of WordPress, Contact Form 7 has been helping website owners add simple forms to their sites. If you’ve trusted it on your own site, then you made a perfectly reasonable choice that millions of other site owners have made, too. But things have officially changed. At WordCamp Asia 2026, Contact Form 7 creator Takayuki Miyoshi confirmed on stage that the plugin will no longer r

Trained equanimity and a bias toward action

Pay attention to what’s in front of you. Don’t let fear contaminate your understanding of the situation. Act with commitment. Notice the gap between event and reaction. Embrace the resources that are available to you. Optimism is a belief about possible outcomes, but equanimity adds a bias toward action, regardless of what happens. There’s enough noise, don’t create more. Simply take right action

Unlimited or Dedicated Hosting? I co-founded WPMU DEV and here’s what I’m genuinely using them for…

As you can probably guess, we’ve been ‘staff testing’ the new Unlimited Hosting package behind the scenes for a while. Which has been useful (we deal with any bugs so you don’t have to) and also super interesting! But also, it means we’ve been using it for a while. So, given that, I’d like to share with you how I’ve been using Unlimited alongside Dedicated . Important vs. test / playground

Ask.com shuts down after over 25 years

Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, which launched 29 years ago on June 3, 1996, before Google launched, shut down on May 1, 2026. Ask.com now has a turn down page that reads: Every great search must come to an end. As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world’s questions, Ask.com offic

Just like me, but…

The actor, artist, mathematician, pianist, speaker, leader, tech nerd: Just like me, but talented. I’m not so sure. It might be more accurate to say “just like me, but dedicated.” The first approach lets us off the hook. The second approach opens the door to possibility.

Nostalgia can be fatal

For hundreds of years, nostalgia was seen as a serious disease, with doctors across Europe scrambling for a cure. Hundreds of thousands of people died from it. In the original understanding of the term, it was a sort of homesickness. Soldiers from Switzerland were the first to get the official diagnosis–separated from their friends, family and homes, these young men would suffer from melancholy a

LinkedIn Articles: What Sets Them Apart & How to Write Them

Key Takeaways: LinkedIn articles are long-form content published natively on LinkedIn. They live on your profile, get indexed by Google, and surface in LinkedIn search results long after you publish them. Feed posts drive reach. Articles build the kind of credibility that makes someone want to hire you, work with you, or trust your expertise. The strongest use case for articles is distribution,

Friendster has returned! But you can only connect with offline friends.

Do you remember Friendster ? The early-2000s social networking platform has now returned roughly 24 years later with a whole new gimmick: Users can only connect with real-life friends. The founder of the new Friendster, Mike Carson, is promoting the relaunched social media platform as being free of any ads and algorithms. But, that’s not all that’s missing either. Friend currently exists as an iO

Microsoft Ads adds deeper reporting to Performance Max placements

Microsoft Advertising is expanding its Performance Max reporting with publisher-level conversion and spend data — giving advertisers more visibility into where results are actually coming from What’s happening . According to Microsoft Ads Product liaison Navah Hopkins, the PMax Website Publisher URL report now includes conversion and spend metrics, moving beyond basic placement visibility into ac

Google Ads API v20 sunset set for June 10

Google is enforcing a hard cutoff for older API versions, meaning advertisers and developers who don’t upgrade risk losing access to critical campaign management tools. What’s happening. Google Ads API v20 will officially sunset on June 10, 2026. From that date onward, all requests to v20 will fail, requiring migration to a newer version to maintain uninterrupted API access. Why we care. If you r

AEO prompt tracking for marketing teams

You already track and analyze your SEO strategy — keyword rankings, organic traffic, SERP positions. But when a prospect asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews a buying question and your brand doesn’t appear in the answer, traditional rank tracking can’t tell you that. AEO prompt tracking helps you measure brand visibility within AI-generated answers by monitoring whether (and how) your

How to build SEO agent skills that actually work

I’ve built 10+ SEO agent skills in 34 days. Six worked on the first try. The other four taught me everything I’m about to show you about the folder structure most LinkedIn posts about AI SEO skills gloss over. What makes these agents reliable isn’t better prompts. It’s the architecture behind them. Here’s how to build an agent from scratch, test it, fix it, and ship it with confidence. Why most A

Google Search May Be Deindexing URLs At Higher Rates

SEOs and site owners are always complaining about indexing issues with Google Search. Why is this page not indexed, why is that page not indexed. But some seasoned SEOs are asking if Google is more picky about what it indexes in the past month or so, than it was maybe a year ago.

Google Discover With New You Asked To See Label

Google is showing a new label on the Discover feed that says “You asked to see.” This label is added to items in your feed that are customized based on the Tailor Your Feed feature.

April & May 2026 Google Webmaster Report

I missed last month’s Google Webmaster Report, so I am combining both April and May into one big report. Google completed rolling out the March 2026 spam update in March, and started the March core update, which completed in April. We also had a lot of other ranking volatility throughout.

A blueprint for semantic programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO (pSEO) has been viewed with suspicion by the market. For many SEOs, the term is synonymous with low-quality pages, duplicate content, and the old tactic of “find and replace” city names in static templates. Google’s spam policies on scaled content abuse are clear: generating vast amounts of unoriginal content primarily to manipulate search rankings is a violation. Modern pSEO rep

Inside ChatGPT ads: What the data tells us and what’s coming next by Adthena

The trial is live, limited to the U.S. for now, and moving faster than you likely expected. ChatGPT ads launched Feb. 9 for logged-in users on Free and Go tiers, with 600+ advertisers already in. With 800 million weekly active users, a global rollout of ChatGPT ads is a matter of when, not if. OpenAI has confirmed the next expansion to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The latest update from Ad

“The most exciting mobile trend is full Qwerty keyboards”

The creators of the Blackberry were sure that customers loved the keyboard. That’s what they heard all day from their users, and it must have been right since they had a huge share of the mobile phone market. When the iPhone came out, it wasn’t seen as a threat because it had no keyboard. Blackberry was in the keyboard business, the iPhone sold something else. We make this mistake more often than

Vulnerability & Patch Roundup — April 2026

Vulnerability reports and responsible disclosures are essential for website security awareness and education. Automated attacks targeting known software vulnerabilities are one of the leading causes of website compromises. To help educate website owners about potential threats to their environments, we’ve compiled a list of important security updates and vulnerability patches for the WordPress ec

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]]> Valuable Tips to Help Your Social Marketing 453 – Interesting Articles This Week https://xtremefreelance.com/valuable-tips-to-help-your-social-marketing-453-interesting-articles-this-week/ Thu, 30 Apr 2026 12:58:48 +0000 https://xtremefreelance.com/?p=24483 Valuable Tips | Interesting Articles This Week

15 Competitor Monitoring Tools Teams Actually Use (2026)

Your competitors are adjusting pricing, launching new ad creative, publishing content that outranks yours, and showing up in AI answers you didn’t know existed — often all in the same week. Competitor monitoring tools exist to catch those moves early, but most teams end up with fragmented data scattered across platforms, and by the time they’ve pieced it together, the window to respond has closed

LinkedIn expands Event Ads beyond its own platform

LinkedIn is rolling out Off-Platform Event Ads, giving marketers a new way to promote events without needing a native LinkedIn Event Page. What’s happening . The new format allows advertisers to run Event Ads that link directly to external destinations — such as webinar platforms, landing pages or livestream sites — instead of keeping traffic on LinkedIn. This marks a shift from platform-containe

Foreign LLC vs Subsidiary: Which Is Better?

Expanding your business into another state forces a decision most founders don’t think about until it’s too late: Should you register your existing LLC as a foreign entity—or create a brand-new subsidiary? On the surface, both options let you operate in another state. But structurally, legally, and financially—they’re very different. […] The post appeared first on .

The framing gap: Why AI can’t position your brand

Every brand holds its claims, and somewhere in the archive of its digital life, there’s proof to back them up. The AI assistive engine (the systems behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews) holds that proof too, scattered across its training data and retrieval index, alongside competitors’ claims. The audience has a need but no vocabulary to bridge the gap between what they want and wh

SEO isn’t just about being seen — it’s about being believed and chosen

Wil Reynolds, founder and CEO of Seer Interactive, is challenging SEOs to rethink what success looks like in a world increasingly shaped by AI. In his SEO Week session, “SEO is a performance channel, GEO isn’t. How do you pivot?”, Reynolds said many marketers are focused on the wrong outcomes — and producing work that people don’t believe. Marketing isn’t just about being seen Reynolds opened by

Why more content is no longer a reliable way to grow SEO

One of the most dependable ways to grow organic visibility was to publish more content. Expanding into the long tail and creating pages around different variations of a topic often led to steady traffic growth. Many SEO teams still operate with this mindset. Content calendars are built around search volume targets, and growth is often equated with how much new content is produced. The problem is

How we Operate as an AI-first Company

This is part three of a three-part series on how HubSpot transformed with AI. Part one covers how we build with AI. Part two covers how we grow with Agent-first GTM. Building the right engineering platform and rebuilding your go-to-market motion are meaningless if the organization running them isn’t ready. That’s the part most transformation playbooks skip. It’s also the part that determines whet

How we Grow with Agent-first GTM

This is part two of a three-part series on how HubSpot transformed with AI. Part one covers how we build with AI. Part three is how we operate as an AI-first company. Over the past three years, we have systematically rebuilt how we attract, engage, and delight customers by creating a new go-to-market model. With AI, we have added hundreds of thousands of companies to our total addressable market,

How we Build with AI

This is part one of a three-part series on how HubSpot transformed with AI. Part two covers how we grow with Agent-first GTM. Part three is how we operate as an AI-first company. Everything we build at HubSpot exists to help our customers grow. So when generative AI emerged, our engineering team didn’t just see a productivity tool; we saw an opportunity to build better products and get more value

How to measure paid social’s impact on PPC

If your paid social campaigns aren’t converting, you may be undervaluing their impact. Your brand’s exposure on social media can influence other parts of your marketing that platform metrics don’t capture. Here’s how to design and measure a test to understand how paid social influences your other marketing channels, including PPC . Step 1: Determine your hypothesis Start with what you want to lea

YouTube testing new search experience, Ask YouTube

Google announced they are testing a new “conversational search experience to complement how you already search on YouTube.” It is called “Ask YouTube” and it lets you “dive deeper into the topics you’re curious about in a more interactive way,” Dave from YouTube wrote . What it looks like. Here is a GIF of it in action: How can I try it. If you want to try it out, you can go to youtube.com/new an

What Ongoing Documents Does an LLC Need Every Year?

Starting an LLC is the easy part. Staying compliant year after year? That’s where most business owners mess up. Miss a filing, forget a document, or ignore a deadline—and your LLC can fall out of good standing, rack up penalties, or even get suspended. The tricky part is that there’s […] The post appeared first on .

Bing Webmaster Tools New AI Reporting Features

Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft Bing demo’ed some new AI reporting features that should launch within Bing Webmaster Tools soon. They include citation share, grounding query intent, semantic topic label, and GEO-focused recommendations.

Google Sends Warning Notices On Back Button Hijacking Spam Penalty

As you know, Google announced a new search spam penalty for back button hijacking. Site owners have until June 15, 2026 to remove any such functionality from its site or it will be subject to a manual action and/or automated algorithmic adjustment. Now, Google is sending email notifications through Search Console as reminders.

Google Showing How Many Reviews Were Deleted

Google is now showing the number of reviews that were deleted on a specific Google Business Profile due to defamation complaints. This seems to be live in Germany and not other countries right now.

Google Search Ranking Volatility Heating Up April 27th & 28th

I am seeing new signs of the Google search ranking volatility heating up. When I reported on it last week, the tools began to show volatility trend upwards. But now, while some of the tools are calm, the chatter within the forums has spiked over the past 24 hours or so.

Google Shopping Ads Tests Pricing In Superscript

Google is testing using a superscript font for the cents portion of the pricing in the Shopping Ads. So when you see a price for a product and it is listed for $99.99, the 99 cents is in superscript.

New to PPC? 7 tips to build skills and confidence fast

Understanding the ins and outs of paid media can seem like an overwhelming process when you’re first entering the field. As AI has rapidly changed ad platforms in recent years, keeping up can feel challenging. Thankfully, you’re not alone. You’re part of a supportive industry with a wealth of content and knowledge to share. Here are seven tips to help you learn and become a more confident PPC man

6 top answer engine optimization benefits for growth and enterprise marketers

The AEO benefits that matter most to marketing leaders have shifted from theoretical to measurable. As AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity handle a growing share of how buyers discover brands, the rise of AI-powered search results increases brand visibility; the teams investing now are seeing real returns in conversion quality, pipeline influence, and long-

Where PPC and SEO teams lose control in branded search by Bluepear

Branded search is often treated as predictable and easy to manage. In practice, it isn’t. PPC teams see rising CPC on brand terms. SEO teams see declining branded CTR, even when rankings hold. These issues are usually investigated separately, with different dashboards, hypotheses, and fixes. Both signals often stem from changes within a single SERP. What look like two separate problems are, in re

New data: 77% use AI to shop. Nearly 1 in 3 won’t let it spend.

Editor’s note: This research was conducted by Exploding Topics , the trend discovery platform owned by Semrush, and is republished here with permission. Data is drawn from a proprietary survey of 1,009 US consumers. Full methodology appears at the end of this article . More than three in four consumers have used AI to help with shopping or purchasing decisions in the last six months, according to

Intro to Claude Cowork: How to Get Started

Looking for a way to get actual work done with AI, not just chat with it? Tired of micromanaging every step of an AI conversation only to hit context limits before you finish? In this article, you’ll discover how to start using Claude Cowork to manage your files, automate tasks, connect your tools, and build […] The post appeared first on Social Media Examiner .

Puddles

When there is motion, it creates an impact of the environment. First, the path is barely noticeable. But then, others see the hint of a path and walk on it, making it more clear. Finally, the path becomes the route. Sometimes there’s a small rut. But a rut shifts gravity and wheels or feet land in the rut, making it deeper. This is how moguls appear on ski hills as well. When it rains, the paths

Seeing everyone play Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is giving me serious FOMO

I’ve never been a Nintendo person. And yet, I’ve never been this completely captured by one of its games until the company’s latest release, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream . My rapturous attention to it is equal parts FOMO and genuine amazement at the unhinged ways people are playing this game. It’s taken over my timeline and is slowly dismantling my will to resist buying a Switch. For context,

How to Register a Foreign LLC (Step-by-Step Guide)

Expanding your business into another state sounds simple—until you realize your LLC isn’t legally allowed to operate there. This is where most business owners get caught off guard. You already have an LLC. You’re generating revenue. Maybe you’re hiring employees or opening a second location. But legally, your business only […] The post appeared first on .

How to Integrate PR & SEO for Maximum Brand Visibility

Unlock higher brand visibility, more topical authority, and increased discoverability with a unified PR and SEO strategy. Learn how to break down silos, align your goals, and maximize your brand reach with practical tips.

How to Turn Webinars Into Your Best Lead Gen Channel in 5 Phases via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

A few weeks ago, we sat down with marketers running webinar programs at agencies and in-house teams, all B2B. We asked them what was working, what wasn’t, and where they felt stuck. Three pain points came up in nearly every conversation: “Webinars are a heavy lift with little proven ROI.” “We’re not generating enough qualified leads.” “Without clear attribution, leadership isn’t seeing the value

Ginny Marvin on AI in search, PPC trends, and Google Ads evolution

Watch this video on YouTube Ginny Marvin didn’t get into PPC because she had a grand plan. She got into it because she was ready to start again. After years working in print publishing and ad sales marketing, Marvin found herself at a career pivot point. A startup magazine she had helped launch folded, and she decided it was time to move fully into digital. That meant going from marketing

AI visibility score: How to summarize your AI visibility

Your brand’s AI visibility score covers the part of the search landscape that traditional SEO rank tracking can’t see. Tracking it is becoming as essential as monitoring Google rankings — and a lot harder to pin down. An AI visibility score summarizes how often and how well a brand appears in AI-generated responses across platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, aggregating metrics such as

Pete Bowen talks about why Google Ads is not just about clicks

Watch this video on YouTube On PPC Live The Podcast, I spoke with Peter Bowen, a Google Ads specialist with nearly 20 years of experience and a strong focus on B2B lead generation. Pete shared two major lessons from his career: always check the basics, and never assume the systems around your ads are working just because the campaigns look fine. The currency mistake that cost 10 times the budget

Adthena launches Google Ads-to-ChatGPT conversion tool

As ad dollars begin shifting toward ChatGPT, ad tech firms have started working to make that transition as seamless as possible. What’s happening . Adthena launched a new tool, AdBridge, designed to convert existing Google Ads campaigns into formats ready for ChatGPT advertising. The pitch is simple: don’t rebuild from scratch — repurpose what already works. The tool analyzes advertisers’ search

How to Optimize Content for ChatGPT: An AI Discovery Guide

A lot is going on in search today. Google still reigns supreme, but the competition and evolution coming from AI alternatives have many marketers wondering how to optimize for ChatGPT. When someone opens ChatGPT and asks a question, they don’t get ten blue links. They get a synthesized, conclusive answer that’s pulled from sources the AI has decided are authoritative, structured, and trustworthy.

