Among the myriad companies that have dug their hands deep into wired and wireless gaming mice, Logitech stands out from the pack with its continuous innovation and drive to use the best possible hardware to deliver accurate, enjoyable gameplay sessions. Its G PRO X Superlight 2 isn’t just a piece of plastic, but the pinnacle of wireless gaming mice designed to give you an unfair advantage in your favorite competitive shooters. Best of all, with the latest discount on Amazon, the G PRO X Superlight 2 is now $50 off, with both the white and black colors down to $129.99. […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/logitech-g-pro-x-superlight-2-wireless-gaming-mouse-50-off-on-amazon/
Synlets provides AI agents that handle the software development cycle from ticket creation to implementation, pull requests, and code reviews. It connects to GitHub or GitLab, syncs with Jira or Asana, and pulls context from Confluence or Notion to draft clear tickets and ship changes quickly. Engineers stay in control by approving PRs while reports surface progress, quality, and security. You can choose preferred AI models and scale capacity with ACU credits to add round-the-clock development power without increasing headcount.
Apple AirPods 4 with ANC hit $119 at Amazon, their lowest tracked price and $60 below the $179 list.
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/airpods-4-with-anc-drop-to-119-on-amazon-34-off/
Samsung has not just made the Galaxy S26 Ultra a flagship that checks all the boxes of a premium smartphone without going overboard like its rivals, but it has also turned its focus on two areas that properly tackle user complaints; battery replacements and thermals. In the latest teardown, we take a look at how the Korean giant has implemented these changes, and how some competitors should take down valuable notes. Extensive use of graphite films and thermal paste on the chipset, storage, and DRAM allows for effective heat dissipation on the Galaxy S26 Ultra It was fairly easy to […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/galaxy-s26-ultra-teardown-easier-battery-replacements-better-cooling-for-components/
Shipping Cost Calculator lets you compare rates from UPS, USPS, FedEx, and DHL side by side to find the cheapest or fastest shipping option. Enter the origin, destination, and weight to instantly see options across domestic and international services. Create shipping labels at up to 70% off retail, choose flat rate options like USPS Flat Rate and FedEx One Rate, and track every shipment in a single dashboard. Rate comparison is free; the $4.99/month Business plan unlocks discounted labels with no hidden fees and cancel anytime flexibility.
Google's head of Search described how multimodal LLMs help Google understand audio and video, and discussed a direction for subscription-aware search.
The post Google’s Liz Reid Says LLMs Unlock Audio And Video Indexing appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Apple has announced two notebooks that occupy entire entirely different pricing brackets, which is a first for the company, meaning that it can become confusing as you attempt to figure out if you should opt for increased savings and get the MacBook Neo or spend the premium to make the M5 MacBook Air your daily driver. This buying guide will highlight all the differences that you need to know so let us begin. Display The MacBook Neo and the M5 MacBook Air sport a unibody aluminum chassis, offering users a premium exterior regardless of how much they choose to spend. However, when […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/macbook-neo-vs-m5-macbook-air-buying-guide/
Modder ports Linux to Sony’s PS5 console and plays GTA V A modder called Andy Nguyen, also known as “theflow0” online, has managed to port Linux to Sony’s PlayStation 5 console. The modder even managed to install GTA V on the system and run it at 1440p 60 FPS with ray tracing enabled, proving the […]
The post Modder turns Sony’s PlayStation 5 into a Linux-powered gaming PC appeared first on OC3D.
SetHabits replaces the anxiety of daily streaks with flexible monthly targets. Set a goal like "run 15 times this month"—miss a day and you're still on track. Enjoy a beautiful calendar view, one-tap check-ins, and a free tier that never expires.
With one fell swoop, Apple seems to have opened for itself a market opportunity of at least 50 million units by launching the MacBook Neo even as most sales projection argue for a healthy but modest take-up rate, hampered by the budget device's copious compromises. Apple's MacBook Neo sits within a market opportunity zone that is worth at least 50 million units per year That Apple's latest MacBook Neo was always expected to sell well was never in doubt. After all, TrendForce continues to expect Apple to sell between 4 million and 5 million units of the budget device. Even so, the […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-just-doubled-its-mac-related-tam-with-the-macbook-neo-even-as-split-opinion-persists/
G.SKILL Flare X5 DDR5-6000 CL30 16GB kit drops to $248, an all-time low — but 32GB CL36 kits cost far less.
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/g-skill-flare-x5-ddr5-6000-cl30-16gb-kit-hits-248-all-time-low/
Verify Backlinks performs live URL-level validation on backlinks before and after they’re indexed. Instead of relying on backlink database discovery, it fetches each URL in real time and evaluates structural integrity, indexability state, link presence, and contextual relevance. Each link is classified as Keep, Review, or Consider Disavow, which standardizes decision-making across vendors and campaigns. A free 5-link trial is available to test the workflow instantly.
It looks like Valve’s Steam hardware is no longer launching “in the first half of this year It looks like Valve has delayed its new Steam hardware, but things aren’t as bad as they first seemed. Initially, Valve’s new “Steam Year in Review” post stated that “We hope to ship in 2026”. Now, Valve has […]
The post It looks like Valve has delayed its new Steam Hardware appeared first on OC3D.
Ever bought something second-hand only to discover hidden problems you didn't know to look for? That's exactly why Pancho exists. Pancho spots what you can't. It knows where to look, what questions to ask, and what red flags mean for every type of used item, including cars, laptops, bikes, and cameras.
Pancho walks you through the inspection step by step, analyzes your answers and images to spot hidden issues, and delivers a shareable report with a 0–10 score, detailed assessments, and clear recommendations so you can buy with confidence. You don't need to be an expert; you just need Pancho.
Specifications leak for Sony’s planned PS6 Handheld and Console systems Specifications for Sony’s next-generation PlayStation 6 (PS6) console have leaked, revealing a hybrid approach to the next console generation. It looks like Sony plans to release a PlayStation 6 handheld alongside a PlayStation 6 home console. This will give Sony a competitor to Nintendo’s Switch […]
The post Full PlayStation 6 console specifications leak, unveiling huge performance boost appeared first on OC3D.
LLMSE (LLM Search Engine) is a service that uses artificial intelligence to automatically analyze and categorize websites. It functions like a modern card catalog for the internet; similar to how libraries organize books by subject, LLMSE organizes websites into meaningful categories that make discovery and research easier.
Apple’s ambitious plan to cater to every price bracket has led the company to bring forth the MacBook Neo, and as soon as the announcement concluded, comparisons were immediately drawn with the technology giant’s first portable Mac to lead the in-house silicon revolution, the M1 MacBook Air, which launched in late 2020. Since a large percentage of individuals believe that Apple’s 5-year-old machine offers better value, the latest comparison should make them believe otherwise, as the MacBook Neo delivers up to a 43 percent performance increase in CPU tests. The only time the M1 MacBook Air gets the better of the […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/macbook-neo-better-value-than-m1-macbook-air-up-to-43-percent-better-performance/
simpliers CHAT unifies your Instagram DMs and comments in a clean inbox and powers them with automations that drive growth. Build flows to auto-reply, route messages, capture leads, answer product questions, and translate conversations instantly, all while staying organized across multiple accounts.
Approved by Meta and using official APIs, simpliers secures your data and scales with influencers, brands, and agencies. Analyze sentiment, categorize comments, collaborate with teammates, and launch in minutes to never miss a message.
It's been a while since we heard about NVIDIA GPUs with missing ROPs, but here we are, seeing one more GPU having fewer ROPs. Redditor Reports 160 ROPs Instead of 176 on His NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell GPU; The First Workstation Blackwell GPU With Fewer ROPs Right after the launch of the Blackwell NVIDIA RTX 50 series, we heard a few reports that confirmed a small percentage of the inventory had fewer ROPs (Render Output Units). This issue was mostly observed on the flagship card, the GeForce RTX 5090, but we also saw slower GPUs, including the GeForce RTX […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/rtx-pro-5000-blackwell-also-reported-to-have-missing-rops/
The WD_Black C50 2TB Xbox expansion card hits $250 at Amazon, its lowest tracked price at $125 per terabyte.
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/wd_black-c50-2tb-xbox-expansion-card-drops-to-250-at-amazon/
Late yesterday evening, Valve posted a 2025 Steam retrospective that also included some small but significant tidbits on the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller shipping. As you will certainly recall, their original goal was to ship all three products in early 2026, as confirmed even by AMD CEO Lisa Su. However, shortly after that statement, Valve told consumers that it was forced to delay the timetable on the heels of the ongoing memory and storage crisis and was now targeting the first half of 2026. The new blog post appears to quietly push the shipping window even further. […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/valve-steam-machine-now-targeting-this-year-instead-of-first-half/
My Baby Name Lab analyzes thousands of names across cultures and meanings to deliver personalized baby name suggestions based on your preferences. Answer a short questionnaire, then explore curated matches with etymology, origin, and style controls. Save favorites, build collections, and share them with your partner to compare, comment, and sync in real time. Start free with daily suggestions or unlock expanded generations, deeper research, and collaborative features with a one-time upgrade.
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SlackPal adds an AI teammate called Pal to your Slack workspace. Mention @Pal in any channel, thread, or DM, and it responds using context from the conversation and your connected tools. It summarizes 200-message threads into action items, drafts support replies with full Zendesk ticket context, pulls standup updates from Jira and GitHub to help you skip the morning meeting, or creates issues directly from a Slack discussion. It connects to over 3,000 apps, installs in under a minute, and requires zero training because it works exactly like messaging a coworker.
Erenya is a meditation and wellness app that consolidates five daily rituals in one place: mood check-in, gratitude journaling, guided breathing, affirmations (including a mirror moment with your camera), and daily intentions. Whether you have three minutes or fifteen, you can choose what matters and build habits with streaks and clear progress. Erenya provides a single home for mental wellness, eliminating the need to juggle multiple apps. With guided breathing and affirmation programs, a calm interface, and routines that fit your life, it offers one app for your daily wellness.
SmartLearn is an AI-powered educational platform that turns any complex subject into a personalized, multi-phase learning roadmap. The system generates tailored lessons and interactive quizzes while using advanced animation tools to create custom educational diagrams and smart visuals specifically for each user's content. It serves as a comprehensive ecosystem for self-directed learners who need a structured path to mastery without the manual effort of organizing resources.
Shipzy is a performance-ranked directory of freight forwarders that helps shippers discover reliable logistics partners. It benchmarks providers using standardized RFQs and measures response time, quote completeness, and pricing accuracy against industry standards. Scores update continuously to rank forwarders by country and service type, giving shippers transparent comparisons while rewarding high-performing providers with greater visibility. You can search for routes to find reliable freight forwarders worldwide.
FluidForms transforms data collection by treating every submission as a conversation, not a transaction.
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Google updated AI Mode recipe search results to change how it displays recipes and to send more traffic to recipe blogs
The post Google Updates AI Recipe Results To Send More Traffic appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Seedance 2.0 is an all-in-one AI video generator that turns text, images, and references into polished 1080p clips with native audio and multi-shot storytelling. Describe a scene or upload a photo, and it produces footage, sound, and transitions in under a minute. Use text-to-video, image-to-video, reference-to-video, video extension, editing, and beat-sync workflows to control style and motion. Access leading models like Seedance, Sora, and Veo in one place, then download and share your results or iterate with refined prompts.
After confirming that South of Midnight would be coming to PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2 sometime in Spring 2026 a few hours ahead of The Game Awards 2025, developer Compulsion Games has confirmed that its previously Xbox Series console exclusive will arrive on PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2 later this month on March 31, 2026. The release date for the new versions of the game came with a new trailer, which you can see below. After Avowed, Compulsion Games' South of Midnight was the next major release from an Xbox Game Studios team to hit shelves last year. Now, it'll […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/south-of-midnight-ps5-nintendo-switch-2-release-date/
Google’s AI Mode is increasingly citing Google itself — and often sending users back to another Google search, according to new SE Ranking research.
Why we care. AI search is meant to surface the best sources on the web. If Google increasingly cites itself, you may see fewer direct links and less traffic as more users stay inside Google.
The details. Google.com was the most cited source in AI Mode answers, accounting for 17.42% of all citations, SE Ranking found.
Accelerating trend. In June 2025, Google cited itself in just 5.7% of AI Mode answers. That share is now tripled.
Self-preferencing on steroids. AI Overviews already link heavily to Google properties like Maps, Images, and YouTube. AI Mode appears to extend that approach by pushing users deeper into Google’s ecosystem, often through additional search results rather than external sites.
What changed. Earlier AI Mode research showed Google mainly citing Google Business Profiles. That’s no longer the case:
Industry differences. Google dominates citations across most topics. Some niches rely on Google even more:
The only category where Google wasn’t the top source was Careers and Jobs, where Indeed appeared 3.1x more often than Google.
About the data. SE Ranking analyzed 68,313 keywords across 20 industries and more than 1.3 million AI Mode citations to measure how often Google.com appears as a cited source.
The report. Is Google stealing your clicks in AI Mode? (1.3M+ citations analyzed)
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.
(Provided to Search Engine Land by SEOjobs.com)
(Provided to Search Engine Land by PPCjobs.com)
Advertising Media Manager, Vetoquinol USA (Remote)
Programmatic Advertising Manager, We Are Stellar (Remote)
Marketing Manager, Backstage (Remote)
Demand Generation Manager, Shoplift (Remote)
Search Engine Optimization Manager, Confidential (Hybrid, Miami-Fort Lauderdale Area)
Meta Ads Manager, Cardone Ventures (Scottsdale, AZ)
Senior Manager of Marketing (Paid, SEO, Affiliate), What Goes Around Comes Around (Jersey City, NJ)
Paid Search Marketing Manager, LawnStarter (Remote)
Senior Manager, SEO, Turo (Hybrid, San Francisco, CA)
Search Engine Op imization Manager, NoGood (Remote)
Note: We update this post weekly. So make sure to bookmark this page and check back.
