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 pressure is mounting. Eighteen lobby and civil society groups wrote to Ribera this month demanding clear remedies and a fine large enough to make non-compliance unprofitable.
The groups warned the commission’s credibility is on the line, noting Google controls over 90% of the EU search market.
“Every day without a decision is a day that European businesses are systematically disadvantaged,” the letter said.
Why we care. A ruling against Google under the Digital Markets Act could force major changes to how it operates search in Europe — potentially reshaping how ads are served, ranked, and priced in one of the world’s largest markets. If remedies include structural changes to search or ad tech, it could affect campaign performance, targeting, and competition dynamics across the board. If you have European audiences, watch this closely — the outcome could ripple through Google’s global ad ecosystem.
Meanwhile, this week. Ribera is in California meeting Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Amazon’s Andy Jassy before heading to Washington, D.C., for talks with the acting head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division.
The big picture. Google isn’t the only one in the crosshairs. The commission has additional open probes into how Google powers AI Overviews and ranks news publishers, and is separately investigating Meta over restrictions on rival chatbots using WhatsApp’s business software.
Bottom line.The EU has been slow to act on Google, but pressure is clearly building. When the decision lands, it could set a significant precedent for how the Digital Markets Act is enforced.
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.
Here’s the full story behind our experiment.
Methodology
The goal was simple: test how far AI content — with no human editing, rewriting, or enhancement — could go in search.
How quickly would it get indexed? Could it rank for relevant queries? Most importantly, could it drive traffic?
We started by purchasing 20 new domains with no backlinks, domain authority, brand recognition, or search history.
Each domain focused on a different niche, covering topics such as:
Arts & Entertainment
Business & Services
Community & Society
Computers & Technology
Ecommerce & Shopping
Finance & Accounting
Food & Drink
Games & Accessories
Health & Medicine
Industry & Engineering
Hobbies & Interests
Home & Garden
Jobs & Career
Law & Government
Lifestyle & Well-being
Pets & Animals
Science & Education
Sports & Fitness
Travel & Tourism
Vehicles & Boats
For each niche, we gathered 100 informational “how-to” keywords—long-tail terms with lower competition.
Each site received 100 AI-generated articles, totaling 2,000 pieces across the experiment.
After publishing, we added the sites to Google Search Console and submitted sitemaps.
From that point on, we left the sites untouched to observe performance over time.
Timeline & key results
Month 1: indexing and early visibility
About 71% of new AI-generated pages were indexed within the first 36 days. They generated over 122,000 impressions and 244 clicks. Even at this early stage, 80% of sites ranked for at least 100 keywords each.
Months 2–3: growth continues
Cumulative impressions grew to over 526,000, with 782 clicks. Content continued to perform well without backlinks, promotion, internal linking, or additional SEO tactics.
Months 3–6: ranking collapse
By about three months, only 3% of pages remained in the top 100. Early relevance helped pages get indexed and briefly appear in search, but without authority, uniqueness, or E-E-A-T signals, rankings dropped sharply. Google still indexed the pages, but users rarely saw them.
Month 16: long-term stagnation
After over a year, visibility remained low across most sites. Impressions and clicks were minimal, and no site showed meaningful recovery. After the August 2025 Google spam update, pages ranking in the top 100 rose to 20% — up from 3% at six months.
Month 1: indexing and early visibility
Just over a month after publication (36 days), the first results came in — and they were stronger than expected for brand-new sites.
Of 2,000 articles, 70.95% were indexed (1,419 pages). For zero-authority domains, that’s notable, as getting new sites fully indexed is often a challenge. This shows Google is still willing to crawl and index AI-generated content in most cases.
Some sites performed particularly well. Eleven of the 20 domains had all 100 pages indexed.
Most were in broad, evergreen niches like Food & Drink, Home & Garden, Jobs & Career, and Lifestyle & Well-being.
More competitive or specialized areas, like Ecommerce & Shopping, saw slower indexation, likely due to stricter evaluation.
Along with indexation came early visibility. During this first month, the sites collectively generated:
122,102 impressions
244 clicks
Several niches stood out generating more than 10,000 impressions in the first month alone.
Hobbies & Interests: 17,425 impressions
Business & Services: 17,311 impressions
Travel & Tourism: 13,598 impressions
Lifestyle & Well-being: 13,072 impressions
Law & Government: 11,794 impressions
Games & Accessories: 11,083 impressions
Vehicles & Boats: 10,677 impressions
In terms of keyword coverage, many sites performed surprisingly well within the first month. Eight sites ranked for more than 1,000 keywords, while another eight ranked for 100 to 1,000.
Even at this early stage, 80% of sites with fully AI-generated content appeared in search for hundreds or thousands of queries.
Notably, over 28% of ranking URLs were already in the top 100. Within the first month, many pages reached positions where searchers could see them.
Overall, these results show AI-generated content can gain traction quickly—even without backlinks, editorial input, or additional SEO work. In the short term, content alone was enough to get indexed and appear in search.
Months 2–3: growth continues
This early visibility wasn’t short-lived. Over the following weeks, impressions and clicks kept growing as Google Search discovered and tested pages.
By about two and a half months after publication, cumulative results across all sites had grown:
Impressions: 122,102 to 526,624
Clicks: 244 to 782
Keyword coverage also expanded:
12 sites ranked for 1,000+ keywords (up from 8 in the first month).
The remaining 8 sites ranked for 100–1,000 keywords.
This pattern is typical for new sites. When Google finds fresh content that matches real queries, it tests that content across results. Pages appear for related queries as Google evaluates their helpfulness.
That’s what happened here. Even without backlinks, internal linking, or SEO improvements, the content gained exposure because it targeted low-competition queries and followed basic SEO structure.
At this stage, it could look like a strong case for large-scale AI content. The sites were new, the content fully AI-generated, and impressions kept rising.
But the growth didn’t last.
Month 3-6: the ranking collapse
Around Feb. 3, 2025, roughly three months after publication, the experiment hit a turning point.
Only 3% of pages remained in the top 100, down from 28% in the first month.
In practical terms, the content remained indexed but rarely appeared where users could see it.
Early relevance can help pages get indexed and appear in search results for a time. Without stronger signals — authority, E-E-A-T, unique insights — those rankings are hard to sustain.
By the six-month mark, Google Search Console showed the following cumulative totals across all sites:
Impressions: 526,624 to 706,328
Clicks: 782 to 1,062
At first glance, these numbers suggest continued growth. But that’s not what happened.
Most activity occurred early. In the first 2.5 months, the sites generated roughly 70% to 75% of total impressions and clicks. Over the next 3.5 months, growth slowed sharply, adding only 25% to 30%.
Month 16: the long-term picture
The experiment ran for over a year to see if rankings would recover.
For the most part, they didn’t.
After the drop around the three-month mark, visibility remained extremely low for the rest of the experiment.
There were a few brief fluctuations. The most notable came in late August 2025.
Starting in August, 50% of sites (10 out of 20) saw a two-week spike in impressions. This closely aligned with the rollout of the Google August 2025 spam update, which began Aug. 26.
However, the boost didn’t lead to a sustained recovery.
Among the sites that saw a short-term lift:
Six quickly lost visibility and returned to prior lows
Four maintained slightly improved performance, similar to early post-publication levels
Following the update, pages ranking in the top 100 rose to 20% — up from 3% at six months. This remained below the 28% seen in the first month, but the August 2025 spam update appeared to have improved some rankings.
In total, 66.9% of pages were still indexed, up slightly from 61.45% at six months.
The following sites had some of the lowest numbers of indexed pages:
Finance domain (9 of 100)
Health domain (14 of 100)
This is likely due to their YMYL nature, where Google applies stricter quality and trust standards.
By month 16, cumulative results across all sites were:
Impressions: 706,328 to 1,092,079
Clicks: 1,062 to 1,381
Most impressions still came from the early growth phase, before rankings dropped.
Why SEO visibility didn’t last
The most obvious explanation is that the content didn’t meet Google’s quality standards — and understandably so.
The 2,000 articles lacked many signals Google uses to assess quality and trust:
Authority. No backlinks or external validation. Without these, new domains struggle to compete with established sites.
Expertise and credibility. No authors, credentials, or real-world expertise — especially critical in finance, health, and law.
Content differentiation. Much of the content resembled what already exists. Without unique insights, pages struggle to stand out.
Site structure. No internal linking, topical organization, or clear hierarchy to help Google understand page relationships.
Google can identify AI-generated patterns. Without authority, uniqueness, or supporting signals, early visibility declines.
Bonus insight: how new AI content supports existing pages
In early March 2026, we ran a follow-up experiment, adding new AI-generated content to eight tracked sites.
As of March 13, not all new content has been indexed. However, sites with new content already show a noticeable increase in search impressions.
Interestingly, this lift comes primarily from older posts, not the newly published ones.
For example:
Business-focused website (from 458 impressions in February 2026 to 7,750 impressions in March 2026) – 17x increase.
Law-focused website (from 19 impressions in February 2026 to 356 impressions in March 2026) – 19x increase.
Science-focused website (from 34 impressions in February 2026 to 633 impressions in March 2026) – 19x increase.
This experiment shows that publishing new content—even fully AI-generated—can lift traffic to older pages that had been stagnant for months. Fresh content may signal to Google that the site is active and up to date, giving the site a temporary boost.
However, these are early results and don’t guarantee lasting gains in rankings or traffic.
Key takeaway: AI can speed up content creation, but not replace SEO
The results of this 16-month experiment don’t mean AI content is useless. They show AI alone isn’t enough to drive lasting impact.
Early traffic and impressions may look promising, but without a clear SEO strategy and human guidance, those gains will likely fade within a few months.
AMD launches its improved FSR SDK with FSR 4.1 upscaling and Ray Regeneration version 1.1 AMD has officially released its FSR SDK 2.2, adding support for its newest versions of FSR ML Upscaling and Ray Regeneration. With this update, FSR 4 is upgraded to FSR 4.1, and Ray Regeneration 1.0 is updated to 1.1, enabling […]
Inspired by the epic world of Dragon's Dogma, GameSir proudly announces the launch of the GameSir G7 Pro Dragon's Dogma 2 Edition-a next-generation controller crafted for warriors seeking precision, power, and platform versatility. Designed for the Arisen, this special edition combines pro-grade performance with exclusive thematic styling, delivering an immersive gameplay experience across Xbox, PC, and Android. The GameSir G7 Pro Dragon's Dogma 2 Edition is available for $89.99/£99.99 from the GameSir website. It also expected to be available on Amazon at a later date.
Refined from the celebrated G7 lineage-G7, G7 SE, and G7 HE-the Dragon's Dogma 2 Edition retains the G7 Pro's elite hardware while showcasing a design worthy of Gransys. Equipped with tri-mode connectivity, Hall Effect analog triggers, GameSir Mag-Res TMR sticks, and a swappable magnetic faceplate, this edition merges mythic aesthetics with cutting-edge engineering.
Square Enix previously revealed that it would be leaning into generative AI tech for coding and bug fixing, aiming to rely on the tech for as much as 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027. It seems as though the game publisher is experimenting with AI in a much more public way, according to a new report by The Sankei Shimbun. The Japanese publication reports that Square Enix announced a new AI integration into the Japan-exclusive Dragon Quest X MMORPG, which will take the form of a ball of slime—appropriately named Chatty Slimey—in order to help players feel less lonely and guide them through the start of the game.
The AI chatbot will receive text input, combined with the context of the player's on-screen content as context, and will respond with a generated voice when called upon. There will also be instances where the chatbot will appear without being summoned, like when the player beats a particularly difficult enemy or obtains a rare item—presumably this will help players learn about the game's systems and loot. Square Enix says that, despite Dragon Quest X's large player base, the game has a particularly steep learning curve, which can be a barrier to entry for new players, which is why it was chosen for the AI chatbot. It's unclear if similar tech will be introduced in other games at the time of writing, but given the studio's previous interest in AI, it seems likely that this test, which is currently seeking beta testers, will inform future implementations.
AMD has released its official FSR Software Development Kit version 2.2, which includes the latest set of FSR technologies. This release features FSR Upscaling 4.1 and Ray Regeneration 1.1, showcased late last week as part of the Adrenalin Edition 26.3.1 WHQL driver. The updated FSR "Redstone" SDK v2.2 introduces a much improved FSR 4.1 upscaling technology for the RDNA 4 family of graphics cards. The transition from FSR 4.0 to FSR 4.1 demonstrates that the latest version provides much finer details of game scenery, especially when objects are in motion. In the Crimson Desert game demo, grass moved by the wind appears much more detailed with FSR 4.1 compared to FSR 4.0, which previously applied a somewhat blurry effect to the grass. This improvement brings the visuals closer to native rendering.
Additionally, AMD has included Ray Regeneration 1.1 in the FSR SDK 2.2. AMD's FSR Ray Regeneration processes the noisy output that ray tracing naturally produces and cleans it up in real time, resulting in noticeably sharper and more polished visuals without requiring developers to overhaul their existing pipelines. With the update to version 1.1, it delivers much better and deeper shadows, immersive lighting, and more. You can check out the images below for comparison. The latest SDK also includes AMD FSR Frame Generation 4.0.0 in its vanilla version, as well as AMD FSR Radiance Caching 0.9.0, which is now in technical preview.
The proposed law, known as the Blocking Anticompetitive Self-Preferencing by Entrenched Dominant Platforms, or the BASED Act, was introduced by California state senator Scott Wiener. It seeks to restrict tactics that allow large platforms to favor their own products and block emerging rivals. In an unusual twist for a policymaker...
Our full reviews of the new Intel CPUs are coming this week, but early ones already point to a meaningful refinement of the Arrow Lake lineup, with improved efficiency, higher core counts, and stronger overall value. Most agree the chips are capable all-rounders, particularly at their aggressive $199 and $299 price points.
The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D has dropped to its lowest price yet, now around the $420 mark, making one of the fastest gaming CPUs even more compelling. Built around AMD's 3D V-Cache technology, it continues to deliver exceptional gaming performance and strong efficiency, standing out in a crowded market.
The effort is being led by Windows chief Pavan Davuluri, who has publicly acknowledged the extent of user frustration with Windows 11. In a recent company blog post, he said the Windows team had spent months analyzing user feedback to identify what he described as "the voice of people who...
The UK’s Imagination Technologies is teasing its roadmap to 'bring high‑performance, scalable, PowerVR graphics to desktop, workstation, and cloud environments.'
Industry Social is a social network for B2B SaaS companies to connect with each other. We believe genuine connections, not algorithms for outreach or engagement, are how companies should collaborate.
We especially want to help upcoming startups that find it difficult to collaborate with other companies and feel disheartened when selling to other businesses. Any company can register, discover companies to procure from, sell to, or collaborate with. You have direct access to communities of similar companies globally across the value chain, with no ads, no premium tier, and no strings attached.
Littlebird is building an AI that reads your screen in real time to capture context, answer questions, and automate tasks, without relying on screenshots.
Grab will acquire Delivery Hero’s Foodpanda business in Taiwan for $600 million, expanding beyond Southeast Asia and setting up a closer challenge to Uber Eats in a tightly contested market.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) equated the DoD's decision to label Anthropic a "supply chain risk" as retaliation, arguing that the Pentagon could simply have terminated its contract with the AI lab.
Hackers working for Iran’s government are using Telegram in hacking operations that use malware to target dissidents, opposition groups, and journalists who oppose its regime, according to the FBI.
A quiet but important change is coming to the Google Ads API that will affect how advertisers and developers create Lookalike user lists — particularly those running Demand Gen campaigns.
What’s changing. Google will begin enforcing a uniqueness check on Lookalike user lists, preventing the creation of duplicate lists that share the same seed lists, expansion level, and country targeting. Attempts to create a duplicate after April 30 will return an API error.
Why we care. Teams using automated scripts or third-party tools to programmatically generate audience lists, an unhandled error could quietly break campaign workflows if integrations aren’t updated in time.
What you need to do.
Audit existing Lookalike lists and reuse ones that already match your intended configuration rather than creating new ones
Update your API error handling to catch the new DUPLICATE_LOOKALIKE error code in v24 and above, or RESOURCE_ALREADY_EXISTS in earlier versions
The bottom line. This is a housekeeping change designed to keep Google’s systems stable — but the April 30 deadline is firm. Developers and agencies managing campaigns programmatically should treat this as a technical to-do before the end of April.
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 consultant Glenn Gabe outlined the issues:
No automated way to buy ad space — deals happen over calls, emails, and spreadsheets.
No meaningful performance data to evaluate outcomes.
Two agency executives told The Information they couldn’t prove the ads drove measurable business results for clients.
Why we care. If you’re considering ChatGPT as an ad channel, the lack of performance data means you’re spending blind — with no reliable way to prove ROI to clients or stakeholders. As OpenAI prepares to scale ads to all U.S. free users, the audience will grow, but measurement tools haven’t caught up. If you jump in now, keep expectations tight and treat it as experimental budget, not a performance channel.
What’s coming. OpenAI told advertisers it plans to show ads to all U.S. users on free and low-cost ChatGPT tiers in the coming weeks — a major expansion. It also advised that performance may improve if you supply more variations of text and visual creative.
The irony. OpenAI builds some of the world’s most sophisticated AI, but its ad reporting tools are stuck in the spreadsheet era.
Bottom line. ChatGPT ads are about to reach a much larger audience, but there’s no way to prove they have value yet. If you enter now, you’re largely flying blind — and paying for it.
Credit. Gabe shared highlights from The Information‘s article (subscription required) on X.
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 wrong conclusion.
As clicks decline, it can look like websites matter less. In reality, their role in shaping what gets seen and trusted may be increasing.
Why ‘zero-click’ discussions often lead to the wrong conclusion
From a traffic perspective, the trend is unmistakable. Clicks are declining in many contexts.
Search engines now answer many questions directly on the results page.
Social platforms function as discovery engines where people research ideas, products, and services without leaving the platform.
AI assistants synthesize answers from across the web before a user ever sees a list of links.
Part of the reason the zero-click discussion resonates so strongly is that it disrupts the way we’ve historically measured visibility. For more than two decades, traffic and click-through rates have served as the primary signals for forecasting performance and evaluating the impact of search.
When answers appear directly in search results, AI summaries, or platform conversations, those interactions often occur outside the analytics frameworks we’re accustomed to using.
The conclusion many draw from this trend — that websites matter less — is an incomplete assessment. The role of websites is changing, but their importance in the information ecosystem hasn’t disappeared. In some ways, it may be increasing.
The reason has to do with how modern information systems determine what to trust. Large language models and AI-driven search interfaces don’t evaluate truth the way humans do. They rely on probabilistic signals drawn from the information available across the web.
When the same message appears consistently across multiple independent sources, the statistical likelihood that the information is correct increases. Visibility in this environment is determined by where information appears.