Bing Webmaster Tools teases new AI reporting updates

Microsoft teased new AI reporting features within Bing Webmaster Tools that enhance the AI performance reports and other reports around AI. The new features that were showcased include citation share, grounding query intent, GEO-focused recommendations. More details. Several shared screenshots of this presentation that was given by Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft at SEO Week today in New York Cit

7 lessons from moving from agency to in-house SEO

If you’re reading this, you’re likely an SEO aficionado like me. I’m a seasoned SEO with 10+ years of agency experience. Being on the agency side gave me deep SEO expertise, exposure to top industry talent, and experience working with some of the world’s most well-known brands. I did a bit of everything on the agency side — from technical SEO to content marketing to new business. Working at an ag

What is Thundr? Omegles replacement, warts and all.

Omegle is in the ground, and Thundr is dancing on its grave. Since Omegle’s demise in late 2023, the internet has been introduced to a number of Omegle alternatives, from the tame to the explicit. Thundr is a random video and text chat service that’s emulating Omegle the most in 2026. Think of it as Omegle with actual guardrails, offering far more ways to get your exact match through tags, countr

What are you optimizing for in paid search when keywords matter less?

Paid search platforms are getting better at deciding who should see your ads, often without relying on the keywords you choose. As that shift accelerates, optimization is moving away from query-level control and toward signals like audience data, landing page context, and conversion behavior. Understanding that change is key to knowing what to actually optimize for now. When keywords gave us cont

How to Reinstate a Suspended LLC (Step-by-Step)

Your LLC was active… until it wasn’t. No warning, no dramatic moment—just a notice from the state saying your business is “suspended,” “revoked,” or “not in good standing.” This happens more often than most people realize. And the worst part? Many business owners don’t even know it’s happened until something […] The post appeared first on .

Do You Need a Registered Agent? (And What They Actually Do)

Most people rush through the business formation process and click whatever gets them to the finish line fastest. That’s exactly how they end up choosing the wrong registered agent—or worse, naming themselves without understanding what they’re signing up for. And that one decision can come back to bite you. Miss […] The post appeared first on .

Cultural SEO: A practical framework for Spanish markets in AI search

AI systems are getting better at generating Spanish. They’re not getting better at understanding Spanish markets. What we’re seeing instead is a consistent pattern: more than 20 Spanish-speaking countries collapsed into a single default . Spain becomes “standard.” Mexico becomes interchangeable. The rest get flattened into statistical averages. The failure modes are structural — dialect defaultin

Why Your WordPress Site Lost Traffic (And How to Get It Back)

Logging into your analytics to find a sudden drop in website traffic is incredibly frustrating. Your first thought is usually, “Did I break something, or did Google penalize my site?” At WPBeginner, we have managed high-traffic websites since 2009. We have seen just about every reason for a traffic dip, from major search engine updates to minor technical settings that accidentally block search bo

Bing Tests Less Clickable Links In Copilot Search Results

Microsoft Bing is testing making the links within the AI results, the Copilot Search results, less clickable. Typically, the whole line of text is clickable to the citation but here, Bing is testing only linking the citation mark at the end.

Google Tests AI Label On Search Ads

Google is testing adding an AI label to some of the search ads, the sponsored results, within the search results. Clicking on the AI label does nothing, according to Brodie Clark who spotted this.

Google Maps Video Editing Within Google App

Google now lets you edit videos within your Google Business Profiles, directly in the Google app. There are basic editing tools, probably more than most businesses require, to update and edit the videos that they want to show in Google Maps and Google Search.

Customers want personalized marketing. Why can’t most brands deliver? by Adobe

Think about the last time you binged those true crime documentaries. The next time you opened your streaming app, the homepage likely shifted. Investigative series rose to the top. Maybe a notification alerted you when a new series dropped. Promotional emails highlighted only what you hadn’t watched. You didn’t see the data parsing or the decisioning behind it. You just looked forward to enjoying

Warm pistachios

In terms of cost, serving a small ramekin of toasted pistachio nuts is a tiny portion of what an airline spends in transporting someone first class. In fact, it’s such a relatively small expense that it’s easy to simply avoid it. Send the money to the bottom line and focus on the parts that are actually worth paying for. Gratuitous bonuses send signals. They tell the customer that you have the re

DEV: Ship Happens

WPMU DEV Blog / 1d
Welcome to DEV, your fortnightly roundup of WordPress news, tools, and ideas worth putting to work. The web keeps evolving. So do the bugs. We’re here to help you keep up. Stick around to the end to find out: if you fall out of a plane… where should you aim? In today’s edition: All your (data)base are belong to us: why WordPress 7.0 is delayed. WCEU schedule dropped and, like a pierogi, i

Bad money…

The expression “bad money crowds out the good” refers to Gresham’s Law. It means that once lesser-quality and counterfeit currency begins to be traded, people hoard the good stuff and only trade the poor substitutes. Social media platforms fall into a trap like this when they seek to grow. For example, at the beginning, Substack had a very high signal to noise ratio–plenty of good ideas and so re

What is DirtyRoulette? Exactly what it sounds like.

In a post-Omegle world , there are many one-on-one cam sites to consider. Thundr, OmeTV, Uhmegle — but none of these scratch the itch that a lot of users went to Omegle for: online sex. While most of these sites do have a large community of people utilizing them to bust a nut on the internet, they aren’t marketed for that. DirtyRoulette is. After its launch in 2010, DirtyRoulette quickly became a

Breathwork

[Off topic, but I hope it might be useful] Mindfulness can improve your life. So can stillness and spiritual grounding. This is not a post about that. Breathing is an architectural challenge and a chemical necessity. We breathe about 20 pounds of air a day (and if you’ve ever tried to weigh air, you can imagine that this is quite a bit.) Why bother? The body is fueled by a series of chemical reac

My Website Is Hosting a Phishing Page – Now What?

Most phishing advice is written for the person staring at a suspicious email. This guide is for the other kind of victim: The website owner whose legitimate site has been quietly turned into the attacker’s weapon. You didn’t send the message or build the fake login page. You just woke up to a browser warning, a suspended hosting account, or a polite note from someone’s security team asking why

Google AI Overviews CTR shows early signs of recovery: Study

After bottoming out at 1.3% in December 2025, the click-through rate (CTR) on Google’s AI Overviews climbed to 2.4% in February 2026. That’s an 85% jump in two months, according to new data from Seer Interactive. What moves CTR. When an AI Overview appears, pages cited in it get more clicks than pages on that same results page that aren’t cited. But both still get fewer clicks than searches with

Google Ads Demand Gen campaigns hit by review delays

Some advertisers say ad reviews are taking more than seven days — far beyond normal timelines. What’s happening . Matthew Skelton, a senior PPC specialist, has flagged a pattern many advertisers are now recognizing: Demand Gen campaigns stuck in “in review” status for days at a time. The delays are showing up across multiple accounts and industries, with no obvious policy violations or warnings t

AI citation tracking: How to track (and grow) AI engine citations

AI search engine citation tracking helps measure brand visibility and authority in AI-powered search results. As AI-powered search experiences reshape how people discover information, evaluate vendors, and build shortlists, visibility inside AI answers is no longer a vanity metric. If AI engines aren’t citing your brand, you’re missing influence at the exact moment buyers are forming opinions. Ac

How to structure AI-driven SEO: 3 frameworks that drive execution

About a year ago, I came out of a meeting with engineers about improving automations for content briefs. A few days later, someone on the analytics team — unrelated to those conversations — pinged me that they’d built a content brief generator using various data pipelines and APIs. That’s when I realized “getting people to use AI” isn’t the hard part. Implementation and integration are. Most SEO

Daily Search Forum Recap: April 24, 2026

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. Google now won’t use spam reports with personal identifiable information. Google’s head of search…

Automate the busywork: 8 SEO tasks you shouldn’t do manually

Take a look at your SEO to-do list. Most of it is probably the same rote, repetitive tasks. Turning everyday work into faster, easier outputs is easier than ever with AI. Besides obvious tasks like note-taking and team reminders, you can automate tasks such as content audits, page outlines, and keyword research. Start with simple strategies to save time on the repetitive work you do every day, th

Why GEO is a reputation problem

There’s a common misconception that GEO is a technical problem. Just scroll through LinkedIn or X for 30 seconds, and you’ll find the next viral GEO hack. Like “create an AI info page” so LLMs can easily understand your brand. Maybe “create markdown versions of your content” to skyrocket AI visibility. Perhaps “get an automated Claude audit” that scans your robots.txt and automatically generates

Google To Fix AI Mode Bug Where It Changes Title Links

Google is working to fix a bug in AI Mode where it is changing the title links and citations. This bug was spotted by Lily Ray who wrote on X, “Google is changing title links / citations in AI Mode – just the name of the person, with a link to the place they were mentioned.”

New: Google Won’t Use Spam Reports With Personally Identifying Information

A couple of weeks ago, Google stunned many by saying that they updated their spam report to pass along all information to the site that you enter in the spam report. There was a lot of backlash to that and Google reverted, now saying if there is personally identifying information, it won’t process the spam report at all.

Google spam reports with personally identifying information won’t be used and processed

Google updated its spam report page for the second time in the past week or so, this time to say that if you include personally identifying information, the spam report will not be processed or used. This comes just a week after Google said that information would be used and passed along to the reported site. What changed. Google posted on its spam report page a new highlight box which says two p

The bureaucracy tax: How disruptors are winning AI search visibility

Whether you lead a scaling brand or an established global enterprise, you already know the frustration. You’re watching massive digital budgets yield diminishing returns, while agile disruptors consistently beat you to the punch. When you audit the citations within AI Overviews, ChatGPT responses, and Claude summaries, the reality is stark. Smaller, faster competitors are claiming more of the mos

Google Testing Audio Overviews In The Wild (Not Just In Labs)

About a year ago, Google announced you can opt in, within Search Labs, to see Audio Overviews within the Google Search results. But now, I saw two different people say they saw it without opting into the experiment. So Google may be testing this in the wild.

Google Business Profiles Sorts Photos By Most Recent

Google Business Profiles lets you upload photos of your business to your Business Profile. Those photos can be viewed on Google Search and Google Maps. And now, these photos are reportedly sorted by most recently uploaded.

How to Sell on ChatGPT with WooCommerce (Agentic Guide)

If you run a WooCommerce store, then you’ve probably heard that ChatGPT now lets users shop for products directly inside the chat interface. A user asks something like “I need a blue yoga mat under $40” and ChatGPT responds with actual products from registered merchants, complete with prices and stock availability. It is a brand new sales channel but most WooCommerce store owners have no idea how

Courage vs. excuses

There are more available excuses now than ever before. In just two letters, “AI” is a simple, brand-new, all-purpose excuse for laying people off, averaging things down, closing things up and generally finding an easier/quicker path. Courage, on the other hand, is the commitment to take risks and work hard to make something better than most people think it needs to be. Example: Open Source softwa

WordPress DDoS Protection: How to Keep Your Site Online

WordPress powers over 40% of the web, which makes it one of the most attractive targets for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. If your site goes down for an hour, you lose revenue, search rankings, and visitor trust. If it goes down repeatedly, you lose much more. A DDoS attack floods your website with fake traffic until it slows to a crawl or crashes entirely. Unlike hacks that steal

AI concept art

Interesting Articles This Week

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]]> Valuable Tips to Help Your Social Marketing 452 – Interesting Articles This Week https://xtremefreelance.com/valuable-tips-to-help-your-social-marketing-452-interesting-articles-this-week/ Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:08:55 +0000 https://xtremefreelance.com/?p=24474 Valuable Tips | Interesting Articles This Week

Why Instagram was turning some users photos black and white

Have your Instagram posts been turning black and white without your consent? You’re not alone. According to Engadget , some users on Facebook and presumably elsewhere (though I wasn’t able to find a lot of complaints on X) have complained that photos uploaded to the Instagram app in color were being automatically and unintentionally turned black and white at some point in the uploading process. I

The funnel flip: Why AI forces a bottom-up acquisition strategy

The industry has been building top-down for 30 years. Start with awareness, get in front of as many people as possible, and work them down through the acquisition funnel. The logic made sense in the broadcast era, and it wasn’t entirely wrong in the search era. In AI-driven environments, it’s simply wrong. Search engines, assistive engines, and agents build their ability to recommend your brand f

Google rolls out new AI safety features in Ads Advisor

Google is adding three new “agentic” safety features to Ads Advisor, its AI assistant inside Google Ads, aimed at reducing manual work while tightening security and compliance. As campaigns grow more complex, advertisers are spending more time fixing policy issues, managing access, and handling certifications. Google’s pitch: let AI handle the heavy lifting so marketers can focus on performance.

Daily Search Forum Recap: April 21, 2026

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. Google says when it comes to SEO…

How to build a YouTube analytics report in Data Studio

Creating video content takes time and budget, so understanding how it performs is critical. YouTube ’s native analytics in YouTube Studio are robust, but they’re locked behind account access. That can make reporting difficult — especially when you need to share data or don’t have direct login access. Moving that data into Google Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio) makes it easier to analyze and

Why IBM says every brand now needs a GEO playbook

Search has changed, and brands need to catch up fast, according to IBM’s Alexis Zamkow (global lead of Marketing Transformation solutions) and Sandhya Ranganathan Iyer (associate partner – AI), speaking yesterday at Adobe Summit. AI tools don’t just help people search. They answer questions, compare products, and recommend brands. In many cases, users never even visit a website. That means if you

The future of generative engine optimization: How 5 GEO trends reshape loop and inbound marketing

GEO has found its place in the search landscape, and it’s reasonable to think that the future of generative engine optimization is guaranteed. According to Datos’s State of Search report , Q4-2025 saw some interesting changes. For the first time, AI tools had a consistent 1.31% to 1.34% of visits in the U.S. In previous quarters and reports, traffic to AI tools was growing. This stability in traf

SEO reporting outgrew Data Studio — here’s what comes next

Picture this: Your company relies on Data Studio for SEO reporting. It’s right before your next big meeting when you’re planning to present results… but Data Studio has an outage (again) and suddenly you have nothing to show. That’s embarrassing. And it happens more than it should. It wasn’t even a year ago that I touted the benefits of Looker Studio (now Data Studio) for SEO reporting . Now the

Microsoft launches AI Max and new ad tools for the “agentic web” era

Microsoft is rolling out a suite of updates across Microsoft Advertising to help brands stay visible — not just to people, but to AI agents increasingly making decisions on their behalf. What’s new . The update spans measurement, commerce, and media, with new tools designed to help advertisers show up in AI-driven experiences and transactions. On the ads side . Microsoft is introducing AI Max for

Google: When It Comes To SEO, Nobody Knows Everything

Google’s John Mueller said the other day that “SEO is not belief-based, nobody knows everything, and it changes over time.” Super true, I’ve been covering SEO changes over the years and I spot this all the time.

Google Documents Read More Snippet Links Best Practices

Several months after Google launched the Read more links within the Google search results snippets, Google decided to post some best practices how Read more links work. These should help you encourage Google to show the read more links and thus help increase click-through rates from Google Search.