OpenAI is backing away from putting checkout directly inside ChatGPT. Instead, purchases will shift to retailer apps that connect to ChatGPT, The Information reported.
Why we care. ChatGPT aims to be more than a discovery engine. Right now, though, product discovery inside ChatGPT is gaining traction faster than purchases. That suggests AI-powered shopping is only influencing the consideration stage (at least for now), not driving conversions.
What happened. OpenAI had planned to let shoppers buy products directly from listings in ChatGPT search results. Instead, an OpenAI spokesperson said that Instant Checkout is moving to Apps, where purchases happen inside connected services rather than natively in ChatGPT.
What changed: OpenAI found that users research products in ChatGPT but don’t complete purchases there. Only a small number of merchants were actively using native ChatGPT checkout, according to the report.
Meanwhile. Shopify president Harley Finkelstein said this week that only about a dozen Shopify merchants were using AI tools, despite Shopify supporting integrations with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. That’s tiny relative to Shopify’s overall merchant base.
What to watch. Can OpenAI make ChatGPT more valuable as a shopping discovery engine without owning the final transaction? Also, how does OpenAI’s commerce strategy intersect with its advertising ambitions? If transactions stay outside ChatGPT, monetizing product discovery through ads could become even more important.
Why this is happening. Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust. Real-time catalog normalization across tens of millions of SKUs is a decade-scale problem Google already solved with Merchant Center, and consumers still default to checkout flows they trust — Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and Amazon one-click.
The report. OpenAI Scales Back Shopping Plans for ChatGPT (subscription required)
TrustThis is an open platform for privacy scoring and AI governance of software applications. It benchmarks vendors with an AI Trust Score based on public evidence, turning complex policies into clear, comparable insights. Follow products and categories, monitor policy changes, and receive incident alerts and updates. The platform applies objective, transparent criteria and uses specialized AI trained for privacy laws like LGPD to keep rankings current and auditable.
SanDisk's 256GB Extreme microSD card drops to an all-time low of $34.28 on Amazon, saving you 24%.
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/sandisk-256gb-extreme-microsd-hits-34-all-time-low-24-off/
Since April 2025, the wider video game industry has been discussing how Nintendo and other hardware makers would respond to the tariffs imposed by the current US government and how those tariffs would affect the price of devices and consumer sales. In all that discussion, the idea that Nintendo, despite its litigious nature, would respond with a lawsuit aimed at the US Government was not what you would call a popular guess. Well, Aftermath's latest report is a reminder to never underestimate Nintendo's willingness to go to court. Nintendo is officially suing the US Government, specifically Scott Bessent, Secretary of […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nintendo-suing-us-government-over-tariffs/
This year's Game Developers Conference (GDC) kicks off next Monday, and a controversy has already emerged following today's LinkedIn outburst by industry veteran Greg Costikyan. First things first, though: context. While not a household name among gamers like Hideo Kojima or Todd Howard, Costikyan is a renowned game designer whose career spans tabletop roleplaying games, board games, wargames, video games (he worked from 2019 to 2023 on Stars Reach, the upcoming sci-fi sandbox MMO by Playable Worlds, as Game Design Lead), and more. He also wrote four novels. A friend of Warren Spector (Ultima, System Shock, Deus Ex, Thief, Epic […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/greg-costikyan-gdc-2026-festival-of-gaming-criticism/
Intel's packaging services are being considered a viable alternative to TSMC's CoWoS, as supply constraints are forcing US fabless customers to seek other options. Intel's EMIB Packaging Orders Could Reach 'Billions in Revenue' Moving Into H2 2026; a New Prospect For the Foundry Business Advanced packaging has emerged as a major driver of computing power in modern-day AI architectures, and alongside semiconductors, solutions like CoWoS are seen as vital for firms like NVIDIA and AMD. With the start of the AI frenzy, advanced packaging has been dominated by TSMC, but as demand for CoWoS and derivatives ramps up, a supply […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-emib-challenges-tsmcs-cowos-as-america-answer-to-the-ai-packaging-bottleneck/
An overview of SpeciesNet, our open-source AI model that is helping people around the world protect and conserve wildlife.
Google’s Liz Reid, VP and head of Search, drew a clearer line between Google Search and Gemini but said it’s still unclear whether the products will converge, diverge further, or be superseded.
The big picture. Reid said Search is an information product focused on helping people connect with the web, while Gemini is centered more on assisting with productivity and creation. She added that the boundaries are fluid, especially as AI products evolve quickly and agentic experiences reshape how people use the internet.
What she’s saying. In short, Reid said Search and Gemini share technology but have different product “north stars.” They could overlap more over time, but the eventual long-term direction is still open. Here’s what she said in an interview on Access Podcast:
Gemini vs. Search. Here’s the distinction Reid made:
Agents and the web’s future. Reid also said Google expects a future with more agent-to-agent internet activity, not just humans browsing directly.
Google vs. ChatGPT. Reid pushed back on the idea that AI is a simple winner-take-all battle between Google and ChatGPT.
Trusted sources. Reid also said Google wants to do more to surface sources users trust or pay for.
She pointed to Google’s Preferred Sources feature and broader subscription-aware experiences:
Why we care. Reid’s comments suggest Google hasn’t settled on Search’s long-term role in an AI-first ecosystem. So keep watching closely as AI assistants, agents, and search results evolve.
The interview. What happens to Google when AI answers everything? with Liz Reid
The NAND shortage has caused SSD pricing to spike Forget the DRAM shortage; the NAND shortage has become the newest thing to ruin the affordability of PC building. A shortage of NAND memory has driven up SSD prices, raising the cost of all SSD storage. Today, a Samsung 990 PRO 1TB SSD costs £159.99 in […]
The post Samsung 990 PRO 1TB SSD price spikes amid NAND shortage appeared first on OC3D.
Google's AI Mode self-citations tripled in nine months. SE Ranking data shows that more links now lead to organic search results, not business profiles.
The post Google AI Mode Cites Itself More Often, With More Organic Links appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Despite putting forth what is largely an iterative update with the new Galaxy S26 series, Samsung appears to be raking in higher sales relative to the last year's Galaxy S25 series, at least as per initial impressions. Should this trend continue, however, it risks rewarding complacency, one that might feasibly result in progressively less competitive offerings from Samsung further down the line. Samsung Galaxy S26 series has recorded a pre-order volume of 1.35 million units in South Korea so far Samsung has now revealed that its initial pre-order volume for the new Galaxy S26 series stands at 1.35 million units […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/the-galaxy-s26-series-sales-are-pulling-ahead-of-the-s25-lineups-incentivizing-samsungs-laziness/
PC players are still reeling from Bloomberg's report earlier this week that Sony will be pulling back on its strategy of putting its first-party PlayStation titles on PC. Ghost of Yotei and Saros are the first two that seemingly won't be making the jump, and it doesn't seem like any PlayStation Studios titles (at least the single-player ones) will get PC ports in the future. The key element as to why Sony is backing off from putting its single-player games on PC fell on claims that it simply wasn't worth it. Despite the first batch of PlayStation titles selling well […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/report-suggests-sony-playstation-lost-out-on-pc-sales-due-to-no-same-day-pc-ps5-launches/
Apple’s M5 Max delivered some decent performance gains over the M4 Max in Geekbench 6’s single-core and multi-core results, with the most impressive feat for the 18-core CPU configuration being that it beat the top-end M3 Ultra in both tests. Now, it is time to look at the technology giant’s ‘middle of the pack’ SoC, the M5 Pro, and according to the latest single-threaded and multi-threaded benchmarks, it nearly matches its powerful brother while trading blows with Apple’s current-generation workstation-class SoC. In short, the company has made an M4 Pro on steroids. Thanks to Apple’s new Fusion Architecture, the M5 Pro packs as […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/m5-pro-is-new-price-to-performance-soc-new-benchmark-comparison-impresses/
This is probably the oddest way for what appears to be a fairly major leak to appear. RoboCop: Rogue City developer Teyon seems to have accidentally leaked its next project, or an early build of a project that never got off the ground, or an early build of its next project. That's all unclear, but what's happened is that someone at Teyon accidentally swapped RoboCop: Rogue City out with an entirely different game when updating it on Steam, revealing what could potentially be a new 3D Hunter: The Reckoning game. First noted by X (formerly Twitter) user Silent, an update […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/robocop-rogue-city-briefly-replaced-with-hunter-the-reckoning-game-steam/
Google is reaching out directly to advertisers via email, requiring them to confirm whether their campaigns contain EU political ads — with a hard deadline of March 31st.
Why we care. This isn’t optional. EU regulation now requires Google to verify political ad status across all active campaigns, and advertisers who don’t act before the deadline could face compliance issues.
What’s happening. Google is asking every advertiser to declare whether their existing campaigns include EU political ads. The requirement applies to all current campaigns and must be completed by March 31, 2026.
How to comply: Google has outlined three ways to submit the confirmation:
Between the lines. The account-level option is the most efficient route for most advertisers who are confident none of their campaigns fall under the EU political ads definition. Google has made it straightforward to reverse or adjust the selection at any point, so there’s no risk in acting early.
The bottom line. Check your inbox — Google is contacting advertisers directly. If you run campaigns targeting EU audiences, log in and complete the confirmation before March 31st to stay compliant.
First seen. This update was spotted by Paid Search expert, Arpan Banerjee, who shared the details of the comms on Linkedin.
Until a few years ago, schema helped search engines extract basic facts and display visual enhancements like star ratings and sitelinks.
However, in the AI-driven search world, schema plays a different and fundamental role for local SEO, helping Google and other AI systems understand who you are, what you do, where you operate, and how confidently your information can be reused.
Improving rankings isn’t as relevant. Now, schema helps reduce confusion for Google and reinforces your business as a stable, trustworthy local entity across traditional search, local packs, AI Overviews, rich results, and external AI platforms.
Let’s dig into how schema helps local SEO in the AI search world.
Google triangulates across multiple data points to understand a business and pull information into a search result:
When these signals align, Google’s confidence in your information increases. When they contradict each other, your correct information might not be pulled into search.
When structured data contradicts on-page content, Google Business Profile data, citations, or reviews, Google doesn’t attempt to reconcile the difference — it discounts the markup and often ignores the information altogether.
For example, consider a law firm that marks up:
Each of these creates friction, leading to mixed signals for AI systems and search engines. One conflict may be ignored, but multiple conflicts can compound and result in lost search visibility for the whole site.
False positives occur when schema asserts something that isn’t fully supported by other signals.
Common examples include:
Login
Person schema to non-professionals.Product schema for services.False positives are particularly damaging in AI-driven systems. AI models are conservative when confidence is low — if information appears inconsistent or exaggerated, it’s less likely to be reused or cited.
When review markup contradicts visible content, Google doesn’t “average” the signals, it ignores the schema altogether.
If you markup “5 stars” but your Google Business Profile shows “4.2 stars,” or if you mark up reviews that aren’t visible on the page, the signal gets confused.
Note: Google strictly prohibits marking up third-party reviews, such as those from Yelp, Google Maps, or Avvo, as your own Review schema. You can only markup reviews that are first-party, or collected directly by your site, and clearly visible to the user. For details, refer to Google’s specific guidelines on Self-Serving Reviews.
Google is the most prominent platform, but AI is also integrated into assistants, such as Siri or Alexa, retrieval-based platforms, such as ChatGPT search, and much more.
To pull information, they need to determine if:
While external AI platforms do not necessarily parse schema the same way Google does, structured data contributes to clearer entity representation across the web.
Importantly, these other systems tend to be less forgiving than Google when data is inconsistent. But if confidence in the entity is low, the business will be excluded from search.
Dig deeper: The local SEO gatekeeper: How Google defines your entity
To understand why schema matters more now than it did five years ago, it’s important to understand how fragmented search has become.
Local businesses no longer only surface in a single list of 10 blue links (the SERP). They appear across multiple interfaces, often simultaneously:
Schema doesn’t guarantee visibility on any platform — it helps AI systems decide if your business information is reliable enough to reuse.
For example, when Google generates an AI Overview, it synthesizes information from multiple sources. Schema helps ensure Google understands exactly who you are and how your business information connects to your services, locations, and employees, so that your target audience can find you.
Site performance is still often measured using metrics like keyword rankings, organic traffic, and conversions. These metrics aren’t wrong, but they are incomplete.
Local businesses now need to think about:
If a local service business appears more frequently in AI-generated answers for informational and service-related queries, their brand visibility will improve, but they may see organic clicks stagnate or decline.
But there’s no need for panic.
In reality, what is happening is a shift in how demand is being fulfilled. In these scenarios, schema doesn’t create visibility. What it does is help ensure the business is represented accurately when it’s surfaced.
Dig deeper: GEO x local SEO: What it means for the future of discovery
For local service-based businesses, a limited set of schema types is all you need to give your business visibility. Implementing too many types can lead to a bloated, templated markup that introduces contradictions.
Let’s look at an example law firm and how they might implement different types of schema.
Subtypes help Google and AI systems categorize businesses correctly and align them with the right expectations. A personal injury firm, a corporate law practice, and a family law mediator should not all be described the same way.
Effective LegalService schema should clearly answer four questions:
This markup aligns directly with what users see on the page, what exists in Google Business Profiles, and what appears in legal directories like Avvo or Martindale-Hubbell.
Example: LegalService markup
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LegalService",
"@id": "https://www.example-law.com/locations/dallas/#location",
"name": "Example Law Group Dallas",
"url": "https://www.example-law.com/dallas/",
"telephone": "+1-214-555-0100",
"priceRange": "$$$",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "100 Main St, Suite 400",
"addressLocality": "Dallas",
"addressRegion": "TX",
"postalCode": "75201",
"addressCountry": "US"
},
"geo": {
"@type": "GeoCoordinates",
"latitude": 32.7767,
"longitude": -96.7970
},
"openingHoursSpecification": [{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": ["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"],
"opens": "08:30",
"closes": "17:30"
}],
"sameAs": [
"https://www.facebook.com/examplelawdallas",
"https://www.linkedin.com/company/example-law-group",
"https://www.avvo.com/attorneys/example-profile"
]
}You can view the full list of specific subtypes in the Schema.org LegalService definition.
