Online shoe and apparel company Allbirds nearly went bankrupt, but now it's reemerging as an AI company that will sell you some GPU space. But what's really going on here?
โThe best thing you can find online is a reason to go offline,โ according to new spots that will run across multiple media channels beginning in May.
A new report from NBC said Apple privately threatened to take the artificial intelligence app off its platform in January due to deepfake nudification concerns.
The cuts will impact about 1,000 and also include closing more than 300 open rules as the company looks to artificial intelligence to improve efficiency.
Starfield has already been out for PC and Xbox for almost three years, recently making an appearance on Sony's PlayStation 5 as well. Now, according to a recent report by Universo Nintendo, it seems as though the game will also get a Nintendo Switch 2 launch in the near future. The report cites a listing from the Taiwan Entertainment Software Rating Information database, revealing that Starfield has been rated for the Nintendo Switch 2 in Taiwan. Bethesda has not yet announced a Switch 2 launch for Starfield, but regulatory leaks, like this Taiwanese rating, are common precursors to game launches.
That said, there's also no indication of a launch date for the Switch 2 version of Starfield, nor do we know what sort of graphical compromises will need to be made to run Bethesda's space adventure, which requires a minimum of an Intel Core i7-6800K or AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 5700 to run on PC. Reports from users on ProtonDB, however, have not had an altogether positive experience, with most reporting getting under 30 FPS, despite running it at the lowest quality settings with FSR 3 enabled and at 50% resolution scale.
The specifications area for its flagship smartphones is where Samsung has been criticized for taking a backseat, allowing Chinese competitors to overtake the company in this specific area. Fortunately, the company is introducing a major storage upgrade for its Galaxy S27 lineup thatโll make them much faster and more responsive than previous launches, not to mention provide a major boost for AI-related operations. In short, a 2nm chipset upgrade isnโt the only change that buyers will look forward to next year. Some Galaxy S27 models are to be equipped with Samsungโs next-generation UFS 5.0 storage, but no major changes to [โฆ]
Looties is a marketplace where developers and tech enthusiasts buy and sell conference swag, limited-edition merch, and developer gear from events they love. It lets collectibles circulate long after the booths have been packed away.
For sellers, it provides a way to instantly monetize unused gear that would otherwise gather dust. For buyers, it offers rare access to exclusive items that were previously out of reach. By making these items visible, accessible, and tradable, Looties creates a new space for a global community of millions of professionals at the intersection of second-hand commerce, tech culture, and professional identity.
Fraudulent iCloud emails use urgency and imitation tactics to trick users into revealing sensitive information through malicious links and deceptive interfaces.
Microsoftโs AI expansion is driving large-scale methane gas deals, increasing emissions, and raising concerns about energy costs, health risks, and climate commitments
A federal jury found that Live Nation has acted illegally as a monopoly -- but the company just came to a tentative settlement with the DOJ last month.
In partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank, Google is releasing a new AI report, announcing $5 million Google.org funding and launching a new AI training acโฆ
A Steam backend update suggests expanded price history tracking could be on the way. The feature highlights a gap on Xbox, where users still rely on third party tools to track game pricing.
Xbox Game Camp returns in 2026 with a new program in Minneapolis, offering a 12 week training course for young developers to build games, learn key skills, and create a portfolio with Microsoft.
Alienware has launched the AW2726DM, a 27-inch QD-OLED gaming monitor priced at $350. This makes it one of the most affordable entries into QD-OLED displays to date, with Alienware saying it is targeting users looking to move beyond traditional LCD panels. The monitor features a 2560 x 1440 Fast QD-OLED panel with a 240 Hz refresh rate and a 0.03 ms GtG response time. It covers 99% of the DCI-P3 color space and supports HDR10, alongside AdaptiveSync and AMD FreeSync Premium. Connectivity includes DisplayPort 1.4 for full 240 Hz operation, as well as two HDMI ports limited to 1440p at 120 Hz. The AW2726DM includes a fully adjustable stand with height, tilt, swivel, and pivot adjustments, as well as an anti-reflective screen coating and wide 178ยฐ viewing angles. A built-in microphone is also integrated.
There are a couple of things worth mentioning. SDR brightness is rated at just 200 cd/mยฒ, which is on the low end for a QD-OLED panel as most competing 27-inch models do better here. That figure will also affect peak HDR brightness despite the monitor supporting HDR10. The other notable omission is G-Sync compatibility, which is absent here. AMD FreeSync Premium and VESA AdaptiveSync are supported as mentioned above, but there is no NVIDIA certification. The AW2726DM positions itself as a lower-cost entry into QD-OLED, though it does so with a more restrained feature set compared to the usual Alienware premium offerings. The monitor was quietly announced in a blog post that was mostly focused on the Alienware Collegiate Clash 2026 university esports event.
A leak from early 2026 claimed that NVIDIA would be pausing production of the GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti for as long as six months starting in the beginning of 2026, with the leaker predicting that supply would start to worsen in the beginning of 2026 and relief only coming in Q4. While it seems as though this may not have come to pass as predicted, a new rumor claims that supply for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB may be halted for two weeks at the end of April 2026. As Gazlog reports, the alleged production halt is as a result of oversupply of the entry-level GPUs.
This production and supply pause means that third-party GPU vendors will not receive 5060 Ti GPUs during this pause, although production is slated to resume in May. The running theory is that the oversupply is causing prices of the 5060 to decline, and the production pause would create artificial scarcity and return the prices to previous levels. Curiously, this news comes hot on the heels of news that NVIDIA may be launching a new 9 GB variant of the RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti near Computex around May or June. It should be pointed out that this is merely a rumor and may not come to pass at all, although leaks that come out of Board Channels generally do carry a decent amount of weight.
A popular brand of WordPress plugins was recently weaponized to download and spread malicious code. The new, potentially massive supply chain attack was unveiled by Austin Ginder, a WordPress developer and founder of the WP hosting service Anchor. The entrepreneur found that the threat was already affecting some Anchor customers,...
The past several months havenโt been kind to Verizon Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman, who has had to brave through widespread network outages, layoffs, and other hardships to ensure that the biggest network in the U.S. doesnโt lose its grip on that title. However, when speaking at the Semafor World Economy conference held in Washington, Schulman implies that a mindset change in the way customers are treated is required to ensure the networkโs longevity. Schulman also states that while Verizon is objectively the best network, all the basic stuff to improve the experience is required, as thatโs where the competition [โฆ]
This ultra-compact mini PC is available in various configurations, ranging from entry-level 6-core to high-end 16-core Panther Lake chips. MSI Introduces Panther Lake-Based Ultra-Power-Efficient and Ultra-Compact Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG Mini PC, Starting at $569 Popular hardware manufacturer, MSI, has launched its latest Intel Panther Lake-based mini PC called Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG, which is one of its most compact mini PCs yet. Aimed at enterprise and business environments, the Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG brings a powerful configuration in a tiny box that measures just 0.51 liters in volume. The machine is super lightweight and incredibly small, making it easier [โฆ]
Another golden opportunity presents itself in the form of the AirPods Pro 3, Appleโs latest and greatest wireless in-ear earbuds, which launched at $249 and are now available for $199.99 on Amazon, making it yet another time that these earphones have dropped down to their best price yet. While we agree that Sonyโs WF-1000XM6 are truly remarkable alternatives, even with a 10 percent discount, these are listed for $298ย on the online retailer, making the AirPods Pro 3 a much better option by miles. Apple uses the same H2 on the AirPods Pro 3 as it has on the AirPods Pro [โฆ]
NVIDIA CEO has stated that even if AI didn't exist, his company would've still been huge, but says that he is happy for the fact that AI is a reality. NVIDIA CEO Talks AI, Competition, China, & Supply Chain Moat In Podcast, Says Accelerated Computing Has Been Their Secret Sauce In a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang talked about several aspects of the company. He emphasized NVIDIA's strategy in becoming a global AI superpower, while also talking about the various aspects, such as the tightening competition from ASICs, the role of China, and the supply chain moat. [โฆ]
Curyo is a decentralized reputation platform where verified humans claim a privacy-preserving Voter ID and rate content through blind, stake-based voting. The main idea is to create a new rating system for the age of AI. BetaList users benefit from additional reputation tokens.
A spinoff of season 7 featuring Amaya Espinal, Bryan Arenales and Nic Vansteenberghe, here's how to watch Love Island: Beyond the Villa season 2 online.
Alienware, in collaboration with Team Liquid, has introduced its first custom keycap and mousepad collection, themed around the Star Wars universe. The set is designed primarily for the Alienware Pro Series keyboards, but remains compatible with most modern layouts. The keycap set uses Cherry-profile, MX-compatible PBT caps with dye-sublimated legends, and includes a 143-key base kit (141 for the space graphic set). Coverage extends to standard ANSI layouts and basic UK ISO support, including common 6.25u bottom rows. While built with the Alienware Pro Wireless Gaming Keyboard in mind, a 75% board using pre-lubricated linear switches with a 40 g actuation force, the set should work with a wide range of mechanical keyboards.
Alongside the keycaps, Alienware and Team Liquid are offering four matching mousepads themed around locations from the Star Wars universe, including Endor, Dagobah, Kamino, and a generic Galactic Conflict scene. The artwork draws inspiration from concepts by Ralph McQuarrie, whose illustrations played a key role in the visual identity of the original Star Wars trilogy. The mousepads measure 88.9 x 40.64 x 0.3 cm, feature a cloth surface with stitched edges and an anti-slip rubber base. The keycap set is priced at $75, the mousepads at $40 and both are available on the Team Liquid US official website.
Since Bungie launched Marathon, there have been two main camps in the online discussions about the new extraction shooterโthose praising the game's PvP focus and those begging for more PvE action. With Marathon's latest update, however, Bungie has introduced a new mechanic to appease those in the latter camp. The C.A.R.R.I. Protocol is a new mechanic that encourages co-operative play, rewarding solo players and cooperative crews for completing objectives and extracting together. The system will reward cooperative players with CyberAcme Commendations, which is a new currency for players to spend in the C.A.R.R.I. Armory, and the rewards will focus on making the game less punishing for new and intermediate players.
CyberAcme Commendations are earned when players complete contract objectives in a crew or when solo players complete contract objectives or extract solo, and bonus Commendations will be rewarded for extracting with other players. The C.A.R.R.I. Armory contains a rotation of weapons, Salvage Crates with Salvage or Reputation, and other upgrades, and there will be daily deals in the armory. The C.A.R.R.I. Protocol will be active starting with Patch 1.0.6 and run until the end of Season 1. In addition to the new rewards, Marathon players will now also have access to Mercy Kit, which is a med kit designed specifically to healed down players not in your squad. The idea is that, if players decide to form an allegiance with another player they've already downed, they can revive the player and turn them into an ally. This depends on proximity chat, which is now easier to use with a new "toggle to open" function that also launches in the same update.
Physical books may seem like an odd market for a tech-first company, but it is perhaps not as far-fetched once you dig in a bit. Spotify already offers audiobooks, and has grown its library from 150,000 titles to over 700,000 in just two years. Offering another way into books complements...
The entire computer industry is sweating profusely over the existence of the MacBook Neo, because Appleโs competitors are well aware that they cannot materialize anything that can compete with the Cupertino giantโs portable in the $599 bracket. It appears that the companyโs only rival at this time is demand and how well it can maintain shipments in these few months. Education is a massive target market for Apple, and it has highlighted just how well the MacBook Neo is selling in its latest promotional video. The MacBook Neo is selling exceptionally well, to the point that Apple has had to [โฆ]
T-Mobile has reportedly terminated its free in-flight Wi-Fi service for businesses, replacing it with a paid tier that entails relatively slower speeds, as per anecdotal evidence. T-Mobile's double-whammy: Free in-flight Wi-Fi for enterprise customers ends, paid service reportedly entails slower speeds As per a T-Mobile notice that is doing the rounds on Reddit, T-Mobile has apparently ended its free in-flight Wi-Fi service for some enterprise customers. The message reads: "Due to changes in airline Wi-Fi programs, free in-flight Wi-Fi may no longer be available on some flights and airlines starting April 13, 2026." Do note that T-Mobile offers its free [โฆ]
Following the recent debut of PRAGMATA and Resident Evil Requiem, the first two RE Engine games to support path tracing, CAPCOM's GDC 2026 presentation titled 'Real-Time Path Tracing in RE ENGINE for Resident Evil Requiem and PRAGMATA' is well worth exploring. The presentation is available on the NVIDIA Game Developer YouTube channel, and that's no coincidence: NVIDIA helped a great deal with the addition of path tracing to CAPCOM's engine. Indeed, the two speakers were Hitoshi Mishima from CAPCOM's RE Engine team, who covered the architectural and artistic implementation, and Calvin Shu, a NVIDIA GeForce developer technology engineer who covered [โฆ]
The flagship Zen 5 X3D chip gets benchmarked ahead of the official launch and here's how it performs with air cooling. AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Appears on HWBot for the First Time in 7-Zip and Cinebench Benchmarking The fastest Zen 5 X3D chip has already been tested by someone, as can be seen from the uploaded benchmarks on HWBot. AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition, which was revealed two weeks ago, was tested by a Bulgarian user, "Stoikov". There are currently four benchmarks available on the HWBot website, including 7-Zip, Cinebench 2026 Single and Multi-Threaded, and Cinebench R23 Multi-core. The [โฆ]
Solvera is an AI-powered marketing platform that launches and manages Facebook and Google ads for your business. It audits your website, maps your sales funnel, and provides built-in analytics and AI assistants that guide setup and strategy. AI Budget Guard monitors performance 24/7, pausing wasteful ads and protecting your spend. The platform connects via official Meta and Google APIs, offers clear ROI tracking, and supports multilingual campaigns, with a 30-day free trial and scalable plans.
Todo4you is a project management platform combining a clean Kanban board with real-time collaboration and customizable workflows. Drag and drop tickets, switch to a sortable table view, and track priorities, deadlines, assignees, tags, checklists, and attachments in one place. It includes chat, roles, comments, blockers, notifications, Gantt charts, estimation, time tracking, an API, and automations. Connect Git providers, Slack, and Telegram, import from Trello or Jira, and stay compliant with GDPR with data hosted in Germany and a company based in the Netherlands.
Threat actorsย have beenย observed weaponizing n8n, a popular artificial intelligence (AI) workflow automation platform, to facilitate sophisticated phishing campaigns and deliver malicious payloads or fingerprint devices by sending automatedย emails.
"By leveraging trusted infrastructure, these attackers bypass traditional security filters, turning productivity tools into delivery
The NBA Playoffs kick off this weekend, and if you're looking for a new TV, here are 11 deals I recommend, including up to $1,700 off 4K, QLED, and OLED TVs.
