When left to its own devices, there are a couple of things Performance Max is absolutely great at doing for lead gen campaigns: Driving volume. Finding the lowest-quality leads it possibly can. It’s not inherently surprising that Google is doing what’s best for Google – that is,...

For many local businesses, performance looks healthier than it is. Rank trackers still show top-three positions. Visibility reports appear steady. Yet calls and website visits from Google Business Profiles are falling — sometimes fast. This gap is becoming a defining feature of local...

Anthropic is drawing the line against advertising in AI chatbots. Claude will remain ad-free, the company said, even as rival AI platforms experiment with sponsored messages and branded placements inside conversations. Ads inside AI chats would erode trust, warp incentives, and...

Google is experimenting with showing third-party endorsement content directly within Search ads. The test places short endorsements from external publishers under the ad description, including the third party’s name, logo, and favicon. What’s showing up. The test was first spotted by...

Many search teams are seeing better rankings, more visibility, increased traffic, and more leads. Yet feedback on pipeline, revenue, and sales outcomes isn’t showing the same positive results. When SEO KPIs are green and graphs are up and to the right, business outcomes don’t always...

Google is working toward a future where it understands what you want before you ever type a search. Now Google is pushing that thinking onto the device itself, using small AI models that perform nearly as well as much larger ones. What’s happening. In a research paper presented at...

Google’s head of Search warned a federal court that forcing the company to share its search index, ranking data, and live results with competitors would cause “immediate and irreparable harm” to Google, its users, and the open web. The warning appears in a filed affidavit from...

Organic search traffic is down just 2.5% year over year — nowhere near the 25% to 60% drops often cited in industry commentary. That’s one big takeaway from a new large-scale analysis by Graphite using Similarweb data from more than 40,000 of the largest U.S. websites. This finding...

Marketers can now set a total budget for a campaign over a defined period. Google automatically optimizes spend to fully use the budget by the campaign’s end date. The feature, earlier only available for Performance Max, is now available Search and Shopping campaigns, reducing the...

Google is rolling out a new update for the Trends Explore page that is powered by Gemini. The goal is to make it easier for users and researchers to find more search terms to explore. “The updated Explore page has a new side panel that uses Gemini capabilities to automatically...