The fragmentation of discovery is real. Information consumption now happens across many environments: search results, social feeds, community forums, video platforms, and AI interfaces.
Users frequently encounter answers without needing to click a link.
A search result might contain an AI summary.
A product recommendation might appear in a Reddit thread.
A professional insight might circulate on LinkedIn.
From a traditional web analytics perspective, these interactions can appear as lost traffic. However, focusing exclusively on clicks misses the more important question: where does the information itself originate?
The environments where people consume information are expanding, but the underlying knowledge those systems rely on still has to come from somewhere.
Zero-click doesn’t mean zero influence
The critical distinction you need to understand is the difference between traffic and information influence.
Traffic measures whether a user visited your website.
Influence measures whether the information you produced shaped the answer someone received.
AI systems don’t generate answers out of thin air. They construct them from patterns learned across the open web.
When an LLM answers a question about a legal issue, a technical concept, or a marketing strategy, it draws on the analysis, explanations, and original thinking that publishers have already placed online.
Even in a zero-click environment, those sources continue to exist. They continue to shape the answers. The difference is that influence increasingly occurs earlier in the information pipeline, before the user even reaches a website.
Fewer clicks don’t mean fewer sources. In practice, it often increases the value of authoritative sources because AI systems depend on them to construct coherent responses. Without expert explanations, detailed analysis, and original insight, there’s nothing for the system to synthesize.
In discussions that follow the “zero-click world” framing, the recommendation is that brands should focus more heavily on platforms they don’t control — social networks, communities, and other forms of “rented land.”
Brands can think of their visibility footprint as two categories of territory:
Owned land, where they control the infrastructure and content.
Rented land, where their message appears on platforms they do not control.
Owned land includes assets such as a company website, product documentation, knowledge bases, and other first-party content environments. These are places where a brand controls the structure, the message, and the permanence of the information.
Rented land includes platforms such as LinkedIn, Substack, industry publications, forums, podcasts, and social media environments where the brand participates but does not control the underlying platform.
In an AI-mediated discovery environment, both types of territory matter. Owned land provides the canonical source of information. Rented land distributes that information across the broader ecosystem where AI systems encounter it.
These platforms are powerful environments for discovery, amplification, and conversation. They are often where audiences encounter brands for the first time and where ideas circulate widely. However, they rarely serve as the place where authority itself is established.
Authority tends to emerge from deeper forms of publishing:
Long-form explanations.
Original analysis.
Research.
Consistent demonstrations of expertise over time.
These forms of content typically live on first-party websites, where ideas can be developed fully and preserved as reference points. Rented platforms still influence how AI systems interpret information, but their role differs from that of first-party publishing.
When a brand, concept, or explanation appears consistently across multiple environments — first-party sites, industry publications, social platforms, and other third-party mentions — the association between that entity and the idea becomes stronger.
Repeated exposure stabilizes the relationship between the brand and the concepts connected to it. As a result, the likelihood that the brand will be included in an AI-generated answer increases.
Platforms amplify the signal. First-party publishing is where the signal originates.
Another misconception in the zero-click discussion is the assumption that AI systems primarily rely on aggregated or repackaged information. In practice, the opposite often occurs.
When AI systems generate answers, they frequently rely on sources that provide clear explanations, detailed reasoning, and subject-matter expertise. These characteristics are more common in original publishing than in aggregated content.
Legal blogs, technical documentation, research publications, and expert commentary often perform well in AI citations because they provide usable knowledge. The material contains context, reasoning, and structured explanations that models can extract and synthesize.
Aggregated summaries frequently lack that depth. Without detailed explanation or original analysis, the content provides limited value for AI systems attempting to construct coherent answers.
The result is a quiet shift in visibility. Domains that consistently publish authoritative explanations may become more influential in AI-generated answers, even if traditional click-based metrics decline.
Websites still matter, but their role is changing. They’re no longer just traffic generators.
In an AI-mediated information ecosystem, websites function as knowledge sources, training signals, and citation anchors — where expertise is documented, and ideas originate.
Platforms distribute those ideas, conversations amplify them, and AI systems synthesize them into answers. The source of the underlying knowledge, however, still matters.
The marketing implication is straightforward. Success can’t be measured solely by clicks. The objective is to ensure that credible expertise exists in durable forms that can be discovered, referenced, and synthesized wherever information surfaces — whether in search results, AI-generated responses, or discussions on other platforms.
Content that is clear, authoritative, and genuinely useful will continue to shape the answers people receive. In a zero-click world, influence simply happens earlier in the information pipeline.
Capcom claims that it doesn’t plan to use AI-generated materials as part of “game content” As part of a new Q&A with investors, Capcom has confirmed that it has no plans to utilise assets made by AI in its games. However, this does not mean that Capcom is entirely anti-AI. After all, Capcom’s Resident Evil […]
Xbox has announced its next Partner Preview for March 26, revealing new details on what to expect, including updates on Stranger Than Heaven, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and more third-party games, alongside Game Pass news.
Adding to the recent controversy surrounding Intel Arc GPU support—or lack thereof—in Crimson Desert, gamers recently flagged a very peculiar in-game painting, among other assets, as evidence of use of generative AI in the game. The image depicted a battlefield filled with cavalry, but many of the soldiers and their horses were blended into one another, and there were general inconsistencies in the image that stood out as being AI-generated. Despite the almost obvious use of generative AI, Pearl Abyss did not use Steam's generative AI disclosure on the Crimson Desert store page. Now, three days after the AI-generated in-game art was discovered, Pearl Abyss has issued a statement, via the @CrimsonDesert_ account on X, acknowledging that it was AI-generated but also claiming that the artwork was not meant to make it into the final game.
According to the announcement, the development team used "experimental AI generative tools" during early iteration to generate 2D props to "explore tone and atmosphere," and that it was always the studio's intentions to replace these AI-generated assets with final artwork after an internal review by the art and development teams. Pearl Abyss says that it "acknowledge that we should have clearly disclosed our use of AI," adding that it apologizes for the oversights. The studio also notes that it has started an internal audit of all in-game assets in order to replace any affected content, and that those updated assets will appear in upcoming patches. The game's Steam store page has also been updated with the corresponding generative AI disclosure following the statement and community backlash, which reads "Generative AI technology is used in a supplementary capacity during the creation of some 2D prop assets. Any such assets are replaced through our production pipeline by our art and development teams, ensuring they meet our quality standards and creative direction." Pearl Abyss's full statement follows.
Semiconductor manufacturing is arguably one of the greatest marvels of the modern world, with only a few companies competing for the top spot. Recently, Elon Musk announced an ambitious project called "TERAFAB," which he plans to build on Tesla's campus in eastern Travis County, Austin, Texas. This initiative will be a joint effort involving Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Musk introduced this idea during a livestream on X as a practical solution to the growing gap between his companies' future chip needs and the current pace of global chip production. The project could become one of the most engineering-intensive tasks these companies have ever undertaken, with some estimates placing the capital expenditure at $20 billion.
As Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI require substantial computing power to support their expanding user base, relying solely on external suppliers is insufficient for the scale of growth Musk envisions. Tesla is known for utilizing TSMC, Samsung, and even some of Intel's manufacturing and packaging capabilities to support its chip production. However, with the creation of TERAFAB, these companies aim to gain more control over the entire chip development process. The plant is expected to integrate several stages of semiconductor production at one site, including logic fabrication, memory, packaging, testing, and mask production. This setup is unusual, as these steps are typically spread across multiple specialized facilities. Musk believes that consolidating these processes could accelerate development by enabling engineers to design, test, and revise chips with fewer delays.
LG Display, the world's leading innovator of display technologies, today announced that it is beginning the world's first-ever mass production of an LCD panel for laptops equipped with its Oxide 1 Hz technology.
The panel's core feature is its ability to intelligently detect the usage environment. It automatically switches the refresh rate down to 1 Hz when the screen is static and up to 120 Hz when needed. For example, when performing tasks involving primarily still images—such as checking emails or reading e-books and research papers—the panel operates at the lowest refresh rate of 1 Hz. Conversely, it runs in high-refresh-rate mode at up to 120 Hz when streaming content such as movies or sports as well as playing games with frequent screen changes.
The AirDrop rollout to Samsung's flagship series starts in Korea today, with US devices set to follow later this week before expanding to more regions, including Europe, Latin America, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia.
The company, valued privately at about $730 billion, is expected to nearly double its headcount to roughly 8,000 employees by year's end, up from about 4,500 currently, people familiar with the matter told The Financial Times. New hires will be concentrated in engineering, research, sales, and product development. A significant share...
WebsitePublisher.ai is an AI web platform that lets Claude, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Grok, Mistral, and Gemini publish complete websites via API. No WordPress, hosting setup, or CMS configuration is required.
Another week, another reminder that the internet is still a mess. Systems people thought were secure are being broken in simple ways, showing many still ignore basic advisories.
This edition covers a mix of issues: supply chain attacks hitting CI/CD setups, long-abused IoT devices being shut down, and exploits moving quickly from disclosure to real attacks. There are also new malware tricks
The Trump administration has deployed ICE agents to over a dozen U.S. airports amid an ongoing federal shutdown that's causing long wait times. Eyewitnesses have already recorded at least one arrest in San Francisco's airport.
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 behavior has been fragmenting across platforms for years, and I see this play out in agency work every day.
Here’s what the data shows about how search behavior is changing across platforms, and why a “search everywhere” strategy matters more than focusing on LLMs alone.
Third-party platforms are encroaching on traditional search
People search TikTok for restaurants, YouTube for tutorials, Reddit for authentic reviews, and Amazon to buy products. In many cases, these platforms are replacing traditional search engines like Google and Bing as the starting point.
This shift isn’t just about behavior — it shows up in traffic, too. Amazon and YouTube still drive far more desktop traffic than ChatGPT, a trend Rand Fishkin recently highlighted.
Recently, I helped run a comprehensive share of voice analysis for a client. The goal was threefold:
See which competitors are winning in traditional search across multiple service lines.
Find keyword and content gaps.
Create a content roadmap based on priority to fill these gaps.
The analysis revealed a lot of helpful data, but one of the most interesting takeaways was that our core competitors weren’t actually our biggest competitors in traditional search. YouTube and Reddit were.
These platforms rank well in traditional search, take up valuable SERP real estate, and move users away from Google and Bing to funnel them back to their own platforms.
The analysis highlighted a key point: if you don’t focus any effort on these places, you’re not only missing out on visibility in traditional search, but you’re also missing valuable attention when users navigate off Google and start watching videos or reading threads.
And this website isn’t the only one seeing this type of trend. Do this type of analysis yourself, and see who your actual competitors are within traditional search. The answers may surprise you.
Third-party platforms can have higher search volumes
As seen above, platforms like YouTube and Reddit are increasingly occupying traditional SERP real estate. But what about searches within the platforms themselves? Depending on the query, there may be far more search volume on these platforms than on Google or Bing.
For example, YouTube dominates in tutorials and “how-to” content. A term like “how to fix a leaky sink faucet” has 15x the search volume on YouTube than it does on traditional search globally.
Source: Semrush
Source: vidIQ
Search volumes are estimates. But if you want to get in front of the right people where they’re searching, any content strategy around a term like this, or a similar topic, must include creating a YouTube video.
Better yet, to be search-everywhere-friendly, create a blog post and embed that video in it.
Aside from traditional search and in-platform search, we also know that “search everywhere” influences AI-generated results.
To provide answers, LLMs need content to synthesize. More often than not, that content isn’t coming from business websites, but from third-party sources and social platforms.
AI visibility tools can quickly show businesses the power of search everywhere in relation to citations. Take a look at these examples:
Brand A
Brand B
These are two completely different brands, yet the trends are the same: a very small percentage of citations come from your own website or even direct competitors.
In both examples, almost 90% of citations come from third-party news and online publications, or social and forum platforms like Reddit or Quora.
The takeaway here is that focusing on your own website, in the context of LLM citations, can only go so far. If you want to improve brand sentiment or ensure that information is accurately reflected by AI, it needs to happen in places outside of your direct control.
The competitive landscape is shifting, and many marketers have tunnel vision when it comes to AI. Discovery now happens across a wide range of platforms.
YouTube, Reddit, Quora, and others dominate significant portions of traditional search results and may have far more search activity within their own platforms. When AI systems generate answers, they often pull information from these platforms rather than brand websites.
To win in modern search, you need to understand where your audience is actually searching. That doesn’t stop at Google. It means showing up everywhere that shapes decisions.
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 painful: agencies aren’t just watching AI disrupt their industry from the sidelines. They’re actively using it themselves, automating tasks, reducing costs, and hoping to improve margins. All while their clients are doing the exact same thing, using AI to justify slashing budgets or bringing work in-house entirely.
It’s a squeeze play from both directions, and agencies are caught right in the middle.
The promise that became a problem
When AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude first exploded onto the scene, many agency leaders saw opportunity.
Finally, a way to automate the repetitive, time-consuming work that ate into profitability. Content briefs, initial drafts, performance reports, basic ad copy, all could be accelerated or partially automated. The math seemed simple: use AI to do more work with fewer people, pocket the difference, and stay competitive on pricing.
Except clients did the same math — and they reached a different conclusion. When brands can spin up decent content, analyze campaign performance, or generate ad variations with a few prompts, the question becomes unavoidable: why are we paying an agency for this?
“Several services that agencies once charged a premium for are now performed in-house or by automation software,” notes Al Sefati, CEO of Clarity Digital Agency, who’s been vocal about the pressures facing boutique agencies.
Earlier this year, Sefati had clients “put marketing on pause” despite strong performance metrics. A manufacturing client backed out of a contract entirely due to tariff uncertainty. When budgets get tight, and AI makes certain marketing tasks feel commoditized, agencies become an easy line item to cut.
Agencies adopt AI hoping to increase profits by doing more with less staff. But clients expect the cost savings to flow to them, not the agency’s bottom line.
The result? Shrinking retainers across the board.
SparkToro’s research shows that sales cycles are lengthening, more agencies now report deals taking 7-8 weeks or even 12+ weeks to close, up significantly from 2024.
Prospects are taking longer to commit because they’re doing their own internal math: “If AI makes this cheaper and faster, shouldn’t we pay less?”
Meanwhile, client expectations haven’t decreased at all. In fact, they’ve intensified.
Progress is no longer good enough. Brands now demand tangible business outcomes, pipeline impact, revenue attribution, and demonstrable ROI on every dollar spent.
So agencies are stuck: use AI to stay efficient and risk commoditizing their own services, or refuse to adopt it and get outpaced by competitors and in-house teams who will.
Perhaps the most concerning finding from the research: 66% of agency owners worry that junior team members will have fewer career opportunities in the future. This goes beyond entry-level headcount to the entire talent pipeline.
Historically, agencies have relied on junior staff to handle the repetitive, foundational work, keyword research, content optimization, reporting, and campaign setup. These weren’t glamorous tasks, but they were essential training grounds. Junior marketers learned the craft by doing the work, eventually graduating to strategy and client leadership.
AI is rapidly automating precisely those tasks. And while that might seem like a net positive for efficiency, it creates a devastating long-term problem: where do future senior strategists come from if there’s no ladder to climb?
The war for senior talent is brutal. Top strategists, creatives, and media planners know their worth and demand premium compensation. Meanwhile, clients push back on fees.
The math doesn’t work unless agencies can maintain lean teams, which AI theoretically enables.
But five years from now, when those senior people retire or move on, who replaces them? If an entire generation of marketers never got hands-on experience because AI was doing the work, the industry risks hollowing itself out.
What AI can’t replace yet
Despite the disruption, there’s a clear pattern in what’s working for agencies weathering this transition.
The research shows that larger agencies (51+ employees) are reporting healthier sales pipelines than their smaller counterparts. Part of this is resources, larger shops have dedicated sales teams, and can absorb economic volatility better.
But there’s something else at play.
Agencies that are surviving, and in some cases thriving, are the ones who’ve stopped trying to compete on execution alone. They’re selling something AI can’t easily replicate: strategic thought, real-world market experience, nuanced storytelling, and intelligent execution tied directly to business outcomes.
“Clients desire teams that really understand their industry,” Sefati observes.
The trend is clear: specialization is no longer optional. Generalist “we do everything” agencies are struggling most. Those with deep vertical expertise, B2B SaaS, financial services, healthcare, and ecommerce, are proving that context and strategic insight still command premium fees.
This matters because AI is phenomenal at pattern recognition and execution within known parameters. But it struggles with the messy, ambiguous work of understanding a client’s competitive position, reading market dynamics, or crafting positioning that actually resonates with a specific audience.
The problem? Many agencies haven’t made this transition yet. They’re still selling and delivering services that feel interchangeable with what AI, or a capable in-house team with AI, can produce.
A few years ago, simply having the technical skill to launch a Google Ads campaign or set up marketing automation gave agencies an edge. That’s no longer true.
As martech platforms have become more complex and AI tools grow faster, more brands have built competent internal teams. The bar for what counts as “differentiated agency value” has risen dramatically.
This is why the sales pipeline data is so revealing.
These numbers have improved marginally from 2024 (when 36% said “not good”), but we’re talking about incremental gains in a fundamentally challenged environment.
Smaller agencies, those with 1-10 people, are hit hardest. They typically lack dedicated sales staff, so business development competes with client delivery for founders’ time. And when budgets tighten, brands consolidate with larger, more specialized agencies that feel less risky.
How your agency can escape the squeeze
Focus on these priorities as client demands rise and margins tighten.
Be honest about what AI has commoditized
Don’t fight AI or pretend it doesn’t exist. Be brutally honest about what AI has already commoditized, and ruthlessly focus on what it can’t replicate.
This means making some uncomfortable decisions now. Stop competing on services that AI handles well enough. If you’re still selling basic content creation, social media management, or standard reporting as core offerings, you’re volunteering to be price-shopped.
Instead, double down on the work that requires genuine expertise: deep market understanding, strategic positioning, creative concepts that actually move the needle, and the kind of nuanced judgment that comes from having seen what works (and what fails spectacularly) across dozens of client situations.
Lead with AI, don’t hide from it
Change how you talk about AI with clients. Rather than downplaying it or treating it as a threat to hide, lead with it.
“Yes, AI can generate content, and we use it to do that faster and cheaper than ever. But what AI can’t do is know that your competitors just shifted strategy, or understand why your last three campaigns underperformed despite good metrics, or recognize that your messaging is technically correct but completely misses what your audience actually cares about. That’s what you’re paying us for.”
Rethink pricing models
Hourly billing and retainers based on team size are relics of a world where labor hours correlated to value. They don’t anymore.
Outcome-based pricing, value-based fees, and performance partnerships align agency incentives with client success, and make the AI efficiency gains work in your favor rather than against you.