Organization schema defines the parent entity behind locations, practitioners, and services. LocalBusiness (or LegalService) defines the physical location. This distinction becomes critical as companies scale, rebrand, or operate across multiple markets.
Without a clear Organization layer, Google may treat each location as a standalone entity. That can lead to fragmented knowledge panels, inconsistent brand attribution, and inaccurate AI citations.
Example: Graph-based hierarchy
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@graph": [
{
"@type": "Organization",
"@id": "https://www.example-law.com/#org",
"name": "Example Law Group",
"url": "https://www.example-law.com/",
"logo": "https://www.example-law.com/logo.png",
"knowsAbout": ["Personal Injury Law", "Medical Malpractice"]
},
{
"@type": "LegalService",
"@id": "https://www.example-law.com/locations/dallas/#location",
"name": "Example Law Group Dallas",
"parentOrganization": { "@id": "https://www.example-law.com/#org" },
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "100 Main St, Suite 400",
"addressLocality": "Dallas",
"addressRegion": "TX",
"postalCode": "75201",
"addressCountry": "US"
}
}
]
}Dig deeper: Schema and AI Overviews: Does structured data improve visibility?
For legal and professional service businesses, Person schema reinforces expertise and real-world credibility (E-E-A-T). Used incorrectly, it creates false authority signals that Google will ignore.
Person schema should only be applied when:
This helps Google and AI systems associate legal expertise with the firm rather than just its content. It also reduces the risk of misattribution when AI systems summarize legal advice.
Example: Attorney bio markup
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Person",
"@id": "https://www.example-law.com/attorneys/jane-doe/#person",
"name": "Jane Doe, Esq.",
"jobTitle": "Senior Partner",
"worksFor": { "@id": "https://www.example-law.com/#org" },
"affiliation": { "@id": "https://www.example-law.com/locations/dallas/#location" },
"alumniOf": "Harvard Law School",
"knowsAbout": ["Tort Law", "Civil Litigation"],
"sameAs": [
"https://www.linkedin.com/in/janedoe-law",
"https://www.statebar.tx.us/member/janedoe"
]
}For law firms, consultants, and agencies, Service schema, particularly the OfferCatalog structure, is more appropriate and accurate than Product.
Using OfferCatalog allows you to create a “menu” of services that AI systems can parse to understand the breadth of your expertise. This helps AI systems understand what the business actually offers without overreaching.
Example: OfferCatalog for legal services
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LegalService",
"@id": "https://www.example-law.com/locations/dallas/#location",
"hasOfferCatalog": {
"@type": "OfferCatalog",
"name": "Legal Services",
"itemListElement": [
{
"@type": "Offer",
"itemOffered": {
"@type": "Service",
"name": "Personal Injury Consultation",
"description": "Free case evaluation for auto accidents and workplace injuries."
}
},
{
"@type": "Offer",
"itemOffered": {
"@type": "Service",
"name": "Medical Malpractice Litigation",
"description": "Representation for victims of surgical errors and misdiagnosis."
}
}
]
}
}Originally, FAQPage schema helped search engines understand common questions and answers on a page. In an AI-driven search environment, well-written FAQs help define what a business does, what it doesn’t do, and what a user should expect. It helps AI systems as they look for boundaries, clarification, and intent resolution.
Example: AI-aligned FAQ schema
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "FAQPage",
"mainEntity": [
{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "Do I have to pay a retainer for a personal injury case?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "No. We operate on a contingency fee basis, meaning you only pay legal fees if we win a settlement or verdict for you."
}
}
]
}In AI Overviews, these answers may be paraphrased or summarized, but schema helps ensure the underlying meaning remains intact.
Schema is often implemented during a site launch or redesign, only to be ignored afterward.
But businesses change constantly. Hours shift, locations open or close, staff turnover occurs, and services evolve. When schema isn’t updated to reflect these changes, inconsistencies are introduced that can erode information signals over time.
A sustainable schema strategy involves two steps:
@id references, and deprecated properties.Dig deeper: Local SEO sprints: A 90-day plan for service businesses in 2026
Structured data now acts as a trust signal, helping search engines and AI systems determine whether business information is accurate, consistent, and reliable enough to reuse at scale.
Schema that reinforces your correct information supports visibility across traditional search, local results, and AI-driven experiences. Inaccurate or outdated schema can hurt your company’s visibility.
Nvidia thinks scarcity is good for them, even if it’s bad for everyone else This week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference, and he has something to say about the global memory shortage. Companies and consumers across the globe are finding it hard to acquire memory. DRAM […]
The post Nvidia CEO thinks the fact “everything is scarce” is “fantastic” for them appeared first on OC3D.
Pamela handles real-world phone calls so you don’t have to. It dials businesses, navigates phone trees, waits on hold, and schedules appointments while you listen live, jump in, or let it run end to end. You can also ask it to search the web, draft messages, and manage follow-ups.
Pamela supports multiple languages, offers a Chrome extension, and integrates via Python/JavaScript SDKs and MCP. Connect Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Slack for memory-aware help, and use your own number or a dedicated AI line.
Higher memory speeds are finally possible on high capacity DDR5 configuration, as demonstrated by ASRock on its Z890I Nova WiFi. ASRock Demonstrates CQDIMM Support With 256 GB DDR5-7400 Memory Configuration on Z890I Nova WiFi R2.0 Reaching higher memory speeds becomes difficult as you increase the memory capacity. While most users don't have a problem reaching 7000 MT/s or much higher on 32 GB or even 64 GB DDR5 memory kits, doing the same with a high capacity RAM kits, such as 256 GB, becomes incredibly difficult. This problem arises due to signal noise and jitter, which makes high frequencies unstable […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/asrock-achieves-7400-mt-s-with-256-gb-cqdimm-ddr5-on-z890i-nova-wifi-r2-0/
Earlier this week, Nintendo hosted its fourth Nintendo Direct event of 2026, and considering that we're only a few days into March at the time of this writing, that's a pretty condensed window for the Mario company to be setting up what players can look forward to for the year. Today, Nintendo has already announced it will host a fifth Nintendo Direct event next week, but it's not the kind you were hoping for. Instead of following up Tuesday's Indie World Showcase Direct with a larger, general Nintendo Direct like Nintendo has in the past, the very next Direct event […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nintendo-direct-super-mario-bros-galaxy-movie-direct-next-week/
A new benchmark appears just a week before the launch. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is the new and fastest mid-range Intel desktop CPU. Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus Benchmarked in PassMark for the First Time, Delivering 50,478 Points in Multi-Threaded and 4,854 Points in Single-Core Tests Just a while ago, we reported that HP is preparing its new OMEN 35L Gaming Desktop with the upcoming Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processor, and now we just spotted another Arrow Lake Refresh chip. As we have mentioned before several times, the Arrow Lake Refresh lineup is going to be […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-core-ultra-5-250k-plus-leaked-in-passmark/
Update 06/03/2026: Following the publication of this article, the co-founder of MegaCrit and one of the main developers behind Slay the Spire 2, Casey Yano, has further clarified that the sarcastic jab the studio took at Bungie's Marathon really was just a joke, and has apologized for it now seeming "a bit meaner than it was intended." "This seems a bit meaner than it was intended...To be fair I didn't think we'd actually pass Marathon in concurrent users." At least two of the developers on Marathon, UI designer Elliot Gray and Marathon's community manager, Cozmo, responded to the post with […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/slay-the-spire-2-420k-concurrent-players-steam-takes-jab-at-marathon-bungie/
Do you think you’re able to answer the question every marketing leader dreads hearing from leadership: “Why isn’t our marketing effort doing more?”
How do you even go about answering that?
Let’s look at what I mean using a fictional location analytics company we’ll call Acme Area Analytics.
The Acme team reviews its reports. Nothing appears broken. Campaigns are running, leads are still coming in, and performance metrics are mostly stable. Yet sales momentum isn’t clearly accelerating, and it’s hard to pinpoint why.
Insights are scattered across site analytics, brand monitoring and SEO tools, CRM systems, and paid media dashboards. Each platform reflects part of the story, but none shows the full picture.
That fragmentation is exactly how well-intentioned “data-driven decisions” can go wrong. Let’s look at how that happens and how Acme, and you, can fix it.
In global, multi-channel campaigns like Acme Area Analytics’, the hardest moments are when nothing is obviously underperforming. Digital channels are running. Leads are coming in, and metrics are mostly stable, yet sales momentum is stalled and it’s unclear which lever to pull next.
At the same time, subtle signals raise concerns. Non-brand CPCs are creeping upward, and a competitor — Spotter Intelligence — is suddenly appearing more frequently in branded search.
Let’s say you’re part of the Acme marketing team. You go back to your reports and ask the question most marketers ask in this situation: Which tactic is underperforming?
When diving into the platform data, you uncover what looks like a clear answer: remarketing performance for your API has softened, conversion rates have dipped slightly, and efficiency has begun to decline.
On the surface, you have your answer. Spend should be pulled back to match demand because audiences have likely seen the creative too many times.
That decision could certainly make sense, and it’s what many teams actually end up doing. But it’s also often wrong. Why? Because you haven’t yet asked the right question.
The more useful question is harder to answer: “Is demand actually declining, or are we failing to create new interest upstream?”
Dig deeper: Why 2026 is the year the SEO silo breaks and cross-channel execution starts
The real issue becomes clear when you look beyond a single channel. The location analytics market still had strong growth potential, but your product was encountering a shortage of engaged audiences receptive to the message. That disconnect became clearer when you looked beyond paid media.
Site engagement trends in analytics and brand search behavior in Search Console suggested interest in your type of location AI wasn’t disappearing. It just wasn’t converting yet.
The focus had shifted from reach to engaged awareness, with a priority on attention and engagement, not just exposure. So your Acme team decided to introduce additional campaign layers, including new content designed to build relevance and trust.
Crucially, you didn’t see any improvement right away. Cost-per-lead efficiency continued to decline, and it looked worse after increased upper-funnel investment. From a platform-only view, this looked like the time to pull back.
But looking across systems changed how performance was interpreted. Engagement from awareness activity began feeding remarketing pools, but the impact wouldn’t surface immediately for a product with long sales cycles like your API.
During that gap, the Acme team maintained confidence in its strategy by sharing early signs of upstream momentum. Only later did results begin to show up. Remarketing efficiency improved and higher sales volumes of the API were confirmed from integrated CRM data.
The takeaway for the Acme Area Analytics marketing team wasn’t just that “remarketing worked again,” or that upper funnel activity drives demand. It’s that the hardest marketing decisions are the ones you have to make — and hold — before success shows up in the metrics leadership typically trusts.
In our Acme example, each dashboard told a technically accurate story, but no single dashboard could fully articulate the whole picture.
Looking at any of those in a silo wouldn’t have allowed Acme’s marketing team to fully understand what was happening.
But we know that the insight didn’t live in any single view. When the question the team asked itself shifted to whether demand was moving effectively through the funnel, and dashboards were evaluated together in context, the decision changed.
This is what unsiloed analytics looks like in practice. It’s not about teams fighting over which touch led to the result, but recognizing that each part of a marketing plan plays a distinct and important role in creating momentum that grows demand and lifts sales.
Leadership wants proof. Pipeline and revenue might feel like the safest validation. But in complex, multi-channel programs, those are often lagging indicators of solid performance.
By the time pipeline clearly reflects demand creation, teams have often already pulled back awareness investment, cut channels that looked inefficient in isolation, and shifted budget toward short-term demand capture.
In the example above, waiting for proof would have meant that Acme reduced awareness and remarketing spend and possibly exited a market that would later show great promise.
Integrated data didn’t eliminate the risk of shifting investment from lead generation to awareness-building in a market that had declining metrics. Instead, it added credibility to the case for doing so.
Dig deeper: The end of SEO-PPC silos: Building a unified search strategy for the AI era
This dynamic isn’t limited to complex, multi-channel programs. You can see it even within a single platform when multiple tactics work together.
Let’s look at a scenario where Acme’s brand search impression volume increased by roughly 50% year over year while Share of Voice remained flat. That means more people have been searching for Acme as the company has invested across out-of-home and other digital campaigns. Acme’s Google campaign then harvested the demand created by other channels.
If Acme’s brand search had been evaluated only in terms of its media plan efficiency, this signal of growing demand would have been easy to miss. In context, it confirmed that Acme’s awareness efforts were working, even though attribution couldn’t perfectly assign credit to individual channels.
In these examples, integrated data — unsiloed data — shifted the conversation.
Instead of Acme’s marketing teams debating budget cuts, they could monitor signs of early momentum, including longer time on site and rising brand search volume. Over time, that interest could be seen in the CRM as higher-quality leads that converted more frequently into closed deals.
The good news is that this doesn’t require new tools or perfectly stitched together data. It simply requires stepping back during planning and asking better questions about how potential customers signal interest as they consider your product.
Dig deeper: SEO vs. PPC vs. AI: The visibility dilemma
In my experience, the most valuable marketing insights come from understanding how different data points relate.
Unsiloing your data isn’t about proving causality or winning attribution debates. Instead, it’s about recognizing opportunity early enough to act on it and identifying which metrics suggest that demand is quietly being built in the background.
The teams that win aren’t only better at reporting results. They’re better at seeing momentum while it’s still forming and acting on it early.
Helldivers 2’s “Slim” build reduced install sizes by 85%, and gamers are loving it Arrowhead Game Studios has confirmed that Helldivers 2 will be returning its “large” PC build with the game’s next patch. This is due to the success of the game’s new “slim” version, which reduced the game’s install size by 85%. After […]
The post Mission Successful – Helldivers 2 to retire its “Large” build following “Slim” success appeared first on OC3D.
Hey Elva is a live AI model benchmarking platform built for startups integrating AI into their products. Choosing the wrong model can quietly increase your burn rate, slow down your user experience, or limit output quality. Most teams test inside individual provider dashboards, but that doesn’t provide real side-by-side comparison data. Hey Elva lets you run your exact prompt across multiple models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google using your own API keys. Execute real API calls and instantly compare token usage, cost per request, latency, and output differences in one structured dashboard.
The Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake is officially "still in development," as confirmed by Saber Interactive CCO Tim Willits in a new interview with IGN. The statement provides a rare moment of reassurance for a fanbase that has spent years wondering if the project had quietly joined the list of canceled projects of the past few months. Unfortunately, this is where the good news ends today. Willits did not provide any additional information on the remake, saying that confirming its development status is all that he could say. “Yes, it is still in development. That’s all I […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/star-wars-knights-of-the-old-republic-remake-not-canceled/
Another strong indication that Intel is going to release the Arrow Lake Refresh desktop processors very soon. HyperX OMEN 35L Gaming Desktop With Core Ultra 7 270K Plus Spotted: 24 Cores and Up To 5.4 GHz Boost Clock While we await the official unveil and launch of Core Ultra 200 Refresh desktop CPUs, OEMs have started preparing their next-gen systems with these CPUs. As of now, several solid reports have confirmed the existence of the Core Ultra 200K Plus, aka Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs. We have seen some of them getting leaked in benchmarks, and it's expected that these will […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/hp-prepares-hyperx-omen-35l-desktop-with-core-ultra-7-270k-plus/
There's been a major development in the ongoing Ashes of Creation legal battle: Intrepid Studios founder and CEO Steven Sharif has obtained his first legal victory against the board, obtaining a TRO (Temporary Restraining Order) from a judge. As a reminder, following the sudden implosion of the game and its removal from Steam, not to mention the fraud accusations levied by one of the game's investors, Sharif was targeted with a lawsuit filed by TFE Games Holdings on February 9, 2026, in the Nevada District Court, Clark County. However, he quickly filed his own lawsuit against Robert Dawson (the major investor behind […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/ashes-of-creation-steven-sharif-tro-tfe-board/
If I hear “always be testing” one more time, I might scream. It was great advice in 2016. In 2026, it’s a great way to light your budget on fire.
That mantra made sense when budgets were loose and platforms forgave a lot of chaos. Launch five audience tests simultaneously? Sure, why not! Swap out three creative variables at once? Go for it!
But the rules have changed. Our new reality has tighter budgets, longer learning phases, and signal fragmentation everywhere. One poorly structured test can distort your performance for weeks, not days. That performance hit compounds fast.
Modern experimentation is expensive and risky. Why pay that price when we have the power of agentic AI to help? And by help, I don’t mean slapping AI onto our existing process and asking it to generate more ad variants. That would just be an expedient way to light our budgets on fire.
Instead, it’s time to use agentic AI to design smarter experimentation systems.
In an “always be testing” era, it was all too easy to throw things to test at the scale Oprah gives out cars or Taylor Swift fills auditoriums. It often led to unstructured testing where we launched ideas on a Monday and checked results on Friday hoping for a lift. There was nary a risk model, overlap detection, or strategic sequencing in sight.
The costs of that approach are now exponentially higher. Take platform disruption. Algorithms crave stability. Industry benchmarks show ad sets stuck in learning phases often see CPAs 20-40% higher than stable sets.
Every time you significantly change creative, audience, or budget, you risk resetting that learning. If you’re running three overlapping tests that each trigger resets, you’re voluntarily paying a volatility tax on your entire media spend.
Then there’s waste. The majority of A/B tests deliver no statistically significant lift. If you aren’t ruthless about what deserves to run, you’re burning budget to prove most ideas don’t matter. “Always be testing” without guardrails turns into “always be destabilizing.”
The shift looks like this. Old approach: “AI, write me 10 new headlines.” New approach: “AI, design the smartest next experiment within our budget, risk tolerance, and current learning state.”
The reframe from creative generation to experimentation architecture is where real leverage lives.
Here’s a practical seven-step framework to turn testing from a tactical habit into strategic infrastructure.
Before you let any AI near your experiments, lock in constraints. Without them, AI lacks proper context. With them, AI becomes a disciplined strategic partner.
Define and document five hard boundaries.
Document this in a single file (e.g., experimentation-guardrails.md) to teach AI the constraints that make ideas viable. Your AI agent must reference this before proposing any test.
Most teams have the data sitting in spreadsheets, but never extract the lessons. Feed your last six months of test results into an AI agent and have it analyze variables changed, duration, performance delta, statistical confidence, and platform resets.
Ask it to find patterns, such as:
This is how AI becomes a true analytical partner.
Rather than jumping straight from idea to launch, use AI to help you enforce hypothesis discipline.
Structured hypotheses create institutional memory. Six months later, when someone suggests testing “speed messaging” again, you’ll know exactly who it worked for and why. Yes, it feels like paperwork, but this discipline can protect your budget from algorithm chaos.
Budget isn’t infinite and neither is algorithm stability. Your AI agent should evaluate each proposed test across five dimensions and assign a risk score.
High risk + low learning = Kill it. Low risk + high insight = Green light.
Example: Testing a radical new enterprise positioning statement is high risk in a paid conversion campaign. Instead, your AI agent might suggest validating it first via organic LinkedIn content or low-budget audience polling. Low risk. High signal.
This is one of the most underused applications of AI in experimentation. Synthetic testing means simulating how different personas may react to messaging before spending media dollars, and the data backs it up.
A study involving researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind found that digital agents trained on interview data matched human survey responses with 85% accuracy and mimicked social behavior with 98% correlation.
This makes synthetic audiences surprisingly useful for early-stage signal gathering. While they don’t replace real-world data (at least not yet), they can act as creative QA.
Here’s how it works. Define psychographic archetypes.
Feed your proposed messaging into your AI system and ask, “How would the Skeptical CMO react to this?”
You might get feedback like: “The phrase ‘All-in-One’ triggers skepticism. It signals feature bloat. Consider reframing as ‘Integrated’ or ‘Modular.’”
That kind of signal costs pennies in API calls instead of thousands in paid testing.
Changing audience, creative, and landing page in the same week teaches you almost nothing. Your AI agent should act like air traffic control: scan active campaigns, flag conflicts, and recommend sequencing.
A better flow:
If overlap is unavoidable, enforce clean holdout groups so you always have a source of truth.
Treat tests like disposable experiments and you lose the compounding value. Have your AI auto-summarize every completed test:
Over time, this database becomes your moat. Everyone can buy the same targeting. Few teams have 100+ validated customer truths at their fingertips.
“Always be testing” was a growth-era mindset. In 2026, the winning mindset is “always be compounding intelligence.”
Rather than more tests, build your competitive advantage through structured, risk-aware, insight-driven experimentation that protects algorithm stability and ties experimentation directly to revenue.
The next time your stakeholder asks why you aren’t testing more, show them your experimentation architecture and say, “We’re not just running experiments. We’re building an intelligence engine.”
Because intelligence compounds.
Video advertising has never been easier to distribute. Platforms can deliver impressions and views at an enormous scale across YouTube, paid social, short-form video, and connected TV.
But distribution isn’t the same as effectiveness. Many campaigns generate impressive platform metrics while producing little measurable business impact.
The problem usually isn’t targeting, budget, or platform choice. It’s a deeper strategic issue: campaigns are optimized for outputs like views and impressions rather than outcomes like attention, persuasion, and action.
Poor targeting, limited budgets, and platform choice are rarely the real problem. The bigger issue is that many video ads are still produced as if they’re television commercials.
In the early days of online video, distribution was the challenge. Getting a video seen at all felt like a win. Today, distribution is abundant. Attention isn’t.
Every major platform — YouTube, paid social, short-form video, connected TV — competes for fragments of cognitive bandwidth. Users arrive with intent, habits, and expectations that have nothing to do with your campaign. We plan for reach, while viewers respond to relevance.
I’ve sat in many meetings where success was defined by impressions delivered or views accrued. But when you look downstream — search lift, site engagement, conversion — the connection often disappears.
Platforms will reliably deliver impressions. Turning those impressions into memory, persuasion, or action requires a fundamentally different mindset.
Dig deeper: From Video Action to Demand Gen: What’s new in YouTube Ads and how to win
Skippable formats changed video advertising permanently, but many advertisers still haven’t adjusted creatively.
Early in my career, I believed strongly in branding up front. Logos, product shots, music cues — everything that signaled professionalism. Those ads looked great in presentations. They underperformed in market.
A clear pattern emerged over time. Ads that opened with a recognizable problem, a provocative statement, or an unexpected visual held attention longer — even when branding appeared later. Ads that opened with branding signals were skipped almost reflexively.
View-through rate isn’t persuasion. A “view” simply means the platform’s minimum threshold was met. It doesn’t mean the message landed, the brand registered, or the viewer cared.
In multiple brand lift analyses, most measurable impact occurred before the skip button appeared. If the opening didn’t earn attention, the rest of the ad didn’t matter.
What works: treat the opening frame like a headline, not a preamble. Lead with tension, a question, or a familiar problem. Design for sound-off environments. If the first frame wouldn’t stop a scroll, nothing that follows will matter.
One of the most counterintuitive lessons in modern video advertising: polished ads frequently underperform scrappier ones.
I’ve seen simple, phone-shot videos outperform meticulously produced studio spots across YouTube, paid social, and short-form platforms. Not because quality doesn’t matter — but because perceived authenticity matters more.
Audiences are exceptionally good at identifying advertising. When something looks like an ad, they disengage. When it looks like content, they give it a chance.
Algorithms reinforce this: they reward watch time, retention, rewatches, and shares. They do not reward lighting setups or production budgets.
I’ve seen brands “upgrade” social video to look more premium, only to watch performance decline. The creative looked better. The results were worse.
The goal isn’t to look amateurish. It’s to look like you belong.
Match the platform’s visual grammar. Prioritize clarity over polish. Use real people and authentic voices whenever possible.
Ads that feel native get watched. Ads that feel inserted get skipped.
Dig deeper: How to get better results from Meta ads with vertical video formats
“Shorter is better” is one of the most persistent — and misleading — rules in video advertising.
Six-second ads can work. So can 60-second ads. I’ve seen both exceed expectations, and I’ve seen both fail badly. The difference was never duration — it was justification.
Some messages can be delivered instantly. Others require context, proof, or emotional buildup. Forcing every idea into the same runtime produces predictable results: safe, bland, forgettable ads.
I’ve reviewed retention graphs where a 45-second ad held viewers longer than a 15-second version, because the story justified its length. I’ve also seen six-second ads lose half their audience in the first two seconds because they wasted the opening.
Test multiple edits, not just multiple lengths. Watch retention curves, not averages. Build modular narratives: hook, then value, then proof, then action.
The “right” length is however long it takes to make the viewer feel their time was respected.
Platforms provide more data than ever. The problem isn’t a lack of metrics. It’s confusing metrics with outcomes.
I’ve seen campaigns praised for high completion rates that produced no measurable business impact. Strong engagement coexisting with low conversion. Impressive view counts that delivered zero lift.
This happens because platforms optimize for their success metrics, not yours. If your goal is to maximize views, the platform can do that easily. If your goal is to influence consideration, preference, or action, things get more complicated.
One uncomfortable question I’ve learned to ask early: what would failure look like here? If the answer is vague, the campaign is already at risk.
Define success in business terms before launch. Tie video metrics to downstream behavior wherever possible. Use lift studies, holdouts, or assisted conversions when they’re available. If you’re running a brand-building campaign, measure brand lift. If you’re running a performance campaign, measure conversions.
Dig deeper: AI for video advertising: 5 best practices for PPC campaigns
Creative is often blamed when video ads underperform. In reality, creative usually does exactly what it was asked to do. The problem is the brief.
Vague objectives produce generic ads. “Brand awareness” without context leads to unfocused messaging. “Make it engaging” isn’t a strategy.
Strong video ads almost always begin with clear answers to three questions:
When those answers are clear, creative decisions become easier. When they aren’t, the work is compromised before production begins.
The deeper diagnostic questions are worth keeping close:
I’ve seen entire campaigns improve simply because the brief forced alignment around audience insight rather than assumptions.
Another common mistake is treating creative and distribution as separate decisions. They aren’t.
The way an ad is consumed — fullscreen versus feed, sound-on versus sound-off, lean-back versus lean-forward — should shape how it’s made.
A video designed for connected TV shouldn’t simply be resized for mobile. A short-form ad shouldn’t be a truncated long-form story without rethinking the hook entirely.
I’ve seen strong ideas underperform because the creative didn’t match the placement. The concept wasn’t wrong. The context was.
Design with placement in mind from the start. Create platform-specific versions, not one-size-fits-all assets.
Accept that “reuse” often means “rethink,” not “repurpose.” Distribution constraints aren’t limitations — they’re creative inputs.
Dig deeper: How to dominate video-driven SERPs
Testing is indispensable. It’s also frequently misunderstood.
Running endless A/B tests without a hypothesis rarely produces insight. It produces noise.
The most effective testing focuses on variables that materially affect attention and comprehension: opening frames, narrative structure, on-screen text versus voiceover, proof points versus emotional appeals.
It’s also important to recognize what testing can’t do. Algorithms are excellent at optimizing toward measurable signals. They don’t understand brand equity, long-term memory, or cumulative effect. Testing should inform judgment — not replace it.
Ultimately, the only thing that matters for creative effectiveness tools is whether their predictions actually correlate to real media and sales outcomes — reliably enough to inform strategy and media decisions.
The question worth asking of any such tool is simple: How often does what it predicts will happen actually happen?
For example, I frequently cite data from DAIVID, an AI-driven creative effectiveness platform. Why? Because in independent testing, DAIVID’s predictions aligned with real-world outcomes more than 80% of the time — a meaningful foundation for making creative decisions with greater confidence before a campaign goes live.
Platforms will change. Formats will evolve. Algorithms will shift in opaque and sometimes frustrating ways. But attention, curiosity, and trust remain stubbornly human.
The best video ads I’ve worked on weren’t optimized for view counts or completion rates. They were optimized for relevance. They respected the viewer’s time. They said something worth hearing.