How to measure Demand Gen creative impact with asset uplift tests

Demand Gen campaigns have high visibility across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. However, they pose a key challenge: the “attribution illusion.” You’ll often question whether reported conversions in the platform are truly incremental or if these users would’ve converted through search either way. That’s why in November, Google launched asset uplift experiments , giving you the ability to measure th

groas introduces a fully autonomous approach to Google Ads management by groas

For 20 years, Google Ads management has followed the same basic model: you log in, review performance, make changes, and hope they work before the next check-in. Agencies, freelancers, and in-house teams all work this way, even as the tools have changed. Spreadsheets gave way to scripts, and scripts gave way to automated bidding, but the core loop never changed — someone still had to sit in the a

Yelp launches AI-powered Assistant to streamline local search and bookings

Yelp is rolling out its most significant AI update yet, centered on a new conversational “Yelp Assistant” designed to move users from searching to actually booking, ordering, and scheduling — all in one flow. What’s new . Yelp Assistant sits at the center of the update, acting as a chatbot that can answer complex queries, recommend businesses, and complete actions like reservations or appointment

Getting Started With OpenClaw: Step-by-Step to Your First Bot

Are you ready to start building AI agents for yourself, but worried the process is too technical? What if the power to build a custom AI workforce was already in your hands, no coding required? In this article, you’ll discover what OpenClaw is, what it can do for marketers and business owners, and how to […] The post appeared first on Social Media Examiner .

DEV: The Dark Mode Rises

Welcome to DEV, your fortnightly roundup of WordPress news, clever builds, and the humans (for now) behind it all. Things are changing fast. We’re here to try to keep up… and help you stay in the loop. Stick around to the end to see the cutest unboxing video of all time. In today’s edition: WordPress hands AI the keys. (Don’t worry, it asked first.) Meanwhile in Opposite Land, EmDash is the one o

The right sort of friction

If we remove impediments that are in the way of where our customers seek to go, they support us. But when we remove the friction that gives people traction on their journey, they flounder. Remove the hassles that people don’t care about, but celebrate the hassles that make it worth the effort.

YouTube & Discover political ad rules updated

Google updated its YouTube and Discover Feed ad requirements as of April 2026 to clarify how election-related ads are handled, without changing how the rules are enforced. Why it matters . Advertisers using YouTube and Discover placements already operate under tight guidelines, and election ads have historically been a gray area. This update is meant to remove confusion rather than introduce new

Google tests video ads in local search results

Google is experimenting with video ads inside the local pack, signaling a shift toward more immersive, visual formats in location-based search. Driving the news . The test was spotted by Anthony Higman, who shared that Google is integrating “immersive map view videos” into PPC ads tied to local results. These video ads appear within the local pack — the map-based listings that show businesses nea

The digital PR duplication method: Rinse, reuse, repeat

Every digital PR (DPR) team’s been there: New data drops and the team huddles while someone stares at a blank Google doc spiraling over angles and journalist targets. Eventually, a pitch limps out the door just in time to hit “Send” before end of day. The pitch then lands in a top-tier publication, everyone celebrates, and the next month the whole team does the exact same thing over again, like i

Utility news content: How to win beyond clicks in AI search

In 2026, news SEO content performance isn’t just defined by page views and clicks — brand awareness is taking center stage. With the emergence of multimodal search , digital editorial strategy is no longer just about the first page of Google. You have to meet readers anywhere and everywhere they consume content. Amid this industry shift, AI platforms are an increasingly important traffic source f

Google adds Read more links best practices

Back in December, Google began showing read more links on some of the search result snippets within Google Search. Today, Google published new documentation around best practices on how to show Read more links in the Google search results. The best practices. The new documentation was posted over here in the snippets section and it lists three best practices: Make sure content is immediately visi

Rand Fishkin: Zero-click search began long before AI

Watch this video on YouTube Rand Fishkin didn’t get into SEO because he saw the future. He got into it because he had no choice. In the early 2000s, Fishkin helped run a small web business with his mom in Seattle. They hired another company to do SEO until they couldn’t afford to pay them anymore. That moment pushed him into search marketing. More than 20 years later, Fishkin has become one of th

Is Google Ads Asset Studio a game changer? Not so fast

If you know anything about Google Ads Asset Studio , you’ve heard the hype: “Google just killed every excuse for not running video ads.” “Total game changer! You don’t need a production budget anymore.” “Upload a few product images and get campaign-ready video in minutes.” From Google Ads > Tools > Asset Studio , you can build, manage, and scale images and videos across ad formats. The recent add

How to use the three-act structure for data storytelling

You’ve audited your client’s website and compiled performance data. You’ve identified what’s working, what can be improved, and your recommendations for future strategies. But how do you turn that data into a presentation that’s easy to explain and builds trust? Start with stories. Storytelling isn’t just for entertainment. It’s how people make sense of information. That’s what makes it so effect

Can Google Handle Domains With One Letter Difference? Usually

A Reddit thread asks if there are any issues with Google Search handling a domain name that has a single letter change in the domain name from another domain name. John Mueller from Google said that usually this is not a problem from Google Search.

How to Build a Product Quiz in WordPress That Recommends & Converts

Your store might have exactly what a visitor needs. But if they can’t find it easily, then they’ll leave without buying. A product quiz fixes that by asking a few short questions, returning a tailored recommendation, and capturing their email address in the same step. It’s one of the easiest ways to make product recommendations feel more personal. Plus, quizzes are interactive and fun to take, wh

Is your AI readiness a mirage? by AtData

AI has quickly become the most overconfident line item in the modern marketing roadmap. Budgets are shifting. Teams are being restructured. Vendors are being evaluated almost exclusively through the lens of how “AI-powered” they appear. There is a growing assumption that once the right models are in place, performance will follow. Better targeting. Smarter segmentation. Higher conversion. More ef

Is it sciatica?

Sometimes, back pain is felt in the thighs or even the ankles. But treating the part that hurts does nothing to address the real problem. Most business challenges have a similar pattern–it might feel like the problem is your customer’s attitude or how busy a location is–but it’s probably a different problem, something more systemic, well-concealed and highly leveraged. Find the system and you’re

The Petrillo complications

80 years ago, the most important person in the music business was James Petrillo. It’s difficult to imagine the head of the musician’s union on the cover of Time magazine, but there he was. Petrillo saw how technology was changing an industry and pushed for changes in the flow of credit and royalties. The story of how recorded music, movies and then streaming turned into a mess is illustrative

The book of concern

“Wait a second.” That’s difficult advice. In a world that moves faster with each cycle, where urgencies are prioritized and last-minute saves are celebrated, it’s not always welcome advice. And so we’ve ended up concerned. Fretting. Worried. Looking for the next thing to drop everything for. is more than a conceptual hack. It’s an actual physical intervention, and it might be worth trying for a

AI & Search Whiteboard Friday Rollup

Did you know there is only a 12% overlap between organic and AI search rankings? Navigate the shift to AI search with these fundamental episodes of Whiteboard Friday from industry experts. Learn about query fan-outs, AI citations, and how to build content workflows that preserve your voice.

Advertisers are testing ChatGPT ads — but uncertainty remains high

OpenAI is emerging as a new advertising channel, but early advertiser sentiment is mixed as brands grapple with limited data, unclear performance, and a rapidly evolving product. Driving the news . Two months after launching ads in ChatGPT, advertisers are experimenting — but still lack clear measurement tools and performance benchmarks. Early campaigns are largely impression-based, with little i

Google Ads API to require multi-factor authentication

Google is tightening security across its ads ecosystem, requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA) for API users — a move that could impact how developers and advertisers access and manage accounts. Driving the news . Google will begin rolling out mandatory MFA for the Google Ads API starting April 21, with full enforcement expected over the following weeks. The update applies to users generatin

Bluesky breaks silence on outage and reveals cause

Bluesky experiences widespread feed outage
Bluesky , the social media app popular with X expatriates, suffered a widespread outage on Thursday, April 16. And in a thread posted on the official Bluesky profile , the app’s leaders revealed the cause of the outage — a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. “Our team received a report of intermittent app outages at about 11:40pm PDT on April 15, 2026,” the post read. “They worked throug

OpenAI begins rolling out ads in select markets

OpenAI is continuing its push into ad-supported monetization — a strategy it began earlier this year — by expanding ads to more countries while keeping premium tiers ad-free. Driving the news . OpenAI is starting to roll out ads for users on Free and Go plans in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The rollout applies only to lower-tier plans. Paid tiers — including Pro, Business, Enterprise, and

Google Ads tests direct Google Tag Manager integration for conversion setup

Google may be streamlining one of the most error-prone parts of campaign setup — conversion tracking — by reducing the need for manual tag implementation. Driving the news. Google Ads is testing a new “Set up in Google Tag Manager” option within its conversion setup flow, according to screenshots shared by Google Ads Specialist, Natasha Kaurra. The feature appears alongside existing installation

Why bottom-of-funnel content is winning in AI search

Google search traffic is dropping. If you’ve spent years building organic strategies, watching it happen in real time is uncomfortable. But it’s also clarifying. I started seeing the shift across SaaS clients. Pages that had driven steady traffic for years — educational, top-of-funnel (TOFU) content — were losing ground. Not because the content got worse, but because users no longer needed to cli

AI traffic converts better than non-AI visits for U.S. retailers: Report

Traffic from AI sources increased 393% year-over-year in Q1 and 269% in March. But the real surprise? AI traffic is converting better than last year. AI-driven visits converted 42% better than non-AI traffic in March. A year ago, AI traffic was 38% less likely to result in a purchase. By the numbers. Traffic from AI sources increased engagement by 12%, time on site by 48%, and pages per visit by

U.S. search ad revenue reached $114.2 billion in 2025

Search remained the largest force in digital advertising in 2025. However, its growth slowed as total U.S. ad revenue climbed to a record $294.6 billion. Search still dominates. Search generated $114.2 billion, accounting for 38.8% of total digital ad revenue, according to the latest IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report. But growth slowed to 11%, down from 15.9% in 2024, as advertisers shi

No-JavaScript fallbacks in 2026: Less critical, still necessary

Google can render JavaScript . That’s no longer up for debate. But that doesn’t mean it always does — or that it does so instantly or perfectly. Since Google’s 2024 comments suggesting it renders all HTML pages, many developers have questioned whether no-JavaScript fallbacks are still necessary. Two years later, the answer is clearer and more nuanced. Google’s stance on JavaScript rendering In Ju

8 Ways to Elevate Your Brand as a Creator or Entrepreneur (& Close the Pay Gap)

While many are still skeptical, the global creator economy is expected to reach $1.18 trillion USD by 2032 . And for minority creators and entrepreneurs from underrepresented groups, this moment is especially significant. The digital age has created endless avenues for self-expression, connection, and community among niche audiences. It’s brought to light pain points and business opportunities th

Your ROAS looks great — but is it actually driving growth?

An ecommerce company hires your PPC agency to explore paid search. A solid plan follows, and after approval, the campaigns go live. Soon, you’re seeing stellar results: high conversion volumes and a healthy ROAS. On the surface, the strategy is a resounding success. But look closer. Some of these conversions might have occurred anyway via direct or organic search traffic — meaning the campaigns m

Google Maps Blocked 292 Million Reviews & Removed 13 Million Fake Profiles

Google also released the annual Google Maps safety report saying blocked or removed over 292 million policy-violating reviews and removed over 13 million fake Business Profiles. Google also said it blocked 79 million inaccurate or unverified edits and placed posting restrictions on more than 783,000 policy-violating accounts.

Google Ads Removed 8.3 Billion Ads – Up Over 60% (Most Before Serving)

Google has released its annual Google Ads safety report and the big number that stands out to me is that Google removed 8.3 billion ads, which is up almost 63% from last year’s number of 5.1 billion. Google did say that 99% of those were removed before serving the ad, thanks to Gemini.

Bing Tests Animated People Also Search For

Microsoft is testing animating the Bing “people also search for” boxes. Bing will run this animated outline around the boxes when it loads, to give it more attention to the searcher.

How to optimize for keywords you can’t use

Sometimes the keywords you need to rank for are the ones you’re not allowed to use. Whether it’s trademark restrictions, brand guidelines, or industry stigma, you might be asked to capture demand without using the exact terms people search. Here’s how to navigate that challenge, align with search behavior, and still build visibility. When the keyword you need is off-limits It’s a common scenario

Fewer Returns, More Sales: How to Add Size Charts in WooCommerce

Have you ever wondered how many sales you lose because shoppers aren’t sure if an item will actually fit them? When buying clothes or shoes online, a customer’s biggest worry is getting the right size. This uncertainty often leads to them closing the tab and looking for a store that provides clearer information, resulting in abandoned carts and lost sales for you. I understand how frustrating it

The second circle

What do your supporters tell their friends? That’s the unseen force behind every successful brand, movement or idea. Most people don’t care about you. They’re not listening to you, not wondering what you’re up to, and certainly not taking the time to seek you out. All you have is a small circle, your supporters. And yet, we spend most of our time treating people like customers, not supporters. We

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]]> Valuable Tips to Help Your Social Marketing 451 – Interesting Articles This Week https://xtremefreelance.com/valuable-tips-to-help-your-social-marketing-451-interesting-articles-this-week/ Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:25:00 +0000 https://xtremefreelance.com/?p=24458 Valuable Tips | Interesting Articles This Week

Google spam reports can now be used for manual actions

Google has posted that it may now use your search spam reports for manual actions and that the text used in those spam reports may be sent along “verbatim” to the site owner being reported. What Google said. Google wrote it has “Clarified that Google may use spam report submissions to take manual action against violations.” The new text says : “Ranking manipulation techniques that attempt to comp

The new PPC playbook: From media buyer to profit engineer

Roll the clock back five, 10, or 15 years, and a PPC practitioner’s value was directly tied to tactical proficiency. Not anymore. Today, Google and Microsoft automate much of the tactical work. Machine learning and AI manage bids, test creatives, and find audiences faster and more efficiently than any human could. Unfortunately, this reality has left many veteran practitioners in a mid-career ide

The Reddit detour distorting PPC signals

At $50+ CPCs, Reddit beats every vendor organically 67.3% of the time across 8,566 keywords. The study from Ross Simmonds and his team focused on B2B SaaS, but the underlying dynamics don’t stop there. The higher the advertising competition on a term, the more likely a Reddit thread sits above every brand in organic results. If you’re in legal, financial services, premium home services, or insura

How to Accept Pre-Orders in WooCommerce (Most Stores Miss This)

Pre-orders are an incredibly powerful way for online stores to launch new products, assess demand, and secure sales even before items are in stock. This strategy can bring in revenue earlier and help you manage inventory more effectively. However, finding the right way to set up pre-orders in WooCommerce can get tricky. With various plugins and settings to consider, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed

What do you own?