Rebuild the talent pipeline
Address the junior talent crisis head-on. The agencies that figure out how to train the next generation of strategists in an AI-enabled world, by pairing them with senior experts on high-level work rather than relegating them to tasks AI now handles, will have a massive competitive advantage in five years when everyone else is scrambling for talent.
The data shows 64% of agencies expect revenue growth over the next 12 months. Whether that optimism is justified depends entirely on whether agencies adapt to the new reality or keep hoping the old model comes back. It won’t.
The squeeze is permanent. But there’s a path through it for agencies willing to fundamentally rethink what they sell and how they deliver it.
Will your agency become indispensable because of how you use AI, or get bypassed entirely because clients realize they can do what you do themselves?
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’s unclear whether this is a display glitch, a test, or something more deliberate.
Why we care. Trust signals in search ads help users make informed decisions and boost click-through rates by building confidence. If those stats appear identical across competing ads, users may dismiss them as unreliable — undermining the credibility boost you rely on.
What we don’t know.
Whether Google is actively testing this or it’s an unintended bug.
How widespread the issue is across different search queries or markets.
Whether it’s affecting user click behavior or advertiser performance.
No official word. Google hasn’t confirmed or commented on the behavior. Paid media expert and founder Anthony Higman first spotted and flagged the anomaly on LinkedIn.
Bottom line. If trust signals can’t be trusted, they stop serving their purpose. You should watch whether this pattern spreads — or quietly disappears.
AMD’s Ryzen 7 9850X3D pricing has dipped, and it comes with Crimson Desert AMD’s Ryzen 7 9850X3D launched last month for £449.99 in the UK, and now the CPU is available at a much lower price, with Crimson Desert included. Overclockers UK is now selling AMD’s Ryzen 7 9850X3D with a free £54.99 game and […]
Capcom has detailed how it plans to use generative AI in game development, focusing on idea generation and efficiency while avoiding AI-generated assets in final game content.
Microsoft’s emergency fix for the Windows 11 sign-in bug is here, but the damage to user trust remains. This latest bug shows why Microsoft needs to let people pause updates forever.
Intel's Core Ultra 200S series CPUs come as a duo of Arrow Lake Refresh processors, and they're refreshingly cheap for creators, with gaming benefits to boot.
Crimson Desert initially launched without working Intel Arc support, prompting backlash from players. Pearl Abyss has now confirmed it is working on compatibility and optimization updates.
After the controversy surrounding the open-world fantasy game "Crimson Desert" not being supported on Intel Arc GPUs, to the extent that the game wouldn't even launch on systems with these GPUs, Pearl Abyss has faced pressure from the gaming community. As a result, the game now officially boots on Intel Arc GPUs, with full optimizations to follow. In a statement on Friday, Intel claimed they had offered Pearl Abyss assistance in delivering full optimization for Intel GPUs, which the studio did not utilize. "Over the past several years, we've reached out to Pearl Abyss many times to help test, validate, and optimize support for Intel graphics, providing early hardware, drivers, and engineering resources across multiple generations, including Alchemist, Battlemage, Meteor Lake, and Lunar Lake."
As the controversy spread and the studio noticed the comments circulating online from millions of Arc GPU users, the situation improved. Pearl Abyss is now allowing Intel Arc GPUs to boot the game, with further performance optimizations to come. Previously, the Crimson Desert FAQ stated that there was no current support for Intel Arc graphics cards, but it has been updated to indicate that support is now present, with optimizations being added. The studio asks gamers to be patient. "We apologize for any confusion our previous FAQ wording regarding playability on Intel Arc GPUs may have caused. Please regard this as our latest official news on the subject," says Pearl Abyss.
You've known us for decades for ergonomic keyboards. The ones that are built around the idea that your keyboard should fit you and not the other way around. That's still true, and we're still very much that company.
After many years of conversations (with IT managers trying to standardize gear across hundreds or thousands of desktops, with companies that need to onboard new employees fast without a tutorial on how to use a keyboard, and for individuals who are just not there yet when it comes to making the ergonomic jump), we started hearing the same thing in different ways: We love what you do, but we also need something more traditional. So we made it.
The ads mark a broader change in how young tech companies present themselves. Instead of courting consumers, they're advertising to peers who already speak the language of machine learning. "The goal is intentional in a kind of 'if-you-know-you-know' type of way," Mike Bilodeau, head of marketing at the AI infrastructure...
From 2017 to 2024, 52-year-old Michael Smith, from Cornelius, North Carolina, and his co-conspirators ran a large-scale fraud scheme that artificially boosted the stream counts of AI-generated songs across Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube, according to court documents.
After testing the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, we’ve seen fantastic application performance across our suite of benchmarks. Gaming performance still struggles, however, even with Intel’s Arrow Lake Refresh changes and an interesting new Binary Optimization Tool.
Chinese eTail giant Alibaba has removed listings and suspended the accounts of sellers that were found to be advertising 'cruise missiles' and 'suicide attack drones.'
Stratalize gives professional services firms complete visibility into vendor spend, subscription exposure, and renewal risk in minutes. It ingests transaction data from banks, ERPs, and accounting platforms, then uses machine learning to classify vendors, detect anomalies, and project multi-year exposure. The platform delivers plain-English advisory reports with specific recommendations to negotiate, cancel, consolidate, or optimize, and exports shareable PDFs for CFOs and legal teams. Built for accounting firms, law practices, and consultancies, with enterprise-grade security.
C2Story is an AI story creation platform that lets you turn ideas and characters into illustrated books, comics, and shared worlds. Generate stories and images in more than 50 styles, then continue, rewrite, and remix as your universe grows. You can reuse characters across projects, browse a public character library, create in multiple languages, and export PDFs and assets for printing or sharing.
AWS Bedrock is Amazon's platform for building AI-powered applications. It gives developers access to foundation models and the tools to connect those models directly to enterprise data and systems. That connectivity is what makes it powerful – but it’s also what makes Bedrock a target.
When an AI agent can query your Salesforce instance, trigger a Lambda function, or pull from a SharePoint
Microsoft has warned of fresh campaigns that are capitalizing on the upcoming tax season in the U.S. to harvest credentials and deliver malware.
The email campaigns take advantage of the urgency and time-sensitive nature of emails to send phishing messages masquerading as refund notices, payroll forms, filing reminders, and requests from tax professionals to deceive recipients into opening
Oh, big flash bang wallop, what a picture! TV's funniest show is in full swing, but what time is Last One Laughing UK season 2 episodes 4-5 on Prime Video?
Account suspensions are essential to “maintain a healthy and sustainable digital advertising ecosystem, with user protection at its core,” according to Google Ads.
For advertisers, though, navigating the suspension process can be a minefield. Suspensions can happen suddenly, limit what you can do in your account, and, in some cases, affect related accounts as well.
Here’s what triggers account suspensions, the different types you might encounter, and what to do if your account is flagged or suspended.
Why do accounts get suspended?
Accounts get suspended when Google Ads finds a violation of one of its policies. The platform uses a combination of automated systems and manual reviews when detecting violations.
The process involves reviewing the account and other aspects, including your customer reviews, business practices, and website content.
In November 2025, Google addressed concerns that a large volume of accounts were being unfairly suspended by announcing that it had improved the accuracy of the system.
Google says that, by using new processes and AI, it’s reduced incorrect suspensions by over 80% and improved resolution times by 70%, with 99% of suspensions now resolved within a 24-hour window.
How Google Ads suspends accounts and what happens next
Depending on the violation, accounts may be suspended immediately upon detection. In other cases, advertisers will be given a prior warning of at least seven days before the suspension takes place.
Advertisers will be notified via email, along with a red banner at the top of their Google Ads account. When an account is suspended:
Ads will not run.
You won’t be able to create any new content, such as ads, ad groups, or campaigns.
You can, however, still access the account to review historical data and reports.
In some instances, accounts related or linked to the suspended account may also be suspended, such as linked Merchant Center accounts or those linked to the same manager account. These will be lifted if or when the original suspension is resolved.
These are suspensions that Google Ads deems unlawful or harmful. They typically reflect the overall practices of a business, not necessarily its campaigns or accounts. As such, it’s unlikely that the suspension will be overturned and will probably be permanent.
Common egregious violations include:
Circumventing systems.
Unacceptable business practices.
Malicious software.
Counterfeiting.
Illegal activities.
Other suspensions
Other reasons why an account may be suspended include:
What you should do next depends on the type of suspension and what caused it.
Policy violations
If your account has been suspended for policy or terms and conditions violations, you must resolve the issue causing the suspension before submitting an appeal.
The Google Ads help guides contain detailed information on these policies, so make sure you read them thoroughly. Don’t submit an appeal until you’re certain that you’ve made the relevant changes.
For example, if you’ve been suspended for violating editorial requirements, review your ad copy to check for potential issues regarding capitalization, spacing, spelling, and symbols.
If you’re uncertain about the violations that caused the suspension and how to fix them, you can use the account troubleshooter beta to determine what steps need to be taken.
Egregious violations are treated very seriously. In most cases, the suspension is permanent. However, if you genuinely believe that the suspension is baseless, then you can submit an appeal.
Make relevant changes to your account or business practices before you submit your appeal. This is important because egregious violations only get one chance to submit an appeal. Take the time to review your business practices honestly and make sure you’ve done all that you can to comply.
Unauthorized account activity
In the case of an “Unauthorized account activity” suspension, Google Ads has detected suspicious activity, and your account has been suspended to protect it.
This may be triggered due to recent changes to account access, an unusual increase in your ad spend, or if your ads are sending traffic to unfamiliar destinations.
You will need to:
Change your Google account password immediately.
Check for any unfamiliar devices signed in to your account.
In many of these cases, billing issues cause suspension, so check the billing section of your account. Ensure that billing information is accurate, your payment method is up to date, and recent payments haven’t been declined.
If your account has been suspended for a billing or payment issue, you must fix this within 30 days. You may also be required to complete the advertiser verification program to confirm your identity or business operations.
Verified advertisers show in the Ads Transparency Center, which plays a part in Google’s efforts to build a safe and positive experience.
Best practices for submitting an appeal
While the specific steps you need to take will depend on the type of suspension your account is under and what caused it, there are some best practices for submitting your appeal:
Ensure that you’ve submitted your advertiser verification, as this will help the system verify your identity and business authenticity.
If you recognize that you’ve made an error, for example, opening a new account for a business when there was already a dormant account created before you joined, be upfront and honest about this information.
If you believe that the suspension has been made in error, then provide as much information, evidence, and context as possible.
While you’ll have a minimum of six months to submit an appeal, try to resolve the issue and submit your appeal as soon as possible. It can be very tricky to return to an account that was suspended years ago and accurately recall the steps that led to the suspension in order to address them.
Unfortunately, many advertisers are reporting long wait times to hear back about their appeal. This means that you’ll need to be patient and wait for a response via email.
In the meantime, don’t submit additional appeals. Doing so will not increase the speed at which your appeal is addressed and may result in the suspension of your appeal process for seven days.
If your appeal is accepted and your account is reinstated
You can resume running your campaigns via Google Ads as usual.
Be aware of violating the same policy again in the future. Depending on the type of policy infringement, you may face permanent suspension for repeat violations.
If your appeal is denied
You may be eligible to submit another appeal, but you must make the relevant changes before you do so.
While there is no limit on the number of appeals you can make, if too many appeals have been made, they may not be processed.
For egregious violations
If your appeal is denied and you’re permanently suspended, you’ve been banned from using Google Ads. Creating any new accounts will also result in suspensions.
If you still have funds in your account, you’ll need to cancel your account to receive a refund.
Making sense of Google Ads account suspensions
Account suspensions are designed to help keep advertisers and users safe. They help keep dangerous and malicious activities off the platform, improving the Google Ads experience.
While finding out your account is suspended is frustrating, in most cases, there are steps you can take to resolve the issues behind the violation and have your account reinstated.
As part of Microsoft's big set of sweeping changes coming to Windows 11, the company has confirmed plans to reduce where Copilot and AI experiences appear across the OS.
A new report details Abstraction as a co-developer on Halo Campaign Evolved, detailing its major role in mission design, gameplay systems, and overall campaign development.
Speaking at an event in downtown Austin, Musk said a new Terafab project will be jointly run by Tesla and SpaceX and anchored by what he called an "advanced technology fab" in the city that can make and test "chips of any kind."
The Core Ultra 3 205 is an 8-core chip with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, part of the Arrow Lake family, branded as the Core Ultra 200S series. It never officially launched despite being listed at several OEMs as a "tray" chip and even being mentioned in Intel's own documents. Its newest spotting is on a French retailer's website where it's only available on order.
The Nvidia chief said that he will be alarmed if his engineers did not use AI tokens amounting to about half their annual salary, saying that AI tools will 10x their productivity.
Seating Hero is a simple tool for creating seating charts for weddings and events. You can add tables, import or type in your guest list, and assign people to tables using a drag-and-drop interface. The layout updates instantly so you can see exactly where everyone will sit.
It helps you organize your seating plan without spreadsheets or paper sketches. If plans change, you can quickly move guests, adjust tables, and export the final seating chart to share with your venue or event team.
Pearl Abyss confirms that ARC GPU support is coming to Crimson Desert following backlash In an official statement released this morning, Pearl Abyss has backtracked on its position on Intel ARC graphics. Until now, the developer has not supported Intel’s GPUs and has simply asked Intel ARC users to get a refund. Now, following a […]
Pricing of AMD Ryzen 5 9600X dropped to $190 on Newegg over the weekend. This is a massive 32% drop from its $280 launch price, although the chip's price had been on a gradual slope over 2025 as it faced stiff competition from the Intel Core i5-14600K and Core Ultra 5 245K. The $190 price puts the 9600X at $10 lower than the $200 launch price of the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus. The 250K Plus offers a significantly higher core count, with 6 P-cores and 12 E-cores, for a total of 18 threads. Both the 250K Plus and 270K Plus are expected to stir things up in the desktop processor market due to their aggressive pricing and value proposition. The 270K Plus is priced at a strategic $300, at which it goes up against the Ryzen 7 9700X, 9800X3D, and even 9900X. It is essentially a 285K on paper, with marginally lower clock speeds. With the 9600X price cut, AMD might be also clearing the decks for the rumored Ryzen 5 9650X refresh.
Microsoft recently announced a plethora of changes coming to Windows 11 to reshape the operating system into a completely stable and enjoyable experience. Today we learn that Microsoft plans a major background usage overhaul with future updates, focusing on RAM usage and overall memory management, so even configurations with less RAM can enjoy the benefits of a smooth operating system. For example, the minimum requirement for Windows 11 is a system with 4 GB of memory, while Copilot+ PCs require a minimum of 16 GB. When a PC has 8 GB of RAM installed, standard Windows 11 versions like Home or Pro will take up a majority of that, leaving only about 2 GB free. Even with 16 GB installed, regular Windows allocation goes beyond 10 GB.
However, Microsoft plans to change this with better background memory management. For example, OS overhead is a significant performance and memory hog, which impacts the user's overall experience on the PC. Apple recently launched a MacBook Neo with 8 GB of memory, and reviews confirmed that users will be able to get a relatively smooth user experience with only 8 GB, while a comparable Windows-based machine would struggle. This has pushed Microsoft to think about memory management more, and the company now promises that the entire operating system will implement new background policies that will help with resource management. While the exact implementation is unknown, we suspect that doing something like Xbox Full Screen Experience, which is proven to increase performance and lower RAM usage, will be implemented on a wider scale. When the numerous background tasks disappear, memory is freed for other things like excessive Chrome browser tabs.
Brook Gaming, the global leader in cross-platform controller solutions, today announced the global launch of the Wingman P5. This high-performance converter allows PlayStation enthusiasts to use their preferred professional controllers—including the Xbox Elite Series 2, PS4, and Switch Pro—on the PS5, PS4, and PC (X-Input) across all game genres with uncompromised precision.
While many market solutions rely on "Remote Play" workarounds that require complex network setups and introduce significant lag, the Wingman P5 utilizes proprietary Direct Connection Technology. By connecting directly to the hardware, it delivers a near-zero latency experience suitable for both casual and competitive play.
In tactical RPG adventures, every decision matters—what you see on screen can determine the outcome of every battle. From exploring mysterious environments to planning strategic encounters, visual clarity and responsiveness play a crucial role in delivering a truly immersive experience. To help players fully experience the rich world of Solasta 2, MSI believes a gaming display must do more than simply present visuals—it must bring every moment of the adventure to life.
Solasta 2—A New Tactical RPG Adventure
Solasta 2 builds on the legacy of the acclaimed tactical RPG series, combining deep strategy, rich storytelling, and immersive turn-based combat. Players lead their party through dangerous lands where every decision matters, exploring dynamic environments and facing challenging encounters that test strategy, teamwork, and precision.
ASUS, a global leader in AIoT solutions, today announced full compatibility across its product portfolio with the newly launched Intel Core 200S Series processors. This integration spans a comprehensive range of industrial motherboards, configurable turnkey-to-order (CTOS) embedded systems, and rugged edge AI computers, further empowering sophisticated edge AI applications with enhanced performance, scalability, and reliability.
Purpose-built for embedded and industrial markets, the Intel Core 200S Series leverages the mature LGA 1700 socket and advanced performance hybrid architecture. Customers can easily upgrade existing Intel 600 series-based systems with a simple BIOS update, delivering up to 24 cores and 32 threads with PCIe 5.0 connectivity and DDR5-5600 memory support. This unlocks significant multi-tasking and AI inferencing power—especially for demanding use cases like machine vision, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent video analytics (IVA).
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra made his prediction during the company's recent earnings call. He said that self-driving cars will represent a new segment that demands huge amounts of memory.
Mystika delivers AI-powered tarot readings, horoscopes, and birth charts rooted in qabbalistic and esoteric traditions. Choose from spreads like Yes/No, Daily Tarot, Love Reading, Career & Prosperity, Shadow Work, and the Celtic Cross, then receive clear interpretations tailored to your question.
Mystika also teaches tarot with a guided library covering the 78 cards, suits, and history. Start with free readings, track daily cosmic energy, or upgrade to Premium for deeper insights and a complimentary birth chart.
Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered malicious artifacts distributed via Docker Hub following the Trivy supply chain attack, highlighting the widening blast radius across developer environments.
The last known clean release of Trivy on Docker Hub is 0.69.3. The malicious versions 0.69.4, 0.69.5, and 0.69.6 have since been removed from the container image library.