Two of Apple's biggest execs have talked about the future of spatial computing in a new interview โand it sounds like there's something in those smart glasses rumors.
Objection, a Thiel-backed startup, aims to use AI to judge journalism, letting users pay to challenge stories. Critics warn it could chill whistleblowers and reshape how media accountability works.
When Grammy-nominated singer-songwriterย Aloe Blaccย got COVID despite being vaccinated and boosted, he tried to fund research for a better solution.ย Whatย heย quicklyย foundย out? Youย canโtย just write a check in biotech. Regulators require a commercialization plan, and philanthropyย doesnโtย move science through clinical trials or get you a license on university IP. Now,ย heโsย bootstrapping a cancer drug platform targeting pancreatic cancer, a disease that [โฆ]
The March 2026 Google core update drove far higher ranking volatility than the December 2025 core update. Nearly 80% of top-three results shifted, and almost one in four top-10 pages fell out of the top 100, according to SE Ranking data shared exclusively with Search Engine Land.
The data. Volatility increased across every ranking tier.
In the top 3, 79.5% of URLs changed positions, up from 66.8% in December. In the top 10, 90.7% shifted, compared to 83.1%.
Stability dropped sharply. Only 20.5% of top 3 URLs held their exact position, down from 33.1%. In the top 10, that fell to 9.3%, from 16.9%.
Churn intensified at the top. About 24.1% of pages ranking in the top 10 fell out of the top 100 entirely, versus 14.7% after the December update.
Based on historical patterns and the scale of movement, most volatility was likely driven by the core update, with the spam update amplifying disruption.
That overlap likely skews direct comparisons to December, though March still appeared more volatile.
More core update analysis. Meanwhile, independent analysis by Aleyda Solis, using Sistrix data from March 26 to April 11, found a consistent shift in where visibility concentrates. Rankings appeared to move from intermediary sites toward stronger destination sources. Website types gaining search visibility:
Official and institutional.
Specialist and niche.
Established brands.
Dominant platforms.
Losses were more common among aggregators, directories, and comparison-driven sites.
Winners and losers. Among the vertical shifts Solis highlighted:
Dictionary and language reference sites declined, while larger reference platforms and major destinations gained visibility.
Job aggregators like ZipRecruiter and Glassdoor lost ground, while employer sites and specialized platforms like USAJobs and Amazon.jobs surged.
Government and institutional domains, including Census.gov and BLS.gov, saw strong gains on fact-driven queries.
Travel and real estate visibility shifted away from broad discovery platforms toward stronger brands and primary destinations.
Health results were re-sorted. Broad consumer health sites declined, while clinical, research-driven, and specialist sources gained.
One exception: YouTube had the largest visibility loss in the dataset.
Why we care. The data suggests Googleโs March 2026 core update raised the bar for ranking. Strong brands, owned data, and direct query value won. Intermediaries now look increasingly exposed.
Automation doesnโt fail on its own โ it does exactly what itโs trained to do. The problem is that when Google Ads is fed incomplete, misaligned, or overly broad signals, it can optimize toward the wrong outcome faster than most advertisers realize.
In our second installment of SMX Now, our new monthly series, Ameet Khabra of Hop Skip Media will break down a real account where a 417% jump in conversions turned out to be the wrong kind of success. Sheโll use that case study to explain the four key ways automation drift enters an account: signal drift, query drift, inventory drift, and creative drift.
Youโll leave with a practical framework for diagnosing drift early, understanding where human oversight matters most, and managing automation more deliberately so it works toward real business goals โ not just platform-reported wins.
Several discounts have been discovered for the Seagate Storage Expansion Cards for Xbox, giving people a chance to increase the storage space of their Xbox's (and PC's via a special peripheral) for less.
ID@Xbox director Guy Richards says Xbox Game Pass boosts game discovery and can drive sales beyond Xbox platforms, highlighting its wider impact across the industry.
NVIDIA today announced the world's first family of open source quantum AI models, NVIDIA Ising, designed to help researchers and enterprises build quantum processors capable of running useful applications. To achieve useful quantum applications at scale, significant breakthroughs are needed in quantum processor calibration and quantum error correction. AI is key for turning today's quantum processors into large-scale, reliable computers. Open models empower developers to build high-performance AI while maintaining total control over their data and infrastructure.
Named after a landmark mathematical model that dramatically simplified the understanding of complex physical systems, the NVIDIA Ising family provides high-performance, scalable AI tools for quantum error correction and calibration โ two of the most critical challenges in building hybrid-quantum classical systems. Ising models run the world's best quantum processor calibration and enable researchers to tackle much larger, more complex problems with quantum computers by delivering up to 2.5x faster performance and 3x higher accuracy for the decoding process needed for quantum error correction.
Sony recently announced sweeping price increases for the PlayStation 5, which meant that, as of April 2, the PS5 base would cost $649.99, while the Digital Edition would cost $599.99, and the PS5 Pro rose to a whopping $899.99. According to industry analyst, Mat Piscatella of Circana Reseach, the announcement of a price increase resulted in a buying rush for the PlayStation 5 towards the end of March and during the first week of April.
As a result of this buying rush, PlayStation 5 sales reached an annual high for 2026 during the first week of April. The increase in sales amounted to a nearly 100% increase in year-over-year console hardware sales when compared to the same week in 2025. Part of this increase in sales can almost certainly be explained by the threat of further price increases down the line, which are expected to result in launch pricing of the PS6 sitting at around $800. With no end to the current DRAM supply issues in sight, it makes sense that some prospective PS5 buyers would want to get hold of the hardware before they are priced out, although it remains to be seen how Sony plays the launch of the PS6.
Book of Travels is a highly stylized "serene" MMO that launched to Steam Early Access in October 2021. Despite an interesting concept, standout art style, and the developer's best efforts, Book of Travels has mostly failed to meet the lofty expectations the studio set for the game, with the studio, Might and Delight, having laid off more than half its staff shortly after a challenging launch. Since then, player counts have dwindled, ultimately resulting in an announcement on 15 April that the servers for Book of Travels will be shut down on July 31, 2026.
Book of Travels will not be shutting down, however. Instead, Might and Delight has issued an update to implement an offline mode and make the game more friendly to single-player gameplay. The studio has also opened the game up to the modding community and added a modding channel to the official Discord in order to work with the modding community on mod support. Book of Travels will also transition from being an Early Access title to being a complete game, and Might and Delight has reduced the price from $29.99 to $4.99. The studio notes that "We are truly sad that this project didn't become all that we wanted it to be. We hope that with this last push, the game can be as good as it possibly could be given the circumstances, and that it can continue to be played for a long time."
According to well-known tipster Jaykihn, Intel's upcoming Nova Lake-S desktop CPU lineup will include at least one SKU featuring an integrated graphics chip with 12 Xe3P cores. Preliminary information from the tipster suggests the chip will feature 16 CPU cores, including four Coyote Cove performance cores, eight Arctic Wolf efficiency...
Alienware makes some of the best gaming monitors on the market, though they are not necessarily the cheapest. Now, the Dell-owned brand is taking a different approach by introducing a more affordable QD-OLED monitor with some unusual trade-offs in its hardware specifications. Getting a modern OLED panel for under $500...
Recordly is a desktop app for recording and editing screen captures with motion-driven presentation tools built in. Recordly has emerged as one of the most compelling free alternatives to paid tools like Screen Studio, offering smooth cursor tracking, automatic zoom effects, and clean motion.
Intel's Xe3P graphics architecture will focus on Crescent Island discrete GPUs for AI & Workstation, while missing out on the Arc gaming family. Intel Xe3P Goes Pro & AI With Crescent Island Discrete GPUs, Arc Gaming Lineup Missing In Action Intel's Xe3 GPU architecture has been phenomenal for Panther Lake CPUs, and as the blue team continues to develop its graphics architectures, there's some good news and bad news for the next-gen discrete GPU family. According to Jaykihn, Intel's Xe3P, the successor to Xe3, will feature discrete GPU options. These graphics series will be branded under the Crescent Island lineup. [โฆ]
In an era of price gouging and intentional sabotaging of one's competitors, as Apple appears to be doing right now, Qualcomm is seemingly taking the rare moral high ground by eschewing deliberately hobbling the vanilla Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chip just to push OEMs towards its pricey 'Pro' counterpart. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chip appears good enough for most OEMs, muddying the demand outlook for its Pro variant The Weibo-based tipster, Digital Chat Station, has just penned an interesting post, highlighting the minimized disparity between the vanilla Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chip and its Pro counterpart [โฆ]
Inflowave was built out of my own frustration managing 30 people with 5 IG accounts each. I ended that. When someone asks "How to scale our SMM Agency," I want the answer to be "Inflowave." That's my goal for 2026.
Lolaloos lets children create personalized stories with their parents. Kids choose the place, hero, villain, age, and language, and Lolaloos generates a unique, illustrated book in minutes. They can create their own character to start adventures. Stories can be read on any device or downloaded for printing. Lolaloos supports English, Spanish, French, and German, so you can create a story in one language and translate or download it in others.
Don't dismiss these gripping crime dramas on cable TV just because we're in the streaming service era โ especially when there's an easy way to combine the two.
Lowe's has a massive spring sale, which is basically like a Memorial Day preview, thanks to huge savings on appliances, patio furniture, grills, lawn mowers, and more.
Windows 11 Recall was delayed in 2024 due to security flaws, and those same issues are being discovered now, despite Microsoft's promise to secure user data.
Google has launched a native Gemini app for macOS, bringing its AI chatbot to the desktop with screen sharing, quick access shortcuts, and built-in image and video generation.
Motorola has sought a permanent injunction restraining the defendants from publishing or sharing what it describes as false or defamatory content about its products, including reviews, videos, comments, and boycott campaigns.
Airwallex, valued at $8 billion, is launching a point-of-sale product that lets businesses accept in-person payments in multiple countries via a single platform.
Google is giving advertisers more control when appealing disapproved ads in bulk โ a small but meaningful update that could save time and reduce accidental resubmissions.
Driving the news. Google has added a new option in its bulk ad review workflow that lets advertisers select ads from specific campaigns when requesting a policy re-review.
Previously, advertisers appealing disapproved ads in bulk often had to resubmit all eligible ads across an account โ including older campaigns that hadnโt been updated.
That created extra work and could clutter the review process with ads that werenโt actually fixed.
Whatโs new. Advertisers can now click a new โSelect eligible campaignsโ option on the Google Ads policy violations page when filing a bulk appeal.
That means they can:
send only recently fixed ads for review,
avoid including outdated campaigns,
and streamline the appeal process.
Why we care. Bulk appeals are often used after widespread disapprovals or policy issues. Being able to narrow submissions by campaign should make the process faster, more precise, and easier to manage at scale.
For agencies and large accounts, the update could also reduce the risk of confusion when handling multiple policy fixes at once.
The bottom line. This isnโt a flashy product launch, but itโs the kind of workflow improvement advertisers have been asking for โ giving teams more control and less friction when fixing disapproved ads.
First spotted. This update was first spotted by Hana Kobzovรก of PPC News Feed.
Intel reportedly plans to extend LGA-1700โs lifespan with โanother Raptor Lake Refreshโ According to the leaker Jaykihn, Intel is reportedly planning to release โanother Raptor Lake Refreshโ to extend the lifespan of its LGA1700 CPU socket. This follows Intelโs effort to release more LGA1700 motherboards that support DDR4 and/or DDR5 memory. Given the worldโs ongoing [โฆ]
GMKtec showcased its latest AI-focused mini PC workstations based on Intel and AMD platforms at an AliExpress event in Shenzhen. The current lineup builds on the EVO-T2 series introduced in mid-March during Intel's Core Ultra (Panther Lake) launch event in Shanghai. The EVO-T2S is based on the Core Ultra X7 358H, featuring a 16-core design and up to 180 TOPS of AI compute. The system pairs LPDDR5X-8533 memory with Phison aiDAPTIV+ PCIe 5.0 SSDs and uses a vapor-chamber cooling solution for up to 60 W. It is positioned for local AI inference workloads, including large language models, alongside general high-end desktop use. The AMD-based EVO-X2 series is pretty well known as it was launched a year ago using the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor with 16 cores, 32 threads, and an XDNA 2 NPU rated at up to 126 TOPS. It supports up to 128 GB of LPDDR5X memory, includes 10 GbE networking, and is designed to handle both AI workloads and GPU-accelerated applications, with multi-display support for up to four 4K outputs.
What's more interesting is how pricing has changed for those Mini PCs since the initial announcements. The EVO-X2 originally launched last year with the top-end 128 GB model starting at $1,999, is now listing the 64 GB + 1 TB configuration at $1,999, while the 128 GB + 2 TB variant now reaches $3,299. On the Intel side, the EVO-T2S with Core Ultra X7 358H, 64 GB RAM, and 1 TB storage is currently listed at $1,899, discounted from an earlier $2,399 price point. Worth mentioning that GMKtec isn't yet listing other memory options, other than the 64 GB for its EVO-T2S, neither availability nor pricing for the Core Ultra X9 388H model.
At Slimbook, we continue working to take our systems to the next level. That's why we are pleased to announce a new partnership agreement with PNY Technologies, one of the most internationally recognized manufacturers of memory, storage solutions, and graphics cards. Since 2015, Slimbook has established itself as a leading Spanish brand in the design and development of optimized computers, especially valued for their compatibility with Linux distributions and their focus on performance and reliability.
Thanks to this new collaboration, PNY becomes a technology partner and key component supplier for Slimbook systems, including:
Under the deal, Meta has committed to an initial deployment of 1 gigawatt of MTIA capacity and plans to ramp to multiple gigawatts of Broadcom-based accelerators as its AI footprint grows. Broadcom said that the chips will be the first AI silicon manufactured on a 2-nanometer process.
Tiny Corp, the same company that built the tinybox AI accelerator, has written its own Nvidia GPU driver completely from scratch. It's called TinyGPU, and it's an open-source macOS kernel extension. Better yet, Apple has signed off on it. That means you don't need workarounds like setting up a virtual...
Apple intends to equip the iPad Air with an OLED screen as soon as next year, harmonizing the display specs of the entire iPad lineup with the exception of the base iPad, which will continue to sport an LCD screen for now. Apple to launch an OLED iPad Air as soon as 2027, with the production of the new display panels slated to commence by late 2026 or early 2027 According to ETNews, Apple will transition the iPad Air to an OLED screen by early next year, with Samsung Display expected to commence the mass production of these display panels [โฆ]
Chinaโs YMTC is expected to start operations at its Phase 3 Wuhan fab late this year as the first leading-edge memory plant built to comply with Beijing's unwritten 50% tooling requirement.
Your Steam games are about to get some new glanceable information next to their price boxes, according to recent changes discovered in the client's backend. Valve might be adding a 30-day price tracker to the platform, letting you see if the game currently costs the lowest it has been in the last month.