What does it mean for us to own something? If we own a piece of land and the rain washes the topsoil downstream, do we go and get the topsoil back? Do we own our reputation? We have influence over it, but some of it was gifted to us without our knowledge, and other parts are influenced by forces out of our control. Do we own responsibility? Is it something we take or acquire or accept? We can try

How HubSpot became the #1 CRM in AI search [A case study]

Today, more and more buyers are beginning their journey with an AI-search. They may ask ChatGPT to compare products or use an AI-powered platform like Perplexity. Or, they’re just Googling an offering and reading the AI Overview, all without clicking a link. HubSpot realized that our buyers were moving from search engines to answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity — but we had no reli

Meta is on track to overtake Google in global ad revenue for the first time

A major shift is underway in digital advertising: Meta Platforms is projected to generate more ad revenue than Google in 2026, signaling how marketers are increasingly favoring automated, performance-driven platforms. Driving the news . According to Emarketer, Meta is expected to bring in $243.46 billion in global ad revenue this year, narrowly topping Google’s projected $239.54 billion. Meta is

Google Ads advertisers report wave of unexplained ad disapprovals

A growing number of advertisers say their Google Ads campaigns were suddenly hit with mass disapprovals tied to DNS and 500 server errors — even when their sites appeared to be working normally. The issue is raising fresh concerns about platform reliability and the risk of sudden performance disruptions. Driving the news . PPC advertisers began flagging widespread problems this week across Google

Your Webinar Program Isn’t Working? (So, Copy Ours) via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

5 years ago, I stepped into the role of webinar ringmaster. I said yes to moderating, but it was all the background work that gave me butterflies. I’d second and third guess everything. Is the title right? What if it flops? Is the content level right for the attendees? Will the right attendees sign up? Is my hair ok?! But the program grew, and you all were so welcoming. Through the years we’ve te

What AEO rank trackers measure and why marketers need them

If you’re asking yourself, “How can I measure AEO success?”, AEO rank trackers should be your next investment. They gauge your brand visibility in AI-generated answers, considering metrics like citations, mentions, share of voice, and sentiment. Sifting through the noise is frustrating, though, because AEO ( answer engine optimization ) and AEO rank trackers are relatively new categories. In this

AEO Insights: Building an Informed Answer Engine Strategy

By now, you know that everyone’s buzzing over answer engine optimization (AEO). So, just what is AEO in marketing? It’s a new way of ensuring your brand shows up in the places your prospects are using more and more: AI tools like Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT. These AEO insights will catch you up on the most crucial information to get started now. Table of Contents What is AEO and how is it dif

Advertisers are gearing up to hit Google with mass arbitration claims worth billions

Google’s legal troubles over its search and ad tech businesses are entering a new phase — one that could expose the company to billions in payouts from advertisers seeking damages after U.S. courts found it illegally monopolized key digital ad markets. Driving the news . A growing group of advertisers is preparing to file mass arbitration claims against Google, according to attorney Ashley Keller

How to Show Up in ChatGPT Results and Get Noticed by Customers

There’s a lot of conjecture out there about how to show up in ChatGPT results, but if you want advice from a practitioner who’s actually done it , keep reading. As a professional blogger, I’ve been snagging top positions in Google for well over a decade, but when answer engine optimization (AEO) started taking off last year, I dove in headfirst. Since then, I’ve gotten posts to show up in ChatGPT

Why topical authority isn’t enough for AI search

Topical authority is a key concept in SEO , but it doesn’t account for how search and AI systems choose between competing sources. The missing layer isn’t in content or structure. It’s in the signals that determine selection once a topic is understood — the difference between being eligible and being chosen. Topical authority explains content, not selection Topical authority is foundational for S

The FSA framework explained: Why AI engines cite certain brands (and how marketers can use it)

Most marketing teams I talk to are doing genuinely good SEO, and yet when they open ChatGPT or Perplexity and type in the prompts their buyers are actually using, their brand is nowhere to be found. This is the exact problem the FSA Framework was built to solve. For the last decade, conventional wisdom has been, “Do good SEO, and the rest takes care of itself.” That assumption was safe, and many

Claude Skills for PPC: How to turn one-off prompts into scalable systems

Despite all the shiny new capabilities at our disposal, many professionals seem stuck in a cycle of “AI Groundhog Day.” You open a chat window, carefully craft a prompt, paste in your context, and get a great result. An hour later, you do it all over again. If this is how you use AI to automate, you’re still doing manual work — you’re just doing it in a chat box. To move from using AI to building

Google Ask Maps is moving from listings to recommendations

Google’s Ask Maps feature does more than help users find nearby businesses. Based on hands-on testing of local service queries for plumbers, electricians, and HVAC companies, Ask Maps often narrows the field, interprets user intent, and frames businesses around qualities such as responsiveness, specialization, honesty, and repair-first thinking. In more complex prompts, it sometimes provides guid

Google Ads MCC hacked? Here’s what to do immediately

At midnight on Jan. 5, hackers took over our Google Ads Manager Account (MCC). We weren’t alone. While it’s hard to get an exact count, hundreds, if not thousands, of agencies have been affected by the hacks, in turn affecting tens of thousands of accounts . While I wouldn’t wish this experience on our worst enemy, having been through it, I have some insights that I hope can help you prevent the

Google Search Goes After Back Button Hijacking With New Spam Penalty

It’s been a while since Google has come out with a new search spam policy and penalty to accompany it with and now we have a new one, “back button hijacking.” Back button hijacking is something many of us were surprised Google didn’t specifically disallow but now, Google said it is on the rise and it is adding it to the list – officially.

Google Ads & Google Analytics Data Controls Update

Google posted an update for the Google Ads and Google Analytics data controls yesterday where changes will be coming to the sources of the data. Google said this is to “simplify data controls and remove redundant settings between Google Analytics and Ads, we are planning to consolidate controls based on where the data is used.”

How Google’s removal tools work for SEO and reputation management by Erase Technologies

When a client calls about a damaging search result, you might typically default to one of two responses: “we can suppress it” or “there’s nothing we can do.” Both skip the middle ground — where Google’s removal tools live. Google provides tools to remove or deindex content from search results. They’re underused, frequently misunderstood, and often conflated. This guide breaks down what each tool

Advanced AI Deep Research: Uncover Insights Your Competitors Are Missing

Are you spending days trying to keep up with everything happening in your industry? Wondering how to make faster, better-informed decisions without drowning in research? In this article, you’ll discover how to use AI deep research to compress days of analysis into hours, which tools work best, and a proven framework for crafting prompts that […] The post appeared first on Social Media Examiner .

On pricing

Pricing is an exchange of value. This for that. But price is also a story. When you have competition, your story doesn’t have to justify the absolute price, simply the difference between you and the next-best option. Price is based on value, not on the cost of production. Thanks to Baumol’s cost disease, productivity doesn’t always correlate with the price of labor. Luxury goods are worth more

Google simplifies Analytics and Ads consent rules

Google is changing how Google Analytics and Google Ads share consent signals — a shift that could have major implications for marketers’ tracking setups starting this summer. What’s happening . Beginning June 15th, Google Ads data collection will rely solely on the ad_storage consent setting, removing a layer of complexity that previously came from linked Google Analytics configurations. Until no

Google is bringing back a familiar name: Data Studio

In an AI-driven economy, companies have more data than ever but still struggle to turn it into useful daily decisions. Google is betting that a revamped Data Studio can become the place where users quickly explore, organize and act on data across its ecosystem. Why the switch back. Google says the new Data Studio will serve as a central hub for a range of assets, from traditional reports and dash

Google Search to penalize back button hijacking schemes

Google has issued a new warning to sites using back button hijacking techniques, saying those sites have two months to remove or disable those techniques. If they do not, they will be subject to both subject to manual spam actions or automated demotions within Google Search. Back button hijacking. Google explained that “when a user clicks the “back” button in the browser, they have a clear expect

AI buttons: Smart UX play, risky GEO tactic, or both?

Over the past year, a new feature has started appearing across food, lifestyle, and travel blogs: AI buttons. You’ve probably seen them already. Buttons labeled things like: “Summarize with AI” “Save this recipe to ChatGPT” “Remember this site” “Ask AI about this recipe” Plugins from Feast, Hubbub, Shareaholic, and others now make these buttons easy to deploy, and hundreds of bloggers have starte

Daily Search Forum Recap: April 13, 2026

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. Catching up on the newsletter…

AI search adoption isn’t equal and income is driving the divide

Search Engine Land / 1d
Everyone is talking about AI search as if it’s already universal — as if we’ve collectively moved on, users have shifted and discovery has changed for everyone. But the reality is far less straightforward. While AI search is growing fast, it isn’t being adopted evenly . The gap is increasingly shaped by something we don’t often discuss in search: household income. AI adoption isn’t equal — and th

The Dangerous Seduction Of Click-Chasing

News publishers chasing SEO-driven clicks often sacrifice audience trust, and pay the price when rankings collapse. The post appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Why no amount of SEO can fix a broken brand

As an SEO professional, you’re often asked to solve what appears to be a technical problem: organic traffic is declining . Standard procedure is a deep dive into technical performance, algorithm updates , technical debt, or content gaps . You review logs, crawl the site, and check Google Search Console . But what happens when the data reveals that the root cause isn’t found in the sitemap, the co

Google Search Console Testing AI Contribution Report

It looks like Google is testing a new report within Google Search Console named AI contribution. I have no clue what it looks like but I suspect it is a lot like the Bing Webmaster Tools AI performance reports.

Google Still Processing Status To XML Sitemaps – Nothing To Announce

Google was asked if it is possible to add a new status to the XML sitemap statuses for “still processing.” John Mueller from Google responded on Blueshy saying, “I’ve chatted with the teams involved about this on & off, I’ve seen that it can be annoying.” But he added he has nothing to announce.

Google May Ignore Links From Sites That Spam & Violate Policies

Google’s John Mueller reconfirmed that Google Search may simply ignore outbound links from sites that violate its search spam policies. This is not new, Google has been doing this manually and algorithmically for years now but he reiterated this on Bluesky.

PPC salaries are splitting: Which side are you on?

Every year, Duane Brown’s PPC Salary Survey gives our industry one of the few honest looks at what practitioners are actually earning. The 2026 edition, with 445 responses across 50+ countries, is no different. This year, one pattern stands out above the rest: the middle of the salary curve is getting squeezed from both ends. PPC salaries aren’t falling, at least not uniformly. The gap between pr

How I Built a WordPress Personality Quiz to Turn Visitors into Subscribers

I was looking for a fresh way to grow my email list in WordPress, and personality quizzes caught my attention right away. They’re engaging, fun to take, and feel personal to each visitor. The challenge is that many quiz tools can feel complicated or require extra platforms to set up. Since I already use WPForms for forms across my websites, I decided to try its Quiz Mode. After turning it on, I w

Justin Biebers Coachella set was deeply online in the best way

Justin Bieber did not spend his Coachella headlining set pretending the past was behind him. Instead, he opened a laptop, pulled up YouTube , and sang directly to it. Midway through his 90-minute set on Saturday, the Day Two headliner began streaming old clips of himself performing snippets of songs like “Baby,” “Favorite Girl,” “Never Say Never,” and “Beauty and a Beat,” duetting with the floppy

Avoiding the purity loop

Some vegans don’t eat avocados. They’re concerned that the bees that are trucked in to pollinate the trees are mistreated, and so they choose to not support this practice. But we live in community, and someone running a vegan restaurant or serving a meal to vegan friends, concerned that they might offend, doesn’t serve avocado. A few strong opinions change the culture. And so the cycle continues.

Ce trebuie verificat pentru 400 rotiri gratuite fara depunere

În lumea ?????ului online, promo?iile cu rotiri gratuite f?r? depunere sunt printre cele mai tentante oferte pentru juc?tori. Acestea permit experien?? gratuit? ?i ?anse de câ?tig f?r? a fi nevoie de investi?ie ini?ial?, fiind ideale pentru încep?tori sau pentru cei care doresc s? testeze diferite cazinouri. Este esen?ial îns? s? fii alert atunci când alegi o promo?ie de acest tip.

Slightly Autistic

Many years ago one of our community members mentioned they were at an SEO conference where a speaker from Distilled mentioned that SEOmoz had hired them to try to outrank us for seo tools , though they were unable to. At the time I think Moz had around 200 employees, while I had around 2. How was I able to outcompete at like a 100:1 ratio? At the time I chalked it up to love for SEO. However, if

Settling

Sometimes it pays to accept and celebrate what we get. And sometimes, we only get something because we settled for it. It helps to be able to discern the difference between the two.

Celebrating Community at WordCamp Asia 2026

WordCamp Asia 2026 brought the global WordPress community to Mumbai, India, from April 9–11, gathering contributors, organizers, sponsors, speakers, and attendees at the Jio World Convention Centre for three days of learning, collaboration, and community. With 2,281 attendees, the event reflected the scale of the WordPress community and the strong turnout throughout the event. The event unfolded

“Even”

There’s a difference between telling someone their work can become better and saying it can become even better. When we say even better , we lock in a foundation — we’re affirming that something good already exists — at the same time we create the conditions for improvement. Ennui and disappointment, on the other hand, are multiplied when we promise things are going to get even worse instead of m

Maddie Lightening speaks on misreported ROAS, account structure chaos & AI mistakes

Watch this video on YouTube Maddie Lightening, head of paid media at Hallam, joined me to talk through the mistakes, lessons and mindset shifts that have shaped her career in PPC. With more than a decade of experience across search, social, programmatic, digital out of home and ABM, she shared a candid look at the realities of leading paid media in a fast-moving industry.

Merchant API lands in Google Ads scripts ahead of Content API sunset

Google is pushing advertisers toward a more modern, scalable infrastructure for Shopping integrations—bringing new capabilities (including AI tools) directly into scripting workflows. What’s happening . Google Ads scripts will begin supporting the Merchant API starting April 22nd, as Google prepares to retire the Content API for Shopping on August 18th. The new API will be available as an Advance

Google Ads simplifies enhanced conversions into a single switch

Google is removing complexity from one of its most important measurement tools. By merging enhanced conversions for web and leads—and allowing multiple data inputs at once—advertisers get more accurate tracking with less setup friction. What’s happening . Google Ads is consolidating its enhanced conversions features into a unified system with a single on/off toggle. At the same time, it’s elimina

Healthcare reviews: How to stay compliant and win in local SEO

There’s a broad consensus that online reviews — especially Google reviews — should be a top priority for businesses that rely on local customers. Four of the top 15 ranking factors in Google Maps were related to reviews (quantity, quality, recency, and consistency), according to a recent Whitespark survey. Other surveys report that more than 80% of consumers use Google reviews to evaluate local b

LLM nudges: The hidden force behind AI-driven journeys

LLMs have become a starting point for nearly everything — work, play, consumerism, health, and more. But one thing gets overlooked: how they finish answering prompts. They don’t — and that matters. They operate in a “no, you hang up first” mentality. The prompts we enter don’t just end. LLMs “nudge” us to continue the conversation, offering to take the next step. “Would you like me to create that

Paid media efficiency: How to cut waste and improve ROAS

We’re being pushed harder than ever — expected to hit bigger revenue targets with the same or smaller PPC budgets. Even with flat budgets, rising platform costs mean we’re effectively facing a budget cut. Average CPCs have risen by as much as 40% , with an average of 3.74%, per Wordstream. Certain periods, such as Black Friday, see much higher increases. Teams are experiencing budget cuts, with a

How to take your marketing measurement from crawl to sprint

Measurement is the foundation for everything we do in performance marketing. Without accurate measurement, what we recommend, implement, and optimize is, at best, guesswork. Maintaining accurate measurement is more challenging than ever — and getting harder. Regulatory crackdowns and increased privacy concerns, alongside longer multi-touch journeys, are compounding to create a measurement crisis.

How to Set Min & Max WooCommerce Order Limits (& Stop Overselling)

It’s frustrating when customers place orders in your online store that are too small to be profitable, or so large that they deplete your stock and create shipping nightmares. Setting minimum and maximum order limits in WooCommerce solves this problem. It can help you keep your inventory under control, prevent overselling, and grow your business more effectively. In this guide, I’ll show you thre

Creating the conditions for magic

If you’re hoping for this meeting or this performance or this engagement to produce something extraordinary, why are you setting it up as if it’s ordinary? The hard work of a brainstorming session, a pitch collaboration or a negotiation happens long before most people begin. We hire architects to design expensive buildings, but we design expensive human interactions as an afterthought. If it does

Awedesk Review: A WordPress Helpdesk Plugin That Helps You Build Structured Support

Managing customer support through a shared inbox is hard with multiple team members. Awedesk brings ticket-based support directly into WordPress complete with flat plugin pricing that doesn’t scale by agent count. In this Awedesk review, I’ll look at whether it fits a support team that wants a WordPress-based workflow. The post ” ” first appeared on WP Mayor .