"New image tags 0.69.5 and
Microsoft has released the KB5085516 out-of-band (OOB) update to address sign-in issues caused by the Windows 11 March update on certain applications. These issues included sign-in failures in the free version of Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Microsoft Edge, Excel, Word, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. In Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2 with the March update KB5079473, OS Build 26100.8037, users experienced problems when trying to sign in to their Microsoft accounts. Now, the company is distributing the OOB update for OS Builds 26200.8039 and 26100.8039. Microsoft claims there are no known issues with this OOB update, suggesting that most concerns have been resolved and users can safely apply the update again.
The problem originally occurred when a device entered a specific network connectivity state that the Windows 11 March update did not handle well, causing some Microsoft applications to mistakenly identify the device as offline. Initially, Microsoft advised users to simply restart their devices to fix the issue, but the connectivity state where Microsoft accounts wouldn't sign in would often return. There was a significant chance that the device might revert to this specific networking state, resulting in repeated sign-in errors. However, now this has been resolved with the KB5085516 OOB update, which fixes networking states, so your device can continue running smoothly.
We are reportedly just days away from the launch of Intel's big "Battlemage" BMG-G31 GPU, specifically the professional graphics card SKU known as Arc Pro B70. Today, we get our first look at the official renders of Intel's Arc B70 GPU, thanks to a leak from VideoCardz. Pictured below is a reference design Intel GPU, which will also be available on the market and not just serve as a render. Intel will offer these GPUs in their reference design form, but add-in card partners will have their own custom designs to match, enhance, or perhaps surprise us with something like a dual-die configuration on a single GPU board, similar to what MaxSun did. Intel is set to launch the Arc B70 Pro, along with its smaller rumored sibling—the B65 Pro—on March 25, which is just two days away from the time of writing.
The B70 Pro will feature 32 Xe2 cores, 32 GB of ECC GDDR6, and a 256-bit memory bus with a TGP range of 160-290 W. Intel's TBP for the reference design will be 230 W. The B65 Pro, on the other hand, is expected to launch with the same VRAM configuration but will have only 20 Xe2 cores, effectively making it a B60 Pro with more VRAM. The B65 Pro is also expected to have a peak TGP of 200 W. In terms of performance improvements, the Intel-tested B70 AI system showed about a 1.49x performance increase in the geometric mean of testing under SLA constraints and a 1.13x improvement at a fixed batch size, compared to the Intel Arc Pro B60 using the BMG-G21. Please note that VideoCardz upscaled the last pair of pictures, and distortion in the images is a natural consequence. We will be receiving official renders and images in a couple of days.
Financial Fitness Passport helps you assess and improve your money health with an AI-powered dashboard, a Passport Score, and a proprietary Retirement Number. Enter your basics without linking your bank, then get clear guidance, calculators, and a roadmap to your goals.
Use cash flow analysis with tax estimates, debt payoff planning, investment tracking, and an AI coach named Penny who provides plain-English answers. Earn progress badges, export or delete your data anytime, and choose Free, Pro, or Enterprise plans for teams.
Plot Travel guarantees you never overpay for a trip you've already booked. Travel prices change frequently, but constantly checking your flights and hotels for price drops is tedious and unrealistic.
Just forward your confirmation emails, and the system takes over. It monitors your exact bookings in the background and helps you claim savings when prices drop, putting money back in your wallet.
Traider is a real-time voice psychological intervention layer for traders that sits between your impulse and your execution. It monitors your behavior, not just your trades, and steps in when you’re about to break your own rules. Within your first session, it builds a living psychological profile and uses it to deliver targeted interventions that keep you aligned with your plan.
Traider helps you close the gap between knowing and doing by tracking patterns, flagging risky impulses, and guiding you back to disciplined execution. It’s currently in private beta with a Founding 50 cohort shaping the product. Beta signups are still welcome.
VO3 AI is a video generation platform that turns text or images into 1080p cinematic videos with synchronized audio. It runs a multi-model engine including Veo3 Fast, Veo3, VO3 Basic, and VO3 Advance to balance speed, quality, and cost. Use batch generation, scene splitting, and a smart prompt system to refine results, while VO3 Bot suggests models and optimizes prompts. Share your videos via SEO-optimized pages with privacy controls and create daily content for social media, promos, and music videos.
Threat actors are suspected to be exploiting a maximum-severity security flaw impacting Quest KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA), according to Arctic Wolf.
The cybersecurity company said it observed malicious activity starting the week of March 9, 2026, in customer environments that's consistent with the exploitation of CVE-2025-32975 on unpatched SMA systems exposed to the internet. It's
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab range includes some of our favourite Android tablets, and some of its latest offerings are discounted for a limited time, with savings of up to AU$1,000.
The raft of upgrades coming to the OLED TVs is unsurprisingly stealing headlines, but it's the updates to the QNED series that has caught my attention.
Sucesio is an estate planning platform for the digital age that lets you centralize physical and digital assets in an encrypted vault and assign precise beneficiaries with custom instructions. A periodic life check triggers automatic transfer at the right time, and heirs access a secure link without creating an account.
Data is end-to-end encrypted (AES-256), GDPR-compliant, and hosted in Europe. The service supports French, Spanish, and English, and you can export all your data anytime.
Bottleneck Calculator tells you which component is limiting your PC's performance and what that means for gaming, content creation, or general use. Pick your CPU, GPU, and target resolution, and it gives you a clear answer based on benchmark data across 200+ components. Most bottleneck calculators give you a percentage with no context. This one explains what's actually happening and whether it matters for how you use your PC.
Calm Sea gives everyday users clear financial planning and retirement tools. You can model accumulation and retirement phases, project cashflows, and test scenarios for inflation, interest, growth, expenses, and contributions. With a simple visual and hands-on approach, you can use charts to see and drill down into assets, zoom out for the big picture, and spot opportunities. The quick onboarding lets you start projecting investment returns and goals, set drawdown strategies, and see how small changes today shape long-term outcomes.
Polymarket Trends tracks the biggest and most influential traders on Polymarket in real time. The Whale Tracker ranks wallets by an Influence Score that blends capital, profitability, consistency, activity, and longevity, refreshing every five minutes from the Polymarket CLOB API. Explore leaderboards, recent large trades, and wallet profiles with volumes, win rates, and market impact to follow smart money and gauge market sentiment.
Videos that include a person talking or that feature a highly visible person in the first three seconds have better retention, according to new data from Emplifi.
A federal jury in California has ordered the X owner to pay as much as $2.6 billion after ruling that he intentionally manipulated the platform’s share price.
OEM software bloat strikes again – Samsung Connect App causes mayhem Earlier this month, reports came in that Windows 11’s March 2026 updates were preventing users from accessing their C: drive. Following an investigation by Microsoft, via Windows Latest, it was uncovered that these issues predated Windows 11’s March update. In fact, it wasn’t caused […]
Cosmic Meta Digital is an AI-powered technology publication that delivers timely news, analysis, and how-to guides on artificial intelligence, programming, blockchain, cloud, and emerging digital trends. It helps readers cut through the noise with clear explanations and curated insights.
The site also offers free online tools and showcases indie apps and games, giving makers and curious readers practical resources to learn, create, and stay informed.
MyChessLab is a suite of chess study tool microsites that is regularly expanded. The site is in early beta and seeking 100 testers to help with bug testing and feature refinement. Beta testers will have free access for the rest of 2026 and a discounted founders rate if they choose to subscribe from January 1, 2027. No card details are required during the beta testing period.
Ask AI Widget adds AI platform icons to your site so visitors can open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, or Perplexity with your prompt already filled in. You frame the question, and they get honest answers from AI they trust. The script is under 25KB, loads asynchronously, and uses no cookies.
The widget supports inline or floating modes, multiple languages with automatic translations, prompt rotation, brand color customization, and an analytics dashboard. It works on any site that accepts a script tag, including WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, and Next.js, with an optional white-label upgrade.
Kioxia launches GP Series SSD using Storage Class Memory to expand GPU-accessible memory, targeting high-performance AI workloads and millions of IOPS.
NinjaPipe is a sales CRM that helps teams turn pipelines into profit. Manage leads, deals, and projects with Kanban boards, a unified inbox for email, WhatsApp, SMS, and social, and built-in quotes, invoices, and payment links. Automate lead capture from ads, route and nurture contacts, trigger tasks and workflows, and collaborate in real time. Create branded client portals, customize with your own domain, and work anywhere with mobile apps and built-in forms.
Nintendo’s building an improved Switch 2 version that’s EU-only – Nekkei claims According to a report from Nekkei, Nintendo has plans to release an improved Switch 2 console version in the EU that features improved repairability. This change will allow the console to comply with the EU’s Regulation 2023/1542, which says the following; Any natural […]
The result of the mod is less a novelty case mod and more a proof-of-concept for what a hybrid Xbox/PC box could look like in practice, arriving months before Microsoft's own Project Helix promises official support for PC titles on next-gen Xbox hardware.
The distinction between the models lies in their platforms. The AI+ versions use Intel's latest Panther Lake platform and are powered by Core Ultra Series 3 chips. These configurations support higher performance, featuring two DDR5 memory slots.
CarBG removes cluttered car backgrounds and replaces them with clean showroom, studio, or branded scenes. Upload a photo from your phone, and the AI handles the rest: background swap, lighting correction, shadow grounding, and export. It processes single images or entire inventory batches in minutes.
The built-in editor lets dealers add logos, contact details, and text overlays before downloading. Outputs are ready for Cars.com, CarGurus, AutoTrader, and Facebook Marketplace with no reformatting. No subscriptions, just prepaid credits starting at $0.40 per image with a free trial included.
Ubisoft has revealed that it did extensive research for the development of Assassin's Creed Shadows and even took guided trips around Japan for inspiration.
"Crimson Desert" should've been a big win for Xbox Play Anywhere on PC, but what followed was a swath of issues that casts a bit of a question mark over Xbox Helix.
Jack Conte created Patreon to try and earn extra from his YouTube videos. The musician-turned-businessman is now managing a platform with 3 million monthly active users, and has plenty to say to big corporations operating chatbots and other AI platforms. First and foremost, these AI companies should stop crying foul...
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra predicts that self-driving vehicles would require at least 300GB of RAM, meaning increasing demand could drive another memory chip shortage as these cars are essentially AI supercomputers on wheels.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, announced Saturday night that his TeraFab semiconductor project will be built on the Tesla campus in eastern Travis County, Austin, Texas, as a joint venture.
GrapheneOS, the privacy-focused Android fork, said in a post on X on Friday that it will not comply with emerging laws requiring operating systems to collect user age data at setup.
Nimbalyst is an agent-native visual workspace for builders. It brings developers, product managers, and designers together to collaborate with Claude Code and Codex on files, sessions, and tasks. Use visual editors for Markdown, CSV, code, wireframes, Excalidraw, Mermaid, and data models; review AI diffs, manage git, and generate code. Organize work with session kanban, session-to-file linking, visual cues, and built-in task tracking. Available for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Theōros is an AI-powered document collaboration platform for PDFs and complex files. It lets teams annotate, comment, and review in real time with version history, review annotations, and integrated form filling. You can ask questions and get cited answers, search instantly across documents, and control access with granular permissions. Theōros secures data with enterprise encryption and supports SOC2, HIPAA, and GDPR, enabling you to share confidently and move decisions faster.
Microsoft is finally walking back its worst Windows 11 decisions, from Taskbar limitations to AI bloat. Is it a change of heart or a billion-dollar survival tactic?
According to people familiar with the project who spoke to Reuters, Transformer is being built inside Amazon's devices and services division as a "personalization device" that could tie together the company's consumer services and its revamped Alexa assistant.
AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT based on the RDNA 4 architecture is currently the company's most powerful graphics card offering impressive 1440p and 4K gaming performance.
Brothers Brandon and Justin Nudelman have been convicted of running a ghost gun factory, with the group using 3D printers to print gun frames while purchasing other parts online to build and sell untraceable weapons.
LeadQualify helps consultants, coaches, and agencies filter out bad leads before they reach your calendar. You can build branded qualification forms, score answers by budget, timeline, and fit, and route qualified prospects straight to Calendly or any link while gracefully handling others. Track time saved and funnel performance in a clear dashboard, enable optional reminder emails, and customize branding with white label options. GDPR-ready consent and flexible routing keep your pipeline efficient and focused on serious buyers.
Mentiq is a retention analytics platform for SaaS teams that surfaces churn risk, explains its drivers, and turns insights into actionable playbooks. It combines product usage, billing, and user behavior to generate customer health scores, cohorts, and channel-level churn views while automatically intervening to prevent users from churning. You can prioritize accounts by renewal window, seats, and expansion likelihood, then trigger workflows like onboarding rescue, adoption nudges, pricing friction fixes, and champion loss recovery. Made for all founders, at any stage.
Thankfully, The Madison season 2 was renewed before season 1 was even released on Paramount+. Here's the latest on the Taylor Sheridan spinoff's return.
For Dakota Shearer, a driver with IMC Logistics, that shift began on a tight bend outside Sparks, Nevada. He took a wrong turn hauling a 40-foot trailer and found himself on a curve too narrow to complete. In a conventional rig, he would have had to climb in and out...
Chinese tech giant Huawei has lined up a magical looking Wi-Fi 7 router featuring the world’s first 'metal mesh crystal antenna' which looks like a glowing mountain.
Welcome to lucky week number 13 and the last full week of the month of March. After a busy week last week, things are slowing down again this week. This week's major release is for all the driving game fans out there and it apparently really screams. The rest of this week's releases are a bit more low-key, starting with a game about packing, followed by one about hanging out at the local mall. After that we quickly move on to some exorcism, rebuilding Rome to your specifications and finally we round off the week with a collection of some classics from Capcom.
Screamer / This week's major release / Thursday 26 March
High-octane action and anime aesthetics collide in this arcade racing game, featuring fighting mechanics and a storyline that hits hard. In this world, some race for glory while others seek power or revenge. Every race is a fight and every battle is personal. Steam link
Crimson Desert looks great and runs well on most PCs, but some settings introduce visual noise and inefficiencies. We break down every option to find the best balance of image quality and performance.
Triall makes three AI models check each other's work. You ask a question, three models from different providers answer separately, then critique each other anonymously, debate to refine the answer, and verify claims against live web sources. What survives is what you get.
Built on neuroscience research that found the neurons causing hallucination can't be fixed with alignment — so instead of hoping one model gets it right, Triall makes three compete. 120+ models, free tier, plans from $11/month.
PlutoBa delivers AI-powered creator intelligence for DTC brands and agencies. Paste any TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube handle and run a deep assessment that analyzes 100 posts and 300+ comments across seven dimensions, including audience authenticity, brand safety, engagement quality, and view consistency. It returns a 0-100 PlutoBa Score with a clear verdict: Proceed, Caution, or Avoid, plus rate benchmarks and AI-generated outreach. Use the built-in CRM and campaigns to track creators and decide with confidence.
All the ways to watch Tottenham vs Nottm Forest live streams online and from anywhere, as two struggling Premier League sides contest a relegation six-pointer.
All the ways to watch live streams of Feyenoord vs Ajax from anywhere in the world, as De Klassieker takes center stage in the Dutch Eredivisie 2025/26.
Every David Cronenberg movie is a certified banger, but if you're going to stream one after Ready or Not 2, don't pick the one that the cast recommends.
All the ways to watch Newcastle vs Sunderland live streams online and from anywhere, with the latest edition of the Tyne-Wear derby scheduled for Sunday.
You know that broken process everyone complains about but no one has time to fix? Reimagine It helps you do something about it. Describe your problem, and the AI walks you through a smart interview, covering people, processes, and technology, so you don't miss anything important. It tracks progress with a clarity score, nudging you when there's more to uncover. When you're done, you get multiple concrete options to solve your problem, each showing complexity and trade-offs upfront. Pick the approach that fits, and Reimagine It generates a full blueprint that you'd get from a consulting engagement, but you can do it yourself in one sitting.
TubeAnalytics is a powerful YouTube analytics platform built for serious creators who want clarity for growth. Track views, watch time, subscribers, revenue, click-through rate, retention, and audience behavior, all in one clean dashboard. Early users get priority feature access and direct input into the roadmap.
Toudou is a surprise-activity platform that turns a short questionnaire into one booked local activity for dates, friend groups, or teams. You set the boundaries of time, budget, location, energy level, indoor or outdoor, and accessibility, and Toudou selects the best fit from curated hosts while taking care of booking and logistics. This makes us more than just a platform, as we organize everything from A to Z. You get enough certainty to say “yes” to the plan and enough surprise to feel like you discovered something—without scrolling, coordinating, or arguing over options.
Maybe tokens really will become the fourth pillar of engineering compensation. But engineers might want to hold the line before embracing this as a straightforward win.
Wispra is an AI business directory that helps companies structure and publish verified information so they can be correctly understood and recommended by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. The core of Wispra is the creation of an AI-optimized company profile. Each business is published in the Wispra AI directory with structured information, including company description, services, products, locations, and key business data.
Splot is a data reporting app that gathers important information usually scattered across various tools. You can send daily or weekly reports about your business financials or app usage. We currently support Slack, with support for Discord, Telegram, and Microsoft Teams coming soon.
EarVu turns valuable knowledge inside Discord communities into structured, searchable website content automatically. Mark important messages in Discord, and EarVu transforms them into organized articles ready to publish on your website. This tool is perfect for communities, educators, and creators who want their best discussions to become permanent knowledge.
Pikkovia is a 3D asset marketplace for UI designers. It offers curated packs of 3D icons in PNG format, allowing you to easily add high-quality renders to interfaces, designs, decks, and videos. Browse categories from finance and film to gaming and weather, download ready-made packs, and drag and drop them into your designs to speed up your workflow.
StackSpend is a spend control platform for startup founders and lean teams. It unifies your cloud and AI costs across providers like AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others into one dashboard, enabling you to see where money is going in real time. Instead of digging through multiple billing portals, founders gain clear visibility into cost drivers by provider, service, team, and project, along with alerts and reporting to help catch spikes early. The goal is simple: reduce waste, improve forecasting, and protect runway without adding finance overhead.
OpenMark is an AI model benchmarking platform that lets you test 100+ LLMs on your own task with deterministic scoring and real API cost tracking. Describe what you need in plain English, pick your models, and get scored results in minutes, without requiring API keys, code, or setup.
With 18 scoring modes, vision support, stability tracking across multiple runs, and accuracy-per-dollar metrics, OpenMark shows you which model performs best for your specific use case and budget. It is free to try at openmark.ai.
Chartle lets you create beautiful, interactive charts from natural language or raw data. Type a prompt like 'UK inflation over the last 10 years,' and it finds real sources, builds the chart, and cites them. You can upload screenshots to convert them to code, paste spreadsheets or JSON, and customize themes to match your brand.
Publish with secret links, embed in Notion or blogs, and export crisp PNGs or SVGs. Build drag-and-drop dashboards, track versions, and connect live data from Google Sheets, Notion, and APIs.