It almost goes without saying that Black Sails is the best pirate TV show of all time. But while it's leaving Netflix, you can still stream it for free.
In the early days of the web and my career, web architecture was simple: we built โfiling cabinetโ websites designed around a single, grand entryway. Visitors arrived at your homepage, a.k.a. the โfront door,โ and navigated through the site to find what they needed.
Then SEO came along and changed everything. Suddenly, every page became a possible entrance point, and people could be dropped in directly at the page most relevant to their current need.
But today, in this AI environment, it seems that things are changing again. As users now use AI tools like Gemini, ChatGPT, and likely mass-adoption tools embedded in our mobile devices, search engines, and browsers to handle the research stage, theyโre now more likely to once again land on your homepage.
Your homepage is once again becoming the most important page for SEO, and we must revisit the time-proven lessons of information architecture to ensure it can capture and convert this traffic.
How SEO inverted web design
In the early 2000s, as search engines improved and became the primary source of website traffic, those of us working in the field had to learn and adapt quickly.
We had to take what we knew about information architecture and layer over SEO thinking, which meant the standard, linear route through a site from the homepage to a destination changed.
We now had users landing much closer to where we wanted them โ typically on inner pages or blog posts โ and then routing them back toward the relevant product or service we wanted to promote.
Homepages were still important, but they became less of a โmust be everything to everybodyโ battleground and could focus more on brand and more general keywords. The money terms were often mapped to more relevant, easily rankable, high-converting long-tail blogs and product pages.
In short, we stopped worrying so much about the homepage, and our attention spread across the spidery maze of deeper pages and reverse-conversion paths. But the pendulum is swinging back.
The informational long-tail traffic that sustained those deep-link landing pages is being swallowed by AI Overviews and LLMs like Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.
AI tools now handle the heavy lifting โ research, comparison, and summarization are easier than ever. When users finally visit your site, they arenโt looking for more answers โ theyโre looking for you.
This shift is driving a resurgence in branded search, funneling users back to your homepage. The problem is, while these users may be warmed up by their research, we now know a lot less about them when they arrive.
If your information architecture isnโt ready to greet users on your homepage and funnel them where they need to be, youโll alienate and lose these warm users and send them swiftly into the arms of your competitors.
Fortunately, there are lessons from the past that can guide us forward.ย
The problem: The erosion of the deep link
In traditional SEO thinking, nearly every page could be a landing page.
Your informational content is an upper-funnel landing page that can direct people to your product or service pages.
Your product or service pages are mid-funnel landing pages that can drive leads and sales.
Your case studies and testimonials are lower-funnel credibility content that can push people to make the final decision.
That approach is losing ground. Industry consensus is clear. Traditional informational click-through rates (CTR) are facing a significant decline as AI provides immediate answers in search results.
When a user asks, โWhat are the benefits of a headless CMS?โ they get a 300-word summary from an AI. They no longer need to click your โHeadless CMS โ Pros & Consโ blog post.
However, once the AI has convinced them that your brand is a leader in headless CMS, they donโt search for the topic again. They search for your brand name. They arrive at your homepage โ warmed up and ready, highly motivated, but we know very little about them. We lose the segmentation and context that a deeper page landing provides.
The psychology of AI: the path of least resistance
Humans are a lazy bunch, somewhat by design. If something makes our lives easier, we seek it out, and our behavior changes. This helped us as hunter-gatherers, but now, with our cars, smartphones, food delivery, and many other modern conveniences, maybe not so much.
Search engines are one of the things that made our lives easier, at least for a while, and changed our behavior as things got easier.
Then, of course, we marketers got involved, competition ramped up, and the web became littered with ads, pop-ups, remarketing, and other tactics. Frankly, seeking things online often became a bit of a drag, making much marketing as much a game of attrition as it was science, skill, or art.
But AI is now making our lives easy again. No scrolling past ads, trying to decode SERPs, avoid pop-ups, identify marketing content, and filter out noise โ just clean, simple answers. The change has brought some chaos, but itโs also a much-needed reset for the web.
People now enjoy a frictionless, conversational research phase, with the heavy lifting done by AI tools. Questions are answered, advice is given, options are summarized and compared. They can then move on via a branded search, which typically brings them to this homepage entry point.
As Steve Krug famously argued in โDonโt Make Me Thinkโ โ a well-recommended book that has stood the test of time โ users on the web behave like foragers. They look for the scent of information and take the path of least resistance. If they land on your homepage and canโt find their specific path, such as โpricing for enterpriseโ or โdeveloper docs,โ within seconds, theyโll disengage and bounce.
Things are different. Users may invest a little more time now after theyโve sunk effort into the research phase, but you canโt expect to take users from the low-friction environment of AI to a site where they have to work too hard to figure things out.
Your homepage and overall information architecture canโt fail. You must let people know theyโre in the right place, that they can trust you, then segment, signpost, and steer them to their intended destination.
Solution: The filing cabinet site
To handle this influx of branded, front-door traffic, we must return to the fundamentals of information architecture.
Drawing from the definitive guide, โInformation Architecture: For the Web and Beyondโ (the Polar Bear Book โ another great read), we must treat our site structure like a filing cabinet.
Logical grouping: Related content must be grouped into clear, intuitive categories. If your โService Aโ and โService Bโ are buried under a vague โWhat We Doโ menu, youโre creating friction. Keep it clear, and donโt confuse people with your fancy branding.
Structural context: SEO may drive fewer people to your deeper pages, but AI tools still conduct queries to identify information and pull content from your site via RAG. You still need the right content structured in the right way to ensure youโre covering all the angles across SEO, AI, and PPC traffic.
The 3-click rule: Modern UX research, championed by the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), emphasizes that users should be able to reach any content within three clicks. In the AI age, this is a non-negotiable performance metric, and you should be measuring these paths in your analytics.
Remember, while users may come directly to your homepage, AI agents still conduct these deeper searches and consume your information, so traditional SEO is still important.
Implementation: The ALCHEMY framework
This is all great to know, but you also need a framework to help you put this process on rails and build a website thatโs structured for humans coming via the front door, search engines indexing and categorizing, and AI crawlers hitting those deeper pages.ย
The ALCHEMY website planning guide addresses this exact issue. It breaks the process down into seven strategic steps designed to bridge the gap between business strategy and technical execution:
Audience research: Identifying personas, segments, and jobs.
Learning: Deep-dive competitor and performance audits to see whatโs working.
Clarify aim: Setting SMART goals so the site has a purpose beyond looking pretty.
Hierarchy: Building the visual sitemap and navigation.
Essential features: Defining the technical must-haves before code is written.
Mapping: Planning the content and goals for every single page.
Yield: Generating the final, battle-hardened, marketing-savvy brief for developers.
The process purposely starts with the audience โ who are the audience segments that matter? And how does this inform the structure and navigation for the site?ย
The process then walks you through mapping out your site to work for users, search engines, and AI.
By following this approach, you ensure that your homepage and category pages arenโt just based on the opinion of the highest-paid person in the room, but on the documented needs of your AI-driven audience.
Your websiteโs information architecture now serves two masters โ human users and AI agents. A clean, hierarchical structure with clear taxonomies helps both navigate and interpret your site with confidence.ย
If an AI reads your site and sees a perfectly organized filing cabinet, itโs far more likely to recommend your brand as a structured, authoritative source. Your site needs to consider two directions of user journey:
Front door: Users arriving without context, finding what theyโre looking for.
Back door(s): Users, search engines, and AI coming in directly to deeper content.
For a website to be successful in 2026 and beyond, you have to account for both. Build strong information architecture and SEO for front-door users and back-door search engines and AI visits.
Donโt let your homepage be a dead end โ turn it into a map.
Addy Osmani, a director of engineering at Google Cloud AI, published new guidance on Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO), a model for making content usable by AI agents.
He positioned this AEO (not to be confused with Answer Engine Optimization) as parallel to SEO, built for systems that fetch, parse, and act on content autonomously.
What heโs seeing. AI agents collapse multi-step browsing into a single request. They donโt scroll, click, or engage with UI โ they extract what they need instantly. That makes most traditional engagement metrics irrelevant.
The token problem. Osmani highlighted token limits as a core constraint shaping content performance. Large pages can exceed an agentโs context window, causing:
Truncated information.
Skipped pages.
Hallucinated outputs.
His takeaway: token count is now a primary optimization metric.
Content needs to change. Osmani recommended restructuring content for how agents read:
Put answers early (ideally within the first ~500 tokens).
Keep pages compact and focused.
Avoid long preambles and buried insights. (Agents have โlimited patienceโ for this, he noted.)
Markdown over HTML. He also recommended serving clean Markdown alongside traditional pages.
Markdown reduces noise from navigation, scripts, and layout, making content easier and cheaper for agents to parse.
This includes making .md versions directly accessible and discoverable.
Discovery and structure. Osmani pointed to emerging patterns for helping agents find and use content:
llms.txt as a structured index of documentation.
skill.md files to define capabilities.
AGENTS.md as a machine-readable entry point for codebases.
These act as shortcuts for agents deciding what to read and use.
Why we care. This adds a new optimization layer alongside SEO. If agents canโt efficiently parse your content โ due to token limits, structure, or format โ they may skip, truncate, or misinterpret it. That directly affects whether your content is used, cited, or acted on in AI-powered experiences.
Thereโs a phrase PPC experts reach for whenever they get a tough question. At conferences, online, and on client calls. Two words, a smug smile, and absolutely zero useful information: โIt depends.โ
This has been bugging me for as long as I can remember. Turns out itโs not just a PPC thing, either. Aleyda Solis gave an excellent presentation calling out the exact same pattern in SEO. So weโre dealing with an industry-wide epidemic here. Two disciplines, same cop-out.
Not every question is equally hard to answer.ย
โWhatโs the maximum number of RSAs per ad group?โ Just look it up.
โWhy did my CPA spike last week?โ That takes data plus interpretation.ย
โWhat will my ROAS look like if I increase budget by 30%?โ Now you need context, too.ย
โWhat bid strategy should I use?โ That requires data, interpretation, context, and an understanding of someoneโs priorities.
It makes sense that โIt dependsโ clusters around the hardest questions. More variables, more context needed, more ways to be wrong. I get it. But since when is โThis is hardโ a reason to give up on being useful?
So I built a framework for giving useful answers instead. I call it PACT, which stands for Process, Anchors, Conditions, and Trade-offs.
The PACT framework assumes a broader audience context where you donโt have the askerโs data in front of you. If you do, great โ crunching the numbers and statistical models become additional answer options.
Not all questions are created equal
If we borrow from the world of analytics, questions come in four flavors, each progressively harder to answer.
Descriptive questions: Asking what happened or how something works
โWhatโs my impression share?โ or โHow does broad match work?โย
These are answered with data and facts. You know them or look them up. Nobody says โIt dependsโ here because nobody needs to. Iโll ignore this category for the rest of this article.
These need data plus your interpretation of that data. โIt dependsโ already starts creeping in here because something clearly changed, and pinpointing the cause is rarely straightforward.ย
Predictive questions: Asking what will happen or what good looks like
โWhat if I decrease my target ROAS by 30%?โ or โWhatโs a good CTR for my industry?โย
These are harder. You need interpretation, but you also need context about the specific business and market. This is where โIt dependsโ starts to feel earned.
Prescriptive questions: Asking โWhat should I do?โ or โWhatโs the best solution?โย
โWhat bid strategy should I use?โ or โShould I consolidate my campaigns?โย
These need everything: data, interpretation, context, and an understanding of someoneโs priorities. If โIt dependsโ has a permanent home, itโs here.
There are many useful answers you could offer your audience instead of โIt depends,โ such as explaining how it depends, outlining the trade-offs, or sharing benchmarks and flowcharts.ย
I tried to categorize the answers into four concrete response types. (Whether the category names were chosen for clarity or reverse-engineered from a four-letter word is between me and my thesaurus.)
The diagram below shows which response types fit which question types. (Thereโs overlap, and thatโs fine.)
Process: Give a structured path
For many diagnostic questions and for some prescriptive questions, a process is the best answer. Show your audience which steps to take, in which order, to reach their answer (and, increasingly, steps you can hand to an AI agent with a skill).ย
โAn agency without process is just a bunch of people running around doing things.โ
Suggested formats
Flow charts: The first time I fell in love with a flow chart was in 2012, when the Rimm-Kaufman Group (now Merkle) shared a performance troubleshooting flowchart in their Dossier 3.2. Itโs an excellent example of a helpful answer to the question, โWhy did my CPA increase (or ROAS decrease)?โย
Decision trees: Prescriptive โShould I?โ questions can also be helped with a decision tree. They can be simple, funny-but-true ones like this one from Tom Orbach:
Or more professional ones, like Aleyda Solisโ SEO Flowcharts for SEO Decision Making.
Anchors are the โquick and easyโ evidence-based answers that are still better than โIt depends.โย
Suggested formats
Benchmarks: Everybody loves a good benchmark. If you have enough data from comparable businesses, you can use it to answer โWhat does good look like?โ questions.ย
When someone asks, โWhatโs the average ecommerce conversion rate?โ donโt say โIt depends.โ Say:ย
โFor health and beauty, itโs 3.3%. For electronics, itโs 1.9%.โ The more specific the benchmark, the better.
Usual suspects: Think of the usual suspects as a โlight versionโ of a process for diagnostic questions using the 80/20 Pareto principle: 80% of outcomes result from 20% of causes.ย
Instead of a 25-step flowchart, you can share a ranked list of the most likely causes ordered by frequency. Basically saying:
โCheck these five things first, because 80% of the time itโs one of them.โ
Case study: When someone asks, โWhat will happen if I do X?โ, telling them what actually happened when a similar account did X is worth more than any theoretical answer.ย
โWe consolidated 12 campaigns into four for an ecommerce account spending $50,000/month. CPA improved 20% after the learning period, but we lost visibility into product category performance.โย
The key is specificity: industry, budget range, what changed, and the trade-off. Vague case studies (โWe saw great resultsโ) are just โIt dependsโ wearing a suit.
Conditions: Name the hidden variables
This is the most direct replacement for โIt depends,โ as youโll say, โIt depends on these specific thingsโ instead.
Suggested formats
Checklist: For diagnostic questions, this could be a segmentation drill-down. Slice the data by device, geo, time of day, campaign, match type, audience, etc., until the anomaly isolates to one segment. This expands โWhy did it happen?โ to โWhere did it happen?โ which can be just as useful.
If [x] then [y]: For example, โWhat will happen if I double my budget?โ Then you follow up with questions like:ย
โWhatโs your current impression share?โย
โAre you budget-constrained or bid-constrained?โย
โHow steep is the diminishing returns curve in your auction?โย
If youโre at 60% impression share and purely budget-limited, doubling your budget could get you close to 80% more conversions. If youโre already at 95% impression share, that extra budget is going to buy you mostly junk.