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]]> Valuable Tips to Help Your Social Marketing 450 – Interesting Articles This Week https://xtremefreelance.com/valuable-tips-to-help-your-social-marketing-449-interesting-articles-this-week-2/ Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:06:58 +0000 https://xtremefreelance.com/?p=24447

Valuable Tips | Interesting Articles This Week

What No One Tells New Creators About Managing Money

Content creators who are just starting to work for themselves think that the hardest part is earning money. In reality, the difficulties begin after the income is received, because the money needs to be properly distributed, invested, and not “eaten up” before the next month. This is usually where problems arise, since money can come from 2–3 sources but leave through 10, and in the end, it’s unc

Google: AI ads driving up to 80% sales lift for some brands

Google says its AI-powered advertising tools are starting to deliver meaningful results, including major revenue gains for some retailers, as it experiments with how ads work in AI-driven search. The big picture . Fears that AI chatbots like ChatGPT would disrupt Google’s core search business haven’t materialized, and instead the company’s ads business continues to grow, suggesting AI may be expa

Sundar Pichai sees Google Search evolving into an ‘agent manager’

Google Search is evolving beyond links and answers into a system that completes tasks, potentially fundamentally changing how users interact with the web. That’s according to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, speaking on the Cheeky Pint podcast. Why we care. Google is signaling a move from information retrieval to task execution. Search becoming agentic. Traditional search behavior is already changing

Google AI Overviews: 90% accurate, yet millions of errors remain: Analysis

Google’s AI Overviews answered a standard factual benchmark correctly 91% of the time in February, up from 85% in October, according to a New York Times analysis with AI startup Oumi. However, Google handles more than 5 trillion searches per year , so that means tens of millions of answers every hour may be wrong. Why we care . We’ve watched Google shift from linking to sources to summarizing the

Google starts showing sponsored ads in the Images tab on mobile search

Google has begun placing sponsored ad units directly inside the Images tab of mobile search results — a new placement that eligible campaigns can access without any changes to existing keyword targeting. What’s happening. When a user navigates to the Images tab within Google Search on mobile, they may now see sponsored units appearing within the image grid. Each unit shows a full image creative a

One in five ChatGPT clicks go to Google: Study

Over 30% of outbound clicks go to just 10 domains, with Google alone taking more than 20%, according to a new Semrush study published today. ChatGPT also relies less on the live web, triggering search on 34.5% of queries, down from 46% in late 2024. The big picture . ChatGPT’s growth has plateaued, and its role in how users navigate the web is evolving unevenly. Referral traffic from ChatGPT grew

New Google Maps features: Local Guides redesign, AI captions, photo sharing

Google is rolling out new Google Maps features that make it easier to contribute photos, reviews, and local insights, while adding Gemini-powered caption suggestions. Local Guides redesign. Contributor profiles are getting more visibility. Total points now appear more prominently, Local Guide levels are easier to spot, and badge designs have been refreshed. Top contributors will also stand out mo

How AI decides what your content means and why it gets you wrong

Google once attributed two of Barry Schwartz’s Search Engine Land articles to me — a misclassification at the annotation layer that briefly rewrote authorship in Google’s systems. For a few days, when you searched for certain Search Engine Land articles Schwartz had written, Google listed me as the author. The articles appeared in my entity’s publication list and were connected to my Knowledge Pa

How to Watch WordCamp Asia 2026 Live

WordCamp Asia 2026 will be available to watch live across three days of streaming, making it easy for the global WordPress community to follow along from anywhere. This year’s live streamed programming begins with a special Contributor Day broadcast, followed by two full conference days of presentations from across the WordPress community. This post gathers each official stream in one place so yo

5 priorities for lead gen in AI-driven advertising

Many of today’s PPC tools were designed to be easily accessible to ecommerce. That doesn’t mean lead gen can’t take advantage of them, but it does mean more intentional application is required. Lead gen with AI still requires a creative approach, and many conventional ecommerce tools still apply — but not always in the same way. Here are the priorities that matter most for succeeding with lead ge

The Mad Men era of SEO: Why AI is shifting search to persuasion

For most people, “Mad Men” means the TV show. But the phrase points to something more specific: Madison Avenue in the 1950s and ‘60s, when agencies grew brands through persuasion, positioning, and earned trust in a world of scarce media channels and powerful gatekeepers. If you wanted attention, you bought your way in, then made your product the obvious choice. When the internet arrived and Googl

Zero-click searches and the future of your marketing funnel

Search results used to be a doorway. You ranked, someone clicked, and they landed on your site. But today, that model is eroding faster than most marketing teams are equipped to move. Bain & Company research found that about 80% of consumers now rely on “zero-click” results in at least 40% of their searches. For some businesses, this means more impressions, but across the board, it’s reducing org

Google, Meta, and the long history of misaligned incentives in paid media

I’m getting a mid-career executive MBA. Last week, in class, we discussed the interaction between automation and advertising. The lecture covered why A/B testing in Meta is less valuable now, since Facebook can auto-optimize faster and better than marketers can on their own. A classmate took the logical leap and asked the professor, “If digital channels have more data and more processing power, w

How marketing leaders are getting unstuck from Salesforce by Stitch

For years, Salesforce Marketing Cloud was the safe choice. Powerful. Enterprise. Trusted. But lately, we’re hearing something different: “Our data is too tangled to activate.” “We’re locked into contracts.” “We’re stuck sending the same emails on repeat.” “Everything is Band-Aids and duct tape — I don’t know how we can move without breaking everything.” “We feel stuck.” Sound familiar? If so, thi

Our Premium Plan Just Got a Whole Lot More Premium ?

If you’re running client sites, you already know that the real challenge isn’t building the sites themselves – it’s scaling your business and handling multiple projects without burning out. That’s exactly what the shiny new and improved Premium Plan is designed to help you do. You spoke, we took notes… and then we got to work. These new Premium Perks are built around what you actually need day-to

AI Video Editing: Save Time and Create Better Videos

Are you avoiding video because you think the production is too time-consuming or expensive? Want to use AI video tools to create and edit quality marketing videos? In this article, you’ll discover a step-by-step breakdown of the video editing workflow, the specific AI tools that handle each stage, and how to put it all together […] The post appeared first on Social Media Examiner .

All the letters

Every writer has all of them. 26 in most Western languages. But no writer knows all the words. That’s the gap where creativity, effort and possibility lie–between the universal letters and the unlimited words. This is an analogy for arenas as diverse as sports and commerce. Sometimes, we work on a project where our competitors have access to more letters than we do. It’s unlikely you’ll win that

Brand Bias in Prompts: An Experiment

We tested 300 prompts to measure how common brand mentions are in LLM responses. See the data on how brand, soft-brand, and non-brand queries impact visibility, including a surprising look at the volume of brand mentions generated by Gemini.

Kinder than necessary

If it’s just the right amount of necessary kindness, it’s not really kindness. It’s pleasantness. If the people in our circle begin to experience behavior that’s kinder than necessary, the expectations for what’s necessary will ratchet forward, making everything more pleasant. And… being kind is a lovely way to spend your day. [Compare this to an alternative: “be as selfish as you can get away wi

Watch a jar of Nutella make space history alongside Artemis II astronauts

As NASA’s Artemis II crew made history today by traveling farther from Earth than any humans ever have, another unexpected passenger quietly drifted into frame: a jar of Nutella. During NASA’s livestream of the mission , the hazelnut spread could be seen floating around the Orion spacecraft cabin just minutes before Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch,

Are low-quality listicles about to lose their edge in Google Search?

If you rank your own product #1 in “best of” listicles , it’s not just a search-quality issue — it may violate FTC rules that took effect in October 2024. Driving the news . As Lily Ray noted on LinkedIn , the FTC’s Consumer Review Rule (16 CFR Part 465) prohibits several deceptive practices tied to reviews and testimonials, including: Presenting company-controlled content as independent reviews.

Human content is 8x more likely than AI to rank #1 on Google: Study

Human-written content dominates Google’s top rankings, appearing in the No. 1 position 80% of the time versus just 9% for purely AI-generated pages, based on a Semrush analysis of 42,000 blog posts. The details . Semrush analyzed 20,000 keywords and their top 10 results, classifying content with an AI detector. Human-written pages outperformed AI and mixed content across all top 10 positions. The

Going viral from space: NASAs tech-savvy Artemis II crew

For the first time in decades, astronauts are heading back toward the moon. And for the first time ever, they are doing it with their iPhones. NASA’s Artemis II crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen — are not only documenting one of the most historic missions in modern spaceflight, but also turning it into socia

Bing, not Google, shapes which brands ChatGPT recommends

In this case study, we went deep instead of broad. We focused on one question: why wasn’t a brand present in a single ChatGPT prompt across ~70 iterations? We chose one prompt: “What are the best hotels in New York City?” We analyzed mentions, citations, fanouts, and SERPs in Google and Bing. We also planned to analyze GPT memory, but it made no discernible difference to mentions, citations, or f

SEO in 2026: Higher standards, AI influence, and a web still catching up

Is it possible to get an accurate view of the current state of SEO ? There have been multiple attempts to reach consensus on what works, predict what might be coming, and identify the factors that may play a role in “good” (or “bad”) SEO. As useful and productive as some of this may be, none of it offers the same grounded data as the Web Almanac, a project I was honored to be a part of. With the

How to design content that AI systems prefer and promote

Most guidance on optimizing for AI still focuses on how content is written. But AI systems don’t read content the way humans do. These systems extract information, break it into parts, and reuse it in new contexts. What matters is whether your content can be pulled into an AI-sourced answer cleanly. Where traditional SEO has centered on ranking pages, AI systems prioritize retrievable units of me

Profound vs. AthenaHQ AI: Which AEO platform fits your growth stack?

AI-referred traffic has increased by 600% since January 2025, and marketers are racing to understand what that means for brand discovery. For teams seeking clarity on how AI impacts brand and pipeline means investing in new tools like Profound or Athena AI for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). This guide provides a comprehensive comparison between Profound and AthenaHQ, covering what each platfor

Is AI Killing Web Traffic? How AI Overviews Impact Organic Website Traffic

Every few years, marketing headlines announce the demise of one foundational strategy or another. First, email; then blogging; then search engines. Now, with the rise of AI comes the question, “Is AI killing web traffic?” — But the curiosity is actually warranted. As of December 2025, AI Overviews chop organic click-through rate (CTR) for position-one content by an average of 58% , and that’s no

Best workflow automation software: How to choose the right tool for your growth stage

Workflow automation tools automate repetitive business tasks across systems using defined triggers and logic. These platforms link apps, CRM data, and communication channels to execute multi-step processes without manual handoffs — routing a new lead through email nurture, scoring it, and assigning it to a rep in a single automated sequence. By replacing manual if/then steps with automated workfl

AI-driven email personalization strategies that actually work

Email personalization drives measurable revenue impact. According to HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing report , 93.2% of marketers say personalized or segmented experiences generate more leads and purchases, and nearly half are exploring AI to scale those efforts. Many teams still rely on static merge tags or broad segments for personalization, which limits relevance and downstream conversion. Th

How to produce content that naturally builds AEO clout

For a long time, links were the primary signal of authority in search. If you wanted visibility, you built backlinks. If you wanted credibility, you earned placements. That still matters — but it’s no longer enough. In AI-driven search, authority is shaped by how often your brand is mentioned, cited, and clearly associated with a topic. Visibility comes from being referenced in AI-generated answe

Guest post outreach in 2026: A proven, scalable process

Since 2021, I’ve worked on more than 350 published guest posts. In that time, I’ve refined a repeatable guest posting outreach process that consistently drives approvals without ever paying for a placement. Although guest blogging is becoming more difficult, the basics of personalized guest posting outreach remain the same. If your mindset is to create mutual value, this process will work for you

How to Setup a WordPress Appointment Booking System & Book Clients 24/7

Sending emails back and forth with potential customers just to find an appointment time is a huge waste of time that often leads to lost sales. When you’re stuck managing a calendar all morning, you can’t focus on actually serving your clients. That’s why I recommend accepting appointments directly on your WordPress website. This can save you hours every week and keep leads from falling through t

GSC Logging Error Yielded Inflated Impressions Since May 2025

Google announced a logging error on Friday, April 3rd in the data anomalies report and explained that error prevented the accurate logging of impressions in GSC since May of 2025. That’s right, almost a full year of inaccurate impressions…

Plumbed

If you want to drink more herbal tea, get a hot water dispenser that keeps it handy and on tap. On the other hand, if you want to watch less television, disconnect the TV after every viewing session. Convenience leads to consumption.

Where do bad choices come from?

We all make them from time to time. You might not know what you need to know. This is where experience is created. You might have an identity that pushes you to make those choices. If you’re determined to act like the person you have assumed you are, the choices come with the role. Or, you might prioritize short-term benefits over the long-term costs of a bad choice. In this sense,

Google is fixing a Search Console bug that inflated impression counts

Google is fixing a long-running Search Console bug that inflated impression counts. As the fix rolls out, reported impressions will decrease. What happened . A logging error caused Google Search Console to over-report impressions starting May 13, 2025. Google today updated its Data anomalies in Search Console page : “A logging error is preventing Search Console from accurately reporting impressio

If you can’t say what problem your brand solves, AI won’t either

Customer journeys are collapsing into a single moment of evaluation. David Edelman recently described this shift as the convergence of behaviors that used to happen separately. As decisions compress, brands need to be clearer about what they are trying to solve for the customer. Many organizations are increasing activity instead, without sharpening the underlying strategy. The shift behind the co

Strategy is the new keyword: What drives paid search performance now

Over the course of my three-decade career, the keyword drove paid search. Today, it’s one of many signals. Strategy is what determines performance. Keywords were what you researched for weeks, then built your strategy around based on what you uncovered or hypothesized. You managed everything from bids to matched search terms to negatives and the audiences you targeted. Your career was built and m

Building high-ROAS ecommerce search campaigns in Google Shopping and Amazon Ads

Paid search is often the highest-leverage ecommerce growth channel, delivering strong conversion rates and efficient spend when structured effectively. Google Shopping and Amazon Ads capture high-intent demand while generating the data needed to scale it. These platforms connect search queries directly to revenue, enabling you to identify which terms drive sales and allocate budget accordingly. T

Why AI search is your new reputation risk and what to do about it

It used to be that Google searches opened up a world of questions. You searched, sifted through links, and came to your own conclusion. Today, AI Overviews , ChatGPT , Perplexity, and other AI platforms compress multiple sources into a single, synthesized response. In the process, nuance is flattened, and certain viewpoints can be overrepresented. This marks a fundamental shift in online reputati

How I Built a Customer Feedback Loop With Surveys in WordPress

Many website owners collect user feedback but never act on it, so they keep making the same guesses about what to build, write, or fix next. A customer feedback loop changes that by turning survey responses into a clear list of the improvements that will actually grow your business. It takes the guesswork out of your strategy by letting your users tell you exactly what they need. We have used a s

Do you know ball? Inside the internets most obsessive basketball debate.

There’s a moment, familiar to anyone who has spent time in basketball corners of the internet, where someone drops a name into the chat — Kosta Koufos, Sundiata Gaines, Jamario Moon — and the room either goes electric or shakes its head in disappointment. On social media, this is called “ball knowledge.” The term has evolved from casual sports-bar shorthand into something closer to a culture and

“There is no alternative”

TINA! This is what Margaret Thatcher said about her draconian free market policies. It’s an easy thing to tell ourselves about compliance to any dominant system. But it’s incomplete. The complete sentence is, “There is no alternative unless we’re prepared to endure short-term discomfort as we push back against the dominant system.” So the real question isn’t, “what’s the alternative?” The questio

Vulnerability & Patch Roundup — March 2026

Vulnerability reports and responsible disclosures are essential for website security awareness and education. Automated attacks targeting known software vulnerabilities are one of the leading causes of website compromises. To help educate website owners

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]]> Valuable Tips to Help Your Social Marketing 449 – Interesting Articles This Week https://xtremefreelance.com/valuable-tips-to-help-your-social-marketing-449-interesting-articles-this-week/ Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:44:02 +0000 https://xtremefreelance.com/?p=24434 Valuable Tips | Interesting Articles This Week

AI-generated fruit slop is taking over the internet

Maybe it says something profound about the human condition that a series of AI-generated talking fruits ripping off reality TV can rack up tens of millions of views. Or maybe it says nothing at all, and we just have to sit with that. What I’m talking about is Fruit Love Island — a series of TikTok videos starring AI-generated anthropomorphic fruit recreating its IRL namesake. As the intro to epis

YouTube adds AI creator matching and ad formats to its partnerships platform

YouTube used its NewFront presentation to unveil a significant upgrade to its Creator Partnerships platform, adding Gemini-powered creator matching, stronger measurement tools, and new ways to run creator content as paid ads. Why we care. Influencer marketing has become a core part of many brands’ strategies, but finding the right creators at scale and proving ROI is a pain point. tackles influen

AI search engines cite Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn most: Study

Reddit ranks as the most-cited domain in AI-generated answers, followed by YouTube and LinkedIn, based on a new analysis of 30 million sources by Peec AI, an AI search analytics tool. The findings . Reddit was the most-cited source across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and Forbes also ranked in the top five. Review platforms like Yelp

Blueskys new AI is being rejected by users, blocked more than White House account

Mere days after Bluesky announced its new AI product, Attie , the coding helper has already become the second most blocked account on the platform. The Attie profile was given the cold shoulder by 125,000 users already, TechCrunch reported. With just 1,500 followers, that means 83 times more users blocked Attie than followed it — that number is higher than the official White House account, the Im

Google Gemini may adapt AI answers to match user tone: Report

A newly published, unverified report claims Google’s Gemini AI is instructed to mirror user tone and validate emotions while grounding its responses in fact and reality. Why we care. If accurate, AI-generated search responses may vary based on how a query is phrased — not just the information available. What’s new. The report centers on the inherent tension in the system-level instructions guidin

Google expands Merchant Center loyalty features to 14 countries and AI surfaces

Google is giving retailers more firepower to promote loyalty program benefits directly within product listings — expanding the program internationally and into its newest AI-powered shopping experiences. What’s new . Merchants can now highlight member pricing and exclusive shipping options directly on listings. Loyalty annotations have also expanded to local inventory ads and regional Shopping ad

Google explains how crawling works in 2026

Gary Illyes from Google shared some more details on Googlebot, Google’s crawling ecosystem, fetching and how it processes bytes. The article is named Inside Googlebot: demystifying crawling, fetching, and the bytes we process . Googlebot. Google has many more than one singular crawler, it has many crawlers for many purposes. So referencing Googlebot as a singular crawler, might not be super accur

59% of SEO jobs are now senior-level roles: Study

SEO hiring is shifting toward senior, strategy-led roles as AI reshapes search and expands the scope of the job. A new Semrush analysis of 3,900 listings shows companies now prioritize leadership, experimentation, and cross-channel visibility over pure technical execution. Why we care . SEO hiring, career paths, and required skills are changing. Entry roles focus on execution, while most demand s

Technical SEO for generative search: Optimizing for AI agents

Technical SEO extends beyond indexing to how content is discovered and used, especially as AI systems generate answers instead of listing pages. For generative engine optimization (GEO), the underlying tools and frameworks remain largely the same, but how you implement them determines whether your content gets surfaced — or overlooked. That means focusing on how AI agents access your site, how co

The push layer returns: Why ‘publish and wait’ is half a strategy

In 1998, submitting a website to search engines was manual, methodical, and genuinely tedious. I remember 17 of them: AltaVista, Yahoo Directory, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, HotBot, Northern Light, Ask Jeeves, DMOZ, Snap, LookSmart, GoTo.com, AllTheWeb, Inktomi, iWon, and About.com. Each had its own form, process, and wait time, and its own quiet judgment about whether your URL was worth

ChatGPT enables location sharing for more precise local responses

OpenAI now allows users of ChatGPT to share their device location so that ChatGPT can know more precisely where the user is and serve better answers and results based on that location. The feature is called location sharing, OpenAI wrote , “Sharing your device location is completely optional and off until you choose to enable it. You can update device location sharing in Settings > Data Controls

5-step Google Business Profile audit to improve local rankings

Google Business Profile (GBP) may be getting shoved down the SERPs by ads and AI Overviews more than ever, but it’s still a top source of inbound leads for local businesses — and one of the fastest ways to improve rankings with simple fixes. Here’s a five-step audit to find and fix the gaps most businesses miss. 1. Evaluate Google review velocity and recency It’s a common misconception that the b

So Your Traffic Tanked: What Smart CMOs Do Next

Organic traffic is declining, but answer engines are driving higher-intent conversions. Here’s how CMOs should rethink strategy, structure, and measurement. The post appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Google On Why Core Updates Take Weeks To Fully Roll Out

Google’s John Mueller explained, one again, why it takes weeks to roll out a core update. It is often because there are different components to core updates through the rollout stages, and each needs to be pushed individually.