StockPortfolio.pro is a calm, focused portfolio tracker for long-term investors. Track holdings, allocation, fundamentals, and performance in one clean dashboard, with no broker connection required. You can add positions manually, spot concentration risk by ticker, sector, or theme, and compare returns against the market. It prioritizes privacy, with optional analytics consent.
Android users deserve a good flight tracker app too, and that's one of the reasons we built Flights25. Sync your calendar, let Flights25 track your flights automatically, and get notified about important flight changes.
Warzone fans decried Raven Software and Treyarch's decision to only have quad queues for Black Ops Royale. The team has now updated the battle royale modes to bring back Solo queues and the Standard Battle Royale mode with Verdansk as the big map, even in the face of Black Ops Royale's success.
Valfred is a real-time AI sales copilot that helps B2B sales teams win more deals. Unlike post-call tools like Gong or Modjo, Valfred assists reps during live calls by surfacing proof points, objection responses, and competitive arguments in real time. It connects to your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive) and ingests call transcripts, emails, and case studies to build a living sales knowledge base. Features include dynamic battlecards, smart success stories, CRM auto-fill, proof pages, pre-call briefs, and an AI sales chat, making it ideal for SDRs, AEs, sales managers, and RevOps at B2B SaaS companies and agencies.
Hannspree Hybri monitor uses ambient light for paper-like readability, reducing energy use while maintaining standard display performance across varying conditions.
According to a Nikkei report, the update will allow consumers to remove and replace batteries using ordinary tools, without special equipment or risking damage to the device. The more easily repairable model is expected to debut in Europe, with the design expanding to other markets if required by similar legal...
Available now to Steam Deck Preview channel users, the update includes various fixes and improvements that appear aimed at addressing the Linux distro's weaknesses. Many of the changes facilitate connecting displays, controllers, and other external devices.
PlayStation 5 architect Mark Cerny said in an interview that Sony will add frame-generation technology to the console in the future, but didn't specify which console will get it or when.
RazFit is a fitness app for iPhone and iPad that delivers 1–10 minute, equipment-free workouts tailored to your level. Choose your time and focus area, then train with clear video guidance, timers, and automatic tracking. RazFit includes 30 calisthenics exercises, 32 achievement badges, and AI coaches Orion and Lyssa to keep you motivated and on form. You can track progress, unlock milestones, and see results in weeks, with support available in six languages.
Postica is a Reddit growth platform for founders and marketers. It analyzes over 20 million posts across more than 100,000 subreddits to show you the best posting times, highest engagement keywords, flair performance, and audience overlap between communities. No more guessing where to share your product.
It also generates personalized daily growth plans based on your product and experience level, with titles modeled after top-performing content. Postica includes a post studio for drafting and scheduling, a conversation finder for comment marketing, and link tracking to measure clicks.
An anonymous Substack post accuses compliance startup Delve of “falsely” convincing “hundreds of customers they were compliant” with privacy and security regulations.
CISPE claims Broadcom's actions have excluded most European cloud infrastructure partners, sharply reduced competition, and forced smaller firms out of the VMware ecosystem altogether.
Researchers are still studying samples of Ryugu collected by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency from its Hayabusa2 mission. After the first papers focused on the composition of the recovered material, a Japanese team has now found a "complete" set of genetic bases belonging to both DNA and RNA.
Nintendo is reportedly set to launch a revised Switch 2 with a removable battery in Europe, in line with regulations requiring easier battery replacement by February 2027.
Story Generator is a structured AI writing tool that helps you create stories step by step, turning your ideas into full story outlines and detailed chapters. Simply enter your concept, choose the genre, and set up your characters, including name, personality, appearance, and occupation. The system then generates a complete, coherent multi-chapter outline tailored to your setup.
The tool supports all major genres, including fantasy, sci-fi, romance, mystery, thriller, adventure, slice-of-life, children's stories, and more. Each generation produces three unique versions, providing you with multiple creative directions to choose from instantly.
MailerBit is an email automation platform for sending thousands of individually personalized messages. It connects to your contact data and inserts unlimited custom fields—text, numbers, dates, and currencies—into dynamic templates with merge tags and built-in math. You can run recurring campaigns on fixed or custom schedules, attach files up to 25 MB, and compute values at send time. MailerBit solves the problem of sending similar emails manually to many customers.
April 2026 will bring some HUGE changes to Windows 11, and more are coming 2026 is the year of Windows 11 improvements. Windows 12 isn’t coming anytime soon, and Microsoft’s focus is on making its Windows 11 faster and more reliable. With Windows 11’s April 2026 Insider updates, Microsoft has started down its path towards […]
As part of Microsoft's big plan to address quality issues on Windows 11, the company has confirmed that it's working on fixing performance of menus, folders, and search in File Explorer.
PC building is in a bad place right now with extortionate price increases and all-around shortages, so when a deal like this pops up on an RTX 5060 Ti it is not to be missed.
Threat actors affiliated with Russian Intelligence Services are conducting phishing campaigns to compromise commercial messaging applications (CMAs) like WhatsApp and Signal to seize control of accounts belonging to individuals with high intelligence value, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said Friday.
"The campaign
In an interview with Club386, Hallock gave a short but telling answer when asked whether he envisioned Intel sockets supporting more CPU generations. "I do," he said. "That's it – I do." Although he offered no technical details, the simplicity of that response hints at a deliberate and possibly overdue...
The Logitech G325 Lightspeed Wireless pairs exceptional comfort with impressive sound quality for a mid-tier price. The microphone leaves something to be desired, but overall, it’s a solid all-day wear, even when you’re not gaming.
Remember the launch of the very first take on DLSS? Remember when frame generation initially arrived? They weren't at all well-received, but Nvidia turned that around.
Fusion power promises to generate large amounts of clean electricity from nearly limitless fuel. This article explains the main approaches and the companies that use them.
AMD hasn’t unveiled it, but that hasn’t stopped ASRock AMD has not revealed this CPU, but ASRock has. ASRock has issued a press release confirming that its motherboards “fully support” AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 CPU. This processor promises “more cache than ever” and “higher gaming performance” for users. Videocardz were the first to spot this […]
Best Buy Tech Fest has a 43% discount on the Lenovo IdeaPad 1, an AMD-empowered laptop with performance rates equal to that of the popular MacBook Neo, while costing half as much.
HP's OMEN 27qs gaming monitor is on sale at its namesake company's website with a generous 30% discount, giving PC gamers a chance to upgrade their rig with the ability to play games at 1440p and 240fps for under $350.
A big change coming soon to Windows 11 will allow users to say no to installing updates for as long as they want, a level of freedom that hasn't been seen since Windows 8.
We're treated to double helpings of Shawn Hatosy this week in The Pitt season 2 and Ready or Not 2, and his time in the ER was the weirdest kind of preparation possible.
Want to get into wire-free vinyl but don't know how to start? You'll need a nice simple system — and this little quartet all come recommended by an audio editor.
An OpenClaw autonomous AI agent has hit back at a volunteer maintainer of a Python library who rejected its code by posting a "hit piece" that criticizes the developer and calls them discriminatory against AI.
Qala is an AI-native data discovery and visibility platform that continuously shows security and compliance teams in real-time how data moves across code, integrations, third parties, and AI systems, all without requiring engineering involvement. In under 30 minutes, users can instantly obtain real-time data visibility from the source with an interactive topology and lineage map that illustrates how data flows across systems, whether at rest or in transit. It uses AI and NLP to automatically detect and classify sensitive data, tag assets, and trace data flows at the point of creation or ingestion.
Sony’s continuing to work with AMD on new “Project Amethyst” technologies for PlayStation and Radeon In an interview with Digital Foundry, Sony’s Mark Cerny, the lead system architect for PlayStation 5, confirmed that ML-based (Machine Learning) frame generation would be coming to “PlayStation platforms”. This tech comes as part of Sony’s “Project Amethyst” collaboration with […]
Oracle has released security updates to address a critical security flaw impacting Identity Manager and Web Services Manager that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-21992, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0.
"This vulnerability is remotely exploitable without authentication," Oracle said in an advisory. "If successfully
Microsoft's big sweeping set of improvements coming soon to Windows 11 don't address its controversial Microsoft account requirements, but that might soon change.
YouTuber runs several PC games on the MacBook Neo, including Cyberpunk 2077 at around 40 FPS. Testing proves that Apple's iPhone SoCs can emulate PC games at playable frame rates.
A YouTuber has modded an Xbox Series X with PC parts, featuring a NUC 12 Extreme with a Core i7-12700, low-profile Gigabyte RTX 5060, and PSU while keeping the console's DVD drive intact.
ERSO lets anyone create and share interactive 3D stories with AI. You can generate scenes from text, turn video into animations, add AI music, and publish to VR, PC app, or the browser with one click. Viewers can explore paths, gather in the same scene from anywhere, and leave avatar comments with custom voices and motion. Skip years of 3D tutorials and go from idea to sharing experience quickly.
MapMaster is a community-driven platform for discovering and creating interactive maps for video games. Explore curated maps across popular titles to track locations, collectibles, and points of interest. Sign in to add, edit, or manage your own maps. Enjoy an ad-free experience, follow updates on X, and join the Discord to collaborate with other players.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added five security flaws impacting Apple, Craft CMS, and Laravel Livewire to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, urging federal agencies to patch them by April 3, 2026.
The vulnerabilities that have come under exploitation are listed below -
CVE-2025-31277 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A vulnerability in Apple
Hullo is an AI-powered dating platform built to optimize for compatibility instead of endless swiping. Rather than relying on random discovery and surface-level browsing, Hullo uses intelligent matching models to analyze user intent, profile signals, and behavioral patterns to suggest more meaningful connections.
The platform also enhances profile quality with AI-assisted optimization, increasing signal clarity and improving match outcomes. Hullo is designed as an AI-native alternative to traditional swipe-based apps, focusing on better matches, not more screen time.
Path to Hired is a Kanban-style job application tracker with built-in CV and cover letter optimization tools. Instead of managing a chaotic spreadsheet or trying to remember where you applied last Tuesday, Path to Hired gives you one place to track every application, move it through stages such as Applied, Interview, and Offer, and get AI-powered suggestions to improve your CV and cover letters. We also launched a Chrome extension that saves jobs from LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor in one click. We're in early beta and looking for job seekers to test the product and provide feedback.
The threat actors behind the supply chain attack targeting the popular Trivy scanner are suspected to be conducting follow-on attacks that have led to the compromise of a large number of npm packages with a previously undocumented self-propagating worm dubbed CanisterWorm.
The name is a reference to the fact that the malware uses an ICP canister, which denotes a tamperproof smart contract on
With every Windows 11 update seemingly introducing a new bug or somehow breaking some core functionality, it seems as though trust in Microsoft and Windows is at an all-time low, with the recent "Microslop" insult popping up in online tech circles as a sort of culmination of the recent spate of issues. Microsoft has apparently been following the backlash against Windows 11, with Pavan Davuluri, President of Windows + Devices, stating in a new Windows Insider Blog post that "over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback," and subsequently laying out a plan that walks back many of the contentious changes that have been made in recent Windows 11 updates and promising to add highly requested new features and return features from older Windows versions that likely shouldn't have been removed in the first place.
One of the earliest complaints about Windows 11—before Copilot launched—was that the task bar could not be relocated to other screen edges, but Microsoft will soon introduce more taskbar customization, including moving it to the top, left, or right screen edges as needed. Microsoft will also walk back many of the Copilot integrations, stating that it will be "more intentional about how and where Copilot integrates across Windows." It specifically calls out removing Copilot from Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad. The other two important changes that will come from the new plan for Windows 11 is giving users more control over updates to reduce interruptions—essentially allowing users to go longer without restating without an update and skipping updates during device setup, and restarting and shutting down without updating. Microsoft also plans to address File Explorer and speed up launch times in order to deliver "smoother navigation and more reliable performance for everyday tasks," as well as polishing the user experience overall.
Sony recently introduced Upgraded PSSR—aka PSSR 2.0—on its PlayStation 5 Pro consoles with the launch of Resident Evil, finally unlocking the additional AI chops of the PS5 Pro's APU. If recent comments by Sony's Mark Cerny to Digital Foundry are anything to go by, PlayStation's console hardware will be following a similar trajectory to gaming PCs when it comes to these ML and AI-based features. Specifically, it seems as though frame generation will be one of the next advancements to make its way to the PlayStation platform, although it seems as though gamers will need to wait a little longer for that to be implemented—if it is implemented during this console generation at all.
Addressing a question regarding FSR Frame Generation on PlayStation, Cerny commented that "FSR Frame Generation is also based on co-developed technology...and an equivalent frame generation library should be seen at some point on PlayStation platforms." He goes on to say that frame generation will not be making it to Sony's consoles in 2026, stating that "we have no more releases planned for this year." Given that the next-generation PlayStation hardware is slated to arrive somewhere between 2027 and 2028, it almost seems likely that Sony will announce FSR Frame Generation at the same time as the PlayStation 6 with a cut-back version available for the PS5, although it's potentially possible for Sony to update the current PS5 Pro with FSR Frame Generation, since FSR Redstone was developed in partnership with Sony, to begin with. There have already been modders who have run FSR 4 Redstone Frame Generation on RDNA 3, as well, so it may be possible for the PS5's RDNA 2 APU, as well, although at the cost of a higher performance penalty.
SparkLocal removes the barriers between having a dream and launching a business. By answering questions about your skills, budget, and location, the AI generates four personalized business ideas rooted in your local market, completely free. You can explore viability scoring, market research, financial projections, a launch checklist, and resources matched to your city. Additionally, you can generate a pitch deck, landing page, and social graphics, as well as access a free directory of over 6,073 local business resources across 547 US cities. Entrepreneurship should be for everyone, not just the well-connected.
Droplink helps dropshippers find winning products, spy on competitors, and fulfill orders from one dashboard. It features AI-powered search, a product database with over 1 million products, and an ad library across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest to validate demand and margins. Connect Shopify to import products with one click and ship through a supplier network offering fast 6-day delivery with no minimum order quantity. Track store revenues, monitor ads and products, and scale with 24/7 support.
AuraMetrics.io is a suite for GEO and AEO that helps your brand get cited by AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI. It audits structured data, entity clarity, trust signals, and citability, assigns a GEO Visibility Score, and delivers a prioritized roadmap for improvement. By integrating GA4 and Search Console, you can measure AI traffic and monitor how LLMs discuss your brand through ongoing prompt tests and citation alerts.
Timerjoy offers free, browser-based timers, stopwatches, and countdowns so you can track time without downloads or sign-ups. Start quick presets for seconds, minutes, or hours, or build custom visual and classroom timers. The site also provides a world clock, time zone tools, date and age calculators, sunrise and sunset times, moon phases, and breathing and workout timers for HIIT, Tabata, and intervals.
AssetHQ provides a simple digital asset management platform for teams to store, organize, and share documents, images, and files. With an intuitive folder structure, tagging, and search, finding assets is fast. You can share with secure links, expiration dates, and permissions. Enjoy image previews, collections, and lightning-fast performance backed by enterprise-grade security. Start free and scale to a paid plan as your storage and team grow.
Anthropic submitted two sworn declarations to a California federal court late Friday afternoon, pushing back on the Pentagon's assertion that the AI company poses an "unacceptable risk to national security" and arguing that the government's case relies on technical misunderstandings and claims that were never actually raised during the months of negotiations.
OneClickGenerator.io generates a privacy policy and a hosted support page for your mobile app using AI. Just type your app name and what it does—no templates and no legal expertise needed. Built for indie iOS and Android developers who need App Store and Google Play compliance without the headache.
Ukrainian drones Shrike 10 Fiber and F10 impress Pentagon, earning contracts in a billion-dollar Drone Dominance program focused on non-Chinese components.
Interactive maps are a huge boon in open-world games like Crimson Desert, and this excellent one is already up even though Pearl Abyss' hit just launched.
Intel has shifted the blame for a lack of Arc GPU in Crimson Desert back on developer Pearl Abyss, saying it's reached out to the studio "many times" over the past several years.
Tindlo is a workflow OS where your calendar is your task board. Instead of switching between Asana for tasks, Google Calendar for scheduling, and Notion for docs, Tindlo puts everything on one timeline through multi-layer scheduling. Your team opens one screen and sees what to do, when to do it, and the context they need. Built for small teams of 2-20 people.
A free plan is available forever, and paid plans start at $7 per user per month.
Intel’s ready to work with Pearl Abyss to bring ARC GPU support to Crimson Desert – Update – Pearl Abyss has backtracked, confirming that they will support Intel ARC GPUs with future Crimson Desert game updates. Pearl Abyss’ newest PC hit, Crimson Desert, is incompatible with Intel ARC GPUs. The game does not boot on […]
The Subnautica 2 founders' lawsuit against Krafton continues, with their legal team arguing the publisher disobeyed a court order given earlier this week.
The controversy where open-world fantasy game "Crimson Desert" isn't supported on Intel Arc GPUs to the point of the game refusing to even launch on systems with Arc GPUs, drew its first response from Intel. Gamers with Intel Arc graphics cards got a rude shock earlier this week, as the game flat-out refused to start on their systems, with a dialog box simply saying "the graphics device is currently not supported." In its FAQ, "Crimson Desert" developer Pearl Abyss said that the game doesn't currently support Arc GPUs, and gamers who bought the game expecting it should seek refunds.
In its statement to the press, Intel says that it reached out to Pearl Abyss over the past several years to help optimize the game for its hardware. "Crimson Desert" has been in development for over 6 years prior to its launch earlier this week. "We've reached out to Pearl Abyss many time to help test, validate, and optimize support for Intel graphics, providing early hardware, drivers, and engineering resources across multiple generations, including "Alchemist," "Battlemage," "Meteor Lake" (Xe-LPG), and "Lunar Lake" (Xe2-LPG)," the statement goes. The company says that it "remains ready to assist Pearl Abyss."
The deal provides both companies with strategic advantages. For Uber, access to a dedicated robotaxi fleet supports its broader push to integrate multiple self-driving partners across its platform. For Rivian, the capital infusion offers financial breathing room and a guaranteed customer as it accelerates the development of autonomous technology.
Quasar Energy is a Dutch B2B platform for electrical installers, solar professionals, and energy market participants across NL, DE, and BE. PowerCalc AI generates IEC 60364-5-52 / NEN 1010 cable sizing reports and EN 50549 solar PV + battery reports as structured PDFs — correction factors, voltage drop, short-circuit withstand, PVGIS 5.2 irradiance data, and 25-year financial analysis. Quasar Intelligence delivers AI-generated EU energy market analytics from ENTSO-E data — day-ahead prices, generation mix, and cross-border flows for NL, DE, and BE. Both lines are pay-per-report. No subscription, no account, no software. Order, pay via Stripe, receive PDF by email in minutes.