Video ads don’t succeed because they follow platform rules. They succeed because they understand people. And that principle outlasts every algorithm update.
Surgent lets you describe your idea and turns it into a full-stack web app. Go from idea to fully launched business in minutes with no code, no Stripe setup, and no deployment headaches. Just build and we handle the rest. It generates production-ready projects for portfolios, dashboards, online stores, booking apps, client portals, and agency sites. It also offers a marketplace of templates to help you start faster and customize before you deploy.
Samsung's NAND supply is now expected to see a significant price hike, as the Korean giant, like DRAM, plans to capitalize entirely on demand from the AI sector. NAND Prices Are Getting Out of Control, And It Could Have Devastating Impacts on the PC Market The PC industry is set to face another crisis from memory suppliers, and after being disrupted by AI customers' demand for DRAM, it appears NAND is next. According to a report by the Korean media outlet Sedaily, Samsung now plans to hike prices by a whopping 100% in Q2, following a similar hike in Q1. […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/the-nand-price-crisis-is-getting-worse/
The PlayStation 6 will reportedly stick to its 2027/early 2028 launch window despite rising component costs, as the financial penalty for delaying TSMC 3nm production far outweighs the current "RAMmageddon" price hikes. Despite recent rumors suggesting a push to 2029, insider Moore’s Law Is Dead argues that Sony’s production contracts with TSMC and the massive development costs already sunk into the system's Orion APU would make a significant delay extremely problematic. According to the report shared in a new YouTube video, Sony has reportedly already secured its 3nm manufacturing allotment from TSMC for Q2 2027. Pulling out now would be […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/playstation-6-not-delayed-ram-would-cost-more/
The Nighthawk RS90 will definitely compete with TP-Link’s affordable Wi-Fi 7 routers because it has dropped to an incredibly low price of $91.99, thanks to a 29 percent discount from Amazon. Now, whether you want to upgrade your home or work wireless networking equipment, that can easily be done for less than $100. With wireless coverage of up to 2,000 square feet, the NETGEAR Nighthawk RS90 Wi-Fi 7 router will also eliminate those ‘dead zones.’ The dual-band Wi-Fi 7 router can reach speeds of 3.6Gbps, making it lightning-fast for gaming, seamless video streaming, video conferencing, and more. Thanks to the […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/netgear-nighthawk-rs90-wi-fi-7-router-going-for-91-99-on-amazon/
The next-generation Xbox, codenamed "Project Helix," will reportedly deliver a 6x jump in rasterization and a massive 20x increase in ray tracing performance over the Series X. According to a new technical analysis from Moore’s Law is Dead, the console’s AMD Magnus APU will bridge the gap between console and PC gaming with a massive performance leap, but it will come with a significant catch: early estimates suggest a target price between $999 and $1,200 for its possible 2027 launch The Xbox Project Helix Will Deliver More Than 120 FPS Gameplay While the Magnus APU reportedly features only 30% more […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/next-gen-xbox-project-helix-20-faster-ray-tracing/
SaveMySaaS gives IT and finance teams full visibility into their software stack. Add a contract and AI automatically researches the vendor, matches it to real pricing tiers, and builds a living profile, all without integrations or IT involvement. A dashboard shows your renewal timeline, monthly spend forecasts, and vendor news scored by how it affects your contracts.
The platform goes beyond tracking dates. It generates executive-ready spend analysis, flags zombie subscriptions and overlapping tools, surfaces cheaper alternatives, and provides negotiation context before every renewal conversation. Setup takes under five minutes, and most teams spot their first saving in the first session.
Google's John Mueller confirmed that most sites don't need to use a disavow file but if you need to be sure, do it.
The post Google Says Disavow Links If You’re Conflicted And Need To Be Sure appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
We are not only seeing RDNA 4 GPUs gradually dropping in prices in some regions, but retailers are now also providing hefty discounts on some models. Ark PC Lists Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB for Just $379 and RX 9070 XT for $632 in Spring Sale Deals Not long ago, we saw the AMD RDNA 4 GPUs starting to drop in prices in some regions. After a continuous price increase over several weeks, the Japanese market saw some relief as the demand dropped for overpriced GPUs. The RX 9000 prices were climbing quickly in the last few months due […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/japanese-retailer-ark-pc-launches-spring-special-discounts-for-rx-9000-series/
A few hours ago, IGN kicked off its Forza Horizon 6 IGN First coverage with a 9-minute gameplay video of "scenic driving" across the game's stunning rendition of Japan. The footage covers a cruise from the south of the map through various biomes, into the outskirts of Tokyo, around its fringe, and back north, ending at one of the game's permanent race circuits. These multiple distinct biomes blend into each other nicely, based on the video. IGN clarified that the traffic in the gameplay video was deliberately toned down by Playground Games to help viewers absorb the surroundings and biomes […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/new-scenic-drive-forza-horizon-6-gameplay/
The A18 Pro found in the newly announced MacBook Neo is slightly different from the silicon powering the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, as Apple has resorted to chip-binning, giving a 5-core GPU to the portable Mac, while its older-generation flagship smartphones are treated to a 6-core GPU. Fortunately, a new benchmark leak shows there’s practically no difference between the two SoCs. The 6-core GPU belonging to the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s A18 Pro is only 5.6 percent faster compared to the 5-core GPU running in the MacBook Neo The $599 portable Mac with the unique identifier Mac17,5 […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/macbook-neo-performs-equal-to-iphone-16-pro-max-with-a18-pro-barely-slower/
During yesterday's Diablo IV livestream, Blizzard provided a deep dive into the Warlock class coming with the Lord of Hatred expansion and also shared details on the Season of Slaughter that will go live next week. In this article: Everything About The Warlock Class The Warlock, the game's eighth class, was designed as a dark, frontline demonologist rather than a traditional back-row caster. The Warlock is someone who has been through hell (literally), uses demons as brutal tools rather than allies, and isn't above collateral damage. Visually, the main inspiration was the heavy metal culture. The class uses two resources: […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/diablo-iv-warlock-season-of-slaughter-butcher/
Here’s 9 minutes of new Forza Horizon gameplay footage Through IGN, Playground Games has released almost 9 minutes of fresh gameplay footage for Forza Horizon 6, showcasing scenic driving in Japan. Forza Horizon 6 is coming to PC and Xbox on May 19th. The game’s PS5 version is releasing “later this year”. Note that this […]
The post Fresh gameplay footage released for Forza Horizon 6 appeared first on OC3D.
After 6,500 hours of heavy productivity use, we revisit our intentionally abused 4K QD-OLED monitor to see how burn-in has progressed under one of the worst-case scenarios for OLED panels.
The CAPCOM Spotlight livestream was pretty stacked with new trailers and even some news, such as PRAGMATA launching a week earlier than expected. Originally scheduled for Friday, April 24, 2026, the action/adventure game based on a new sci-fi IP will debut on Friday, April 17, 2026. There is a little exception to this: in Japan and across Asia, the Nintendo Switch 2 version of PRAGMATA is still launching on the original date of April 24. The CAPCOM Spotlight also debuted a new PRAGMATA trailer showcasing previously unseen locales in the game's lunar setting. These include the moon's surface and a […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/capcom-spotlight-earlier-launch-pragmata-new-trailers/
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Fabricate turns your ideas into deployed web applications. Describe what you want in plain text, and the AI generates a complete full-stack codebase and deploys it to a live URL in minutes. It produces real production code — React, databases, authentication — rather than drag-and-drop templates. You own and can export everything.
LastJobScout automates the tedious parts of job hunting. It searches dozens of job boards at once, reads every posting, and scores each role against your resume so you can focus on strong applications and interviews. Ghost job detection and source verification flag expired or spammy listings, while Scout Reports provide company research and skill gap analysis. Triage opportunities on mobile with swipe actions, dive deep when ready, and track application status in one place.
The GPU market share report for Q4 2025 shows NVIDIA leading with a dominating 94% figure as the AIB market is gripped by rising prices. AIB GPU Market Getting Crushed By Rising Prices Due To Memory Shortages, But NVIDIA Still Managed To Increase Its Sharehold The latest GPU AIB market share report is out by Jon Peddie Research, covering Q4 2025. As per the report, the overall AIB shipments decreases -4.4%, dropping down to 11.5 million units. With a CAGR (Compund Annual Growth Rate) of -5.9% (2024-2028), the AIB installed base is expected to hit 172 million units with a […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-secured-94-percent-aib-gpu-market-share-q4-25/
Lenzo automates trade compliance for SMB exporters. It screens partners against over 50 sanctions lists, classifies products to HS and ECCN codes, and alerts you when regulations change. It sets up in five minutes, starts at $99 per month, and requires no IT support.
smrtlyFit unifies workout tracking, macro logging, and coaching in one platform. Log any routine across 8 training styles with templates, rest timers, and track body metrics with progress photos. Scan barcodes, save meals, and follow daily macro targets. Chat with an AI coach or let it build plans and adjust macros with your approval, or upgrade for a dedicated human coach. Coaches get a dashboard, client management, messaging, scheduling, lead access, and Stripe payouts.
The new Fusion Architecture allows Apple to cram in more CPU cores in the M5 Max, with its top-end configuration flaunting six super and 12 performance cores to deliver incredible multi-core performance. However, in the latest single-threaded and multi-threaded benchmark leak, the SoC secures an almost negligible improvement over the M4 Max. While this is disappointing to learn, there is a silver lining, as the M5 Max beats the workstation-class M3 Ultra in the same comparison, making it its most astounding feat ever. Despite a plethora of performance cores on the M3 Ultra, Apple’s newest M5 Max outperforms it by almost […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/m5-max-18-core-cpu-first-benchmark-comparison-against-m4-max-and-m3-ultra/
According to Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, users will now need to change their device settings to activate the feature.
According to multiple reports, the company’s contractors in Kenya are allegedly reviewing users’ private intimate content for training purposes.
Since OpenAI began running ads four weeks ago, data tracked by Sensor Tower showed more than 100 individual brand promotions.
The company was pressured into this concession by the EU Commission and is allowing competitors access in an effort to prevent regulatory proceedings.
The company touted an uptick in construction jobs and infrastructure support, while also committing to the White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge.
BounceBunny is an AI performance coach that creates personalized basketball training plans to help you jump higher, move faster, and excel on the court. Every plan is customized based on your body metrics, position, available equipment, and injury history. Experience the same quality training that NBA players use at a fraction of the cost. BounceBunny is trusted by over 100 college basketball teams, including UCLA, Cornell, and Northwestern. Train smarter, perform better, and stay injury-free.
NanoClaw's creator says Google ranks a fake website above his project's real site despite 18K GitHub stars, press coverage, and structured data setup.
The post NanoClaw Creator Loses SEO Battle To Impostor Website appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Promotional performance in the app was significantly more effective than for traditional linear television advertising, according to new data from the company.
ToolsFree.ai offers a collection of free online calculators, converters, and utility tools across finance, health, web development, unit conversion, text, and math. Use it without signup or limits on any device; every tool runs in your browser, so your data stays on your device. Explore mortgage and loan calculators, BMI and calorie calculators, QR and password generators, JSON formatting, and more, while following updates as new tools launch.
The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro is now teaching a lesson to those willing to learn: a masterclass in how to debut new tech, replete with genuine innovation rather than gimmicks and outright falsehood à la what Samsung just did at its Galaxy Unpacked event for the new S26 series. Samsung's disastrous Galaxy Unpacked event: Pre-leaks and falsehoods For the benefit of those who might not be aware, Samsung experienced a particularly egregious bout of channel leaks in the run-up to its Galaxy Unpacked event, one that saw an unreleased Galaxy S26 Ultra fall into the hands of a tech YouTuber […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nothing-phone-4a-pro-just-showed-samsungs-galaxy-s26-series-how-to-do-innovation/
The record-breaking Q1 2026 quarter saw Apple bring in a mammoth $143.756 billion, but this impressive figure was also accompanied by a statement made by CEO Tim Cook, hinting at which silicon would be found in the newly announced MacBook Neo. The A18 Pro found in the latter is still an insanely powerful chip, but the A19 Pro is on another level, and had it not been for the supply situation, we’d be getting a different set of specifications for the latest low-cost portable Mac. Supply constraints from TSMC’s end meant that Apple couldn’t secure sufficient A19 Pro shipments to […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/tim-cook-statement-this-year-explains-why-macbook-neo-does-not-feature-a19-pro/
The Trump administration is exploring options to address AI chip exports, and initial reports suggest the proposed regulations are far more aggressive than the industry anticipated. The US Is Planning New AI Chip Export Regulations, By Looking at Compute Power Being Shipped Out The debate around AI chip exports has emerged several times since chip manufacturers like NVIDIA and AMD achieved significant compute breakthroughs. This matter was also under intense focus by the Biden administration, which introduced the "AI Diffusion" act that addresses AI chip exports by categorizing countries into different levels, each with its own caveats. The Diffusion Act […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/the-us-could-soon-turn-nvidia-and-amds-ai-chips-into-a-foreign-policy-tool/
Gentlemen, we meet yet again. It's only been a week since the last time I wrote an article about Optiscaler, but development on the mod is happening at such a rapid pace that I once again have some updates to share with you. This time, it's AMD's Ray Regeneration that's getting the Optiscaler treatment. Thanks to the work done by DarkHelmet, you can now swap Nvidia's Ray Reconstruction for AMD's legally distinct Ray Regeneration denoiser. This is huge news, since currently there's a grand total of two titles with support for Ray Regen, and one of them isn't out till […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/i-tested-amd-ray-regeneration-in-cyberpunk-thanks-to-optiscaler-its-surprisingly-good/
MSI's X870 Tomahawk WiFi drops to $240 on Amazon with WiFi 7, USB4, and dual Gen5 M.2 slots for AM5 builds.
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/msi-mag-x870-tomahawk-wifi-drops-to-240-on-amazon/
For this year’s I/O Save the date, we’re showing how anyone can build incredible games with help from Gemini.