Bing Tests Sponsored Label That Is Almost Transparent

Microsoft is at it again with its sponsored labels tests. This time, Microsoft is testing almost transparent sponsored labels within the Bing search results. The labels are super grayed out and super hard to see.

Google Ads PMax Asset Group Theming

Google Ads is rolling out asset group theming for Performance Max campaigns. This lets you copy an asset group and apply this theme to your text and images using Google AI.

Page Authority: How to Build Pages That Rank

When I first started working in content and weaving SEO into my strategy, I treated Page Authority like a report card: the higher the score, the better I was doing. It took a few humbling ranking losses to a competitor with a lower PA score to make me reconsider. Turns out, Page Authority is more of a compass than a finish line. In this post, I‘m breaking down what it actually is, how it’s calcul

A 6-point scorecard for AI-ready product pages

AI search engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity are changing how consumers discover and purchase products online. If your product pages aren’t optimized for these AI assistants, you could be missing out on a growing source of traffic and revenue. The challenge? AI assistants don’t evaluate product pages in the same way traditional search engines do. They need to fully understand yo

WPBeginner Spotlight 22: Big Milestones, Better Backups, and WordPress Community Tools

Welcome to Issue 22 of WPBeginner Spotlight! March was full of exciting developments in the WordPress industry. In this issue, we are celebrating a massive decade-long milestone for one of our favorite WordPress form builders and exploring exciting new AI tools designed to put your WooCommerce promotions and course creation on autopilot. We’re also looking at major updates to how you can manage s

Google May Call, Text or WhatsApp To Confirm Business Details

Google is sending out emails with updates on how Google Business Profiles may verify your business details. Google said it may “reach out using automated messages via call, text, or WhatsApp to the verified phone number on your Business Profile.”

How to Gain Superpowers With AI

Tired of not seeing real results from AI experiments in your day-to-day work? Wondering how to use AI to fundamentally change the way you work? In this article, you’ll discover the five-step ADOPT framework that turns scattered AI experimentation into a structured, sustainable approach to using AI to change how you work. The Biggest Misconceptions

Rehearsing possibility

Most of us would like to live with wonder, grace and optimism. Perhaps it pays to practice this in advance. When considering any given moment, is there a glimmer of good worth focusing on, even making a comment about? Our narrative of reality often becomes our reality.

We didnt grow up on social media. We grew up on digital nicotine.

I don’t remember much of my life before social media. It took over in seventh grade and my individual style started bending toward whatever the algorithm pushed to the top. My wants were no longer my own but reflections of what Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube algorithmically advertised as desirable. Sleepovers that used to be chaotic with pillow fights and hide?and-seek were replaced b

Google removes Search Engine Land article after false DMCA claim

Google removed a Search Engine Land article ( Report: Clickout Media turned news sites into AI gambling hubs , published March 26) from its search results after a copyright complaint (that appears, to us, to be entirely false). Meanwhile, a similar DMCA filing led to the takedown of the original Press Gazette investigation. What happened. A DMCA notice filed March 27 claimed Search Engine Land co

Microsoft lets merchants update store names and domains in Merchant Center

Microsoft Advertising now allows e-commerce merchants to edit their Merchant Center store name and domain directly within the platform — no support ticket required. Why we care. Store details like names and URLs change as businesses rebrand or restructure. Previously, updating these required manual intervention. Self-serve control reduces friction and keeps campaigns running more smoothly during

Reddit Pro opens to all publishers, adds new features in public beta

Reddit today opened its Pro publishing tools to all publishers, removing the waitlist and offering free access in a public beta to expand distribution and engagement. Why we care . Reddit Pro gives you a centralized tool to track where your content spreads, streamline posting, and find the right communities. It transforms Reddit from a manual posting exercise into a structured distribution channe

Google Ads Editor bug links structured snippet languages across accounts

A bug in Google Ads Editor is causing structured snippet extensions copied between accounts to remain unintentionally linked. When advertisers change the language in one account, it can automatically update the same extension in another. Why we care. This bug creates hidden inconsistencies for advertisers managing multi-market campaigns, especially when different languages are required across acc

New Google TurboQuant algorithm improves vector search speed

Google says a new compression algorithm, called TurboQuant, can compress and search massive AI data sets with near-zero indexing time, potentially removing one of the biggest speed limits in modern search systems. What it is. TurboQuant is a way to shrink and organize the data that powers AI and search without losing accuracy. It reduces memory use while keeping results precise and cuts the time

Where paid media optimization should stop in long sales cycles

In long sales cycles, a lot of what happens after lead submission involves people. When you optimize campaigns to final sales, you’re teaching the ad platform to respond to how well the sales team performed that month rather than lead quality, and that’s a problem no amount of campaign changes will fix. The common advice is to “ optimize the full funnel ” (i.e., track media spend to revenue, opti

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 30, 2026

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. Google Search Console performance reports may be off again. A teen SEO wants to save his family business…

How to build a custom GPT for business (that your team actually uses)

The OpenAI GPT Store launched in January 2024 with more than 3 million custom GPTs. Ask any team how many they still use, and the answer is usually zero or one. Most business GPTs fail because they’re built like novelties rather than tools. They’re too broad, under-tested, and launched without a strategy, so they never become part of a team’s workflow. I’ve built and audited 12+ custom GPTs acros

Google Chimes In On Teen SEO Wants To Save Family Spain Vacation Rental

Google’s John Mueller chimed in on Reddit when a teenager of a family vacation rental business said he was trying to save his family business through SEO after being burned by previous SEOs. In short, it seems the family has a vacation rental in Spain, and business is significantly down due to the loss of Google traffic.

How to build FAQs that power AI-driven local search

There’s no such thing as “too much information” in AI search. The more detail you provide, the less likely your business is to be replaced by third-party sources — or left out entirely. With the rise of AI search, we know users want answers, and they want them fast. Google Maps has Know before you go and Ask Maps about this place (not to be confused with Ask Maps , the new conversational “AI Mode

Brand optimization: What it is and why your AI visibility depends on it

Consistency is key to achieving any goal. Want to learn to play the piano? Practice consistently. Trying to get in shape for a sibling’s wedding? Exercise and eat healthily consistently. Want your brand to be seen and positioned as the premier choice in its industry by both your target audience and AI? Enter brand optimization. While the phrase may sound new and exciting, brand optimization has b

AI content optimization: How to get found in Google and AI search in 2026

I’ve spent most of the last 10 years writing, managing, and improving content to reach internet audiences. But even for an ol’ marketer like me, AI content optimization was hard at first. Thankfully, I’ve done a lot of the work, so it doesn’t have to be for you. AI content optimization is the practice of structuring and improving online content so it performs well and gets seen in traditional sea

What the ‘Global Spanish’ problem means for AI search visibility

AI search often fails to identify which Spanish-speaking market it’s serving. Instead, it blends regional terminology, legal frameworks, and commercial context into a single response, creating answers that don’t map to any real market. The result is answers that mix multiple countries into something no user can actually use. This is the “Global Spanish” problem. How AI turns ‘correct’ Spanish int

How to Prevent Content Theft on Your WordPress Membership Site (Before You Lose Members)

Your WordPress membership content could be circulating on public forums for free right now, and you wouldn’t know it until your revenue starts to drop. Many site owners rely on simple password protection, which does nothing to stop a member from sharing direct download links with non-paying users. The good news is that you don’t need to build custom security systems or hire a developer. The right

Redundancy and resilience

If it’s important, don’t ask the team to try harder. Instead, create the conditions for ordinary effort to produce redundant outputs that reduce crises. If quality is a problem, look at the system, not the people.

The next social media ban? Austria looks to block kids under 14 from social media

Less than 4 months ago, Australia banned social media for kids under 16, sparking a wave of similar proposals from governments around the world. The latest effort to ban social media for children now comes from Austria. In a press release , the Austrian government announced that a bill will be introduced by the end of June to ban social media use for children under 14. According to the press rele

Long odds and unseen differences

“The odds of winning the lottery are the same whether you buy a ticket or not.” This seems nonsensical at first. Obviously, there are lottery winners. Therefore, the odds aren’t the same. Except we’re not mathematicians doing a math problem (at least most of us). Odds are how we navigate the world. When they’re sufficiently low, the useful approach is to assume that they’re zero.

Mini Kindle Pods are trending on TikTok, but these devices arent what they seem

Among passionate TikTok communities, BookTok , may be the most influential . BookTok is where book lovers and e-reader obsessives to come together to discuss their favorite books and device hacks. For readers who use e-readers, Kindle , Kobo , and Boox lead the charge as the most popular devices, so it’s notable when a new device goes viral. “Mini Kindles” appear to be the latest device to cause

Heidi Sturrock shares how a costly mistake became a competitive advantage

Heidi Sturrock, a paid search consultant with 24 years of industry experience, joined me on a recent episode of PPC Live The Podcast. The episode covers a broad match mistake with an unexpected silver lining, and Heidi’s experience testing AI Max across 50+ accounts. The broad match mistake — and the unexpected silver lining Early in her career, Heidi ran a competitor conquest campaign for a high

Systems and the default to yes

Joseph Brandlin is a scofflaw . After months of fighting to get the city council to put a stop sign on the corner of the dangerous intersection near his home, he simply did it himself. A first-rate, professional job that cost more than $1,000. As he was finishing the job at 1:30 am, he was arrested and charged with a felony. A hundred years ago, the default was that pedestrians were in charge. Ca

J.K. Rowling controversy explained

Thirty-five years ago, British author J.K. Rowling was commuting from Manchester to London when she was struck by divine creativity : She imagined the tale of a young, orphaned wizard who was key to unraveling a magically violent authoritarian uprising. In what would become Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (for American readers), the young mother found her pot of gold.

Search Central Live Asia Pacific 2026: Get Ready for Sydney and more!

It’s that time of the year again! Let’s talk about the Search Central Live (SCL) schedule for the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. We have mapped out a series of events designed to connect you with our Search teams and fellow community members. Here is everything you need to know about our plans for the year, at least for the APAC region.

Search Central Live is coming to Canada!

Our event series, Search Central Live, is coming to Toronto, Canada on April 21, 2026 for the first time! The event series has been a great way for communities to connect with each other and Googlers to learn more about the web ecosystem and how Google Search works and exchange ideas.

Google brings its Veo video generation model to Google Ads globally

Advertisers can now generate short videos directly inside Google Ads using Veo, Google’s most advanced generative video model — no video production required. How it works. Upload up to three static images into Asset Studio and Veo generates videos up to 10 seconds long with natural motion, designed specifically for YouTube formats and audiences. These can then be turned into ready-to-serve ads us

YouTube test replaces video titles with AI summaries

Google is testing AI-generated summaries in YouTube feeds, replacing video titles with auto-written synopses. Some YouTube users are seeing video titles replaced by AI-generated summaries in the Android app. Reports on Reddit showed title-less video cards with collapsible summary boxes instead. The details . Video thumbnails remain, but titles are missing in some cases. AI summaries appear in exp
Stop chasing Reddit and Wikipedia: What actually drives AI recommendations
We’ve all seen the charts going viral on LinkedIn. They’re everywhere at this point. Multiple industry studies, even this research from Semrush , confirm that Wikipedia and Reddit are the top-cited domains across major LLM platforms — and CMOs are running with this data. The response is predictable: Just search for any bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) software query, and you’ll find Reddit threads in the

ChatGPT hits $100 million in ad revenue and is opening self-serve access in April

Just six weeks after launching its ad pilot, OpenAI has hit a significant milestone — and the platform is still in its early stages of rollout. The numbers. Over $100 million in annualized ad revenue, generated from less than 20% of eligible US free and Go tier users seeing ads daily Around 85% of Free and Go users are eligible to see ads — meaning the current revenue represents a fraction of the

ChatGPT ads are showing up – a lot

OpenAI have been pumping out the ads ads for free-tier ChatGPT users in the US for over a month now, and early testing suggests they’re more frequent and more targeted than many users might expect. How often they appear. In a test of 500 questions across the mobile app, roughly one in five questions in a new conversation thread triggered an ad at the bottom of ChatGPT’s response — always as a web

How SEO maturity unlocked a 133x ROAS in medical device marketing

You know SEO improves traffic, authority, and trust. What we don’t talk about enough is how a strong SEO foundation can help other channels, including PPC . This practical case study will show you how performance marketing scales in a high-consideration B2B medical device market and how getting SEO fundamentals firmly in place enables paid media to deliver at scale. B2B medical device marketing b

AI-forward campaigns are a B2B growth gold mine — if you’re patient

If your entire Google Ads strategy consists of targeting brand and non-brand keywords, you’re limiting growth. If performance is declining, it’s not the platform — it’s the strategy. People don’t discover you through non-brand search. They research on Reddit , ChatGPT , Facebook, LinkedIn , and YouTube . They watch demos, read testimonials, and learn about your brand long before they ever search

Google released v23.2 of the Google Ads API

A new version of the Google Ads API is out, bringing a handful of targeted updates across video, app campaigns, and audience planning tools. Key changes in this release. A new VideoEnhancement resource that surfaces whether a video ad is Google-generated or advertiser-provided — giving developers clearer visibility into auto-enhanced creative A new AppTopCombinationView resource providing read-on

Google adds seasonal creative theming to PMax asset groups

Refreshing creatives for every seasonal moment just got significantly faster — Google has quietly launched Asset Group Theming inside Performance Max, letting advertisers apply seasonal themes to existing asset groups without rebuilding from scratch. How it works. Advertisers can clone a high-performing asset group and apply a theme — Google then generates themed image variations and suggests ali

Google Search Live Goes Global

Google announced Search Live has launched globally, for all languages and locations where AI Mode is available. Google said this is possible by its “new audio and voice model, Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, which delivers even more natural and intuitive conversations.”

Google Ads Expanding Loyalty Program

Google Ads and Merchant Center is expanding the Loyalty program features to highlight key perks, expand local and regional visibility, expand internationally and within AI Mode and Gemini.