Reversibility test: For a quick filter on prescriptive โShould I?โ questions, use one condition: reversibility. Categorize decisions by how easy they are to undo. Low-stakes reversible decisions (e.g., testing a new ad copy) get a โJust try itโ answer.
High-stakes irreversible decisions (such as restructuring your entire account) get the full trade-off analysis (and move to the next category). This helps your audience judge how much thought a decision actually deserves.ย
Jeff Bezos famously calls these irreversible Type 1 (one-way door) and reversible Type 2 (two-way door) decisions. He also warns us not to treat Type 2 decisions as Type 1 decisions.
Trade-offs: Surface the choices
Some questions donโt have a right answer. Instead, they involve choosing between competing priorities.ย
When someone asks โWhatโs the best approach?โ, they often donโt realize theyโre asking โWhich trade-off am I most comfortable with?โ The fix is to make the trade-offs visible.
Suggested formats
Trade-off explanation: Replace โWhatโs the right answer?โ with โHereโs what each option gains and sacrifices.โ
For example, โShould I consolidate my campaigns into fewer, bigger ones?โ Instead of โIt depends on your goals,โ surface the actual trade-off:ย
โConsolidation gives you more data per campaign, which helps Smart Bidding learn faster. But it reduces your control over budget allocation and makes it harder to optimize for different segments.โย
โSo the real question is: Do you value algorithmic learning speed more than granular control right now? That depends on whether your current structure is data-starved or if youโre already getting strong results and just want more precision.โ
Now the person isnโt stuck. They have a choice to make, and they understand whatโs at stake on both sides.
Calculators: If the calculator presents the trade-off as an input field, it can yield a useful answer. One of my all-time favorites is the Build vs. Buy calculator from Baremetrics, which helps you decide whether to buy a tool or build it internally.
Closer to the daily life of a PPC practitioner, we created two free calculators to determine your target CPA or target ROAS. When you enter โ% of margin willing to invest in acquisition,โ youโre resolving the subjective part of the trade-off yourself. The calculator just runs the math on your decision.
Next time your gut says, โIt depends,โ check which type of question youโre dealing with and pick the format that fits.
Iโm not naive enough to think weโll eradicate โIt dependsโ overnight. But I do think we can hold ourselves to a higher standard. If youโre speaking at a conference, writing a blog post, or answering a client question, try replacing your next โIt dependsโ with one of these four response types.
And if you find a question that genuinely canโt be answered with a process, anchor, condition, or trade-off, Iโd love to hear it. I havenโt found one yet. But Iโm probably not done looking.
Bambu Lab adds โColor Mixerโ to Bambu Studio, taking multi-colour 3D printing to the next level Typically, the colour of your 3D prints is limited by the number of filaments you have and the feature set of your 3D printer. Now, clever tinkerers have blasted through this barrier, with users mixing colours to create new [โฆ]
Forza Horizon 6 may well be upon us, but the franchise owes its roots to the first Horizon Festival in Colorado almost 14 years ago. Take a trip down memory lane with this epic retrospective.
AppControl has replaced Task Manager on my PCs, and it seems like it's just getting started. The latest update adds optional AI integration that answers questions regarding system history, which is basically like having your own private IT tech inside your system.
Our sister site, Tom's Guide, just launched its overhaul, featuring all-new shopping tools and exciting prospects for the future. Here's what it all means.
CTL, an EdTech lifecycle products and services provider, announced today the launch of its new CTL Chromebook PX112C Series with integrated 5G, 4G LTE, and CBRS connectivity. By supporting both cellular and private wireless networks, this new Chromebook brings instant-on connection to students for learning anywhereโeliminating the logistical burden of external hotspots.
The new CTL Chromebook PX112C Series is one of the first of its kind to feature next-generation, power-efficient 5G technology designed specifically to maximize battery life and performance for students. There are a myriad of use cases for student learning via a connectivity-enabled Chromebook, including:
OXS today announced the official launch of the Thunder Duo X and Thunder Duo, a groundbreaking 5.1.2-channel, studio-grade gaming speaker that brings true Dolby Atmos immersion to desktop setups for the first time. Fresh off a highly successful Kickstarter campaign and high-profile showcases at IFA and Gamescom 2025, the Thunder Duo arrives as the new flagship of OXS's rapidly expanding gaming and home-audio portfolio. Designed to deliver cinematic sound without the complexity of ceiling speakers or virtual surround workarounds, Thunder Duo creates a genuine 360-degree audio environment through its upward-firing sky channels, coaxial front drivers, and the proprietary Xspace spatial audio engine.
The Thunder Duo range is available in two distinct configurations. The Thunder Duo serves as the 3.1.2 channel foundation, delivering 110 W RMS (220 W peak) of room-filling sound across spaces up to 220 square feet. Engineered for both gamers and creators, the Thunder Duo lineup achieves studio-grade accuracy with alloy magnet drivers, dual DSP processing, and fluid-dynamics bass ports. Distortion stays under 0.5%, achieving the standard of studio speakers. Every element-from gunfire and footsteps to cinematic scores and subtle audio cues-emerges with audiophile clarity. For those looking for an even more immersive experience, the Thunder Duo X expands immersion to a full 5.1.2 system with a wireless headrest satellite neck speaker, offering authentic rear-channel surround that moves seamlessly with the listener.
According to Microsoft Executive Vice President Rajesh Jha, AI agents may eventually be required to purchase licenses to use specific software products. Jha proposed this idea during a recent conference, describing a not-so-distant future in which AI agents act as company employees with their own corporate identities.
Apple is viewing the ongoing AI-driven crunch in memory capacity as a strategic opportunity and a cudgel of sorts to beat back upstart competitors, as per the gist of a new research note from Daishin Securities. Apple is using strategic levers to gain an advantage over its competitors as the ongoing memory crunch continues to unfold, as per a new research note from Daishin Securities We reported on supply chain chatter in early April, suggesting that Apple was actively buying up "all available mobile DRAM on the market" to prevent its competitors from securing enough memory chips. Well, Daishin Securities [โฆ]
In a roundtable interview attended by Gamesradar, Bethesda Game Studios' Todd Howard defended the developer's latest titles, Starfield and Fallout 76. When one of the interviewers pointed out that they were more divisive among gamers than all-time classics like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Howard suggested that even the early stages of now-acclaimed franchises like Elder Scrolls and Fallout were a bit divisive, until the franchises found their groove and a dedicated audience. The game designer also noted that both Starfield and Fallout 76, the studio's first sci-fi game and first multiplayer game, have eventually found their niches. If you [โฆ]
Right before the PlayStation 5's latest price increase went into effect on April 2, sales of the Sony current-generation console peaked in the United States according to data provided by Circana's Matt Piscatella, indicating how real the fear of price increases is for consumers in the US. โUS weekly unit and $ sales of PlayStation 5 hardware reached 2026 highs during the week ending April 4th, as price increases loomed,โ wrote Piscatella on Bluesky. โUS spending on video game hardware for the week nearly doubled when compared to the same week a year ago.โ Unfortunately, Circana's Video Game Industry Advisor [โฆ]
The Enermax Platimax II 1200DF delivers outstanding Platinum-level efficiency, exemplary power quality, and an audacious 13-year warranty, though its lean connector loadout falls short of what 1200W should offer.
DataLink APIs offers developers a single subscription to validate emails, look up phone carriers, score IP threat levels, and check domain age through one API key and billing plan. Stop managing multiple vendor accounts and API keys. It provides contact intelligence, fraud signals, and deliverability scoring built for production workloads. There is no need to juggle multiple providers or credentials. Automatic fallback providers ensure the API always runs and there is no charge for cached calls.
Palabra.ai is a real-time AI speech translation platform that offers seamless interpretation for video calls, live events, broadcasting, and custom integrations via API. It supports over 60 languages with near-zero latency, covering the full pipeline from automatic speech recognition (ASR) and translation to text-to-speech (TTS).
Palabra.ai delivers professional-grade accuracy with custom glossaries that keep industry-specific and technical terms translated correctly every time. It also features voice cloning to preserve the speaker's natural tone and identity across languages, producing a human-sounding output rather than a robotic one.
SellerCard lets you create complete, marketplace-ready listings from a single photo in about 30 seconds. Upload a product image, choose your marketplace and language, and it generates SEO titles, bullets, descriptions, keywords, tags, and six professional product and lifestyle photos.
SellerCard also offers Listing Pro for platform-specific optimization, bulk CSV generation, competitor analysis, and SEO scoring, plus Photo Studio Pro and AI Video for custom scenes, model shots, and social-ready clips. Try one listing free, then pay with reusable stars.
A recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting nginx-ui, an open-source, web-based Nginx management tool, has come under active exploitation in theย wild.
The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-33032 (CVSS score: 9.8), an authentication bypass vulnerability that enables threat actors to seize control of the Nginx service. Itย has been codenamed MCPwn by Plutoย Security.
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A numberย of critical vulnerabilities impacting products from Adobe, Fortinet, Microsoft, and SAP have taken center stage in April's Patch Tuesdayย releases.
Topping the list is an SQL injection vulnerability impacting SAP Business Planning and Consolidation and SAP Business Warehouseย (CVE-2026-27681, CVSS score: 9.9) that could result in the execution of arbitrary databaseย
NordVPN's recent macOS app update hasn't gone down well, with users complaining of crippling lag and dropped connections. Fortunately, the provider has confirmed a hotfix is imminent.
Amazon is refreshing its Fire TV interface for 2026 with new organisation and new streaming channels. Plus, it's bringing out a new, slimmer Fire TV HD Stick.
The company cites advancements in AI for the cuts. CEO Evan Spiegel also wrote that the company is closing more than 300 open roles. Snap had about 5,261 full-time employees as of December 2025.
Reid Hoffman says tracking AI token use can gauge adoption, but cautions it should be paired with context and not treated as a direct productivity metric.
Adobe says the assistant can work across apps like Firefly, Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, Express, Illustrator and its other apps to do tasks for you.
Following the initial release of the first-generation Fire TV Stick HD two years ago, Amazon has created a new model that is its thinnest streaming device to date, the company says.
The involvement of AMD, Arm, and the venture arm of Qualcomm is about more than money. It's also about tapping into the variety of compute platforms that Wayve's self-driving system will need to use.
HBO Max will be available to JioHotstar subscribers as an add-on starting at โน49 (about $0.50) per month and would feature content from HBO, Max Originals, Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Bros. Television, and DC Studios.
Google replaces Dynamic Search Ads with AI Max. Learn whatโs changing, when migrations begin, and what advertisers should do before September upgrades.
Google is retiring legacy Search automation tools, including Dynamic Search Ads (DSA), in favor of AI Max, its broader AI-powered campaign suite. This will affect you if you use DSA, automatically created assets (ACA), or campaign-level broad match settings.
Driving the news. AI Max for Search campaigns is exiting beta after adoption by โhundreds of thousandsโ of advertisers globally, Google said.
Starting in September, eligible campaigns using DSA, ACA, or campaign-level broad match will be automatically migrated to AI Max.
Google will stop allowing advertisers to create new DSA campaigns through Google Ads, Ads Editor, and the Ads API once automatic upgrades begin.
The company expects all eligible migrations to be completed by the end of September.
Why we care. These tools are being phased out, whether you act or not. Moving early to AI Max gives you more control over targeting, creative, and landing page settings before automatic upgrades begin. It also offers potential performance gains, with Google reporting an average 7% lift in conversions or conversion value at similar efficiency.
What Google says. AI Max delivers โan average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA/ROAS for non-retailโ when you use its full feature set โ including search term matching, text customization, and final URL expansion โ compared with search term matching alone.
Catch up quick. DSA has long helped advertisers capture additional traffic beyond keyword-based campaigns by dynamically generating headlines and directing users to relevant landing pages.
But Google says consumer search behavior is becoming more complex and less predictable.
AI Max is designed to go beyond website landing page signals by using broader real-time intent data.
Uses advertiser inputs, such as website content and existing ads.
Expands reach to additional relevant search queries.
Dynamically customizes ad copy and landing page destinations.
Adds more controls for advertisers, including brand, location, and text guidance settings.
What you should do now. Google is urging advertisers to upgrade before September to keep more control over setup and avoid disruption.
Phase 1: Voluntary upgrades (starting now)
DSA users: Google is rolling out upgrade tools this week to help move campaign history, settings, and data into standard ad groups.
ACA and broad match users: Advertisers will see in-platform prompts to switch to AI Max.
Phase 2: Automatic upgrades (starting September) For advertisers who donโt switch manually:
DSA campaigns will convert dynamic ad groups into standard ad groups, with legacy settings and URL controls preserved.
ACA campaigns will move to AI Max with search term matching and text customization turned on by default.
Broad match setting campaigns will move with search term matching enabled by default.
What Google are saying. I asked Google whether this update reduces the role of manual keyword strategy and feed-based search structures. A Google spokesperson responded that keywords remains essential and this update is to help with keyword management:
โKeywords remain an essential component of a successful campaign strategy, providing the โfuelโ for our AI and for the intent signals necessary to drive performance.โย
โRather than reducing their role, this upgrade is designed to help advertisers simplify management and expand beyond keywords while remaining in control.โ
Bottom line. Google is making AI Max the default path for Search automation, signaling a broader shift away from manual campaign management toward AI-led optimization. If you migrate early, youโll have more time to test settings and fine-tune performance before the forced switch.
โRanking manipulation techniques that attempt to compromise the quality of Googleโs search results violate our spam policies and can negatively impact a siteโs ranking. Google may use your report to take manual action against violations. If we issue a manual action, we send whatever you write in the submission report verbatim to the site owner to help them understand the context of the manual action. We donโt include any other identifying information when we notify the site owner; as long as you avoid including personal information in the open text field, the report remains anonymous.โ
Spam reports used for manual actions. Google framed this as a clarification โ that it may use spam reports for manual actions. However, it seems to contradict Googleโs earlier statements that it doesnโt use spam reports for manual actions. This feels like more than a clarification to me.
Your spam report text sent along. Google also said it may send the text you include in a spam report directly to the site owner. Google wrote:
โSend whatever you write in the submission report verbatim to the site owner to help them understand the context of the manual action. We donโt include any other identifying information when we notify the site owner; as long as you avoid including personal information in the open text field, the report remains anonymous.โ
Google also warned that you should avoid including personal information or anything you donโt want the site owner to see.
Why we care. This appears to be a significant change from how Google previously handled spam reports. If you submit them, be aware of these changes and adjust your reports accordingly going forward.