Expect to hear more about Microsoft’s “next generation” Xbox at GDC 2026 Microsoft’s Asha Sharma, the CEO of Microsoft Gaming (Xbox), has unveiled Project Helix. Helix is the codename for Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox console, and Microsoft plans to discuss the system in depth at GDC 2026. Project Helix will be able to play “Xbox and […]
The post Xbox unveils “Project Helix” and it can play “Xbox and PC games” appeared first on OC3D.
Track My Visibility monitors how your brand appears in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. It runs prompts at scale, measures mentions, citations, position, and sentiment, and shows which pages drive visibility. You can compare against competitors, audit query coverage, and view URL-level citation paths. A dashboard displays model-wise coverage, share of voice, and AI-ready scores, while actionable recommendations help you address gaps and increase AI citations.
Asha Sharma, the recently installed chief executive officer of Microsoft Gaming and the new head of Xbox following Phil Spencer's retirement, has just teased the next-generation Xbox console in a post on her personal X (formerly Twitter) account, which we now know is codenamed Project Helix. Sharma shared the codename and what appears to be a new look for the Xbox logo, while also teasing that this new console will "lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games," confirming reports that the next generation of consoles from Xbox will be a hybrid between a PC and console reportedly […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/asha-sharma-teases-next-gen-xbox-project-helix-pc-console-hybrid/
The launch of the 13-inch and 15-inch M5 MacBook Air is excellent news for those wanting a jaw-dropping deal on a portable Mac because Apple’s older-generation M4 MacBook Air has dropped by $300 on Amazon. Of course, it should be mentioned that the extensive price cuts have been observed on a few 15-inch models, but that’s still an attractive deal because we don’t remember the last time that such discounts were introduced. Unfortunately, the stock is slowly dwindling, and if you don’t act fast, you’ll be out of luck and a cheaper M4 MacBook Air. If a chipset upgrade and base […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/select-m4-macbook-air-models-300-off-on-amazon/
Over the past few months, I’ve been shopping around for a first home, and one of the requisites was to have a dedicated office space. Fast forward to November 1st of this year, and my wife and I signed the final documents to get the keys to our new home. Autonomous actually reached out to us much earlier in the year and sent samples of both their Desk 5 Pro and ErgoChair Ultra (in black and white to match the Wccftech logo), but remained sealed in a box until I finally had the space to install a brand new desk. […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/review/autonomous-desk-5-pro-and-ergochair-ultra-review-clean-and-professional/
Embark Studios' latest update for ARC Raiders isn't your bog-standard fixes or new content release. Instead, it's an update that the team rushed out the door this morning after a report from tech blogger and systems engineer Timothy Meadows pointed to an incident where two ARC Raiders players' private Discord DMs (direct messages) appeared in a game log file. Per Meadows report, the game's Discord SDK captured private messages between two users and a Discord Bearer token. It was a massive over-extension of the data that Embark collects through ARC Raiders' Discord SDK, an issue that is thankfully now fixed […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/arc-raiders-latest-update-fixes-massive-security-flaw-private-discord-dms-collected-by-embark/
Google AI Max drives revenue but at a higher cost, according to Smarter Ecommerce’s Mike Ryan, who analyzed 250+ campaigns. Outcomes vary, and much more testing is still needed.
Why we care. AI Max isn’t a minor update. It’s Google’s most significant reimagining of Search campaigns in years, shifting away from keyword syntax toward pure intent matching. For you, that’s both an opportunity (possible growth) and a risk (an efficiency tradeoff).
By the numbers. The result of the analysis:
Advertisers who activate AI Max typically see 14% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA or ROAS, rising to 27% for campaigns still relying on exact and phrase match keywords, Google says.
Turning on AI Max is essentially a coin toss: you may see a lift, but efficiency likely won’t follow, Ryan concluded
What AI Max actually is. Rather than forcing Search campaigns into Performance Max, Google went the other direction — bringing PMax-style automation into classic Search. The result is three core features:
Four pitfalls Smarter Ecommerce identified:
Between the lines. Google’s 14% uplift stat conspicuously excludes retail — an omission Ryan flags as significant for ecommerce advertisers. There’s also a deeper irony: you’re most likely to adopt AI Max if you’re already running Broad Match, DSA, and PMax — yet Google says those accounts will see the lowest incremental benefit.
What’s next. In a conversation with Ryan, Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin confirmed that Google plans to deprecate Dynamic Search Ads and migrate the technology into AI Max for Search. No firm timeline was given, though past Google deprecations often run about a year from announcement.
Ryan recommends activating AI Max’s keywordless features in your existing Search campaigns now and beginning to wind down DSA — not migrating it to PMax.
Ryan’s verdict is cautious optimism. About 16% of advertisers are testing AI Max, and few have gone all in. Start small, audit aggressively, and don’t let FOMO around AI Overviews drive your decision.
The report. The Ultimate Guide to AI Max for Google Search
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New SMEC study analyzes AI Max in Google Ads Search campaigns, showing a 13% conversion value lift but higher CPA and unpredictable ROAS results.
The post What SMEC’s Data Reveals About AI Max Performance appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar Games' parent company, Take-Two Interactive, is also the owner of 2K, the massive publisher and developer behind several titles, though most notably the annual basketball series, NBA 2K. Today, Rockstar announced that it would be combining the two franchises, with players subscribed to GTA+, which grants special bonuses in-game Grand Theft Auto V, getting access to NBA 2K26 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles for a limited time starting next week. The latest installment in the annualized basketball franchise will be accessible to GTA+ subscribers on March 10, and the full game, on top […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/rockstar-expands-gta-subscription-nba-2k26-ps5-xbox-series/
NVIDIA's ambitions for China are glooming down with each day, as a new report indicates the AI giant is now looking to scale back H200 production in favour of ramping up Vera Rubin production. NVIDIA Plans to Shift H200 Production Towards Vera Rubin, as it Prefers 'Consistency' Over Revenue We have reported extensively on the NVIDIA-China saga in the past as well, and one of the more common trends in these stories is that both NVIDIA and China seem to be running in cycles, trying to catch each other. We'll discuss this aspect further ahead, but for now, according to […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/china-catch-22-is-pushing-nvidia-to-the-brink/
Learn more about AI Mode in Search’s query fan-out method for visual search.
This new unboxing video from Google shows off the Pixel 10a’s sleek, durable design and brand new Berry color.
Has OpenAI’s increasing independence from Microsoft and, by extension, Bing, become an overly dependent relationship with Google?
Our study comparing shopping query fan-outs (QFOs) in ChatGPT from both Google and Bing carousels appears to have provided at least a partial answer to that question. Let’s take a look at how this study was conceived and what we found.
In November 2025, a few researchers in the AI research space, including myself, detected a mysterious field in ChatGPT’s source code: id_to_token_map. But what that field revealed when decoded was even more intriguing.
This field is what’s called base64 encoded, but when we decoded it, it revealed what looked to be Google Shopping parameters, such as productid, and offerid, but also language/locale parameters. Even more interesting? This field revealed a query used to look up that particular product.
To categorically prove this was indeed a Google Shopping link, we would have to be able to reconstruct the shopping URL solely from the extracted parameters.
Let’s look at an example of what this looks like using the ChatGPT product carousel for the prompt “best smartphones under $500.”
If we decode the relevant field, we can recreate the Google Shopping link from the extracted parameters.
The big question was: Would this link correspond to the exact product in the ChatGPT product carousel? So we tried it:
It turns out that, in fact, yes it does!
But this decoding technique alone doesn’t answer any of these important questions:
Using Peec AI data, the following study aimed to robustly prove once and for all that ChatGPT does indeed mainly source from Google Shopping.
To do this we analyzed more than 40,000 carousel products and 200,000 organic products from each Google and Bing. By comparing the similarity of the products, we got a very clear picture of what was really happening behind the scenes. Let’s dig into our findings.
To answer whether shopping query fan-outs are different from normal search query fan-outs, we analyzed 1.1M shopping query fan-outs from Peec AI data and compared them to the normal search query fan-outs for the same user prompt. We found that they are almost always different:
| Shopping QFO unique to user prompt | 99.70% |
| Shopping QFO unique to normal query search fan-out | 98.31% |
To dive deeper, we explored the average word counts of both of these query fan-out types by calendar week.
The chart below clearly shows that normal fan-outs are significantly longer — 12 vs. seven words. That makes sense since search query fan-outs are used to retrieve contextual information. This means they need to be long enough to retrieve web results that are specific to the user prompt. Vector search (or comparing embeddings) works best with more context.
Shopping fan-outs, on the other hand, typically target a specific shopping results page and therefore do not need to be as long. It appears the main goal is to retrieve products based on the shopping fan-out. Rather than compare chunks of text, the data in this study supports the hypothesis that ChatGPT relies heavily on Google organic shopping results to populate its carousel.
Further evidence of the distinct nature of the shopping fan-outs surfaces when we look at how many are used per prompt. On average, 2.4 search fan-outs are used per prompt vs. just 1.16 for shopping fan-outs. For reasons similar to above, retrieving more contextual information often requires more search fan-outs vs. simply retrieving products. To populate an eight product carousel in ChatGPT, it seems that, for the most part, one page of Google Shopping results is enough.
To answer this question in the fairest possible way, we extracted around 5,000 ChatGPT carousels comprising 43,000 products from the Peec AI dataset. Prompts were chosen to be as diverse as possible (see Methodology for the creation process).
We then extracted the organic shopping pages and retrieved the top 40 organic products for both Google and Bing shopping results. Paid ads and sponsored products were excluded from the analysis.
We used a three-step matching algorithm (see Methodology for exact details) to attain a similarity score between the ChatGPT product title and the title found in organic shopping results. This is because not only is ChatGPT probabilistic, but so is, to a certain extent, Google Shopping. Product titles can be rewritten with or without certain product features and results are very sensitive to the exact proxy location where the results are retrieved.
We counted a product as matching if it reached a threshold of 0.8 or above, effectively, if it was the same brand and product name and exhibited a very high degree of similarity.
The results are summarized in the chart below.
Impressively, across 43,000 highly diverse ChatGPT carousel products, 45.8% were found to have an exact title match in the corresponding Google top 40 organic shopping products for that exact shopping fan-out.
For Bing, this exact match rate was just 0.48%.
If we simply look at the percentage of strong product matches across all eight ChatGPT carousel positions, over 83% were found in the Google top 40 products, but that number drops to just under 11% for products found on Bing. This is very strong evidence that ChatGPT sources its carousel products from organic Google Shopping results.
We also see a very high number of weak matches in Bing at over 62%. This implies that the top 40 returned products for each shopping fan-out differ significantly across Google and Bing. This makes sense as there are many 1000s of possible combinations of brand and product that can be surfaced in shopping results.
Even if Bing found around 11% of ChatGPT carousel products, how many of those products were only found by Bing? Across the 43,000 carousel products Bing only found 70 that were not found in Google Shopping, constituting just 0.16%. This means that in almost every case there was a match in Bing there was also a match in Google.
It seems unlikely, then, that ChatGPT is also sourcing products from Bing Shopping in the vast majority of cases.
Here we explore the most common positions (mean and median shown) of Google shopping product positions for each ChatGPT carousel position:
For example, for the first carousel position we can see that the average Google Shopping position is around five. Note that we see a sloping trendline for the carousel positions that correspond to higher Google Shopping positions. This implies that ChatGPT sources top carousel products from higher Google Shopping positions.
Plotted another way, we can visualize the cumulative number of strong matches across organic Google Shopping positions. This chart allows us to see that 60% of the strong product matches are found in the top 10 Google shopping results alone.
Comparing the top 20 vs. positions 21-40, ChatGPT’s favoritism for higher positions becomes clear, with an overwhelming majority of matches (almost 84%) coming from the top 20:
Finally, we explored whether the prompt being branded vs. non-branded made a difference to the product matching results.
The results show a similar high level of product matching for both branded and non-branded prompts, with only slightly higher match rates for non-branded:
This study analyzed over 43,000 ChatGPT carousel products across 10 industry verticals and compared them against 200,000+ organic shopping results from both Google and Bing. The findings painted a clear picture.
Over 83% of ChatGPT carousel products were found as strong matches in Google’s top 40 organic shopping results. For Bing, that figure was just 11%, and of those, only 70 products across the entire dataset (0.16%) were found exclusively in Bing. In almost every case where Bing returned a match, Google had already returned the same product.
The data strongly supports this. Shopping query fan-outs are distinct from normal search fan-outs 98.3% of the time. They are significantly shorter (seven vs. 12 words), and ChatGPT uses far fewer of them per prompt (1.16 vs. 2.4 words). This makes sense; populating a product carousel is a fundamentally different task from gathering contextual information to construct a written answer. One is about retrieving structured product listings from a shopping index while the other is meant to retrieve web pages rich enough in context for vector search and re-ranking to work effectively.
The data shows a clear positional bias, with 60% of strong matches coming from the top 10 Google Shopping results and nearly 84% from the top 20. ChatGPT carousel position correlates with Google Shopping rank, meaning products that rank higher in Google Shopping are more likely to appear earlier in the ChatGPT carousel.
Since these patterns hold across branded and non-branded prompts, and across all 10 verticals tested, this reinforces that this is a systematic architectural behavior rather than a category-specific or query-specific artifact.
For brands and retailers, the implication is straightforward: Your Google Shopping ranking strongly influences whether your products make it into ChatGPT’s carousel. These findings indicate that the selection set of carousel products in many cases is effectively the top 40 organic Google Shopping positions for the corresponding shopping fan-out query.
But while product ranking in Google Shopping plays a role, it doesn’t tell the full story. It is likely that other factors, such as overall product mentions and sentiment in the context sources retrieved, also factor into the final ChatGPT carousel selection and ranking.
Understanding the full picture in terms of how your products are perceived across relevant sources, as well as how you show up on Google Shopping, could be the key to understanding ChatGPT product carousels.