EvoLink unifies access to leading chat, image, and video models through a single API key and endpoint. It delivers 99.9% uptime with automatic failover, real-time usage and cost tracking, and smart routing that can cut AI spend by up to 70%. Integrate in minutes using OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google-compatible formats, then call models like Claude, Gemini, Veo, Sora, Wan, and Nano Banana Pro without refactoring. Build production-grade workflows with low latency and predictable costs.
AMD introduces Agentic AI on PCs, enabling autonomous task execution, persistent local models, and enhanced productivity for professionals and organizations.
CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at Nvidia’s GTC conference this week in his signature leather jacket to deliver a two-and-a-half-hour keynote, projecting $1 trillion in AI chip sales through 2027, declaring that every company needs an “OpenClaw strategy,” and closing with a rambling Olaf robot that had to get its mic cut. The message was hard to miss: Nvidia […]
According to Nvidia's press materials, DLSS 5 enhances lighting and material interactions without modifying underlying geometry. The company later reiterated this point to HotHardware, while TechSpot also highlighted commentary from Ryan Shrout arguing the tech is not simply a post-processing filter. However, in email exchanges with YouTuber Daniel Owen, Nvidia...
According to Business Insider, the issue came up during a January Google DeepMind town hall, where VP of Global Affairs Tom Lue said the company was "leaning more" into national security work.
CallAgent provides AI phone agents that make and answer calls for your business. They follow up on new ad leads in seconds, qualify prospects, book appointments, confirm schedules, and run outbound campaigns at scale. You can connect a dedicated number, integrate calendars and CRMs, and trigger calls via API or webhooks. Monitor recordings, transcripts, and analytics in real time. CallAgent supports multilingual, natural conversations, 24/7 availability, and GDPR-grade security with pay-as-you-go and tiered plans.
Omnia shows how your brand appears across AI engines and tells you exactly what to do to improve it. We track share of voice, citations, competitor benchmarks, and visibility across AI search. Insights turns that data into prioritized, prompt-level tasks, indicating what content to create, what to improve, and where to get featured based on real citation data, brand authority, and category. Monitoring is the diagnosis, and Insights is the prescription. There are no dashboards collecting dust, just a clear plan to win AI visibility.
Looking to take the next step in your search marketing career?
Below, you will find the latest SEO, PPC, and digital marketing jobs at brands and agencies. We also include positions from previous weeks that are still open.
Job Description Job Title: Web Designer & Digital Marketing Specialist Location: Phoenix, AZ / Hybrid Job Type: Full-Time Experience Level: Mid-Level (2–5 Years) About FirstLine Road Solutions Founded in 2022, FirstLine Road Solutions has quickly become the partner, employer, and acquirer of choice in the towing and roadside industry. Today, we support 20 independently operated […]
Our Snooze Story We are Snooze, the OG brunch leaders who have never stopped flipping the script on breakfast, powered by culinary creativity, unmatched hospitality, and a passion for our communities. Our Snoozers bring their authentic selves to work every day. This allows us to serve our Guests through genuine care and radical hospitality. Joining Snooze […]
About CompoSecure CompoSecure, a GPGI business (NYSE: GPGI), is the leading manufacturer of Premium Metal Payment Cards and also offers best-in-class Authentication and Digital Asset solutions. The Company’s offerings combine elegance, simplicity, and security to deliver exceptional experiences and peace of mind, enabling trust for millions of people around the globe. For more information, please […]
Description: This role can sit in our Hayward, CA, Santa Clarita, CA, or Farmington, MI locations. Job Summary We are seeking a strategic and hands-on Digital Marketing Manager to own and run all aspects of our marketing campaigns from planning through execution and optimization. This role will lead our digital presence across paid, owned, and […]
Head of Digital Marketing About the Company Top-tier organization in the consumer services industry Industry Consumer Services Type Privately Held About the Role The Company is seeking a Head of Digital Marketing to spearhead the development and execution of comprehensive digital marketing strategies. The successful candidate will be tasked with enhancing brand awareness, […]
At MERGE, we are Built Different. We are a marketing and technology agency purpose-built for the intersection of health and wellness—where human impact matters most. By weaving storytelling through technology, we move beyond traditional engagement to Whole Human Marketing. This approach recognizes that humans are multidimensional and complex, and uses AI to ensure every brand interaction […]
About Electra: At Electra, we’re pioneering sustainable aviation by developing hybrid-electric Ultra Short Takeoff and Landing aircraft designed to transform regional air mobility, by making air travel more efficient, quieter, and environmentally friendly. Able to operate from soccer field-sized spaces, our Ultra Short unlocks a new era of aviation through what we call Direct Aviation […]
Description: The Digital Marketing Specialist is responsible for executing creative marketing initiatives by producing content, copy, and digital assets that support campaigns, brand presence, and customer engagement. Requirements: Create marketing copy for ads, emails, blogs, landing pages, and social media Design digital assets including graphics, visuals, and basic video content Maintain brand consistency across all […]
Job Description Digital Marketing Specialist Salt Lake City, UT | Hybrid | $70,000 / year + discretionary bonus About the Role We are a fast-growing company looking for a driven, well-rounded, full-time Digital Marketing Specialist to join our expanding team. This is an exciting opportunity for a self-starter who thrives in a dynamic environment, embraces […]
Job Description Carter Services, Inc. in Torrance, CA is hiring a full-time Digital Marketing Representative to take charge of our outreach efforts and educate potential customers on the extensive range of services we offer. This is a great opportunity to support a local business while developing your marketing knowledge and sharpening your problem-solving skills! Here’s […]
Role Overview As our Creative Strategist, you will be the driving force behind the ideation, strategy, and optimization of paid media creatives across platforms (Facebook, Instagram). You’ll collaborate closely with designers, video editors, copywriters, and media buyers to turn insights into creative concepts that drive customer acquisition, loyalty, and brand affinity. This role requires both […]
Are you the type of person who immediately checks out a new product after seeing your favorite influencer showcase it on TikTok, Snapchat, or YouTube? Do you love diving into the world of social media advertising, particularly on Instagram? Are you someone who thrives in a role that blends creativity with data‑driven decision‑making? If so, […]
At UnitedHealthcare, we’re simplifying the health care experience, creating healthier communities and removing barriers to quality care. The work you do here impacts the lives of millions of people for the better. Come build the health care system of tomorrow, making it more responsive, affordable and optimized. Ready to make a difference? Join us to […]
Do you have experience building paid search campaigns? Are you data-driven and enjoy analyzing campaign performance? Our Paid Search Analyst at Click Here Digital manages a portfolio of paid search campaigns on Google and Bing, as well as other search marketing engines. Job Description As a Paid Search Analyst, you will play a crucial role […]
Paid Media Specialist Location: Pleasant Grove, Utah (On-site) Department: Marketing Salary: $62K We’re looking for a hands-on Paid Media Specialist to join our growth marketing team and take ownership of our paid media channels. This role is ideal for someone who loves building campaigns, testing creative, and optimizing performance. Reporting to the Customer Growth & […]
Organic Growth: Build and execute the SEO roadmap across technical, content, and off-page. Own the numbers: traffic, rankings, conversions. No handoffs, no excuses.
AI-Optimized Search (AIO): Define and drive CARE.com’s strategy for visibility in AI-generated results — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and whatever comes next. Optimize entity coverage, content structure, and schema to ensure we’re the answer, not just a result.
Design and execute inbound-led outbound campaigns—reaching prospects who’ve shown intent (visited pricing page, downloaded resources, engaged with content) at precisely the right moment
Build and optimize Apollo sequences, LinkedIn outreach, and multi-touch campaigns that book qualified demos for AEs
Trivy, a popular open-source vulnerability scanner maintained by Aqua Security, was compromised a second time within the span of a month to deliver malware capable of stealing sensitive CI/CD secrets.
The latest incident impacted GitHub Actions "aquasecurity/trivy-action" and "aquasecurity/setup-trivy," which are used to scan Docker container images for vulnerabilities and set up GitHub Actions
Intel says that it is listening to feedback Club386 has had the opportunity to talk with Intel’s Robert Hallock, the company’s VP and GM ot its “Enthusiast Channel”. When asked about the possibility of “a future where Intel sockets support more CPU generations, Hallock’s answer was simple: “I do. That’s it – I do”. Elaborating […]
After feeling the heat from macOS and Linux, Microsoft is getting its act together and making significant changes to Windows 11 that will bring it up to par with the competition.
The ZimaCube 2 compact NAS and mini-server platform from IceWhale has been announced and is now listed for pre-orders. The lineup is built around 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake processors and includes a standard model with an i3-1215U CPU, a Pro variant with the i5-1235U processor, and a Creator Pack with added GPU support. Measuring 240 x 221 x 220 mm, it's compact but roomy enough to handle high-end configurations without feeling cramped. In terms of storage, you will get six bays supporting 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drives, either SATA III or NVMe, and up to four M.2 slots for additional capacity. Total storage can reach 164 TB depending on configuration. Expansion includes two PCIe slots, a full-size PCIe 4.0 x16 (physically x4 lanes) for GPUs, and a PCIe 3.0 x8 (physically x2). The latter supports network cards or NVMe expansion. Connectivity is solid with dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, four USB 3.0 Type-A ports, two 2.5 GbE Ethernet ports, plus optional 10 GbE on higher models. HDMI and DisplayPort outputs are included for display support.
As an operating system, it runs ZimaOS Plus, a Linux-based OS optimized for self-hosted services like file storage, media servers, virtual machines, and containerized workloads. The base unit starts at $799, equipped with 8 GB of DDR5 RAM, a 256 GB NVMe SSD, and an Intel Core i3-1215U. The Pro model is priced at $1,299 and features the more powerful i5-1235U CPU along with 16 GB of memory. For users needing higher performance in virtualization, rendering, or machine learning tasks, a Creator Pack version is available for $2,499, this includes the same Core i5 processor, 64 GB of DDR5 RAM, a 1 TB SSD, and an NVIDIA RTX Pro 2000 GPU.
Microsoft's Windows 11 March update has a confirmed issue affecting Windows 11 versions 25H2 and 24H2 with KB5079473. This issue causes sign-in failures in some Microsoft applications, including the free version of Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Microsoft Edge, Excel, Word, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. After installing the Windows 11 March update, you might encounter a message saying, "You'll need the Internet for this. It doesn't look like you're connected to the Internet," even when your device is connected. This problem occurs when a device enters a specific network connectivity state that the Windows 11 March update does not handle well, causing some Microsoft applications to mistakenly identify the device as offline. It's important to note that this issue only affects Microsoft accounts.
To resolve this issue, Microsoft recommends simply restarting your device. This should fix the connectivity state that causes the connection to Microsoft accounts to fail. However, there is a significant chance that the device might return to this specific networking state, resulting in repeated sign-in errors. Microsoft is working on a fix, which is expected to be released in the coming days. As the week ends, the release will likely be early next week. No server platforms are affected by this issue; it only impacts Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2 with the March update KB5079473, OS Build 26100.8037.
The decision, made public on Thursday, concludes that Apple's latest implementation of pulse-oximetry functionality falls outside the scope of Masimo's asserted rights. The full ITC commission will now review the judge's ruling and decide whether to adopt it – a step that will determine whether the redesigned watches remain protected...
FSR 4.1 builds on the FSR Redstone framework by enhancing image reconstruction quality, particularly in older games that natively support only lower-resolution input. It also delivers sharper visuals for machine learning – based upscaling, improving detail reconstruction and reducing artifacts in scenes with foliage and other fine textures. However, a...
Fortnite's new season not only brings new content for the players but also gives them a chance to earn real-life rewards, such as an RTX 5080. If you're good enough at the game and win enough "rivalries" in matches every week and rank among the top five players in the world, Epic will give you a free RTX 5080.
AMD has added Ray Regeneration 1.1 and FSR 4.1 upscaling to its RDNA 4 GPUs, bringing it to parity with Sony's PSSR 2 on the PS5 Pro. Games that support these features will have better ray tracing quality with more accurate shadow detail, while also getting a sharper-looking image through ML-based upscaling.
As AI agents reshape how advertising platforms are used, Google is bringing focus toward the developers behind the systems and create content specifically for them.
What’s happening. Google’s Advertising and Measurement Developer Relations team has launched Ads DevCast, a bi-weekly vodcast and podcast hosted by Cory Liseno. The show focuses on technical deep dives across Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360 and related tools.
Zoom out. This is a companion to Ads Decoded, hosted by Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin, which focuses on campaign strategy. Ads DevCast is explicitly built for developers and technical practitioners.
Driving the news. Episode 1 — “MCPs, Agents, and Ads. Oh My!” — centers on what Google calls the “agentic shift,” where AI agents are becoming primary users of advertising APIs.
Why we care. Ads DevCast gives developers a direct line to the engineers building Google’s ad tools, which should help stay ahead of technical changes, discover new capabilities faster, and build more efficient integrations in an increasingly AI-driven ecosystem.
The big picture. AI is expanding who can work with ad tech systems. Google is seeing a shift from a narrow “Ads Developer Community” to a broader “Ads Technical Community,” where marketers can execute technical tasks without full development cycles.
What’s next. Ads DevCast is a pilot, and Google is collecting feedback to shape future episodes.
Bottom line. Google is positioning Ads DevCast as a tool to give developers a front-row seat to Google’s latest ads innovations, with practical insights to build, test, and adapt faster in an AI-first landscape.
A new Google Merchant Center update changes how e-commerce sites must handle out-of-stock products, with direct implications for product approvals and ad performance.
What’s happening. Google now requires that out-of-stock products must still display a buy button, but it can no longer be active or hidden. Instead, the button must be visibly disabled and appear grayed out. In other words, users should be able to see the button, but not click it.
This marks a clear shift from common practices where retailers either left the “Add to Cart” button clickable or removed it entirely. Both approaches are now non-compliant.
How it works. In practical terms, the requirement is simple. The buy button must remain on the page, but its functionality needs to be turned off. Typically, this is done by applying a disabled state so the button becomes unclickable and visually subdued.
The catch. The button change is only part of the update. Google also expects clear availability messaging on the product page, such as “in stock,” “out of stock,” “pre-order,” or “back order.” This information must match exactly with what is submitted in the product feed.
Any inconsistency between the page and the feed can lead to disapprovals.
The bigger shift. This update removes a long-standing workaround used by many retailers. Previously, it was possible to keep selling out-of-stock products by leaving the purchase button active. That approach is no longer allowed.
If a retailer still wants to accept orders for unavailable items, the product must now be labeled as “back order.” This status needs to be reflected consistently across both the landing page and the feed.
Bottom line. What looks like a small UI requirement is actually a meaningful policy change. Retailers will need to review how they manage out-of-stock products and ensure their pages and feeds are fully aligned to avoid disruptions.
First seen. This update was spotted by Google shopping specialist who shared the his how to video on LinkedIn.
Google is testing AI-generated review replies in Google Business Profile.
Why we care. Responding to reviews can impact conversions and trust. But generic AI replies could be risky and erode trust, especially on negative reviews where authenticity matters most. Response quality matters more than whether a business replies to reviews.
What it looks like. Here’s a screenshot:
The details. Google appears to be rolling out a limited test of Reply to reviews with AI inside Google Business Profile.
The feature generates suggested responses to customer reviews.
Users can review, edit, and manually submit replies.
Availability is inconsistent across accounts and reviews.
The feature has been spotted in the U.S., Brazil, and India, but not widely in Europe.
Early behavior. Some users report prompts focused on older, unanswered negative reviews.
In at least one test, users could trigger AI responses in bulk.
There are conflicting reports on automation — some users say bulk responses still require review; others report fully automated replies can be published without edits.
First seen. The feature was first shared on LinkedIn by Chandan Mishra, a freelance local SEO specialist, and amplified by Darren Shaw, founder of Whitespark.
A critical security flaw impacting Langflow has come under active exploitation within 20 hours of public disclosure, highlighting the speed at which threat actors weaponize newly published vulnerabilities.
The security defect, tracked as CVE-2026-33017 (CVSS score: 9.3), is a case of missing authentication combined with code injection that could result in remote code execution.
"The POST /api/v1
Sam Altman’s latest tweet thanks the coders who “got us to this point” — but a closer look at that phrasing raises a bigger question about what happens next.
A French naval officer went on a run around the deck of the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier, inadvertently leaking the warship's location when he uploaded the workout to Strava.
The U.S. Justice Department said an Iranian security ministry operates the fake activist persona known as Handala, which claimed responsibility for the destructive hack targeting medical tech giant Stryker.
Pearl Abyss' colossal new action game Crimson Desert has reached 2 million copies sold, and the dev has now responded to all the "Mixed" feedback about it.
Microsoft is launching the "largest update ever" to the Feedback Hub, featuring a unified submission flow and modernized navigation to prove it’s finally listening to Windows 11 critics.
It recently came to light that NVIDIA may be planning a GeForce RTX 5070 Mobile GPU with an upgrade to 12 GB of GDDR7, 4 GB more than the currently available 8 GB models, with both Lenovo Yoga and ASUS laptops appearing to be planning new models with the new GPU configuration. While there still hasn't been any confirmation from NVIDIA itself, another handful of Lenovo laptop listings have shown up, lending credence to the earlier claims—this time in official, public Lenovo specifications documentation.
According to Lenovo's spec sheet for the Legion Pro 5 16ADR10, the new laptop will pair an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX with 32 GB of DDR5-5200, a 1 TB PCIe 4 ×4 SSD, and NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5070 12 GB. The GPU itself looks largely unchanged from the version in Lenovo's other Legion laptops, with the exception of a much lower boost clock in the Legion Pro 5. Despite having the same 115 W TGP as the LOQ models with the 5070 12 GB, Lenovo has rated the boost clocks of the RTX 5070 12 GB in the Legion Pro at 1425 MHz, compared to 2347 MHz in the LOQ models, which are identical to the original RTX 5070 8 GB. There have been murmurs of an April release for these laptops, but those are unconfirmed so far.
The public is still learning more about DLSS 5 technology, and NVIDIA is gradually revealing additional details. In a conversation between YouTuber Daniel Owen and NVIDIA's GeForce Evangelist Jacob Freeman, we discover that DLSS 5 essentially takes 2D frames and motion vectors as input, applying its generative AI model to output frames in a 2D context rather than 3D. This means that while the model is trained on materials that might appear 3D, its actual work is based on 2D imagery. It identifies each frame's motion vectors and anchors the model to them, operating in a 2D space instead of a full 3D environment. This approach to handling graphics is much more computationally efficient, as achieving complete photorealism in 3D would require more GPU power than is currently available. No underlying geometry is changed. Instead, 2D images and motion vectors serve as input, a generative AI model processes textures and applies scene photorealism, resulting in the final output that NVIDIA promotes as DLSS 5.