Corsairโs next-generation PSUs are packing fancy new 12V-2ร6 tech Corsairโs Jonny โGuruโ Gerow has confirmed that Corsair plans to release new PSUs with โper-pin monitoringโ technology. This should allow users to monitor their 12V-2ร6 power cables and detect power distribution along the cablesโ wires. This should also allow Corsair to implement new 12V-2ร6 safety features, [โฆ]
The Schenker CONNECT 15 stands out in the office laptop segment thanks to its advanced network connectivity and a variety of external ports. Notable features include an integrated Smart Card reader, an easily swappable battery and an optional LTE module that enables mobile network access via a nano SIM card. The 15.6-inch laptop is powered by the energy-efficient Intel Core 5 120U processor, supports up to 64 GB of socketed DDR5 RAM, and includes advanced security features for use in corporate and public sector environments.
Schenker CONNECT 15 with Intel Core 5 120U and up to 64 GB RAM
Compared to the established WORK and WORK Base series, the 15.6-inch Schenker CONNECT 15 (E26) offers a range of additional functional features. Its plastic chassis measures 361 x 239 x 21 mm and weighs 1.75 kg.
With the DeltaMate GPU Block Astral - ROG 5080, Thermal Grizzly introduces a GPU water block with a viewing window made of Schott BOROFLOAT glass. Borosilicate glass refracts the light of the integrated RGB lighting differently than acrylic glass, making the new GPU block a visual highlight. In addition, the glass is less susceptible to alcohol-based cleaners.
The design of the DeltaMate GPU Block Astral - ROG 5080 water block is otherwise identical to other water blocks in the DeltaMate series and therefore shares their features:
Ultra-High-Performance microfins with 0.2 mm structure width
Full-metal construction with RGB-illuminated viewing window
Targeted cooling of all VRAM and VRM components
Configurable with Through Terminal (4-port) or Direct Terminal (2-port) made of brass
Thermal paste, thermal pads, and putty included in the scope of delivery
In April 2025, von Ahn announced plans for Duolingo to become yet another "AI-first" company, meaning more of the technology being integrated into the platform and the eventual elimination of contract workers. This wasn't a first for von Ahn: in January 2024, 10% of Duolingo's contract workers were laid off...
Charts from Warranty Week indicate that Nvidia paid $894 million in warranty claims in 2025, an 11-fold increase from $84 million the prior year. Although the newsletter does not mention specific products, 2025 saw the release of the company's RTX 5090, which has well-documented power cable issues.
SemiAccurate, a niche site with a history of semiconductor scoops, reported that Nvidia had been negotiating a deal for more than a year that would "reshape the PC landscape."
Nintendo has two sides -- there's the company that makes broadly appealing, polished entertainment like Mario and Zelda, and then there's that weird side that makes stuff like Tomodachi Life. While the last Tomodachi Life was a surprising success, moving nearly 7 million units on the 3DS, not many expected a follow-up to the Mii-focused life sim, as it kind of felt like the seriesโ time had come and gone. There's no keeping the weird side of Nintendo tamped down, though, and so, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, a game in development in one form or another for nine years, [โฆ]
The market isn't apparently ready for lower capacity storage drives, but for most, lower RAM capacity is still acceptable. Lexar Says Demand for Smaller Capacity SSDs Have Dwindled While Smaller RAM Capacity RAM Kits are Still Popular Not every component has the same influence when it comes to building a PC. While RAM and SSDs have both gone insanely expensive in recent months, their influence varies when it comes to what gamers prefer. RAM shows a clear impact in gaming and non-gaming workloads, but storage drives contribute much except for faster loading times. Irrespective of that, faster SSDs are always [โฆ]
Netgear secured a conditional approval from the FCC to continue releasing new models of several router lines, with the company saying in its SEC disclosure that it can launch new models indefinitely provided it can maintain its approval.
Glimpse automates competitor intelligence so you never miss a move. It tracks pricing changes, job postings, ads, blog content, reviews, social posts, website updates, and tech stack shifts, then delivers filterable signals to your inbox and Slack. AI detects patterns and strategic shifts, powers an on-demand analyst, and generates live sales battle cards. Build board-ready reports and share insights across teams without integrations or maintenance.
ZenFlip converts PDFs into interactive flipbooks in under 5 minutes. It's built for publishers, marketers, and content teams who care about quality and accessibility. The platform is WCAG 2.2 AA compliant by default, offers page-level analytics and heatmaps, lead capture forms, and full white-label branding. It also has a Price Lock Pledge ensuring rates won't increase without consent. You can start free with 10 publications and no credit card is needed.
Few technologies have moved from experimentation to boardroom mandate as quickly as AI. Acrossย industries, leadership teams have embraced its broader potential, and boards, investors, and executives are already pushing organizations to adopt it across operational and security functions.ย Penteraโs AI Security and Exposure Reportย 2026 reflects thatย momentum: every CISO surveyed
Big Mood season 2 arrives back on the small screen this week โ and Nicola Coughlan agrees on the need for Bridgerton-style energy with this chaotic female friendship.
Roll the clock back five, 10, or 15 years, and a PPC practitionerโs value was directly tied to tactical proficiency. Not anymore.
Today, Google and Microsoft automate much of the tactical work. Machine learning and AI manage bids, test creatives, and find audiences faster and more efficiently than any human could.
Unfortunately, this reality has left many veteran practitioners in a mid-career identity crisis. If algorithms pull the levers, what exactly are we getting paid to do? Where is our sustainable value to the business?
Hereโs what that evolution looks like in practice and how the hard skills in your playbook have changed.
PPC shifted from tactical execution to designing systems
Iโve been in the paid search trenches for 24 years โ long enough to witness the wild west of early Overture, the rise of Google AdWords, the shift to mobile, and now, the total โalgorizingโ of the ad platforms.
It used to be that if you could diligently research thousands of new keywords, methodically change bids, split-test ad copy until your eyes bled, and sculpt the perfect exact-match account structure, you were a lean, mean PPC advertising machine.
If your toolbox is still mostly tactical execution, youโre positioning yourself as a backroom lever-puller, and your days in this industry are numbered. Todayโs most valuable practitioners arenโt media buyers. Theyโve made the leap to become true engineers of revenue and profit.
An engineer doesnโt blindly pull levers. They design systems. Our sustainable value is in programming the coordinates and telling the machine where to go. If you want to be a revenue and profit engineer, you must:
Be an expert at data analysis and signaling.
Possess deep business acumen to understand how the company or your client makes money.
Cultivate your executive presence to explain your strategy confidently to the C-suite.
That intersection is your career golden ticket. The next four steps will help you achieve just that.
If you sit in an interview, client pitch, or meeting with your boss and say, โIโm going to reexamine your metrics,โ you sound like every other media buyer. Theyโll politely nod and move on.
But if you say, โIโm going to map your paid search program directly into your profit and loss statement so every dollar we spend is engineered for maximum margin,โ you instantly become the most valuable person in the room. Youโre no longer selling clicks. Youโre selling an unfair business advantage.
Most PPC accounts are structured around a websiteโs navigation โ a campaign for shoes, a campaign for shirts, etc. While not inherently wrong, this approach reflects limited thinking. You build a more nuanced, precise account structure that aligns directly with what drives the P&L, moves inventory, or generates high-value leads.
How to execute this
While every business is unique, the process to get there follows a universal framework.
The margin interrogation: Sit down with your client or your finance team and work to learn the profit margins on their core offerings. You will often find that the product driving the most volume has the tightest margin, while an obscure, niche service has massive profitability.
The architecture shift: Restructure your campaigns by margin tier and business value, not just product category. You should have completely different target ROAS (tROAS) or target CPA (tCPA) goals based on what the business can afford to spend to acquire that specific customer type.ย
If you treat a low-margin conversion the same as a high-margin conversion in your account architecture, youโre risking revenue and profit leak โ no matter how pretty your in-platform metrics look.
Separate the engine room from the boardroom
Once mapped, you must segregate your metrics.ย
In the โengine roomโ (your daily platform optimizations), you still look at click-through rates (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). They are vital leading indicators used to steer the ship.ย
But in the โboardroomโ (leadership reporting), you never lead with them. Your conversation is strictly about the engineered outcome: โWe shifted budget into the high-margin tier and successfully protected our $150 CPA target, ensuring our overall profitability remained stable.โ
2. Master the art and science of signal engineering
This is the most critical hard skill for the modern paid search profit engineer. Algorithms are hungry, but they inherently lack intelligence and the ability to reason. They only know what you tell them.ย
In our brave new world of automated bidding, properly โfeeding the machineโ is what separates the experts from the obsolete. If you only feed Google Ads data about who filled out a form, the machine will go find you more people who like to fill out forms โ even if those people are terrible leads who never actually convert.
A massive part of your job today is understanding and analyzing first-party backend data and strategically feeding it back to the machine to get the best results. Youโre no longer optimizing the bid. Youโre optimizing the signal.
How to execute this
You have to move past basic pixel tracking. You must implement robust offline conversion tracking (OCT) or direct CRM integrations (like HubSpot or Salesforce into Google Ads).ย
If youโre managing larger, more complex programs, leveraging enterprise tools like Search Ads 360 (SA360) or similar platforms is a massive advantage for signal engineering. These tools allow you to seamlessly ingest, weight, and share these critical business signals across multiple search engines from a single centralized hub.
For lead generationย
Stop optimizing for a generic lead. Map your clientโs sales stages directly into the ad platform. Assign specific monetary values to each stage based on historical close rates.ย
For example, tell the algorithm a raw lead is worth $10, a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) is worth $50, and a closed/won deal is worth $500. Then switch your bidding strategy from Maximize Conversions to value-based bidding (Target ROAS). Youโre programming the AI to pursue lead quality and pipeline revenue, not just form-fill volume.
For ecommerce
Ecommerce is a distinct beast with its own complexities. Tracking top-line revenue to hit a basic ROAS target is table stakes. To truly engineer profit, you must manipulate signals around inventory, margins, and lifetime value:
Feed engineering: The modern ecommerce practitioner doesnโt just upload a product feed; they strategically engineer it. Use Custom Labels to segment products by business reality โ such as inventory velocity (overstocked vs. low inventory) or historical return rates. If a specific apparel item has a 40% return rate, pushing it heavily destroys backend profitability, even if the in-platform ROAS looks incredible.
Profit margin bidding: Donโt just track gross revenue. Use custom conversion variables (or cart data integration) to pass profit margin data back into the ad platform. When the algorithm understands the difference between a $100 sale with a 10% margin and a $100 sale with a 90% margin, it fundamentally changes how it bids in the auction.
New customer acquisition (NCA): Algorithms gravitate toward the path of least resistance, which often means taking credit for returning brand loyalists. You must integrate your first party customer lists to differentiate a net-new buyer from a repeat buyer, allowing you to bid aggressively for market share on the former while protecting margins on the latter.
Because ad platforms are largely automated, your biggest performance bottlenecks rarely sit inside ad accounts. Your revenue and profit leaks happen after the click. True profit engineers donโt just throw traffic over the fence and hope for the best; they take responsibility for the entire user journey.
If your campaigns drive highly qualified traffic but the backend system is suboptimal, the business still loses money. You have to debug the pipeline.
How to execute this
Make it a quarterly habit to mystery-shop your clientโs business and tear down the post-click experience.
Stress-test the sales handoff (lead gen): Submit a test lead through the website. How long does it take the sales team to call you back? If it takes 48 hours, it doesnโt matter how finely tuned your value-based bidding is โ the sales team is letting those expensive leads go cold. You need the data to show the CEO that the leak isnโt the traffic; itโs the speed-to-lead.
Audit the checkout flow (ecommerce): Go through the process of buying a product from your clientโs site. Is checkout a clunky, five-step ordeal? Do unexpected shipping costs appear at the end? If your drop-off from add-to-cart to purchase is massive, your ROAS isnโt suffering from a bad keyword match type. Itโs suffering from UX friction.
Listen to the tape: Ask the client or the call center for call recordings of leads generated specifically by paid search. Are the leads complaining about pricing? Are they confused about the specific service offered?
When you walk into a boardroom and say, โI listened to 15 sales calls this week, and your team is struggling to overcome pricing objections, so Iโve updated our ad copy to explicitly pre-qualify users on price,โ you instantly elevate yourself from a disposable media buyer to an indispensable business partner.
You can be the most brilliant revenue engineer in the world, properly weighting every CRM signal into the algorithm, but if you canโt communicate that strategy like a true business partner, the rest doesnโt matter.
Youโre in a never-ending battle of misconceptions about what PPC is and what the expectations are. Iโve lost count of how many times Iโve heard from clients or in-house bosses things like: โWhy arenโt we in Position 1?โ or โIf we increase spend by X, then weโll get Y more leads.โ How you handle that battle dictates your career trajectory.
How to execute this
Executive presence means you donโt flinch when a CEO challenges your spend in a boardroom. You donโt get defensive, you donโt blame the algorithm, and you never dive into a nervous rant about impression share.
You calmly control the room by anchoring your response in the businessโs goals:ย
โWe deliberately pulled back spend on the low-margin product line to fund the enterprise push you mentioned in last monthโs all-hands meeting. Top-line lead volume is down by 10%, but because we engineered our data signals to target MQLs, our projected pipeline revenue is actually up 14%.โ
Adopt the โSo what?โ reporting model. For every metric you present, ask yourself, โSo what?โ and answer it before they have to. Speak the language of the boardroom: pipeline velocity, profit margin, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value.
Years ago, I wrote that you need to โsweat the small stuffโ โ meaning you need to know every detail of your account. That principle remains exactly the same today, but the definition of the small stuff has changed.
Today, sweating the small stuff doesnโt mean manually adjusting a bid by three cents. It means:
Obsessing over data hygiene.
Understanding exactly how your clientโs CRM tags a lead so your signal engineering doesnโt break.
Having the guts to tell your boss bad news โ like their backend sales process is broken, and no amount of algorithmic bidding will fix it until they do.
The machines have taken many repetitive tasks off our plates. Good riddance.
Today, you have the freedom โ and the obligation โ to step into the role of a revenue and profit engineer. Master your data signals, stop playing in the weeds, start engineering the P&L, and watch your career take off.
At $50+ CPCs, Reddit beats every vendor organically 67.3% of the time across 8,566 keywords.ย
The study from Ross Simmonds and his team focused on B2B SaaS, but the underlying dynamics donโt stop there. The higher the advertising competition on a term, the more likely a Reddit thread sits above every brand in organic results.ย
If youโre in legal, financial services, premium home services, or insurance, those CPCs arenโt unusual territory. This study is worth your attention.
The SEO community has been talking about this for a while, and the conversation has largely stayed in SEO territory: Reddit is eating organic search, so build your glossaries and invest in content strategy. These are great suggestions, but Iโm not an SEO, so I canโt speak to them.ย
What I keep thinking about isnโt mentioned in the study: What does this actually do to the signal layer your PPC campaigns depend on?