Google March 2026 Core Update Is Rolling Out – First Core Update Of Year

Google officially announced the rollout of the March 2026 core update early Friday morning at around 5:14 ET. This core update is expected to take up to 2 weeks to roll out. Google said this “is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.”

Google Ads PMax Audience Exclusions & New Reporting

Google announced several new steering updates for Google Ads Performance Max including first-party audience exclusions, budget reporting, full audience reporting and network segmentation in placement reporting.

If your local rankings are off, your map pin may be the reason

The local SEO community remains locked in a permanent debate over the “hide address” toggle for service area businesses (SABs). Most owners view this switch as a simple privacy setting. In reality, it’s a high-stakes decision that dictates how Google’s algorithm interprets your physical relevance. Does your defined service area influence where you rank? Does hiding your street address suppress yo

Stop Losing Sales: How to Add a WooCommerce Cart Reserved Timer

The most frustrating part of running a WooCommerce store is watching a customer add a product to their cart only to disappear at the final second. You did the hard work of getting them to your site, but you miss out on the sale. When shoppers leave your products sitting in an open tab, they often get distracted and forget why they wanted them in the first place. This leads to a high cart abandonm

Google March 2026 core update rolling out now

Google released the March 2026 core update today, the company announced . This is Google’s first core update of 2026. It follows the quick March 2026 spam update from a couple of days ago and the February 2026 Discover update . What Google is saying. Google updated its Search Status Dashboard to state: “Released the March 2026 core update. The rollout may take up to 2 weeks to complete.” Google a

What’s in the status bottle?

It’s often mislabeled. Sometimes the contents can make us ill, especially if we drink too much. Status is easy to sell. But despite how often people buy the promise, it rarely delivers.

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WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate 1

The first Release Candidate (“RC1”) for WordPress 7.0 is ready for download and testing! This version of the WordPress software is still under development . Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended to evaluate RC1 on a test server and site. WordPress 7.0 RC1 can be tested using any of the following methods:

Google releases March 2026 spam update

Google released its March 2026 spam update today at 3:20 p.m. It’s the second announced Google algorithm update of 2026, following the February 2026 Discover core update . This is the first spam update of 2026. Google’s most recent spam update was in August 2025 . Timing. This update may only “take a few days to complete,” Google said . On LinkedIn, Google added : “This is a normal spam update, a

Reddit introduces collection ads, deal overlays, Shopify integration

Reddit is rolling out new Dynamic Product Ad features, including a shoppable Collection Ads format and Shopify integration, the company announced today. What’s new . Collection Ads : A new Dynamic Product Ad format that pairs a lifestyle hero image with shoppable product tiles in one carousel, bridging discovery and purchase. Early adopters following best practices are seeing an 8% ROAS lift. Com

AI citations favor listicles, articles, product pages: Study

AI search citations favor a small set of formats. Listicles, articles, and product pages drive over half of all mentions across major LLMs, according to new Wix Studio AI Search Lab research analyzing 75,000 AI answers and more than 1 million citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. The findings . Listicles led at 21.9% of citations, followed by articles (16.7%) and product pages

Google is tightening political content rules for Shopping ads starting April 16

A quiet but important policy update is coming to Google Shopping ads next month, requiring some merchants to verify their accounts before running ads featuring political content. What’s changing. From April 16, merchants running Shopping ads with certain political content in nine countries will need to verify their Google Ads account as an election advertiser. Google will also outright prohibit s

ChatGPT citations favor a small group of domains: Study

AI citations in ChatGPT are far more concentrated than citation distributions in traditional search. Roughly 30 domains capture 67% of citations within a topic. That’s according to Kevin Indig’s latest study, which also found that broad topical coverage, long-form pages, and cluster-based models outperform the old “one keyword, one page” approach. The details. Citation visibility wasn’t evenly di

Google is testing AI-generated animated video clips inside PMax

A new creative feature has been spotted inside Google Ads Performance Max campaigns — and it could change how advertisers without video budgets approach animated display advertising. What was found. Vice President of Search at JumpFly, Inc. Nikki Kuhlman spotted an option to generate animated video clips directly within PMax asset groups, using AI to enhance and animate a single source image. How

SEO’s biggest threat in 2026? Your own organization

AI tools and visibility have dominated the SEO conversation in the past two years. But while discussions focus on these new technologies, most of the biggest SEO risks in 2026 will come from somewhere else: within your own organization. Fragmented data, unclear ownership, outdated KPIs, and weak collaboration can quietly destroy even the best strategies. As SEO expands beyond the website and into

Apple is bringing ads to Apple Maps this summer

Apple is preparing to introduce sponsored listings in Apple Maps, marking a significant expansion of its advertising business beyond the App Store. How it will work. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the system will function similarly to Google Maps — allowing retailers and brands to bid for ad slots against search queries. Sponsored businesses will appear in Maps search results, much like sp

DEV: One Does Not Simply Deploy On A Friday

Welcome to DEV, your fortnightly peek into what’s happening in WordPress. WordPress is always changing. Quietly, constantly, and occasionally all at once. DEV is where we try to keep up, and bring you the most interesting bits worth your attention. Stick around to the end to find out what they’re actually singing in the opening sequence of The Lion King… In today’s edition: Plugin submissions are

Bing Webmaster Tools now links AI queries to cited pages

Microsoft added query-to-page mapping to its AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, letting you connect AI grounding queries directly to cited URLs. Why we care. The original dashboard showed queries and pages separately, limiting optimization. Now you can tie specific AI-triggering queries to the exact cited pages, so you can prioritize updates based on real AI-driven demand — not guesse

The entity home: The page that shapes how search, AI, and users see your brand

The entity home is the single page that anchors how algorithms, bots, and people understand your brand. It’s usually your About page, and it does far more than most teams realize. It’s where algorithms resolve your identity, where bots map your footprint, and where humans verify trust before they convert. In one test, improving that page alone lifted conversions by 6% for visitors who reached it.

Digital Mina: Navigating the Future of Cryptocurrency Mining with Innovative Demos

Inledning: En Industri i snabb förändring De senaste decennierna har gruvindustrin för digitala tillgångar utvecklats till en av de mest dynamiska och teknologiskt avancerade sektorerna inom finans och IT. Med den växande efterfrågan på kryptovalutor som Bitcoin och Ethereum har behovet av tillförlitlig och effektiv gruvutrustning ökat exponentiellt. Samtidigt har utmaningarna kring energieffekti

Why better signals drive paid search performance

In an increasingly automated environment, paid search performance is constrained by a simple reality: Algorithms can only optimize toward the signals they’re given. Improving those signals remains the most reliable way to improve results. That sounds straightforward, but in practice, many people are still optimizing around signals that don’t reflect real business outcomes. Let’s dive into how alg

7 WordPress SEO Plugins That Actually Use AI in 2026

Not every plugin that claims AI is using it for anything meaningful. Here’s an honest look at seven WordPress SEO plugins where AI is doing real work, what that work is, and which ones belong on your site. The post ” ” first appeared on WP Mayor .

Google Tests Reply To Reviews With Al

Google is testing encouraging business owners to reply to reviews using AI. There is a new option in the Google Business Profile dashboard that is showing for some businesses that says “Reply to reviews with AI.”

Local Ads Coming To Apple Maps

Apple is reportedly launching local ads within Apple Maps, as soon as this month. “Apple Inc. is preparing to introduce advertising in its Maps app, part of a broader push to generate more money from services,” Bloomberg wrote.

The checks that make or break your next website migration

Website migrations have a well-earned reputation for going wrong, with even well-planned migrations leading to rankings slipping, traffic dropping, or tracking breaking. But most migration problems come from small oversights rather than complex technical failures. You can reduce your risk with a staged approach. The checks you complete during staging, on launch day, and in the first few weeks aft

Over the past decade, the landscape of digital gambling has undergone a profound transformation. The

Introduction: The Evolution of Digital Slot Gaming advent of online slot games has shifted the dynamics of traditional casino entertainment, leveraging advances in technology, user interface design, and immersive experiences. Today, players seek more engaging and thematic experiences, leading developers to innovate with captivating graphics, exciting bonus features, and jackpot opportunities. Am

DEV: You Had Me At “Hello World”

Welcome to DEV, your fortnightly roundup of WordPress news, clever builds, and contributors who keep the project humming along. We’re here to share the highlights that make developers fall in love with the craft all over again. Oh and if you want to see some proper panda-monium, stick around to the end. In today’s edition: WordPress 7.0 Beta 3 is live: AI experiments and editor twists await brave

How Real-Time Data Unlocks 100X AI Performance

Are you still manually copying data into your AI tools every time you need an analysis? Do you keep uploading the same files to Claude or ChatGPT only to find they’re already outdated by the time you need them again? In this article, you’ll discover how to connect live data to your AI tools for […]

Numbers and the human/computer interface

If you tell me your ID number, your phone number or the wiring instructions for your bank account, not only will I forget them, I’ll need you to repeat it a few times so I write it down without making a transcription error. When we first started using serial numbers (the Roman Legion did this thousands of years ago, and the British Board of Ordnance required it by law in the 1700s), it made perfe

The internet made BTS. Arirang asks what comes next.

The first thing BTS ask for on Arirang , the group’s long-awaited fifth studio album, is simple: “Put your phone down.” It sounds almost cliché in an era of screen fatigue, but coming from BTS, it lands with a strange kind of dissonance. This is, after all, a group that didn’t just benefit from social media but helped define how K-pop stars are expected to exist within it. For over a decade, BTS

Desperate times: Reddit considers adding ID verification to fight flood of AI bots

Reddit has a real bot problem on its hands . And, in order to deal with this problem, Reddit is considering turning to the latest go-to solution for the tech industry: ID verification. On the tech show TBPN , Reddit CEO Steve Huffman spoke about how AI has caused issues for the platform and discussed potential solutions. Hoffman explained how the solutions would look to answer the question “Is th

EU signals imminent decision on Google DMA probe

The EU’s top antitrust enforcer signaled a decision on whether Google is violating the Digital Markets Act is imminent, without committing to a timeline. What she said. “It will come,” Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera told Dow Jones Newswires, adding the cases are complex and the commission is committed to decisions based on evidence and fair procedure. The backdrop. The European Commission

The incel glossary decoded: Alpha males, body counts and the manosphere’s key terms

If you’ve spent any time consuming dating content lately, you’ve almost certainly encountered the vocabulary: high value , alpha , body count , Chad . Terms that, not long ago, were esoterically confined to misogynistic, racist incel (“involuntarily celibate”) forums and have now migrated wholesale into mainstream culture — repackaged as self-improvement content, dating advice, and meme language

How AI-generated content performs in Google Search: A 16-month experiment

With AI, you can generate dozens (if not hundreds) of articles in hours and publish at scale. But publishing is the easy part. What happens after they go live is what matters. Together with the research team at SE Ranking, we ran a 16-month experiment to track how well AI-generated content performed on brand-new domains with zero authority. As you will see, the results are hard to call a success.

Answer engine optimization case studies that prove the ROI of AEO in 2026

AI search is already influencing how buyers discover brands — and the results are measurable. According to the 2026 HubSpot State of Marketing report, 58% of marketers say visitors referred by AI tools convert at higher rates than traditional organic traffic. As platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini increasingly shape buying decisions, visibility inside AI-generated answers is quickly be

Google Ads API to block duplicate Lookalike user lists

A quiet but important change is coming to the Google Ads API that will affect how advertisers and developers create Lookalike user lists, especially for Demand Gen campaigns. What’s changing. Google will enforce a uniqueness check on Lookalike user lists, blocking duplicate lists with the same seed lists, expansion level, and country targeting. Attempts to create a duplicate will return an API er

ChatGPT ads pilot leaves advertisers without proof of ROI

OpenAI is moving forward with ads in ChatGPT, but early adopters say it isn’t ready for serious performance marketing. The big picture. ChatGPT’s ad product shares almost no data, lacks automated buying tools, and offers minimal targeting—leaving advertisers with little ability to measure whether their spend is doing anything, The Information reported. What advertisers are dealing with. SEO consu

Why zero-click search doesn’t mean zero influence

In a recent keynote at the Industrial Marketing Summit, Rand Fishkin argued that we’re marketing in a “zero-click world.” His observation captures an important surface-level trend: fewer users are clicking through to websites. The deeper shift, however, is structural. What has changed is the way information is evaluated, repeated, and trusted across the web — and that’s where many are drawing the

Why ‘search everywhere’ is the new reality for SEO

Most SEO discussions today center on AI — from AI Overviews to ChatGPT and other LLMs — and the concern that they’re taking traffic from business websites, forcing a shift toward GEO or AEO. For the most part, that concern is valid. AI is reducing traffic for many sites, especially those that rely on top-of-funnel, informational content. But the data suggests AI may not be the biggest shift. User

AI is squeezing marketing agencies from both sides

The numbers tell a story that most agency owners already know in their gut: AI anxiety is rising fast. In 2024, 44% of digital marketing agencies viewed AI as a significant threat to their business model. Just one year later, that number jumped to 53%, according to SparkToro’s annual State of Digital Agencies survey of hundreds of agency owners worldwide. But here’s what makes this particularly p

Microsoft Bing Tests New AI Image Search

Microsoft seems to be testing a new AI-powered image search interface and result set for Bing Image Search. If you do a search on Bing Images, on the right side you may see a button for “New Version.” That new version says you can “try a new version of Image Search.”

Duplicate website stats appear in Google paid search ads

A strange pattern has emerged in Google’s paid search results: multiple competing ads display the exact same web statistics, raising questions about a bug or an intentional design shift. What’s happening. Several paid search ads are showing the same website statistics simultaneously, even though these signals are typically unique to each site. The uniformity makes the data look unreliable, and it

All-in-One WP Migration Pro Review: The Simplest Way to Move a WordPress Site

Moving a WordPress site between hosts involves more ways to break things than most people expect. Upload limits, corrupted serialized data, broken URLs, and missing media are all waiting to trip you up. In this All-in-One WP Migration review, I’ll look at the premium extension to help you decide whether this plugin can help you move sites without a hitch. The post ” ” first appeared on WP Mayor

Google Business Profiles Gains Place Page Attributes

Google seems to have added a new section to the Google Business Profiles section named Place page attributes. Place page attributes allows you to let customers know more about your business by showing attributes on your Business Profile. These may appear publicly on Search, Maps, and other Google services.

First ChatGPT Ads Share Little Data To Advertisers

The Information wrote “OpenAI’s First Advertisers Can’t Prove ChatGPT Ads Work.” In short, the ChatGPT ad platform from OpenAI shares almost no data with advertisers. It is low tech, there is no ad performance data, and it also has very limited ad targeting features.

Google Adds Google-Agent User Agent

Google has added a new user-agent to the user-triggered fetchers named Google-Agent. Google said the “Google-Agent user agent is rolling out over the next few weeks, and will be used by Google agents hosted on Google infrastructure to navigate the web and perform actions upon user request.”