For the AI research community, this study provides robust, large-scale evidence that ChatGPT’s product carousel operates as an independent retrieval pipeline for the selection set of products, separate from the contextual web search that powers the written portion of its responses. It is possible, and even likely, that for the final selection and ranking of products, ChatGPT uses contextual clues such as product sentiment from the sources retrieved by the normal search fan-outs.
As always, this represents a snapshot of current behavior. OpenAI could change its retrieval sources or methods at any time, but this behavior has been consistent in our findings for at least the last four months.
Measure how much product overlap there is between ChatGPT Shopping (via product carousels) and Google Shopping organic results for the same queries, across 10 industry verticals. This was contrasted to Bing shopping results as a control using an identical pipeline.
Specifically, the study evaluated:
Prompts were created with the purpose of triggering ChatGPT carousels. To maximize diversity, a mixture of branded and non-branded prompts were used, as well as prompts that explicitly included a price and ones that did not.
Additionally, a diverse selection of verticals were chosen to make the findings more robust. These were: Apparel & Footwear, Baby & Kids, Beauty & Personal Care, Electronics, Home Improvement, Home & Kitchen, Office Supplies, Pet Supplies, Sports & Outdoors, Toys & Games.
The product matching algorithm compared ChatGPT product titles against the top 40 Google Shopping titles using a three-stage cascade approach
The goal was to find the best match between a ChatGPT product title and the corresponding Google Shopping titles. A match was determined using a cascade of three stages:
This approach was set to be fairly conservative, and 0.8 was determined as a reasonable threshold for a product match as this often corresponds very closely to the same brand and product.
Real examples of matching thresholds from the data:
| Match threshold | Description | ChatGPT product | Google Shopping | Differences observed |
| 1.0 | Exact string match, no differences | Hot Wheels RC 1:64 Mustang GTD | Hot Wheels RC 1:64 Mustang GTD | None |
| 0.95 | Near exact, minor differences such as hyphen, punctuation only | Learning Resources Snap-n-Learn Matching Dinos | Learning Resources Snap‑n‑Learn Matching Dinos | The hyphen character is different in unicode |
| 0.9 | Same brand and product, additional non-crucial words allowed | Block Tech 250 Piece Set | Block Tech 250 Piece Building Blocks Set | “Building” added to blocks, but product and brand are the same |
| .85 | Same product and brand, potentially slightly different word order and additional, non-crucial words | LEGO Japanese Red Maple Bonsai Tree | Japanese Red Maple Bonsai Tree LEGO Botanicals | Different word order and one additional word “Botanicals,” same product and brand |
| .8 good match threshold Same brand, same product | Same brand and product, possibly additional descriptors | Cards Game Against FRIENDS – Limited Edition | Cards Game Against FRIENDS – Limited Edition – Party Card Games For Adults | Same brand and product with additional descriptors that don’t affect the match |
| .75 | Same brand and product line, very minor product differences such as size or dimensions | My Sweet Love 14-inch My Cuddly Baby Doll | My Sweet Love 8-Inch MinWeBaby Doll | Same brand and product line but different size dimension |
| .7 | Same brand, often slightly different product, but within same category | Adventure Force Ram Truck RC Car | Adventure Force McLaren 765LT RC Car | Same brand and product category but different individual product |
| .65 | Same brand, often slightly different product but within same category | Mattel 300‑Piece Puzzle | Mattel 80th Anniversary Puzzle | Same brand and product category but different individual product |
| .6 | Typically same product category, but often different brand and product line | Tell Me Without Telling Me Party Card Game | Elimino! Card Game | Different brand and product line, the same overall category of “card game” |
| .55 | Similar product category but usually not either different brand and/or different product | Furby Interactive Plush Toy Interactive Digital Pet Toy | Interactive Digital Pet Toy | Different brand, similar product category but different specific product |
Nvidia reportedly targets “around Computex” launch for its 9GB RTX 5050 Benchlife.info claims to have confirmed yesterday’s reports of Nvidia’s planned RTX 5050 9GB graphics card, and has “confirmed” a release date for the GPU around Computex 2026. Nvidia’s reportedly planning to upgrade its RTX 5050 graphics card to 3GB 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory modules, […]
The post Nvidia targets RTX 5050 9GB launch around Computex appeared first on OC3D.
Routime is a cross-platform, local-first, real-time social media app with AI support for creating and sharing events, schedules, and routines. Currently in beta, we plan to add public schedules and groups in future updates.
After layoffs at Skate developer Full Circle just last week, the remainder of the team at EA's studio continues to work on updating the game with new content, the latest of which is Season 3: Fluid Flashback, which begins on March 10, 2026, and promises to bring skaters "back to skateboarding's first major era," which it describes as a time when "polyurethane wheels replaced clay and metal ones," and when the sport began to grow and evolve rapidly. That means elements of San Vansterdam will be taken back to the 1970s, "with vibrant colors and bold designs." Areas like Rolling […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/ea-skate-season-3-fluid-flashback-revealed/
This afternoon, independent Polish developer Reikon Games announced that RUINER 2 is in development for PC. As suggested by the title, it will be a sequel to 2017's twin-stick shooter, which was well-received by fans and critics. RUINER earned an 8 out of 10 score on Wccftech: RUINER is a no-brainer if you are interested in fast-paced action games that require real skill to truly perfect. However, RUINER 2 will be greatly expanded: it will support co-op gameplay and shift its genre to "cyberpunk action RPG". Marek Roefler, Game Director of the sequel at Reikon, said in a statement: We […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/ruiner-2-announced-pc-co-op-cyberpunk-action-rpg/
Epic Games is officially suing former contractor AdiraFNInfo, marking a significant escalation in the industry-wide hard stance against leakers. Following Activision's recent shutdown of a Call of Duty leaker, Epic’s legal action confirms that gaming companies have had enough of confidential IP and trade secrets being shared ahead of official announcements. As confirmed today with a message on X, Epic Games "took legal action against a former contractor who repeatedly leaked confidential partner IP and trade secrets that they received while working with Epic." The publisher absolutely does "not allow this and will continue to take action when Epic team […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/epic-games-sues-former-contractor-and-known-fortnite-leaker-adirafninfo/
Assassin's Creed Unity has received a 60 FPS patch today for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S, which may have packed an undocumented bump to 4K resolution. While a previous-generation title, this update makes the 2014 classic relevant again for those wishing to experience the series' old, more straightforward gameplay formula. According to multiple online reports, today's Assassin's Creed Unity patch increases resolution up to 4K. While no one has made an actual pixel count, the game's PlayStation 5 update history mentions 4K resolution and 60 FPS gameplay. Some users, such as ResetERA's RayCharlizard, shared screenshots captured […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/assassins-creed-unity-ps5-xsx-patch-4k/
Yesterday, the official X (formerly Twitter) account for the United States White House published a video promoting its ongoing strikes on Iran, which contained footage and UI elements from Microsoft and Activision's popular shooter franchise, Call of Duty. The United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran this past weekend, which recent reports estimate have resulted in 1,230 casualties. Amidst the responses to the video, which began with Call of Duty footage followed by real-life footage of the strikes, Chance Glasco, one of the original founders of Infinity Ward and developer on Call of Duty said that the video was […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/call-of-duty-co-founder-says-activision-wanted-cod-about-iran-attacking-israel/
Here are Google’s latest AI updates from February 2026
For 20 years, the web has run on a simple trade: publish content that meets a person’s needs, rank in search, earn traffic, then monetize that traffic through products, services, affiliate referrals, or ads.
Zero-click answers and AI search are rewriting that relationship. The new question is whether AI will cite you as a source — and whether that visibility can turn into revenue.
To understand who gets included and who gets routed around, I ran over 200 AI visibility audits across 10 industries.
The pattern was consistent: Most sites are easy to parse, but hard to justify citing. And the industries that rely on discovery traffic the most are often the ones making themselves the hardest to access.
I ran 201 audits using the same rubric and captured an overall AI visibility score, plus four subscores:
The dataset included 201 audits across 10 industries:
Note that there was a page type skew — the sample is homepage-heavy (131 homepages, 13 articles, with the remainder a mix of pages). That matters because homepages tend to be marketing-heavy and evidence-light.
I also tracked access failures because “error” results are part of the story. 38 of the 201 audits (18.9%) returned an error, meaning the agent was likely blocked or couldn’t reliably access the content.
An additional eight audits were technically processed but scored 0 due to missing subscores, consistent with partial extraction or app-style rendering that yields little accessible content.
When I summarized score distributions, I focused on the successfully processed audits (163 sites), so “cannot access” didn’t get mixed with “low quality.” I treated error rate by industry as its own signal because it indicated whether AI systems could reliably use a site as a source.
The table below shows how the industries in the dataset performed in the audits.
| Rank | Industry | Error rate | Median overall | Median authority | Median extractability | At risk |
| 1 | Travel booking and trip planning | 33.3% | 45.5 | 31.0 | 52.0 | High |
| 2 | Job boards and career marketplaces | 40.0% | 64.0 | 44.0 | 74.0 | High |
| 3 | Legal directories and lead gen | 35.0% | 63.0 | 44.0 | 74.0 | High |
| 4 | Coupons and deals | 20.0% | 62.0 | 36.0 | 74.0 | High |
| 5 | Local directories and lead gen | 5.3% | 64.0 | 38.0 | 74.0 | Medium |
| 6 | Online courses and learning marketplaces | 30.0% | 67.5 | 46.5 | 80.0 | Medium |
| 7 | Health info and symptom lookups | 15.0% | 69.0 | 52.0 | 80.0 | Low |
| 8 | Personal finance comparison | 5.0% | 67.0 | 52.0 | 78.0 | Low |
| 9 | Affiliate product reviews | 0.0% | 69.5 | 54.0 | 74.0 | Low |
| 10 | Recipes and cooking content | 5.0% | 75.0 | 55.5 | 81.5 | Low |
The findings show that most websites aren’t built to be cited consistently. Here are the three numbers that matter.
38 of 201 sites (18.9%) returned an error. In some categories, it was far worse: job boards (40%), legal directories (35%), travel booking (33%), and course marketplaces (30%). In those spaces, a third to nearly half of the market is effectively AI-dark by default.
Legal directories had the highest AI blocking of any industry.
Across the 163 processed audits:
Translation: Most brands aren’t built to be reliably used and cited.
Median subscores across processed audits:
Most pages are easy to parse. Far fewer are easy to justify citing. Two repeated findings explain why:
That should change how you think about risk. More than losing traffic, the bigger threat is being removed from the consideration set.
Dig deeper: What 4 AI search experiments reveal about attribution and buying decisions
Industries disappear for three reasons. You can think of them as three failure modes.
If agents can’t consistently access your content, the model has less to work with and will either route around you or fill in the gaps from other sources.
What access failure looks like:
Why this causes vanishing:
Trust failure is quieter. The agent can access your page, parse it, and summarize it, but the page doesn’t provide enough proof for the model to confidently cite it as a source.
This was the dominant pattern in the completed audits. In plain language: Your content is readable, but it isn’t defensible.
The clearest proof of this showed up when I compared page types:
A polished homepage isn’t proof. If you want to be cited for anything beyond your brand name, a typical homepage alone isn’t enough. Evidence usually lives in articles, explainers, data pages, policy pages, and methodology pages.
Utility failure is the most painful. You might get included. You might get cited. But if your value is only information, AI can compress it into an answer, and the user never needs to visit your site.
Visibility determines whether you appear in the conversation. Utility determines whether appearing turns into revenue.
A practical way to think about it:
Access failure gets you excluded. Trust failure gets you skipped. Utility failure gets you summarized.
Once access, trust, and utility get viewed together, the vulnerable industries stop looking random.
The categories that repeatedly showed high risk in my dataset share three traits:
That’s why travel booking, job boards, legal directories, and coupon sites clustered as the most exposed categories in this dataset.
The bigger takeaway? Your website can be built in a way that invites exclusion, even if your business is healthy.
Dig deeper: Why every AI search study tells a different story
Some industries will feel this harder than others. A site funded primarily by high-volume informational traffic is more exposed to zero-click behavior. But even in those categories, the path forward is to stop selling information alone.
The big mistake right now is treating AI search like a ranking update, when it’s an economic update. The audits made two things obvious:
The threat is invisibility. You don’t win by hiding. You win by becoming cite-worthy and by building something the user still needs after the answer is delivered.
Trust plus utility is the new moat. Anything else is just playing from yesterday’s playbook.
Sony reportedly halts PC porting efforts for single-player PlayStation 5 games Recent years have seen Sony bring more and more of its classic PlayStation titles to PC, to the point that it created its PlayStation PC publishing unit in 2021 to support these efforts. Now, it looks like Sony has fallen out of love with […]
The post Sony shifts PC strategy towards console exclusivity appeared first on OC3D.