The problem starts before anyone clicks your ad
When a buyer searches a high-intent term and lands on a Reddit thread instead of your page, two things happen.ย
The buyer gets peer opinions, real comparisons, and experiences from people whoโve already been where they are.
Google records a behavioral signal: someone searched this query, engaged with this result, and didnโt need to go further.ย
That signal feeds back into Googleโs understanding of what satisfies that query, and over time, it shapes how the algorithm models relevance on that term.ย
Your page didnโt just lose a click. It contributed to a pattern of signal degradation on a term youโre actively paying to compete on, originating entirely outside your account, with no report that surfaces it.
This is what makes it an automation drift problem. The algorithm is updating its model based on the behavioral data it can see, while your account operates in the dark about where that data is coming from.
The buyer who spent three days on Reddit before clicking your ad arrives as a different person than someone who searched and converted in the same session. Theyโve compared options, read real experiences, and already filtered out most of the noise.ย
Smart Bidding has no idea any of that happened. It sees a $50 click and waits to see if a conversion fires within your attribution window.ย
If youโre running a short window and the buyer spent several of those days in a research phase before coming back, youโre looking at 100% of the cost and none of the conversions still sitting in that detour.ย
The system interprets this as underperformance and starts pulling back on the exact terms producing your most qualified buyers, not because anything went wrong inside the account, but because the signal it was given told it to.
The automation is doing exactly what it was built to do. The signal just doesnโt reflect the full picture of whatโs happening.
What UCaaS gets right that others donโt
Simmondsโ study covers four verticals. In three of them, Reddit beats every vendor simultaneously on more than half of shared keywords.ย
In the unified communication and contact center as a service (UCaaS) category, the vendors win. RingCentral, Nextiva, and Dialpad consistently outrank Reddit on the same terms where every other vertical loses.
Itโs not because of domain authority or budget. Itโs that they built informational content at scale years ago โ glossaries, category explainers, how-to-choose guides โ and never stopped. Google had something real to point to on those terms beyond an ad, and the behavioral signals on those queries reflect that.
Thatโs a content investment conversation, and a worthwhile one. But the principle connects directly to the bidding side: the algorithm makes better decisions when the signals around a term are cleaner, and cleaner signals donโt happen by accident.
On the bidding side, offline conversion tracking is the mechanism that closes the gap.ย
When you import downstream outcomes back into the algorithm โ which leads qualified, which closed, and what they were actually worth โ you give Smart Bidding the context it needs to understand that a longer, more research-heavy path at a higher CPC can still be the right outcome.
Googleโs own data shows a median 10% lift in conversions for advertisers using first-party data alongside click IDs for offline measurement. Without it, the system keeps optimizing toward the fastest path to a conversion, which is rarely the path your most informed buyers take.
On the organic side, getting more intentional about where your business shows up in the conversations your buyers are already having is worth considering.
That might mean investing in content that actually answers the questions Reddit threads are currently answering for you, or thinking about whether your business has a presence in the communities where your buyers are doing their research.
The UCaaS vendors didnโt beat Reddit by outspending everyone. They beat it by showing up consistently in the right places with the right content, long before anyone was ready to click an ad.
The terms where youโre spending the most are the same terms where Reddit is most likely sitting between your ad and your buyer, quietly shaping the signals your automation depends on.
Thatโs what automation drift looks like when it starts entirely outside the account.
ASML plans to boost its EUV machine output significantly in 2026 and 2027 due to high memory demand ASMLโs EUV machines are the backbone of todayโs semiconductor market. Everyone who manufactures leading-edge silicon uses EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) machines from AMSL, including TSMC, Intel, and Samsung. In its Q1 2026 financial report, ASML has confirmed that [โฆ]
ASUS now has Zenbook A16 and Zenbook S 16 models on the market, and at first glance, they seem quite similar. But once you get inside, differences begin to appear. I've put together this comparison based on our reviews of both laptops to help you make the right decision.
Turtle Beach's Stealth 700 (Gen 3) gaming headset is back on sale for a 33% discount, so players can enjoy its immaculate soundscapes and comfortable ergonomics at a lower price.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 Aura Edition laptop is having a Doorstopper discount at Lenovo, giving business professionals a chance to own its powerful specs for office work for 18% less.
Thermaltake, a leading PC DIY brand for premium hardware solutions, continues to advance immersive sim racing experiences with the launch of the XRW-G1 GT Steering Wheel and XRP-L1 Loadcell Pedal Set. Designed for competitive sim racers who demand uncompromising precision, realism, and customization, these two new products further expand the Thermaltake Sim Racing System and deliver professional grade control engineered for podium level performance.
XRW-G1 GT Steering Wheel - Ultimate Control
The XRW-G1 GT Steering Wheel is designed for sim racers who demand precision, comfort, and deep immersion. Featuring a 300 mm GT-style layout, the wheel blends CNC-machined aluminium, carbon fiber, and reinforced polymer to achieve a rigid yet lightweight construction that ensures consistent control during endurance races and high intensity sprint sessions.
MSI, a global leader in gaming, content creation, and business & productivity laptops, proudly introduced the redesigned Raider and Crosshair gaming laptop series, built for gamers seeking high-performance 16-inch laptops with the latest Intel Core Ultra 200HX Plus processors and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series Laptop GPUs. The new lineup delivers up to 300 W combined CPU and GPU power on select Raider models and up to 200 W on select Crosshair models, alongside upgraded cooling, OLED display options, and rear I/O for cleaner cable management. These models set a new benchmark as the most powerful gaming laptops in the industry.
MSI has also upgraded its existing 18-inch gaming lineup, including the Titan 18, Raider 18 Max, and Stealth 18. In addition to featuring the Intel Core Ultra 200HX Plus processors, users can experience ultra-smooth visuals through top-tier specifications such as a 4K 240 Hz Mini LED display.
MSI has announced the launch of the Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG, a powerful and ultra-compact 0.51-liter Copilot+ PC designed to deliver advanced AI capabilities and enterprise-ready connectivity for modern business environments. This device is powered by the latest Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, providing efficient on-device AI performance while maintaining exceptional power efficiency within a remarkably small footprint.
To enhance multitasking workflows, the Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG is equipped with dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, supporting up to four simultaneous displays to boost productivity and deliver an immersive visual experience. Additionally, it features dual 2.5G Ethernet ports, ensuring secure, high-speed networking for enterprise deployments, digital signage, and edge computing applications.
In an April 14 update to the FCC Covered List, the agency said the Department of War had granted conditional approval for Netgear's Nighthawk and Orbi router lines, as well as its CAX cable gateways and CM cable modems, through October 1, 2027. Netgear highlighted the decision in an SEC...
The security problem starts with how cellular modems are built. A phone's baseband is effectively its own operating system, typically written in C and C++, and it runs tens of megabytes of largely proprietary code that handles everything from signal processing to protocol negotiations.
Very early this year, The Blood of the Dawnwalker developer Rebel Wolves confirmed that their debut dark fantasy action RPG would release in 2026. Now, after a few months of silence, the CEO, Game Director, and Co-Founder Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has been interviewed on The Game Business Show, revealing that he is comfortable with the widespread comparisons to The Witcher games, especially after the successful focus tests. He also shared that the console versions are already shaping well, and he personally finished the whole game on a PlayStation 5. I'm really comfortable. I feel really confident about our game; we're already [โฆ]
Something new could be coming to Dragon's Dogma 2. Although the game hasn't received a significant update in a long time, some recent discoveries made by the community via SteamDB suggest that those who believed CAPCOM teased an expansion last month may not have been too far off the mark. As spotted by Reddit user Professional-Bank469, a new 77 GB depot was recently uploaded. This massive depot was quickly removed and then updated again with smaller depots weighing 115 and 291 KB. What makes this notable is the comparison between the game's file size and the size of the now-removed [โฆ]
Buy this incredible 4-item Newegg bundle for $1099.99 and receive 64GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5-6400 RAM for effectively ~$266 - an unbelievable value. $833 off this combo makes high-capacity memory cheaper than many 32GB kits.
Leaked documents allegedly show that the IRGC Aerospace Force is using a Chinese satellite to observe U.S. bases in the Middle East and use it for targeting American assets with drones and missiles.
Our tech colleagues over at Tom's Guide just relaunched their homepage, with destination-focused features like a dedicated live feed for news and expert reactions, AI-infused shopping and upgrading tools, and more short-form video.
Most enterprises think a prompt is enough to keep their AI agents in check. It is not, and the gap between prompt-level instructions and platform-level governance is where things go wrong.
This collaboration is with Bookshop.org, an online marketplace dedicated to supporting local, independent bookstores. Currently, the ability to purchase physical books is available exclusively on Android devices, with iOS users set to gain access next week.
Nvidia Warranty claims rose 1000% in 2025 โ an 11x increase! Warranty Week has released data on warranty claim rates for AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, revealing an explosion in Nvidia claims. The publication claims that Nvidiaโs warranty claims value has risen from $81 million in 2024 to $894 million in 2025, an 11x increase. [โฆ]
Microsoft Excel was originally created as competition for Lotus 1-2-3, which has had lasting effects on my favorite spreadsheet software. Here's how a small shortcut taken in the '80s has lasted through until 2026.
Valve is implementing a number of new changes to its Steam platform, all aimed at enhancing the quality of the user experience for gamers. One of the latest updates involves adding a 30-day price history to all listed games. This feature will allow buyers to see if a game's price has changed recently, promoting greater transparency. Previously, gamers had to rely on third-party tools like SteamDB to track price fluctuations over time. Now, the Steam platform itself is set to include price tracking, integrating this functionality directly. This update will also highlight when a game is on discount, the percentage drop compared to its launch price, and how it compares to its price over the last 30 days. Gamers will be able to use these metrics to decide whether to wait for a Steam Sale or purchase the game immediately if it's a good deal.
Additionally, Valve is reportedly developing the SteamGPT AI system to assist with customer support queries, covering issues such as refunds, platform problems, and payment processing, among others. There is also talk of a new "Frame Estimator" tool that can predict your PC's performance before you buy a game. While Valve hasn't confirmed these features or provided a timeline for their release, these developments suggest preparations for future updates, which could be unveiled soon. Below is a sample price tracker from SteamDB for NBA 2K26 game, as we could see something similar on the main Steam platform soon.
Elon Musk announced today on X that Tesla has completed the design of a new generation of its AI chips for Full Self-Driving (FSD). The CEO also mentioned earlier that the AI5 chip will offer performance comparable to NVIDIA's "Hopper" architecture, with two AI5 units matching the power of a single "Blackwell" processor. In late 2025, reports indicated that Samsung had achieved a significant win for its previously struggling foundry business, as Tesla decided to split the manufacturing of its new AI5 accelerator between Samsung and TSMC. The chips will be produced at Samsung's plant in Taylor, Texas, and TSMC's facility in Arizona. This decision is part of a strategy to keep the supply chain diversified and maintain chip supply under control for any demand scenario.
Samsung and TSMC are not the only partners in this project. Tesla is also sourcing DRAM chips from SK hynix, which appear to be LPDDR5X memory integrated into the package. On both the left and right sides, there are two rows of SK hynix LPDDR5X memory modules, each with three modules. This totals 12 LPDDR5X memory modules per AI5 chip. With 16 GB per module, this results in 192 GB of LPDDR5X memory per single AI5 SoC.
In the latest Q1 2026 quarterly figures, ASML announced plans to ship over 60 EUV units this year, including both High-NA and Low-NA EUV lithography scanners. This is a significant increase from the 48 units shipped in 2025, but it doesn't break any records compared to the company's expectations for 2027. ASML predicts shipping about 80 EUV systems in 2027, driven by massive demand from memory makers. As memory has become the most sought-after commodity in AI data centers, there is simply not enough supply to meet demand. In Q1 2026, ASML reported that nearly halfโ45% to be preciseโof its revenue came from South Korea.
While ASML hasn't provided specific data per manufacturer, we know that South Korean semiconductor makers primarily focus on memory, storage, and to a lesser extent, logic production. More than half of the quarterly shipments, at 51%, are dedicated to memory production. Companies like SK hynix and Samsung are purchasing many EUV systems to support their growing memory and storage businesses, which include the latest technologies like GDDR6, HBM3, HBM4, and DDR4/DDR5, all consumed by AI data centers worldwide. SK hynix plans to install 20 Low-NA EUV units in the next two years, all designed for HBM memory and advanced storage solutions, making SK hynix one of ASML's largest customers.
The next entry in the God of War series, directed by Cory Barlog, will be an expansion of the series' universe and the first one to not feature Kratos as a protagonist. According to new reports from Mp1st and Reddit, this yet-to-be-announced game will see players explore other mythologies and have some rather weird companions, including aย talking swordย and aย โgelatinous cube.โ The first new rumor about the next entry in the series, long said to be aย new IP, came from Reddit userย IntrinsicGamer, who penned a report back in 2023 about the game. In their follow-up, the user revealed some additional information: [โฆ]
It's disappointing to see GPU manufacturers cutting supply for some of their GPUs, but thankfully, the higher VRAM capacity variant isn't affected. NVIDIA Expected to Temporarily Halt Supply for RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB GPU for Two Weeks, Starting Late April The uncertainty keeps affecting components that depend on DRAM and SSD or both. With increasing prices for DRAM and SSD components, many have revised the prices of their products multiple times. These include various consumer electronics, such as popular laptop series like the Microsoft Surface series, pre-built PCs, and graphics cards that have gone pricey in recent months due [โฆ]
The latest HWiNFO software version has added support for the upcoming AMD chips, which points at the Zen 6 lineup. Latest HWiNFO Software Version Rolls Out, Featuring Support for Zen 6 AMD CPUs/APUs; Adds RTX 5060 With GB205 Die As Well Popular hardware monitoring tool, HWiNFO, just got its latest update, and before you panic, let me tell you that HWiNFO isn't flagged with malware like CPUID's tools, like CPU-Z and HWMonitor. HWiNFO's latest version 8.46 rolled out with some crucial updates, offering new functionalities and enhancements for modern hardware. Apart from adding support for the latest and upcoming hardware, [โฆ]
This morning, South Korean developer Pearl Abyss announced that Crimson Desert has now surpassed 5 million copies sold to date across all platforms. The game launched across PC, Mac, and consoles on March 19, so the milestone was reached in less than a month. It's an impressive figure, to be sure, and the pace remains strong. Pearl Abyss had already boasted 3 million units sold in the first week. Over time, Pearl Abyss has also been addressing some of the launch issues. For example, the game did not even launch on Intel Arc graphics cards at first, prompting the developer [โฆ]
Entry-level OLED monitors used to cost $500 last year, but you could find them for a bit less on sale. Now, Alienware has just launched the AW2726DM for $350. That's the MSRP, not a discounted price. For that money, you get a 27-inch gaming monitor featuring a 1440p 240 Hz QD-OLED panel with FreeSync Premium.