Forget Boring Forms: How to Build Interactive WordPress Surveys with AI

Building a survey in WordPress is easy. But the problem is that most surveys are too long and static. Visitors lose interest halfway through and abandon them, leaving you with incomplete data you can’t act on. I’ve found that the best way to fix this is by creating interactive surveys that show different questions based on how each visitor responds. And by using AI to build your forms, you can sk

Follow-through

How does the ball know? In tennis, golf or just about all ball sports, the follow-through determines the flight of the ball. Great players always have a complete and confident follow-through. But the ball is long gone before that happens. So, what’s the point? It turns out that the ball can tell that you intend to have a serious follow-through. A weak or non-existent follow-through requires that

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Les modes de paiement dans l’industrie du jeu en ligne : fiabilité et innovation

Avec l’essor du marché des jeux d’argent en ligne, la question des moyens de paiement acceptés devient centrale pour les opérateurs souhaitant garantir la sécurité et la fluidité de l’expérience utilisateur. Au fil des années, cette dimension a évolué en réponse à la montée en puissance de nouvelles technologies, à la réglementation stricte, et aux attentes croissantes des joueurs en matière de s

YouTube tests sticky banner after ad skip

YouTube is experimenting with a format that keeps ads visible even after users skip — potentially reshaping how advertisers think about skippable inventory. What’s happening . YouTube is testing a sticky banner overlay that appears once a user skips an ad. Instead of the ad disappearing entirely, a branded card remains on-screen until the viewer actively dismisses it. How it works . After hitting

Google adds video visibility to Performance Max reporting

Google is incrementally improving metric visibility in Performance Max, giving advertisers more insight into how creative choices — particularly video — impact performance. What’s happening . Google Ads has introduced a new “Ads using video” segment within Performance Max channel performance reporting, allowing advertisers to break down results based on whether video assets were included. Why we

Google expands Personal Intelligence to AI Mode, Gemini, Chrome

Google is expanding Personal Intelligence across AI Mode, Gemini, and Chrome in the U.S., moving it beyond beta into broader consumer use. Why we care. Personal Intelligence pushes Google further into fully personalized search, using first-party data like Gmail and Photos. That makes results harder to replicate, rank against, or track — especially in AI Mode, where outputs may vary based on user

Google says AI Mode stays ad-free for Personal Intelligence users

Although Google continues to test ads in AI Mode, users who connect apps to enable Personal Intelligence won’t see ads — and that isn’t changing right now, a Google spokesperson confirmed. What’s happening. Google has been testing ads inside AI Mode in the U.S. Early results: users find these business connections “helpful,” per Google. But there’s a clear carveout: no ads for users who opt into a

Yahoo CEO: Google AI Mode is the biggest threat to web traffic

Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone said AI-powered search — especially Google’s AI Mode — is putting the open web’s core traffic model at risk and argues AI search engines must send users back to publishers. “I think that the LLMs are one big reason that they’re under threat, with AI Mode in Google being the biggest challenge.” “Those publishers deserve [traffic], and we’re not going to have the content to co

How nonprofits can build a digital presence that actually drives impact

For a long time, a nonprofit’s digital presence hasn’t been a “nice-to-have.” It’s the central hub for mission delivery, donor engagement, and advocacy. Many organizations struggle with the technical and strategic foundations needed to turn a website and a few social accounts into a high-performing digital ecosystem. The goal isn’t simply to “be online.” It’s to build reliable infrastructure, so

5 competitive gates hidden inside ‘rank and display’

If you’re a content strategist, you might feel this isn’t your territory. Keep reading, because it is. Everything you build feeds these five gates, and the decisions the algorithms make here determine whether the system recruits your content, trusts it enough to display it, and recommends it to the person who just asked for exactly what you sell. The DSCRI infrastructure phase covers the first fi

Why social search visibility is the next evolution of discoverability

Search strategy once meant ranking on Google. We optimized websites and invested heavily in organic visibility. Entire marketing strategies were built around capturing demand from Google search results. But search behavior doesn’t live on a single platform. Today, people search on TikTok for recommendations, YouTube for tutorials, Reddit for honest opinions, and Amazon for product validation. Sea

Google Ads Editor 2.12 adds creative control and campaign flexibility

Google is expanding capabilities in Google Ads Editor to give advertisers more creative flexibility, automation control, and budget precision — especially as AI-driven campaign types continue to evolve. What’s new . The 2.12 release introduces a wide set of updates across Performance Max, Demand Gen, and video campaigns, with a clear focus on scaling creative assets and improving workflow efficie

How Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol could reshape search conversions

As Google rolls out AI Overviews, AI Mode in Search, and the Gemini ecosystem, we face a growing challenge: what happens when users get answers — and soon complete purchases — without leaving Google’s interfaces? Enter Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), now in beta. UCP is designed to help brands to sell to consumers without leaving the Gemini or LLM experience. Consumers can check out w

How to Sell AI Services Without Selling Your Soul

Are you sitting on genuine AI expertise but unsure how to turn it into actual revenue? Wondering whether you need to know everything about artificial intelligence before anyone will pay to learn from you? In this article, you’ll discover how to get your first clients, what to charge, and which AI services create the most […] The post appeared first on Social Media Examiner .

Green flags

We were taught to look out for red flags. Little signs that something is wrong, that we should be careful or even turn around. Don’t let that distract you from being on the lookout for green flags. We might need encouragement to leap forward. If you look for the green flags, you’re more likely to find them.

OpenAI tests Ads Manager as ChatGPT ad business takes shape

OpenAI is beginning to build the infrastructure for a formal advertising business around ChatGPT — but early performance signals suggest the company still has work to do to match established search platforms. What’s happening . OpenAI started testing an Ads Manager dashboard with a small group of partners, according to confirmation shared with ADWEEK. The tool allows marketers to launch, monitor,

Google tests “Sponsored Shops” blocks in Shopping results

Google appears to be testing a new “Sponsored Shops” format in Google Shopping results that highlights entire stores instead of individual products — a potential shift in how brands compete in Shopping ads. What’s happening . Instead of displaying only single product listings, the new block groups multiple products from the same retailer into one sponsored unit. The format features the store name

Google Brings Helpful Changes to Ads Editor with Version 2.12

Google is now rolling out Ad Editor version 2.12, featuring helpful changes from the web interface into the software. This update should be a welcomed one, with a handful of changes that should allow for more meaningful work in Ads Editor…

What incrementality really means in affiliate marketing

The words “incremental” and “incrementality” get thrown around in affiliate marketing, but they might not mean what they sound like. There may be no increase in actual sales, new customers, or revenue. Affiliate marketers who refer to incrementality often look at it only within the affiliate channel, not across your company as a whole. To determine whether affiliates are truly incremental, ask a

LinkedIn updates feed algorithm with LLM-powered ranking and retrieval

LinkedIn is launching a new AI-powered feed ranking system that uses large language models and GPUs to analyze post content and surface more relevant updates to its 1.3 billion members. Why we care . Understanding how LinkedIn surfaces content is critical if you want your posts — or your brand’s — to be discovered. The new system prioritizes topical relevance and engagement patterns, LinkedIn sai

Why entity authority is the foundation of AI search visibility

The webpage is no longer the unit of digital visibility. For years, we’ve built our digital presence on a foundation of URLs and keywords, but that infrastructure was designed for a highway that AI has now bypassed. In the search everywhere revolution, the most powerful atomic unit is the entity — a well-defined, machine-readable representation of a concept, product, organization, or person. The

Negli ultimi dieci anni, il settore dei giochi mobili ha conosciuto una crescita senza precedenti. C

La Crescita Esponenziale del Gioco Mobile: Dati e Tendenze on oltre 3,2 miliardi di giocatori attivi nel mondo, rappresenta ora il segmento più redditizio dell’industria videoludica globale. Secondo Newzoo , nel 2023, i ricavi da giochi mobile hanno superato i 100 miliardi di dollari, rappresentando circa il 55% delle entrate totali nel settore. Questa espansione è guidata da fattori chiave come

Die Zukunft des Online-Bingos: Innovationen, Sicherheit und Spielqualität

Im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung erlebt das klassische Bingo eine faszinierende Transformation. Während das Spiel seinen Ursprung in britischen Gesellschaften des 16. Jahrhunderts hat, erfreut sich das Online-Bingo seit den frühen 2000er Jahren wachsender Beliebtheit. Besonders in Deutschland, einem Land mit einer reichen Glücksspieltradition, gewinnt die digitale Variante zunehmend an Bedeutung.

7 organic content investments that drive ecommerce ROI

The rules of organic content are shifting from a “publish more” to a “prove more” mindset. Search results increasingly answer questions directly through AI summaries, shopping features, and other SERP integrations. Visibility alone doesn’t resolve buyer uncertainty. For ecommerce brands, organic visibility now requires recognition and trust amid the noise on the SERPs. The 2026 game is both simpl

La Rivoluzione delle Slot Originali Online: Innovazione e Sicurezza nel Casinò Digitale

Negli ultimi anni, l’universo del gioco d’azzardo digitale ha vissuto una crescita esponenziale, guidata dall’innovazione tecnologica e da un cambiamento nelle preferenze dei giocatori. Tra le tante novità, le slot originali online rappresentano un segmento sempre più consolidato, offrendo non solo intrattenimento di alta qualità ma anche elevati standard di sicurezza e affidabilità. Questa evolu

Breaking Through Creative Ops Bottlenecks: Your 2026 Technology Roadmap by Canto

Are you watching your team’s creative operations buckle under mounting pressure ? You’re not alone. As project complexity skyrockets and client demands intensify, creative leaders face an unprecedented challenge: scaling operations without sacrificing quality or burning out teams. The solution isn’t working harder, rather, it’s working smarter with technology that transforms your entire content l

How to Find and Delete Duplicate Images in WordPress Automatically

Every time you upload a photo, WordPress creates five or ten different hidden size variations to fit your theme. These extra files consume your storage and slow your site backups. Plus, most of these extra image sizes are never used on your site. They sit on your server like digital clutter and can even increase your monthly hosting costs. I’ve found that using an automated image deletion tool is

A kitchen metaphor

Colleagues you care about are coming over for dinner. What should you make? Some people don’t care if it’s delicious, as long as it’s interesting. Some don’t need it to be interesting, but it needs to start on time. Others define delicious differently than you do. One couple doesn’t care at all about the effort you put into it. A few don’t care if you’ve worked hard to create a spectacular meal,

Timothée Chalamet loses Best Actor at the Oscars. Social media celebrates.

Timothée Chalamet is now a four-time Best Actor loser at the Academy Awards, adding another near-miss to his growing collection after failing to take home the trophy for his role as Marty Mauser in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme . Marty Supreme , with nine nominations, did not take home any Oscars. The competition was stiff, but Michael B. Jordan’s electric dual performance in Sinners took home the

Wildest moments from Oscars 2026

The beauty of live television is that absolutely anything can happen, and nowhere is that more reliably, terrifyingly true than at the Oscars. The Academy Awards like to present themselves as the pinnacle of Hollywood elegance, and yet the ceremony has an almost proud history of producing moments that range from the benignly chaotic like the the La La Land / Moonlight Best Picture debacle to the

Sitting in zimbo

You’re at the Zoom meeting, on time, and no one is there. Are you the ghost or is everyone else? We needed a word for this existential minor dread, and now we have one. Coordination is hard. PS the Ides of March are overrated as a threat. It’s the chronic conditions that really get us in the end.

Visible measures

When an organization is known for speed and quality, it’s likely that if times get tough, quality will suffer before speed does. That’s because customers notice speed right away, but it takes a while to come to a conclusion about quality. If a musician or politician is known for showmanship and wise insights, the showmanship will probably outlast the wisdom. When we measure and compare the easily

Digital PR Strategy in 3 Simple Steps — Whiteboard Friday

In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Chloe Osunsami provides 3 simple steps for crafting a successful digital PR strategy in 2026. Join her to discover how to analyze competitors, find AI visibility gaps, and secure authoritative brand mentions.

Steven Spielberg praises ballet and opera at SXSW amid Timothée Chalamet backlash

The internet has spent weeks debating Timothée Chalamet’s now-viral comments about ballet and opera. The latest voice to enter the discourse: Steven Spielberg. During a live podcast conversation at SXSW on March 13, the legendary director was reflecting on the communal power of moviegoing when he suddenly shouted out two of the oldest performing arts institutions. “It happens in movies. It happen

Chloe Varnfield talks sneaky Google Ads settings and tanking performance

Chloe Varnfield, a digital marketing specialist at Atelier Studios with nearly eight years in PPC, joined me to share the mistakes that shaped her career — and the lessons every advertiser should take from them. When Google sneaks settings past you Chloe’s first story centers on Google’s account-level automated assets setting — a feature so well hidden that many advertisers don’t know it exists u

SerpApi asks court to throw out Reddit scraping complaint

SerpApi is asking a federal court to dismiss Reddit’s lawsuit over alleged scraping of Reddit content from Google Search, saying Reddit is trying to use copyright law to control user posts and public search results. The motion follows Reddit’s amended complaint filed in February. SerpApi says the filing still fails to show copyright ownership, circumvention of technical protections, or concrete h

Beyond keywords: Mastering AI-driven campaigns

The days of building campaigns around long lists of keywords are fading. Today, AI-powered Google campaigns and features like Performance Max (PMax) and AI Max are changing the rules. These keywordless campaigns lean on automation, audience signals, and machine learning to find new opportunities, often faster and at greater scale than humans can. At SMX Next, three PPC pros — Nikki Kuhlman, VP of

Why surface-level SEO tactics won’t build lasting AI search visibility

A recent Harvard Business Review piece echoes the shift we’re sseeing in the SEO industry: at a macro level, LLMs and Google’s AI-powered SERP features, such as AI Overviews, aren’t just creating a zero-click environment, but also changing user journeys and behavior. They’re collapsing what used to be multi-touch customer journeys into a single synthesized answer. For a more visual and emphatic m

Only 15% of pages retrieved by ChatGPT appear in final answers: Report

ChatGPT retrieves far more webpages than it cites. A new AirOps analysis found that 85% of discovered sources never appear in the final answer. Why we care. If you want your content cited in AI-generated answers, discovery isn’t enough. Most retrieved pages never become visible to users. Key finding. In AI answers, retrieval doesn’t equal citation. Your page can rank and be retrieved yet still lo

Starting Or Steering The Wave

Why traditional “utility SEO” content is losing value, and how marketers can create demand instead of chasing existing searches. The post appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Stop paying for traffic: The enterprise CMO’s guide to ROI-driven SEO

The standard agency reporting call is broken. Budgets are under extreme scrutiny, yet you still invest in vendors that celebrate arbitrary traffic gains while your sales pipeline stays flat. Optimizing for raw traffic volume is a legacy mindset that hides real commercial performance. The new mandate is to build an acquisition engine that influences buyers and protects your profit and loss (P&L) l

Google Search Ads in 2026 require a different kind of audit

Brandon Ervin, Director of Product Management for Google Search Ads, recently discussed campaign consolidation, AI Max, and what advertiser control looks like in 2026 on Google’s Ads Decoded podcast. The conversation was serious and informed, and reflected a product team that understands advertiser concerns and is actively working to address them. But the podcast is also incomplete. The gap betwe

How I Display WooCommerce Reviews Anywhere in WordPress (& Boost Sales)

Hiding your best WooCommerce reviews on product pages is like keeping your top salespeople in the back room. When reviews are scattered or hidden, most visitors never see them. And that means missed chances to earn trust and make sales. By showing your reviews on your homepage and other key pages, visitors can see real customer experiences right away. This helps them feel confident about buying a

“It’s faster to just do it myself”

Here’s a simple rubric for outsourcing: If you’re never going to need to do this again, and it’s easier to do it than to instruct someone else to do it, by all means, do it yourself. If doing it yourself will give you joy or satisfaction that is greater than the productivity boost you’ll get from leverage or better tools, please do it yourself. But if you’re going to do it more than once, and the

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]]> Valuable Tips to Help Your Social Marketing 446 – Interesting Articles This Week https://xtremefreelance.com/valuable-tips-to-help-your-social-marketing-446-interesting-articles-this-week/ Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:54:27 +0000 https://xtremefreelance.com/?p=24395 Valuable Tips | Interesting Articles This Week

Programming Note: Offline For Several Days

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.

Google Search Ranking Volatility Still Heated

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 Of Google On Teaching AI To Link Out

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.

Why tomorrow’s media leaders must think like product managers

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

Pokémon Pokopia is the cozy escape the internet needed

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

Before You Shift SEO Budget to AI, Ask These Questions [Webinar] via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

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

DEV: <h1> in the Right Direction

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

How Much Do Keywords Matter in 2026?

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.

McKinsey’s ‘Organize to Value’ a blueprint for evolving to positionless marketing by Optimove

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

The AI Tool Stack That Saves Creators Hours Every Week

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

Small changes to big systems

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,

Blueskys CEO is stepping down. Heres why.

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.

Google Ads adds AI voice-over to Performance Max video ads

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 updates privacy policy as ads expand in ChatGPT

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 Marketing Live 2026 set for May 20

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 assistants now equal 56% of global search engine volume: Study

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

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 9, 2026

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…

Why PPC teams are becoming data teams

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

Why We Need To Talk About Young People

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 .

Discover ShortPixel: Smarter Image Compression for a Faster WordPress

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 .

ChatGPT ads are coming — here’s how you should prepare now

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

Google’s Liz Reid On Progression Of Google AI Search

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 Discover Follow Widget Home Card

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.”

The Digital Markets Act promised fairer search. It’s failing.

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

How I Enabled Search by Blog Post Author in WordPress (in 3 Easy Steps)

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

Answer engine optimization strategy beyond basic SEO and AEO tactics

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

Organic search is fundamentally disrupted. Here’s what to do about it. by Brightspot

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

Google’s undocumented method to disavow a whole TLD

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’

Considering infinity

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

10 Reddit comment frameworks that drive engagement without sounding like ads

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 to ban social media for children under 16

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

Confused about donations

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.

Emerging Trends in Online Casino Gaming: Innovation, Responsible Play, and the Rise of Demo Versions

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

If they knew…

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

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