Below, you can see the complete Q&A exchange between Daniel Owen and Jacob Freeman, which was nicely compiled by VideoCardz. Numbers represent questions from Daniel Owen, while answers are provided by NVIDIA's Jacob Freeman.
Recent right to repair laws passed in the EU demand that, starting in February 2027, electronic devices have batteries that are user-replaceable with commonly available tools and without risk to the end user—that is to say, they shouldn't require proprietary tools or tools that aren't available to consumers. Nintendo, for its part, already preparing an update to the Nintendo Switch 2 to comply with this law, according to a report by Nikkei (via Covergeek), although the exact details of the more repairable battery model is unknown at the time of writing. According to the report, the more repairable Switch 2 will only launch in Europe, but Nintendo would expand the hardware to different regions as required by law.
In iFixit's teardown of the Nintendo Switch 2 and its battery replacement guide for the Switch 2 Joy Cons, the organization noted that the battery for both the Switch 2 and its Joy Cons were adhered in place, and a spudger was required to remove the batteries from the devices. While this isn't necessarily a specialized tool, it could be argued that needing to either dissolve an adhesive or pry a battery loose could add additional risk to the end user. To this end, it seems likely that both the Switch 2 and its Joy Cons could see a revision with weaker adhesive or no adhesive at all, which would make battery replacements easier and safer. It could also mean that Nintendo will need to replace the tri-point screws that hold the Switch 2 together.
Google has confirmed that Android will not retire app sideloading, but the company is implementing measures that make the process cumbersome – something only "power users" are likely to attempt. According to Matthew Forsythe, the newly introduced advanced flow is designed to protect users from potential coercion, scams, or malicious software.
Google Chrome 146 fixes 26 security vulnerabilities but with no evidence of active exploitation so far. The update addresses three critical memory-related flaws, along with several high-risk issues impacting components like WebGL and the V8 JavaScript engine.
Wirewiki lets you explore internet infrastructure across domains, IPs, and DNS servers. You can search domain profiles, inspect IP addresses, and run lookups for DNS propagation, SPF, MX, TXT, reverse DNS, and website-to-IP. The platform helps you trace delegation paths, check zone transfers, and validate email sender records to troubleshoot issues or research setups. It's a quick way to answer routing questions and review how domains are configured.
Whether you're scaling a company or building a business, getting real value from AI is harder than it should be. Cuadra AI lets you build your own AI that continuously learns from your business, runs on any model, and works wherever your users are. You can synchronize your documents, Notion, or Google Drive, allowing your AI and knowledge to grow together. Connect with WhatsApp, Slack, SMS, or Telegram to meet your users where they already are. If you have a team, you can access your model in your own private workspace.
Google is testing AI-generated headline rewrites in Search results, describing it as a small, narrow experiment for now.
What’s happening. Google confirmed to The Verge (subscription required) that it’s testing AI-generated titles in traditional Search results, not just Discover.
The test is “small” and “narrow,” and not approved for broader rollout.
It impacts news sites but isn’t limited to them.
The goal is to better match titles to queries and improve engagement, Google said.
One example showed Google replacing original headlines with shorter or reworded versions, sometimes changing tone or intent (e.g., reducing “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything” to “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool.”).
Why we care. Google Search is already sending fewer clicks. Now you also have to contend with Google generating entirely new headlines with AI, risking changes to meaning, brand voice, and click-through rates.
What they’re saying.Sean Hollister, senior editor at The Verge, wrote:
“This is like a bookstore ripping the covers off the books it puts on display and changing their titles. We spend a lot of time trying to write headlines that are true, interesting, fun, and worthy of your attention without resorting to clickbait, but Google seems to believe we don’t have an inherent right to market our own work that way.”
Google’s generation of title links on the Google Search results page is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page and references to it that appear on the web. The goal of the title link is to best represent and describe each result.
Google said it uses these sources to “automatically determine title links”
Content in <title> elements
Main visual title shown on the page
Heading elements, such as <h1> elements
Content in og:titlemeta tags
Other content that’s large and prominent through the use of style treatments
Other text contained in the page
Anchor text on the page
Text within links that point to the page
WebSite structured data
What to watch. Google called this one of many routine experiments, but that’s no guarantee it stays small. The Verge noted a similar “experiment” in Discover later became a full feature.
Any future launch may not rely on generative AI, but Google didn’t explain how that would work.
Reaction. After seeing this news, Louisa Frahm, SEO director at ESPN, wrote on LinkedIn:
“After 10+ years in news SEO, I’ve come to find that a headline is the most prominent element for attracting readers in timely windows, to provide a targeted synopsis that elevates your brand voice. If that vision gets altered and facts are misrepresented, long-term audience trust will be compromised.”
Former Microsoft Game Studios executive producer Laura Fryer believes Bungie's extraction shooter Marathon is a success among players, but the studio has a long road ahead to make the game worth its investment.
Trump’s AI framework pushes federal preemption of state laws, emphasizes innovation, and shifts responsibility for child safety toward parents while laying out lighter-touch rules for tech companies.
The device is being developed by the company's Devices and Services division, and it would feature personalized features aimed at making it easier to use Amazon's suite of apps, including Amazon shopping, Prime Video, and Prime Music, according to Reuters.
Intel is expected to launch its first “Big Battlemage” GPUs next week According to Videocardz, Intel is getting ready to launch its first “Big Battlemage” GPUs next week, on March 25th. Intel’s new GPUs are the ARC PRO B70 and the ARC PRO B65. Both of these GPUs feature 32GB of ECC GDDR6 memory, making […]
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XPPen, a global leader in digital art innovation, today unveiled its new flagship drawing display, the Artist Pro 27 (Gen 2). Combining professional-grade color performance with advanced X-Touch solution on a 27-inch 4K 120 Hz screen, this flagship model offers a transformative creative experience, enabling professional creators to push the boundaries of their craft with stunning color fidelity and an intuitive, efficient workflow.
"At XPPen, we remain committed to advancing digital art technology and empowering creators with professional tools and premium drawing experience," said Brian Huang, Marketing Director at XPPen. "Positioned as Color Master Touchscreen Drawing Display, the Artist Pro 27 (Gen 2) sets a new standard for flagship displays, offering large-format workspace, high performance, and efficient workflow for professional creators. It completes XPPen's premium professional lineup with the Artist Pro series spanning from 14 to 27 inches, offering creators a clear upgrade path as their ambitions grow."
The pair will share the $1 million prize for their pioneering work in quantum cryptography and the broader field of quantum information science. Their 1984 paper introducing the BB84 protocol – an encryption method based on the fragile nature of photons – reimagined how information could be kept secret. At...
Following a slew of mostly average to quite good pre-launch reviews for Crimson Desert, Pearl Abyss' stock price fell almost 30%. It seems many had expected the game to receive Baldur's Gate 3-level praise.
Sony reportedly sent an email to developers informing them of its decision to phase out the "PlayStation Network" and "PSN" branding across its platform, ostensibly to "properly capture the breadth of our evolving digital services." The company insists the changes will be "purely visual" and will not introduce any technical...
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RConnectFor, inspired by Larry Mitchell's The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, which states "Friendship was not an idea or a status you took for granted, but something you did over and over," is a web and mobile platform to support all stages of reconnecting with friends and community
RConnectfor, allows you to set personal goals to define your reasons for seeking deeper connections, offers customized activity list to ensure meaningful interactions, intelligent scheduling features to minimize decision fatigue about when and where to meet, organizational tools for managing social groups, and a community space to share stories and find inspiration for growth and collaboration.
StackForge is an AI-powered platform designed to accelerate the development of SaaS applications and modernize legacy systems. Its core capability lies in transforming high-level specifications and complex code, such as PL/SQL procedures, into production-ready codebases using modern technologies like Java Spring Boot on the backend. As a self-contained modernization engine, StackForge eliminates repetitive manual work by automating the generation of entities, repositories, and services from a structured JSON Schema mapping.
YouTube is where all sports come to life — because no sporting event or game would be complete without the commentary, breakdowns and analysis surrounding it. In 2025 al…
AI won’t make SEO obsolete, but it’ll change how the work gets done. There’s a growing concern that as AI systems improve, they’ll replace the need for human SEO analysis entirely. Early experiments suggest otherwise.
While AI can assist with technical tasks and even generate usable outputs, it still depends heavily on detailed human input, structured data, and technical oversight to produce meaningful results.
The real shift is toward redistribution. AI is accelerating parts of the workflow, raising the bar for execution, and changing where human expertise matters most.
Why AI hasn’t made SEO obsolete
AI aims to reduce the need for semi-technical expertise. Where data is highly structured (e.g., coding a Python script), it has an advantage.
Even then, human expertise is still required. AI can generate scripts, but without detailed instructions and debugging, the output is often unusable.
Generative AI can produce working functions with strong prompts, but it still “thinks” like a machine. That’s why technical practitioners are best positioned to get the most from it.
Technical knowledge is also required for AI-assisted SEO tasks like generating product descriptions or alt text at scale. Even with tools like OpenAI’s API, you still need to transform and structure data into rich, usable prompts — for example, turning Product Information Management data into prompt-ready inputs.
AI depends on human instructions, and output quality reflects input quality. Thinking in structured terms — IDs, classes, and distinct entities — is key to getting reliable results. It’s what makes the output usable.
That makes prompt creation a critical skill. Employers should factor in technical expertise when using AI to drive efficiency.
However, don’t celebrate too soon.
As AI evolves and absorbs more information, this advantage may be temporary. For now, AI still depends on human expertise to function — which is why SEO isn’t obsolete.
Early generative AI models relied on curated data within their LLMs. OpenAI’s models couldn’t perform web searches up to and including GPT-4. After GPT-4, AI systems began relying less on internal data and more on web searches for fresh information.
Because the web isn’t curated and contains a lot of misinformation, this initially represented a step backward for most AI tools, including ChatGPT and Gemini. This shift also mirrors how traditional algorithms rely on raw information.
This raises a key question: Is more information always better for AI?
The open web contains both empirical data and subjective opinion, and AI often can’t distinguish between the two. Giving it access to uncurated data has arguably caused more errors and issues in its outputs.
Finding the right balance of data remains a challenge. How much data helps or harms performance, and how much curation is needed? While developers continue refining LLMs and connected systems, users still need to load up prompts with as much detail as possible to offset how AI sources and evaluates information.
These limitations highlight a core issue: without structured input and human judgment, AI struggles to produce reliable SEO insights.
Basic AI tools can assist with SEO tasks, but full automation is far more complex than it sounds.
That said, AI platforms and technologies are evolving rapidly. The first wave of this evolution came as organizations began producing AI agent platforms like Make, N8N, and MindStudio.
These platforms provide a canvas for automating workflows, combining inputs, outputs, and AI-driven decision-making. Used well, they can turn from-scratch content creation into structured editorial processes, with efficiency gains that can be significant.
However, applying this to real-world SEO work is where complexity sets in. A full technical SEO audit pulls from multiple data sources and environments — crawl data, browser-level diagnostics, and desktop tools.
While parts can be automated, stitching everything together into a reliable, end-to-end workflow is difficult and often requires custom infrastructure, API work, and ongoing maintenance.
Even with platforms like N8N, full end-to-end automation of complex SEO tasks remains challenging. Simpler, checklist-style audits can be automated, but deeper, more technical work often needs to be simplified to fit automation — which isn’t advisable.
In practice, fully automating SEO at depth requires tradeoffs — which is why human expertise is still critical.
More recently, there’s been a wave of local AI applications that let you create your own “brain” on a laptop or desktop. These tools are often code editors with support for popular AI models, along with local structures for saving reusable skills, similar to Claude Projects or ChatGPT Custom GPTs.
Tools like Cursor and Claude Code allow you to connect models, generate code, and automate parts of workflows through prompts.
It’s possible to use these technologies to vibecode a system that automates a technical SEO audit. I attempted this. While the capability exists, building a system that matches the depth and quality of a manual audit could take months, especially when handling large volumes of data.
Initial issues included memory limitations, where AI struggled to retain both the data and its detailed instructions. In some cases, outputs were also misweighted — for example, flagging missing H1s as critical despite finding no instances.
These issues could be resolved over time, but they highlight that these tools aren’t automatic shortcuts. Making effective use of them still requires technical expertise, time, testing, and troubleshooting.
They lower the barrier to building AI-driven systems, but they don’t eliminate the need for technical expertise. They simply shift the work.
What would need to change for SEO to become obsolete
For SEO to become obsolete, AI would need to operate independently, reliably, and at scale — without human correction. Generative AI can only act with human input, and it struggles to differentiate between fact and fiction.
Some algorithms have reached their limits in terms of commercial viability. This is arguably why Google is trying to convince us that links are redundant before they truly are.
Consider AI as an evolution of algorithmic output. These systems can attempt to make analytical determinations based on input data. However, the idea that feeding AI more and more data is an unrestricted path to success is already running into significant limitations.
This doesn’t mean technical analysts are entirely safe. Humanity’s ambition for faster, more efficient insights will continue. Initially, AI will be seen as the solution to everything. If one AI falls short, another can critique its results.
However, AI requires significant processing power. The real challenge will be finding the balance between AI and simpler algorithms. Algorithms should handle basic tasks, while AI should be used for analysis and insights.
This balance between AI and algorithmic efficiency is still years — perhaps decades — away. Only then will AI truly test SEO professionals and create the potential for redundancies.
AI’s learning is hindered by the web’s misinformation, providing SEO professionals with temporary insulation. This advantage won’t last forever, but it offers a valuable head start.
There are also limitations tied to how society adopts AI. Many technological innovations — like the internet and the calculator — were initially considered “cheating.”
Calculators were banned from exam rooms, and the internet was seen as a shortcut compared to traditional research. Yet those perceptions didn’t last.
Most technologies, despite rapid advancement, aren’t adopted quickly due to cost and social factors. We value human perspective and often resist tools that threaten how we think or work.
The main barrier to AI replacing us is how we perceive it. As long as it’s seen as a threat to our ability to provide, it won’t fully replace human roles. That perception, however, will change over time.
As these technologies become normalized, adoption will follow. Governments will adapt, and expectations around human creativity will continue to evolve.
Algorithms and Google didn’t end human interaction on the web, and AI won’t eliminate contributions from people. In the medium to long term, adaptation is inevitable.
AI integration with SEO: Contrary to fears, AI won’t make SEO obsolete. Instead, it will reshape how SEO is practiced. AI can automate routine tasks like generating product descriptions and alt text, but its effectiveness still depends on precise, technically sound input.
Importance of technical expertise: The ability to craft detailed, technically sound prompts is becoming more valuable. This ensures AI tools are used effectively and reinforces the role of experienced SEO professionals.
Data sensitivity in AI performance: AI performance varies significantly depending on the data it processes. Systems using curated datasets behave differently from those relying on open web data. This highlights the importance of data strategy and structured oversight.
Evolving roles in SEO: As AI advances, SEO roles are shifting. Professionals are more likely to focus on managing AI systems and refining outputs rather than being replaced by them.
Societal acceptance and adaptation: Widespread adoption of AI in SEO depends on how quickly society embraces these tools. As normalization and regulation evolve, so will the role of SEO professionals.
Future outlook: Despite AI’s capabilities, the creative, strategic, and complex aspects of SEO still require human insight. The future of SEO is a collaboration between human expertise and machine efficiency.
AI bots could outnumber humans on the web by 2027, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, as agent-driven browsing explodes alongside generative AI adoption.
Prince made the prediction at SXSW, warning that bots are already reshaping how the internet is used — and how it’s monetized.
Why we care. Search is shifting from human clicks to AI-generated answers. If bots become the web’s primary “users,” you’ll need to reshape your strategy to ensure AI systems can access, trust, and use your content.
The details. Prince said AI agents generate far more web activity than humans because they gather information differently. A person shopping might visit five sites. An AI agent could hit thousands.
“If a human were doing a task… you might go to five websites. Your agent… will often go to a thousand times the number of sites.”
“So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load.”
He also noted the web’s baseline is shifting fast.
“For a long time, the internet was about 20% bot traffic.”
“We suspect that in 2027 the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic.”
Prince said this growth isn’t spiking like COVID-era traffic. It’s rising steadily with no end in sight.
Between the lines. Prince compared AI to past shifts like mobile and social. The difference: users may no longer visit websites directly. Instead, they rely on AI interfaces that aggregate and answer.
“The business model of the internet was… create content, drive traffic, and then sell things… That was the business model.”
“That breaks down because… bots don’t click on ads.”
“Customers are trusting the output from the helpful robot. They’re not clicking through the footnotes.”
AI sandboxes. AI agents also change how computing works behind the scenes. Prince described a future where “sandboxes” — temporary environments for AI agents — spin up and shut down instantly, potentially millions of times per second.
“You can… as easily as you open a new tab in your browser… spin up new code which can then run and service the agents.”
“We think that there will be literally millions of times a second these sort of sandboxes… being created… and then torn back down.”
The result: sustained pressure on internet infrastructure.
“We’re seeing internet traffic grow and grow and grow. And we don’t see anything that’s going to slow it down or stop it.”
The business impact. Companies are already split on how to respond to AI agents. Prince pointed to diverging strategies across major retailers.
“There are three radically different strategies about how they are going to interact with the bots.”
At the core is a bigger risk: losing the customer relationship.
“The nature of bots is going to be that it disintermediates the relationship between you and your customer.”
“Agents… don’t care about brand.”
For publishers. Prince argued AI could both hurt and help media. While AI reduces direct traffic and breaks ad-based models, AI companies need unique, original data — especially local and hard-to-replicate information — and may pay for it.
“Traffic has always been a really bad proxy for value.”
“What they actually want is… unique local interesting information they can’t get elsewhere.”
He pointed to local media as an example.
“If you don’t have the Park Record, then you don’t get that information.”
“We may make more off licensing our content to AI companies than we do off digital advertising.”
For small businesses. Prince was more blunt. AI agents optimize for price, quality and efficiency — not brand loyalty or proximity.
“My bot doesn’t care.”
“My bot is going to figure out actually who is the best… and route that traffic.”
That could erode traditional advantages.
“The shortcuts of trust that small business had in the past… are going to be much more difficult.”
“The natural tendency of AI is towards that level of aggregation.”
What to watch. The next phase of the web will hinge on control and compensation. Prince said:
“There has to be some exchange of value.”
“We’ve got to figure out… what’s going to pay for it.”
Prince said the core question is still unresolved:
“What is the future business model of the internet?… I don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s going to change.”
You could be ranking in Position 1 and still be completely invisible.