Nvidia has announced Ising, a family of open-source AI models for quantum processor calibration and real-time error correction decoding that claims to offer substantial speedups over existing methods.
Quick Contacts is a cloud-based phone book you can open on any device with just an alias and a PIN. It keeps your contacts private with AES-256 encryption and no links to iCloud or Google. You can use message templates, include your current location, and send messages via SMS or WhatsApp. Mark primary contacts, add notes, and access everything from any browser when your phone isnโt available.
Microsoft on Tuesday released updates to address aย record 169 securityย flaws across its product portfolio, including one vulnerability thatย has been activelyย exploited in theย wild.
Of these 169 vulnerabilities, 157 are rated Important, eight are ratedย Critical, three are rated Moderate,ย and one is rated Low inย severity. Ninety-three of the flaws are
AMD's China store on JD has just started accepting pre-orders for the upcoming Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition desktop processor. Priced at an MSRP of $899, this model is $200 more expensive than the launch MSRP of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D. In China, AMD's store requires pre-orders with a deposit of 100 RMB, which counts as 300 RMB towards the final payment due to the "early bird" pre-order benefit. The final payment will be made on April 22, the planned retail launch date. Additionally, at launch, the processor will be available both as retail PIB (processor in box) packages and as part of pre-built gaming desktops by popular OEMs and system integrators. Currently, no Western stores offer pre-orders for this CPU, either in the United States or Europe. Most likely, these stores will start accepting orders on April 22. Some, like B&H, have a placeholder to notify customers when it becomes available.
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition is a 16-core, 32-thread processor built on the "Zen 5" microarchitecture and features 3D V-Cache technology, with stacked 3D V-Cache on both of its 8-core chiplets. This configuration results in an on-package L3 cache of 192 MB and a total cache (L2+L3) of 208 MB. In comparison, the 9950X3D has 3D V-Cache on only one of its two CCDs and relies on software-based OS scheduler guidance to ensure gaming workloads are directed to the CCD with 3D V-Cache. As a result, this new processor is more suited for productivity and workstation tasks, while the 9950X3D remains focused on gaming. Aside from the cache differences, the 9950X3D2 Dual Edition is mostly similar to the 9950X3D, except its maximum boost frequency is 5.60 GHz, which is 100 MHz lower than the 9950X3D, and it has a higher TDP of 200 W compared to the 170 W of the 9950X3D. While technically compatible with any Socket AM5 motherboard, support requires UEFI firmware updates from motherboard vendors.
During a media tour at Lexar HQ in China, Digital Foundry spoke with Lexar's Europe General Manager, Grace Su, who explained what gamers are buying and where they are willing to compromise. Interestingly, Lexar found that, despite the pricing of DRAM and NAND Flash, users could purchase lower-capacity RAM kits without issues, while SSDs with capacities lower than 512 GB weren't selling well. Although this is not a direct comparison, when building a new PC system, you need both a RAM kit and an SSD. Based on their budget, enthusiasts often have to decide between a larger SSD or a bigger RAM kit. However, Lexar reports that users are so committed to having larger SSD space that they are even willing to revert to HDDs rather than buy an SSD smaller than 512 GB. This is understandable, considering that modern games can take up hundreds of gigabytes of space.
Currently, high RAM prices are driving PC gamers to invest considerably more in their gaming rigs to play smoothly. As 16 GB is somewhat considered the minimum for a Windows 11 system, some games and tasks are so demanding that PC DIY enthusiasts need to invest in 32 GB kits at prices that were unimaginable just a year ago. For example, we reported on the DDR4 spot market pricing, which saw the cost of a single 16 Gb module increase by about 2,200% over the past year, with only a minor 5% correction in March. We can only hope for more corrections soon so that PC gamers can finally see signs of relief, but with AI demand projected to continue rising, that seems far from reality.
Yesterday, Ubisoft kicked off a behind-the-scenes video series dedicated to its Anvil Engine, which is mainly used to make the company's Assassin's Creed franchise. The latest iteration of the saga, Assassin's Creed Shadows, introduced several technological improvements that made it a stunning technical showcase upon release. With this behind-the-scenes video series, Ubisoft aims to delve into the key innovations introduced to Anvil, starting with Atmos. Atmos is Ubisoft's physically based weather simulation system built into the Anvil engine for Assassin's Creed Shadows. Rather than using pre-baked or downloaded weather states, it simulates atmospheric conditions in real time, propagating physical quantities [โฆ]
Elon Musk has shared the very first update on the Tesla A15 chip, confirming its successful tape out & plans for A16 and Dojo3. Elon Musk Shares First Pictures of Tesla A15 After Successful Tape Out, The Road Ahead Includes A16 & Dojo3 In the latest update on X, Elon Musk has congratulated the Tesla AI team on the successful tape out of its A15 AI chip. Elon has also shared pictures of the chip, featuring a large primary die in the middle that will handle all of the compute and 12 DRAM modules on the outskirts, offering high capacity [โฆ]
You want to change a button color on your site but you're not a developer. You either wait days for a developer or try AI and risk breaking your payments page. SafeCanvas scans your React + Tailwind repo and figures out which files are safe to edit and which are not. You type what you want changed, it writes the code, but it won't touch your auth, payments, or database files. If it isn't sure, it stops. You get a preview on a separate branch. Your developer reviews the PR and merges it.
AMD's upcoming Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition CPU is now available for pre-orders in China ahead of its 22nd April launch. You Can Now Pre-Order AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition CPU In China - Deposit ยฅ100 & Get ยฅ300 Paid Back Towards The Final Price The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition CPU is coming and finally bringing dual 3D V-Cache dies to the mainstream AM5 platform. The launch has been much-awaited, and a few days back, AMD confirmed the price of the chip, which will be set at an MSRP of $899, making it the most expensive AM5 [โฆ]
Unigen's latest AI module runs on a standard M.2 slot and offers up to 60 TOPS, 32 GB memory, & can run up to 20B parameter LLMs. Unigen Amaretti AI Module Packs a 60 TOPS NPU, 32 GB Memory, & Consumes Just 10W Power On A M.2 or E1.S Slot With the rise of local AI agents, many companies are putting out some unique AI products. Unigen is one of these manufacturers that has announced the Amaretti E1.S AI module, a tiny M.2-compatible module that looks like a regular SSD but houses some strong AI capabilities. The Unigen Amaretti E1.S [โฆ]
Life can get busy, and it takes more than a group chat to stay close with the people you care about most. The Monthly Soup fixes that. Invite your people, and throughout the month everyone shares answers, photos, songs, and podcasts in response to weekly prompts or questions posted by group members. Weekly prompts give you 24 hours to reply and let you see what others said. Questions from group members stay hidden until the end of the month, when everything is compiled into a diary and shared with the whole group at once. You can run as many groups as you want. There are no ads or algorithms. Pricing is per group, with the first month free.
Kosmo Research is an AI-powered mixed methods research platform that helps teams run user interviews and surveys at scale, without the cost or complexity of traditional agencies. The AI moderator asks intelligent follow-up questions, transcribes voice responses, and delivers automated summaries when your study wraps. You can run concept tests, landing page reviews, pricing research, and customer discovery via Web or WhatsApp, where participants already are. It is fully branded, asynchronous, and GDPR compliant. Pricing starts from โฌ99.
OpenAI on Tuesdayย unveiled GPT-5.4-Cyber, a variant of its latest flagshipย model, GPTโ5.4, that's specifically optimized for defensive cybersecurity use cases, days after rival Anthropic unveiled its own frontierย model, Mythos.
"The progressive use of AI accelerates defenders โ those responsible for keeping systems, data, and users safe โ enabling them to find and fix problems
California-based auditor webXray reports that tech giants have continued to use cookies to track users across the internet, even when website visitors reject them. Google, Microsoft, and Meta have all disputed the findings.
DaVinci Resolve 21 beta pushes further into all-in-one territory, adding a dedicated Photo section that allows edition of still images using the same color pipeline that made Resolve a favorite for video. The update leans heavily on AI to speed up everyday work. Early impressions highlight how seamlessly the new tools fit into existing workflows.
TrajectoryAI is a company monitoring platform made for go-to-market teams who need to understand changes across their market. It continuously tracks company signals like hiring activity, leadership changes, product launches, partnerships, and strategic shifts, turning scattered data into clear, actionable insights.
This helps save time on research, increase win rates, improve retention and revenue from existing customers, boost conversion rates using intent signals, strengthen pipeline performance, and support faster, data-driven decisions.
By now, the legal debacle between the founders of Subnautica developer, Unknown Worlds, and Krafton, the studio's parent company and the game's now-former publisher, is public knowledge, with the situation ultimately culminating in the ousted founder and CEO of Unknown Worlds being reinstated by a judge in a recent legal decision. Following that legal drama and a Subnautica 2 release date leak, which was heavily criticized by the returning founder Ted Gill, it appears as though Unknown Worlds has broken with Krafton as the publisher for Subnautica 2.
A quick look at the survival game's Steam Store page reveals that Unknown Worlds Entertainment is now listed as both the developer and the publisher of Subnautica 2. The same is true for the game's Epic Games Store page, where the publisher now also reads Unknown Worlds Entertainment. It's a rather curious turn of events, given the nature of the relationship between Krafton and Unknown WorldsโKrafton being Unknown Worlds's parent companyโand it brings up questions about the destiny of the game developer. At this point, it's unclear who cut who loose, but it remains to be seen how Unknown Worlds will handle the launch now that there is no dedicated publisher. It probably helps that Unknown Worlds is very deep into the development process for Subnautica 2, with the studio previously commenting that the game was ready for launch in 2025 already. In March 2025, however, the studio commented that the Early Access version of the game would not be a complete experience.
NVIDIA has introduced Ising, its newest OpenAI models designed to make Quantum Computers useful and faster with brand new capabilities. NVIDIA Ising AI Models For Quantum Computers Bring Up To 3x Performance Boost Quantum Computing has been cited as the next frontier of computing for decades. Several companies have been trying to perfect quantum computing for years now, and only now have a few started to break the code. NVIDIA already offers an open-source development platform for quantum computing called CUDA-Q. The platform is "qubit-agnostic" and works seamlessly with QPUs and Qubit Modalities. Today, NVIDIA is announcing its first family [โฆ]
Promptbook tracks your AI coding sessions automatically. Every prompt, token, dollar, and line is logged and turned into a public profile and project timeline so your best work doesn't disappear.
Create your profile, track your progress, and share the proof. Over 40 builders are already tracking more than 2,400 sessions. Setup takes just 2 minutes. The first 1,000 users get permanent Founding Builder status.
One investor who has backed both companies told the FT that justifying OpenAI's recent round required assuming an IPO valuation of $1.2 trillion or more โ making Anthropic's current $380 billion valuation look like the relative bargain.
Meta will fulfill its massive AI demands by co-developing multiple next-gen AI Silicon "XPUs" with Broadcom. Meta & Broadcom Partner To Develop A Multi-Gigawatt AI Ecosystem Powered by Custom AI Silicon "XPUs" Last month, Meta announced four AI chips featuring a custom design for its AI tasks. These XPUs (chips with multiple IPs) were branded under the MTIA AI lineup & each chip is optimized for a specific workload that spans GenAI inference, General-Purpose, and Training tasks. The four chips are listed below with their specs: Metric MTIA 300 MTIA 400 MTIA 450 MTIA 500 Workload Focus R&R Training General [โฆ]
DevShip unifies issue tracking, project management, client collaboration, and time logging in a single workspace for engineering teams. Use triage queues, roles and permissions, and a client portal to organize requests and keep stakeholders aligned, while the API and Slack integration connect your workflow. Start free and upgrade for advanced reporting, exports, and unlimited users.
4ever gives every family member their own profile where a lifetime of memories lives in one beautiful timeline. Every birthday, holiday, and first sports game are all organized and easy to find. Grandparents can digitize photos in boxes and add the stories behind them before they fade. Parents can build a living scrapbook for their kids that grows with them year after year. Recipes have their own section so dishes that bring everyone together are never lost. 4ever is one place where your entire family's history is preserved for generations.
DRAM quantity aside, the move would also see NVIDIA decrease the bus width of the respective cards, going from 128-bit to 96-bit by using new 24 Gbit memory chips, resulting in an overall decrease in bandwidth and reduced memory performance. According to @harakuze5719 on X, the new 9 GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti GPUs are slated to launch sometime between May and June, with a Computex launch seemingly likely.
The failure rate of NVIDIA's 16-Pin connector GPUs should be the primary reason why the company's warranty claims have increased by 1000%. With A Share of Over 90% In The Discrete GPU Segment, NVIDIA Witnesses A Massive Surge In Warranty Claims That Could Be Linked To Its New 16-Pin Connector Products NVIDIA's warranty expenses have seen a drastic rise over the past three years, as Warranty Week reports an unusual rise in the company's warranty claims and accrual rates. It is reported that NVIDIA's warranty claims increased ninefold, whereas AMD's warranty claim rates increased by two-thirds during the 2024-2025 period. [โฆ]
As the United States continues to hammer down trade restrictions on China, YMTC has decided to uplift the chipmaking capacity by building new fabs. China & US Trade Wars Continue, In the Midst, YMTC Decides To Double Its Production Capacity With Two Brand New Chipmaking Factories The semiconductor industry is currently facing a trade war between two giants. On one hand, there's the United States, and on the other, there's China. From export restrictions to the banning of necessary tools that are required for making chips, the United States is trying to ensure that China doesn't get bleeding-edge materials and [โฆ]
The annual messaging conference will be held June 3 and showcase artificial intelligence innovations and upgrades to WhatsApp, Messenger and IG Direct.
Bambu Lab launches its X2D 3D printer at a shockingly low price After a time of teasing, Bambu Lab has officially unveiled its X2D 3D printer, the companyโs highly anticipated replacement for its popular X1 Carbon. With this new model comes a suite of features, including an โauxiliary nozzleโ, AI error detection, and more. This [โฆ]
Reported Starfield sales on PS5 suggest a slower start than expected, raising questions about Xboxโs multiplatform strategy and whether moving away from exclusivity impacts hardware value.
Overwatch Season 2: Summit arrived today, and itโs a massive update introducing high-octane DPS hero Sierra and a bounty of rewards to earn on an all-new battle pass.
Bethesda's Todd Howard says Fallout 76 and Starfield were different than its usual RPGs by design, as the devs "have ideas that we want to get out there."