NVIDIA's CEO has talked about the 'agentic AI' inflection point at the Morgan Stanley conference, and he has called out OpenClaw as the "most important" software release of our times. NVIDIA's CEO Says that Agentic AI Has Brought Uses 1,000x Higher Tokens, Bringing In Immense Compute Demand Jensen has talked about AI being a "5-layer cake", and one of the more interesting layers that yields the most returns to hyperscalers and frontier labs is the applications layer. OpenClaw and AI agents are examples of how AI, when placed in a hyper-personalized environment, yields results that replicate human workloads. NVIDIA's CEO […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-ceo-says-openclaw-did-in-3-weeks-what-linux-took-30-years/
VR developer and publisher nDreams, the studio behind VR titles like Reach, Vendetta Forever, Synapse, Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord, and more, have just announced "a significant reduction in overall staffing levels," resulting in the closure of two of its internal studios, Near Light and Compass studios. Confirmed in a statement on the company's LinkedIn page, the layoffs will impact studios across nDreams' suite of teams as the company gets restructured to put nDreams Elevation at its core, though only the aforementioned Near Light and Compass will be shuttered. Between the studios, 78 developers are impacted by the closures. […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/vr-studio-ndreams-announces-significant-layoffs-shuts-down-two-internal-studios/
Apple has finally debuted its latest chronically hyped up budget offering, dubbed the MacBook Neo, replete with specs that barely qualify for 2016, let alone 2026. Of course, budget offerings almost always cut corners in some way or the other. But how do you justify two USB-C ports with wildly different characteristics and no way of knowing which is which until you actually plug in your peripheral? What about a heavily binned SoC, a hobbled trackpad, and pricing tiers that make an M3 MacBook Air appear like a godsend? Apple seems to have designed the MacBook Neo to specifically cater […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-just-debuted-a-glorified-piece-of-e-junk-and-called-it-macbook-neo/
A company that prides itself on its stringent focus on detail can often make head-scratching blunders that you’d never expect it to. On this occasion, one eagle-eyed individual caught Apple comparing a 15-inch M1 MacBook Air, a product that has never existed in its lineup, to the M5, which currently powers the technology giant’s latest portable Mac. Fortunately, the technology giant rectified the mistake, but not before someone posted it on social media for millions to see. Larger 15-inch MacBook Air models were added to the lineup after the M2’s release To remind you, Apple’s M1, which launched back in […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-accidentally-mentioned-non-existent-15-inch-m1-macbook-air-in-m5-comparison/
To combat the current GPU shortages due to higher VRAM prices, NVIDIA is reportedly bringing back its popular RTX 30 series budget GPU. Five-Year-Old GPU to Return to Shelves; AIBs Will Reportedly Start Getting the GPUs Between March 10 and March 20 It's remarkable how we are going back to older hardware, but it's one of the only measures left for hardware manufacturers to maintain a steady supply and meet the demand. Turing architecture-based GPU, GeForce RTX 3060, is about to make a comeback, as we reported recently. RTX 3060 has been one of the most popular graphics cards in […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-expected-to-make-a-comeback-in-mid-march/
Today, California-based independent developer Ember Lab announced that Kena: Bridge of Spirits will launch on Nintendo Switch 2 this Spring. Kena: Bridge of Spirits first launched on PlayStation platforms and PC in September 2021 and went on to win several awards, including Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie Game at The Game Awards 2021. On Wccftech, the game earned an 8 out of 10 score from reviewer Francesco De Meo, who wrote at the time: Despite featuring a very familiar experience inspired by The Legend of Zelda series, Kena: Bridge of Spirits manages to stand out from the competition […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/kena-bridge-spirits-nintendo-switch-2-spring-2026/
After celebrating its sixth anniversary last month, NVIDIA has prepared another large lineup of PC games for the GeForce NOW cloud platform in March. Throughout the month, NVIDIA is planning to add fifteen games to the library, starting with the following eight this week: The most interesting new releases are landing later this month, though, with Crimson Desert from Pearl Abyss leading the pack. The game will support NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution for GeForce NOW users with the Premium tier and also NVIDIA DLSS Multi Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction for GeForce NOW users with the Ultimate tier. Weirdly enough, […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/geforce-now-march-2026-lineup-crimson-desert-15-games/
The "upgraded" GeForce RTX 5050 is expected to arrive in June this year at the Computex event. NVIDIA Will Reportedly Debut its 9 GB RTX 5050 GPU at Computex; Same GPU, but Newer GDDR7 Memory With an Additional Gigabyte of VRAM Instead of increasing the VRAM to 12 GB, NVIDIA is straight up reducing RTX 5050's memory bus width to offer 9 GB VRAM capacity. The original version comes with 8 GB GDDR6 memory and is the only RTX 50 series GPU in the series to run on previous-gen GDDR memory. That said, with the new GPU planned for launch, […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5050-with-9-gb-gddr7-memory-rumored-to-debut-at-computex/
Superpollutants have been responsible for close to half of planetary warming, and without action they’ll continue to warm the planet rapidly in the decades to come.That’…
How content is structured in an article or blog post might not seem controversial. But, apparently, Google doesn’t want you to create bite-sized chunks of content simply to please LLMs. Called “chunking,” this technique helps get your content noticed by AI models and reflects how readers actually engage with online content.
Chunking may make content more retrievable or citable in AI search, but ultimately, it improves the flow of content and makes concepts easier for people to understand. Let’s talk about how chunking works and when to use it.
Chunking is the practice of organizing text into distinct, self-contained units of meaning. When content is chunked, information is segmented so each paragraph focuses on a single idea and contains everything the reader needs to understand the basics of that idea simply and quickly.
Someone should be able to read a single paragraph and grasp the concept without having to hunt for context in the surrounding words.
The recent criticism from Google suggests that the practice of chunking over-optimizes content, specifically so that it will show up in AI answers. The idea that people are writing specifically for AI assumes that what’s good for AI is somehow bad for human readers.
But really, chunking helps communicate ideas for both readers and search retrieval systems. When content is chunked, it doesn’t dumb down or artificially fragment ideas. It organizes information to match how people actually read online content, making articles easier to scan.
Chunking also helps AI systems because they operate at the passage level rather than the page level. For example, when a system needs to identify an answer for “how to measure keyword cannibalization,” a heading that says exactly that, followed by a focused paragraph, would create a clear match.
In contrast, when an answer to that same question is buried in a dense paragraph covering three other topics, that information gets diluted. The AI might see relevant keywords, but if the text meanders between ideas, it will have a lower confidence that the passage definitively answers the query.
Clear structure creates clear meaning.
Chunking helps both readers to scan content and AI systems to accurately identify what your content says.
Dig deeper: Chunk, cite, clarify, build: A content framework for AI search
When writing from scratch, integrate chunking into your process from the start.
However, it may not be worth your time to edit existing content solely to chunk it. You may find that some articles already follow chunking principles, even if they weren’t explicitly planned to do so. Others may be out of date or poorly structured, requiring more substantial rewrites.
If you want to chunk existing content, prioritize pieces that:
Skip chunking edits for content that:
If you have content that is impactful because it creates an emotional arc, chunking or breaking it down into discrete chunks could hurt the piece. If your content succeeds by carrying readers through a journey rather than letting them jump to an answer, preserve that flow.
For example:
Dig deeper: Chunks, passages and micro-answer engine optimization wins in Google AI Mode
A chunk in a piece of content should be long enough to explain one thought. This often results in shorter paragraphs — the defining feature is a singular focus, not the word count.
These focused paragraphs sit under clear headings. The heading tells the reader what to expect, and the chunks beneath it deliver on that expectation.
To include chunking in your writing, the most effective approach is to integrate it from the start.
Define for yourself or other writers which ideas or concepts in a given topic constitute a chunk, focusing on paragraphs and heading descriptions.
If using content briefs, make it clear in your outlines that each H2 or H3 should cover one complete concept and the content under that heading should fully explain the concept.
Focus your efforts on high-value pages first when editing existing content. Prioritize pages that receive traffic but struggle with engagement or pages that rank well but aren’t being cited.
Don’t let Google convince you that chunking is a hack. Chunking makes content work better for everyone and everything — from readers scanning for specific information to AI systems matching queries to answers.
Dig deeper: How to build a context-first AI search optimization strategy
You’ve probably heard developers talk about the DOM. Maybe you’ve even inspected it in DevTools or seen it referenced in Google Search Console.
But what, exactly, is it? And why should SEOs care? Let’s take a look at what it is, why it’s important, and how to best optimize it.
The Document Object Model (DOM) is a browser’s live, in-memory representation of your webpage. It acts as the interface that allows programs like JavaScript to interact with your content.
The DOM is organized as a hierarchical tree, similar to a family tree:
<body>, <p>, and <a> become branches (or “nodes”).This hierarchy is critical because it allows the browser (and search engines) to understand the relationship between different parts of your content. For example, proper hierarchical order lets your browser understand that a specific paragraph belongs to a specific heading.
The DOM itself is actually a JavaScript object structure stored in memory, but browsers show it to you as markup that looks very much like HTML.
You can see this HTML representation of the DOM by right-clicking on a page and selecting Inspect > Elements. This is called the Elements panel. I’ve outlined it in the red box below:
In the Elements panel inside DevTools, you can:
Note that DevTools doesn’t necessarily show you what Googlebot sees. I’ll circle back to what that means later in this article.
To understand why the DOM often looks different from your HTML file, you first need to understand how the browser creates it. That begins with your browser building the DOM tree.
When your browser requests a page, the server sends back an HTML file. The browser reads this response line by line and translates it into “tokens” (tags like <html>, <body>, <div>).
These tokens are then converted into distinct “nodes,” which serve as the building blocks of the page. The browser links these nodes together in a parent-child hierarchy to form the tree structure.
You can visualize the process like this:
It’s important to know that the browser simultaneously creates a tree-like structure for CSS, known as the CSS Object Model (CSSOM), which allows JavaScript to read and modify CSS dynamically. However, for SEO, the CSSOM matters far less than the DOM.
JavaScript often executes while the tree is still being built. If the browser encounters a <script> tag (without defer or async attributes, which allow for the script to load asynchronously), it pauses construction, runs the script, and then finishes building the tree.
During this execution, scripts can modify the DOM by injecting new content, removing nodes, or changing links. This is why the HTML you see in View Source often looks different from what you see in the Elements panel.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Each time I click the button below, it adds a new paragraph element to the DOM, updating what the user sees.
Your HTML is the starting point, a blueprint, if you will, but the DOM is what the browser builds from that blueprint.
Once the DOM is created, it can change dynamically without ever touching the underlying HTML file.
Dig deeper: JavaScript SEO: How to make dynamic content crawlable
Modern search engines, such as Google, render pages using a headless browser (Chromium). This means that they evaluate the DOM rather than just the HTML response.
When Googlebot crawls a page, it first parses the HTML, then uses the Web Rendering Service to execute JavaScript and take a DOM snapshot for indexing.
The process looks like this:
However, there are important limitations to understand and keep in mind for your website:
Looking ahead to a world that’s becoming more AI-dependent, AI agents will increasingly need to interact with websites to complete tasks for users, not just crawl for indexing.
These agents will need to navigate your DOM, click elements, fill forms, and extract information to complete their tasks, making a well-structured, accessible DOM even more critical than ever.
The URL inspection tool in Google Search Console shows how Google renders your page’s DOM, also known in SEO terms as the “rendered HTML,” and highlights any issues Googlebot might have encountered.
This tool is crucial because it reveals the version of the page Google indexes, not just what your browser renders. If Google can’t see it, it can’t index it, which could impact your SEO efforts.
In GSC, you can access this by clicking URL inspection, entering a URL, and selecting View Crawled Page.
The panel below, marked in red, displays Googlebot’s version of the rendered HTML.
If you don’t have access to the property, you can also use Google’s Rich Results Test, which lets you do the same thing for any webpage.
Dig deeper: Google Search Console URL Inspection tool: 7 practical SEO use cases
The shadow DOM is a web standard that allows developers to encapsulate parts of the DOM. Think of it as a separate, isolated DOM tree attached to an element, hidden from the main DOM.
The shadow tree starts with a shadow root, and elements attach to it the same way they do in the light (normal) DOM. It looks like this:
Why does this exist? It’s primarily used to keep styles, scripts, and markup self-contained. Styles defined here cannot bleed out to the rest of the page, and vice versa. For example, a chat widget or feedback form might use shadow DOM to ensure its appearance isn’t affected by the host site’s styles.
I’ve added a shadow DOM to our sample page below to show what it looks like in practice. There’s a new div in the HTML file, and JavaScript then adds a div with text inside it.
When rendering pages, Googlebot flattens both shadow DOM and light DOM and treats shadow DOM the same as other DOM content once rendered.
As you can see below, I put this page’s URL into Google’s Rich Results Test to view the rendered HTML, and you can see the paragraph text is visible.
Follow these practices to ensure search engines can crawl, render, and index your content effectively.
Your most important content must be in the DOM and appear without user interaction. This is imperative for proper indexing. Remember, Googlebot renders the initial state of your page but doesn’t click, type, or hover on elements.
Content that is added to the DOM only after these interactions may not be visible to crawlers. One caveat is that accordions and tabs are fine as long as the content already exists in the DOM.
As you can see in the screenshot below, the paragraph text is visible in the Elements panel even when the accordion tab has not been opened or clicked.
As we all know, links are fundamental to SEO. Search engines look for standard <a> tags with href attributes to discover new URLs. To ensure they discover your links, ensure the DOM shows real links. Otherwise, you risk crawl dead ends.
You should also avoid using JavaScript click handlers (e.g., <button onclick="...">) for navigation, as crawlers generally won’t execute them.
Like this:
Use heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) in logical hierarchy and wrap content in semantic elements like <article>, <section>, and <nav> that correctly describe the site’s content. Search engines use this structure to understand pages.
A common issue with page builders is making DOMs full of nested <div> elements without semantic meaning. This does little to help search engines understand your page and sets up problems for you or future devs trying to maintain the code on your site.
Ensure to maintain the same semantic standards you’d follow in static HTML.
Here’s a snippet of semantic HTML as an example:
<!-- Semantic HTML -->
<nav>
<ul>
<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="/about">About</a></li>
</ul>
</nav>Here’s an example of “div soup” HTML that’s non-semantic and harder for search engines and assistive technologies to understand.
<!-- Non-Semantic HTML -->
<div class="nav">
<div class="nav-list">
<div class="nav-item"><a href="/">Home</a></div>
<div class="nav-item"><a href="/about">About</a></div>
</div>
</div>Keep the DOM lean, ideally under ~ 1,500 nodes, and avoid excessive nesting. Remove unnecessary wrapper elements to reduce style recalculation, layout, and paint costs.
Here’s an example from web.dev of excessive nesting and an unnecessarily deep DOM:
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<!-- Contents -->
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>While DOM size is not a Core Web Vital itself, excessive and deeply nested DOMs can indirectly impact performance, especially on lower-end devices.
To mitigate these impacts:
A workable understanding of the DOM can help you not only diagnose SEO issues, but also effectively communicate with developers and others on your team.
We know that the DOM impacts Core Web Vitals, crawlability, and indexing. As AI agents increasingly interact with websites, DOM optimization becomes more critical. It’s important to master these fundamentals now to stay ahead of evolving search and AI technologies.
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