I know that sounds counterintuitive. But here’s what’s actually happening:
A potential customer opens ChatGPT or Perplexity and asks, “What’s the best [tool/agency/platform] for [your category]?” Your competitor gets mentioned. You don’t. Your No. 1 ranking did absolutely nothing to help you.
This is the new SEO reality, and it’s catching many smart marketers off guard.
LLMs synthesize consensus across multiple sources, rather than relying on a single source. This means you need corroborating mentions distributed across the web. The game has shifted from ranking to consensus, and if you don’t understand that difference, you’re already losing ground.
Let me break down what’s actually happening and, more importantly, what you can do about it.
From rankings to consensus: What changed and why
Traditional SEO had a clear logic: rank high, get clicks, drive traffic. In this retrieval-based system, Google found pages and users chose which ones to visit.
AI-driven search doesn’t work that way. Systems like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are now constructing answers. They pull from dozens of sources, identify which claims appear consistently across credible publishers, and synthesize a single response.
The data backs up just how significant this shift is: organic CTRs for queries featuring AI Overviews have dropped 61% since mid-2024. Even on queries without AI Overviews, organic CTRs fell 41%. Users are simply clicking less, everywhere.
The technical engine behind this is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The AI retrieves content from across the web, gathers potentially dozens of sources, identifies the claims that repeat most consistently across credible publishers, and generates a response based on that consensus.
Your goal isn’t just to publish a great page. It’s to be one of those sources. Repeatedly.
Think of the consensus layer as the degree to which multiple AI systems produce consistent, repeatable outputs about your brand. It’s about pattern recognition at scale.
When AI systems encounter your brand described the same way across multiple credible sources, in the same category, with the same expertise, and with the same problems you solve, they build confidence. When they don’t see that pattern? You become a statistical outlier, and outliers get filtered out.
This happens because AI systems are engineered to prevent hallucinations. Their primary defense is corroboration: if multiple independent sources say the same thing, the AI assigns higher confidence to that claim. If only one source says it, the AI can become cautious or ignore it entirely.
This creates a rule most marketers haven’t fully internalized yet: isolated authority isn’t enough. You need distributed credibility.
I’ve seen this firsthand. A client ranking first for a competitive keyword, with solid traffic and strong domain authority, was invisible across ChatGPT. Why? Because that page existed in isolation. No corroboration, no distributed mentions, no external validation.
As Will Scott wrote: “Brands aren’t losing visibility because they dropped from position three to seven. They’re losing it because they were never cited in the AI answer at all.”
So what signals do AI systems actually use? Here’s where to focus your energy.
Traditional authority is table stakes, not a finish line
Backlinks, domain authority, and topical depth remain foundational. But they’re no longer sufficient on their own. They get you in the game; consensus is what wins it.
Unlinked brand mentions matter more than most marketers realize
AI systems scan the web for brand references, even when those mentions aren’t linked. Unlinked mentions are growing in importance as signals for both traditional search and AI visibility. A mention in an industry publication with no link is still a consensus signal.
Nearly 9 out of 10 webpages cited by ChatGPT appear outside the top 20 organic results for the same queries, per a Semrush study. This tells you everything you need to know about how different this game is.
Publisher diversity signals broader credibility
Being mentioned repeatedly on the same domain doesn’t build consensus. Being mentioned across a range of credible, independent publishers does.
Diversity tells AI systems your authority isn’t contained to one corner of the web. It’s recognized broadly across your industry.
Community platforms are consensus gold
Reddit, Quora, and niche forums are becoming major consensus signals. AI systems increasingly pull from community discussions because they represent real user opinions and experiences.
With Reddit dominating the SERPs, positive brand mentions in relevant subreddits contribute meaningfully to how AI systems perceive you. You can’t fake your way into genuine community trust, you have to earn it.
Entity clarity makes retrieval easier
Search engines use knowledge graphs to understand entities and how they relate to each other. If your brand is inconsistently described across platforms or your category is ambiguous, AI systems struggle to incorporate you into their answers.
Structured data, schema markup, and JSON-LD are critical here. Google has explicitly stated that “structured data is critical for modern search engines.” The clearer your entity profile, the easier it is for AI to retrieve and cite you.
Alright, let’s get tactical. Before you start building, you need to know where you stand.
Start with an LLM audit
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and start asking questions the way your customers would.
“What’s the best [tool/service] for [problem you solve]?”
“Who are the leading [your category] providers?”
“What do people say about [your brand name]?”
Pay attention to three things:
Is your brand mentioned at all?
If it is, is the information accurate and up to date?
How are you being described relative to competitors?
You may find outdated information, missing context, or, worse, a competitor owning the narrative in your category entirely.
This audit becomes your baseline. It tells you what gaps to close, what misinformation to correct, and where your consensus footprint is weakest. Only once you know that, should you start building.
Establish your owned media foundation
Your site needs to be technically sound and semantically clear. Use structured data. Establish explicit entity definitions, who you are, what you do, and what problems you solve. Reinforce those same entities and relationships across multiple pages within your site.
Topic clusters, pillar pages supported by related subtopic content, create semantic reinforcement that signals depth and expertise. Without a strong foundation, nothing else sticks.
Treat earned media as consensus amplification
Press coverage, guest posts, podcast appearances, and expert citations distribute your authority across the web. More than links, digital PR is now about narrative control.
One placement won’t move the needle. A sustained, coordinated presence across trusted publications will. Monitor your brand-to-links ratio, unlinked mentions alongside traditional link building is now the balanced strategy to pursue.
Publish original research
This is the highest-leverage consensus tactic most brands are underinvesting in. When you create genuinely novel data, an industry benchmark, a proprietary survey, original research, other publishers reference it naturally, journalists cite it, and AI systems incorporate it into answers. Establish yourself as the source for benchmark data in your niche, and you’ll earn citations for years.
Invest in expert-led content
AI systems are trained on vast amounts of text, including articles, research, and interviews. When your team members are consistently positioned as recognized experts, quoted in articles, cited in reports, and contributing bylined pieces, they become recognized entities that AI systems trust. Optimize author profiles with structured data, consistent bylines, and entity markup to reinforce this.
Participate genuinely in communities
This doesn’t mean dropping links in Reddit threads. It means answering questions, contributing knowledge, and building a reputation where your audience already hangs out.
When users recommend your brand organically because they find it genuinely valuable, that’s your strongest consensus signal.
Traditional rankings tell you where you stand in search results. They don’t tell you whether AI systems are citing you. You need new metrics, and as more SEOs are recognizing, success metrics are shifting from clicks and traffic to visibility and share of voice.
Start by systematically testing high-value queries across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Note when your brand appears, how it’s described, and which sources get cited alongside you.
Track share of voice in AI responses, how often your brand gets mentioned relative to competitors in AI-generated answers. If competitors are consistently appearing and you’re not, you’re losing the consensus battle regardless of how your rankings look.
Also monitor cross-domain mention density (how many unique domains reference your brand) and entity co-occurrence (how often your brand appears alongside relevant topics, competitors, and concepts). These give you a real picture of your consensus footprint and where the gaps are.
The brands winning in AI-driven search aren’t necessarily the ones with the best content or the highest domain authority. They’re the ones building distributed credibility, authority that appears consistently across owned media, earned media, and community platforms.
As Google’s Danny Sullivan said, “Good SEO is good GEO.” The fundamentals haven’t disappeared, but they’re now table stakes, not differentiators. The new formula is: authority + consensus + distribution.
Integrate SEO, digital PR, and community engagement into one cohesive strategy. Building a distributed network of authority, mentions, citations, and community validation that takes time to construct, and is nearly impossible for competitors to dismantle overnight.
That’s the visibility moat worth building, and the clock is ticking.
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Gamers with Intel Arc GPUs hoping to have a go at Crimson Desert are in for a rude surprise. Its developer, Pearl Abyss, stated that the game does not support Intel Arc graphics cards. What this means in practice, is that the developer will not fix any bugs or issues arising from trying to play the game on Arc GPUs. While apologizing for the inconvenience caused, Pearl Abyss, in an FAQ entry, said that gamers who bought the game expecting Intel Arc support should try to seek refunds for the game. To date, AMD and NVIDIA have released GPU drivers with optimization for Crimson Desert. AMD's Adrenalin 26.3.1 WHQL and NVIDIA's GeForce 595.79 WHQL include day-zero optimization for the game. The game also leverages several AMD-exclusive gaming technologies, including FSR 4.1 upscaling, and ray regeneration.
MAINGEAR, the leader in premium-quality, high-performance gaming PCs, today announced the official launch of its Rush Crimson Desert Limited Edition PC: a hand-built collector's collab aligned with today's launch of Crimson Desert, Pearl Abyss's open-world action-adventure set across the brutal continent of Pywel. Only 30 units will ever be produced. Orders close April 2, or when the 30th system is sold, whichever comes first.
Crimson Desert is one of the most anticipated open-world titles of 2026, and MAINGEAR crafted a system worthy of this moment. At the center of this collaboration is the Crimson Desert AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, the Sapphire Nitro+ limited edition GPU featuring a design inspired by the game's visual identity, and the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D CPU, the world's fastest gaming processor, for a build that can handle everything Pywel throws at it: massive open landscapes, dynamic lighting, large-scale faction battles, and cinematic boss encounters, all without compromise.
While the first TriFold was discontinued after just a few months on the market, the report suggests that Samsung has not entirely backed away from multifold hardware. Instead, the company is said to be testing the feasibility of a lighter but slightly thicker second-generation model.
G-Sync Pulsar blur reduction tech makes its debut in Acer’s Predator XB273U F5. It’s a 27-inch QHD IPS screen with 360 Hz, Adaptive-Sync, HDR500, and wide-gamut color. It brings the quickness and smoothness of OLED to the LCD realm.
Competitor Analyzer helps marketers track and analyze competitors' social media across Facebook, Instagram, and X. You can use a unified dashboard to compare engagement rates, content performance, posting frequency, and audience growth over time. Monitor trends with historical data and receive AI-powered insights and alerts that surface actionable opportunities while maintaining secure data controls.
Adobe will shut down the SEO feature in Marketo Engage at the end of March 2026, according to its February 2026 release notes.
The tool will be deprecated on March 31, and you must export any existing SEO data before then. (This page includes links to the export instructions.) The SEO tile will be removed from the platform on April 1.
What happened?
Adobe’s Keith Gluck said deprecating low-use features lets the Marketo Engage team focus on other areas of the platform. For your SEO needs, Adobe announced in 2025 that it was acquiring Semrush, a full-featured SEO and visibility tool. (Reminder: Semrush owns Third Door Media, the publisher of Search Engine Land.)
The deprecation came as no surprise if you follow Marketo news closely. Reports suggest few people fully configured the SEO tool, and its features didn’t seem to be a priority for the Marketo Engage product team in recent years.
With LLMs rapidly changing the search landscape, it was time to say goodbye. The arrival of Semrush into the Adobe family provided the perfect opportunity.
If your law firm’s referrals aren’t converting, validation may be the problem.
Referred prospects don’t go straight from recommendation to contact. They research, compare, and verify what they were told — on your website, in search results, and through AI tools.
These are your highest-value leads — pre-sold through trusted recommendations and expected to be your easiest conversions. But when that validation falls short, even they lose momentum.
This is the referral validation gap: the moments during online research when trust is broken rather than built. Here’s where referral validation fails and how to fix it.
While this article focuses on law firms, the same dynamics apply to any referral-based business.
The four types of referral validation failure
Referral loss follows predictable patterns — and once you can spot them, you can fix them.
Credibility gaps: When your digital presence doesn’t match the expectations set by the referral.
Specificity gaps: When your content doesn’t reflect the specific problem the prospect was referred for.
Authority gaps: When third-party or AI validation fails to confirm your expertise.
Friction gaps: When prospects are ready to act but encounter unnecessary barriers to conversion.
1. Credibility gaps
In under three seconds, a website visitor forms a first impression. If your site doesn’t immediately validate what the referrer said about you — if it looks outdated, generic, or fails to showcase the specific expertise they praised — that trust becomes conditional.
A referred prospect arrives expecting professionalism, confidence, and authority, only to encounter uncertainty. Thin attorney bios, generic claims (“experienced,” “trusted,” “results-driven”) without proof, or outdated design can all create hesitation.
The referral earned you consideration. Your digital presence determines what happens next.
The prospect’s reaction is simple: This doesn’t look like what I was expecting. That moment of doubt is often enough to end the process.
What you can do about it
Implement practice area-specific landing pages with targeted H1s, schema markup for your specialties, and prominent visual trust signals (credentials, case results, awards) above the fold. Ensure mobile page speed stays under two seconds with Core Web Vitals optimization.
Referrals are almost always problem-specific. The website they’re referred to rarely is.
Imagine a prospect referred for a complex custody dispute lands on a homepage about “family law.” A business owner referred for a ground lease negotiation sees “commercial real estate services.”
Nothing is technically wrong. But nothing confirms the recommendation. When a site fails to mirror the exact issue that prompted the referral, the prospect starts to question it: Does this firm actually specialize in my problem, or was the referral overstated?
At the same time, prospects are actively looking for proof — case results, credentials, relevant experience. If that evidence is buried, disconnected, or requires more than two clicks to find, momentum drops quickly.
What you can do about it
Create practice area-specific case study pages with structured data markup. Implement FAQ schema tied to common referral scenarios. Ensure content directly reflects the search intent behind the referral, and use internal linking to guide visitors from homepage → specific expertise → proof points within two clicks.
3. Authority gaps
Referral prospects are asking questions like: “Is this firm actually good at complex custody cases?” or “Do they have experience with ground lease negotiations in New York?” — increasingly through AI search tools.
If AI tools can’t find credible, structured information on your site to validate the referral, they won’t confirm it. And if competitors provide clearer answers, those are the sources AI will surface. This creates an immediate form of negative validation. The prospect starts to question the recommendation: If they’re so good, why aren’t they showing up here?
If a competitor has invested in content that’s structured for citation, the AI will quote them, reference their work, and position them as the authority, even though the prospect came to you through a trusted referral. You can’t claim authority. AI systems will either confirm or contradict it.
What to do about it
Forward-thinking firms are now monitoring a new metric: AI search share of voice— the percentage of relevant AI-generated answers that mention or cite your firm compared to competitors. Start by:
Identifying the 10-15 questions prospects most commonly ask about your practice areas.
Running those queries regularly through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Documenting which firms appear, how often, and in what context.
Tracking whether you’re cited as a source, mentioned, or absent entirely.
If your firm’s content, credentials, and case results aren’t structured for AI parsing and citation, you’re invisible in these crucial validation moments regardless of how strong the initial referral was. Once you’ve identified where your competitors are outperforming you, create in-depth topic clusters around your specialties, and build authoritative content that answers the questions prospects ask AI tools.
4. Friction gaps
Friction gaps occur after trust has already been established, but conversion still hasn’t happened. Common examples include:
No obvious next step above the fold.
Forms that are difficult to complete on mobile.
No immediate way to call, text, or book.
At this stage, prospects are ready to act. But any delay introduces doubt and gives them time to reconsider or move on. You’ve earned the referral. Your site validated your expertise. The prospect is ready to hire you — but can’t quickly figure out how to take the next step.
This is the final failure point in the referral validation gap: when a motivated, pre-sold prospect abandons because the conversion path is unclear, inconvenient, or unnecessarily complicated. You need to remove every obstacle between “I want to hire this firm” and “I’ve made contact.”
What to do about it
A referred prospect should be able to answer these questions within three seconds of landing on any page:
How do I contact this firm right now?
What happens when I do?
Is this going to be easy or painful?
Test it yourself: open your site on your phone and start a timer. Can you initiate contact within a few seconds without scrolling? Try it from a homepage, attorney bio, and practice area page. If the answer is no, you’re losing prospects at the finish line.
Closing the referral validation gap doesn’t require a complete digital overhaul on day one. Strategic, phased implementation will allow you to see quick wins while building toward comprehensive optimization. Let’s look at the steps you can take.
Quick wins: Remove immediate friction
These are some changes that require minimal investment but can immediately reduce referral abandonment:
Adding a prominent click-to-call button in mobile header (and ensuring that it’s visible without scrolling).
Testing form completion on mobile devices and reducing any fields to essential only.
Ensuring page load speed under two seconds on mobile (test via PageSpeed Insights).
Verifying that “Contact Us” is visible on every page without scrolling.
Adding a secondary CTA option (for example, many prospects prefer “Schedule Consultation” over “Contact”).
Testing that your firm’s phone number is clickable on mobile across entire site.
Medium-term: Build validation infrastructure
These initiatives can require more investment but, over time, can generate a sustainable competitive advantage:
Creating dedicated landing pages for each significant practice area.
Structuring each page with: a specific H1 tag, a detailed service description, any relevant credentials, relevant case results, an FAQ section, and a clear CTA.
Implementing schema markup (e.g., LegalService, Attorney, and FAQPage) on each landing page.
Building out an internal linking strategy that guides visitors from homepage → specific expertise → proof points in two clicks maximum.
Developing 3-5 detailed case studies per practice area (these can be anonymized where required).
Writing blog posts that address the specific questions prospects ask during the research phase.
Ensuring all content includes author attribution with credentials to build E-E-A-T signals.
Long-term: Dominate AI search validation
These strategic initiatives can position your firm for sustained advantage in an AI-driven search environment:
Creating entity-based content that AI models can parse and cite (e.g., detailed attorney bios, practice area guides, or legal topic explanations).
Developing topic clusters: pillar pages for major practice areas with supporting cluster content that addresses related queries.
Optimizing content for the natural language queries that prospects ask AI tools.
Building citation-worthy resources such as comprehensive guides, state-specific legal explanations, and process walkthroughs.
Identifying 15-20 high-value queries prospects use to validate referrals.
Monitoring how your firm appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview responses monthly.
Tracking competitor mentions and citation patterns.
Adjusting content strategy based on AI search visibility gaps.
But, most importantly, don’t let this roadmap overwhelm you. The firms that successfully close the referral validation gap don’t do it by accomplishing everything all at once. Instead, they start with a single, crucial decision: acknowledging that the gap exists. And then they take the first step to fix it.
Once you accept that your best leads are researching you — on your website and through AI tools — and making judgments based on what they find (or don’t find), your path forward for fixing that gap will become clear.
Prospects are getting their answers without ever visiting your website. The gap between digital presence and digital authority is widening — and for firms that wait, it becomes unbridgeable.
Closing the referral validation gap isn’t just about improving conversion rates. It means:
Capitalizing on your highest-value leads.
Reducing customer acquisition costs.
Building a compounding advantage.
Creating momentum in an AI-driven search environment.
Firms that master this will pull ahead. Those that don’t will watch their best leads slip away — one validation failure at a time.
A referral gets you consideration. Your digital presence determines what happens next. Closing the referral validation gap turns trust into conversion.
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