It seems as though God of War studio, Santa Monica Studio, is slated for a busy time in the coming months and years, with recent rumors suggesting that there is another God of War game on the horizon, some even claiming that it may be announced as soon as April 2026. Not all that much is known about the new God of War game, but according to reporting by MP1st and Tom Henderson on the Insider Gaming podcast, it will not follow Kratos. Instead, the new spin-off, which does not yet have a name, will feature Tรฝr and Faye, the erstwhile Norse god of war and Kratos's deceased wife. This suggests that the spin-off will be a prequel to the recent God of War 2018 and Ragnarรถk.
The reports make mention of a talking sword, which will apparently be Merlin from English legend, as well as elements from Japanese, Chinese, and possibly other East-Asian mythologies. According to Henderson, the next "mainline" God of War game was meant to be announced at an April Sony State of Play, and it is assumed that the spin-off with Faye will be the next mainline installment in the franchise. This news comes not too long after Santa Monica Studio and Sony announced that a remake of the original God of War trilogy was in the works at Santa Monica.
Keychron may be known for its mechanical and HE keyboards, but it has also recently made a name for itself in the mouse space with wireless mice like the M6 8K and M7 8K. Now, Keychron has launched two new gaming mice under the Keychron G3 name. The G3 is an ultra-light gaming mouse with a right-handed symmetrical design and two material options for the shellโa carbon fiber top and an ABS base or a translucent polycarbonate top and an ABS bottom. Both the carbon fiber and the translucent PC version of the Keychron G3 have the same shape, weight, and internals, so potential buyers have two aesthetic choices without giving up any performance or battery life. The Keychron G3 is available on the Keychron web store at $84.99 for the translucent PC version and $109.99 for the carbon fiber version.
The Keychron G3 uses a PixArt 3950 sensor, replete with 8 kHz polling, tri-mode wireless connectivity (2.4 GHz, Bluetooth 5.3, and USB-C), and a 500 mAh battery, which Keychron says offers up to 160 hours of use on a single charge. Keychron has not specified the test configuration, but it can usually be assumed that manufacturers test battery life over Bluetooth or 2.4 GHz at something like 1,000 Hz polling rate. Unlike many modern gaming mouse, but much like Keychron's other gaming mice, the G3 uses mechanical Huano Transparent Shell White Dot micro switches for the main clicks, meaning they have a 120 million-click rated MTBF, which is a step up from the Huano Transparent Blue Shell Pink Dot switches used in other Keychron mice, which were only rated to 80 million clicks.
The Mac lineup will obtain a mammoth advantage over the competition because Apple has kept its prices in check, but this isnโt the only lineup the company is focused on. According to the latest rumor, the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Maxย could become two of the most popular flagships on the planet because, where rivals are introducing price hikes left, right, and center, Apple is rumored to introduce a price freeze. However, thereโs a catch, but not a terrible one: those who are used to picking out their favorite color options might be left sorely disappointed. iPhone 18 [โฆ]
MemoKee is a central memory hub that lets you save articles, videos, social posts, product pages, notes, and voice notes from any device and find them fast. It uses AI to auto-tag and categorize your saves and semantic search to retrieve what you remember without exact keywords. Group by topic, project, or tag to build a long-term personal knowledge library you can trust.
The more thinking you outsource to AI, the harder it gets to reason on your own.
Thessea reverses that with 10-minute daily sessions built around real articles, not brain games. Read actively, answer reasoning questions, and get structured feedback that shows exactly where your thinking held up and where it broke down. A six-axis skill profile tracks your progress over time, so you can see your reasoning sharpen week by week.
A Reddit user has found a way to use an Xbox Expansion Card on PC with a CFexpress adapter, potentially giving unused storage a second life with faster-than-SATA SSD speeds.
Microsoft's 7th Edition Surface, one of the best AI laptops we use daily for its supreme workflow performance and perfected clamshell, is now 38% off to defy the recently announced price hikes.
YMTC (Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp) is planning to significantly expand its manufacturing capacity, with Reuters reporting the Chinese NAND flash maker intends to build two additional factories on top of one already nearing completion. When all three are running at full capacity, YMTC's total output would more than double from its current 200,000 wafers per month to 400,000 wafers per month (each new plant is designed for 100,000 wafers monthly). The third fab, located in Wuhan alongside the existing two plants, has already been built and is currently being equipped. The fab is expected to start operations later this year and reach 50,000 wafers per month by 2027. Notably, over half of the equipment has been sourced domestically, including tooling for vertical layer stacking, a sign of how much YMTC has leaned into local suppliers since the US added it to the Entity List in December 2022. However, recently, the U.S. Government's Bureau of Industry and Security reportedly removed YMTC from the list of restricted Chinese companies.
The two planned factories don't yet have confirmed locations or target dates, but all three new plants will reportedly allocate some capacity to DRAM production alongside NAND. YMTC has already sent LPDDR samples to clients and expects feedback by year-end, which will shape how aggressively it pursues DRAM going forward. On the NAND side, YMTC already holds 11.8% of the global market, on par with Sandisk and not far behind SK Hynix (16%), Kioxia (15.9%), and Micron (13.3%), while Samsung leads at 30.4%. UBS expects the YMTC shares to pass 14% by early 2027. The company is pushing its Xtacking 4.0 architecture, which is considered competitive with what the industry leaders are shipping.
It's no secret that since the RTX 40-series GPUs launched, pushing the new 12VHPWR connectors to new heights, and again increasing power draw with the RTX 50-series, that premature failures have been high. However, Warranty Week has quantified NVIDIA's warranty expenses and total warranty claims, finding that the GPU maker saw a 1000% year-over-year increase in warranty expenditure in 2025. According to the analysis, NVIDIA paid out a whopping $894 million in warranty claims in 2025, compared to just $81 million in 2024. Part of the driving force behind the increased warranty payments is the recent spike in hardware prices, but much of it also has to do with increased warranty rates.
The analytics firm reports that NVIDIA's warranty claim rate rose to as much as 0.9% by Q4 2025, compared to just 0.17% in Q1. Although not quite as drastic, AMD, for its part, also saw an increased warranty rate, with rates climbing from 0.43% in 2024 to 0.68% in 2025. AMD's 2025 warranty claims totaled to $238 million, compared to $110 million in 2024, amounting to an increase of just over 100%. By the end of 2025, NVIDIA had increased its warranty reserves from $416 million to $2.59 billion, whereas AMD increased its warranty reserve balance from $310 million to $597 million.
After the success of the Forta Gaming Headset, GXTrust announces the launch of the highly anticipated Forta Wireless - an Official Licensed Product for PlayStation 5 consoles. With all of the premium features that gamers have come to expect from the Forta - immersive sound, seamless connection with their consoles, and ultra-comfortable design - this new edition gives players yet another ultimate feature: complete wireless freedom.
Designed specifically for PlayStation fans, the officially licensed Forta Wireless offers ultra-low latency lossless wireless connection via a 2.4G USB receiver, giving players the freedom to move, cheer, and enjoy with no cables getting in the way. What's more, with no lag, the Forta Wireless ensures precise actions and reactions, keeping gamers fully connected to every crucial moment.
Malwarebytes recently uncovered a new malicious campaign targeting the Windows Update service. Focused on French-speaking users, the campaign uses layered obfuscation techniques to deliver multiple malicious payloads built with legitimate tools. The malware's primary goal is to steal passwords and other sensitive user data.
Path of Exile 2 is developer Grinding Gear Games' self-dubbed "next generation action RPG," and this round-up will take you through everything you need to know about the game between its early access launch, to 1.0, and beyond. After getting announced all the way back in 2019, Path of Exile 2 arrived in Early Access in December 2024 after it was delayed from its initial November 2024 release window. When it arrived a little more than a year after Diablo IV, comparisons between the two ARPGs were all over the place. But at least at the time of its early [โฆ]
Boxlab is an online packaging design tool that turns your box dimensions into production-ready dielines and realistic 3D previews. Pick a template, set your sizes, upload artwork, and see the result fold and rotate in real time, complete with foil stamping, spot UV, and material effects. Place your packaging into photorealistic scenes using 100+ built-in studio and lifestyle presets, or generate a custom environment from a text prompt with AI. Lighting, shadows, and atmosphere adjust automatically. Export dielines in PDF, SVG, or DXF, download high-res renders, or embed an interactive 3D viewer on your site, no switching between apps.
I built PeopleBuild around a problem Iโve had for years: itโs hard to find the right people for your ideas and just as hard to find ideas where you can contribute. The layoff and job-transition angle was part of the starting point, but the problem feels broader. Many talented people want to keep building, but most platforms push them toward jobs, generic networking, or solo work. PeopleBuild aims to create a more direct place for collaboration and team formation.
Memorial Day sales will be here before you know it, so I've created this guide with everything you need to know, including the date and what deals you can expect.
The Best Buy Ultimate Upgrade sale features some excellent laptop deals this week, so I've picked out seven of the top offers that I'd recommend buying.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that Sony would be largely stepping away from porting its first-party games to PC, returning to console exclusives for its single-player games and only releasing multiplayer games across different platforms. Now, it seems as though Microsoft may be plotting or is at least considering a similar maneuver for its first-party Xbox Game Studios games. This is according to industry insider, Jez Cordon, on the Xbox Two Podcast. According to Corden, "there are very very very big discussions happening about the exclusivity stuff" internally at Microsoft. Corden goes on to explain that, despite Microsoft's recent moves away from platform exclusives, it recognizes the value in exclusive gamesโthat is to say the value in keeping users largely locked into your gaming platform as opposed to being mostly a publishing and game development company.
Corden continues with a prediction that Microsoft will continue its shift away from Xbox gaming hardwareโespecially if it decides to move away from the platform approach and lean further into its game publishing business. Currently, the Xbox Helix is on the horizon, which is a hybrid game console that will run both PC and Xbox games, but that doesn't necessarily preclude Microsoft from launching exclusives; it just means that the exclusives would be PC and Xbox exclusives. This convergence of PC and Xbox has been echoed by other rumors that Microsoft may be combining Xbox and PC Game Pass subscriptions into one unified subscription service.
Shortly after announcing the OneXPlayer ONEXStation, powered by the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU, OneXPlayer is apparently planning to launch the OneXPlayer X2 Mini, a new gaming handheld powered by the same powerful AMD Strix Halo APU with its Radeon 8060S iGPU. The OneXPlayer X2 Mini features many of the same features and design cues as the X1 Pro that released in 2025, but in a more compact form factor, much like the OneXPlayer Apex that we saw at CES 2026. The new X2 Mini, however, also has a few upgrades over the Apex, including a slightly larger display, an optional exclusively air-cooled version, and a modular design. Pricing has not yet been revealed, although the X2 Mini is slated to launch on May 10.
According to a video posted by Nitrix on YouTube, the X2 Mini will have an 8.8-inch, 144 Hz, OLED display with VRR and HDR. It will feature an 85 Wh battery that is user-swappable, allowing users to keep an extra battery on-hand to swap in when the battery dies. The rest of the console is modular, as well. The detachable controllers will feature user-replaceable buttons, casings, joysticks, and vibration motors, and the display will also be user-serviceable. The Joy Con-like controllers will also have a frame to join the two halves into a single mini controller, and the X2 Mini will include two d-pad configurationsโthe standard cross and an octagonal pad, similar to Microsoft's Xbox Series Elite controller. One point of contention that has been mentioned on Reddit is that the X2 Mini will feature micro switches for the face buttonsโalthough notably not the d-padโwhich means the buttons will have lower travel and be slightly louder than a normal membrane switch. There will also be a magnetic connection with pogo pins to attach a keyboard accessory to the bottom of the gaming handheld. The full video showing off the device follows below.
While Meta partnered with Ray-Ban to position its smart glasses as more lifestyle-oriented than experimental, Apple's design philosophy remains distinctly in-house. In his Power On newsletter, Gurman notes that Apple is taking an independent approach, choosing to develop the product internally rather than collaborate with an established eyewear brand. Each...
Per the agreement, Amazon will take ownership of Globalstar's existing operations including its low Earth orbit satellite network and supporting infrastructure, as well as related assets like mobile satellite service spectrum licenses. Amazon is paying $90 per Globalstar share โ available either as cash or in Amazon stock โ which...
Pragmata is drawing positive early reviews thanks to its inventive mix of third-person shooting and real-time hacking mechanics alongside striking futuristic visuals. The dynamic between its lead characters and the game's strategic combat depth stand out as key strengths.
Starfield finally made its (somewhat inevitable) arrival on PS5 last week, alongside the launch of its Free Lanes update and the Terran Armada DLC expansion, and in its first week on PlayStation, according to a new report from Alinea Analytics, the game has managed to sell 140K copies. Not a bad start when you look at it on the surface, but Alinea's report seemingly proves that Starfield is mid. Or at least its PS5 launch sales are, compared to other Xbox Game Studios-published games that have arrived on PS5 within the last six months. Compared to The Outer Worlds 2, [โฆ]
Today's exclusive interview is a bit different from the usual because it is focused on a company called Wolfjaw Studios that is probably unknown to most gamers but still powers many of the most played online games, including the likes of NBA 2K, WWE 2K, Destiny 2, Marathon, Among Us, and Magic: The Gathering Arena. Founded in 2019 by Mitchell Patterson (following a conversation at TwitchCon 2018), Wolfjaw was built from scratch around a single, focused ambition: to establish backend development as a distinct, mission-critical discipline within game development, rather than an afterthought bolted on after the "real" work was [โฆ]
Even though Samsung has now ended the production of its triple-folding Galaxy Z TriFold smartphone, its successor might already be in the works and would likely bear a wide form factor popularized by the upcoming iPhone Ultra, as per the insights gleaned from Samsung's patents. Samsung's patents hint at an upcoming successor to the now-defunct Galaxy Z TriFold, albeit in a wide form factor We already know that Samsung has been working on a Galaxy Z TriFold 2, which is expected to sport a more refined hinge mechanism, one that is lightweight and ultra-thin, allowing the South Korean behemoth to [โฆ]
Digital Dashboard Hub unifies 255+ interactive dashboard tools for managing finance, productivity, and wellness in one place. Explore three collectionsโCareer & Skills Lab, Vision & Values Suite, and Tools That Workโto budget, invest, plan your career, set goals, and build healthy habits. Start with a free 14-day trial and choose from Starter, Pro, Premium, or a one-time Lifetime Deal to unlock unlimited views, saves, exports, and priority support.
In an interview at the Semafor World Economy summit this week, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark explained why the company was still engaged with the U.S. government while simultaneously suing them.
A major shift is underway in digital advertising: Meta Platforms is projected to generate more ad revenue than Google in 2026, signaling how marketers are increasingly favoring automated, performance-driven platforms.
Driving the news. According to Emarketer, Meta is expected to bring in $243.46 billion in global ad revenue this year, narrowly topping Googleโs projected $239.54 billion.
Meta is forecast to capture 26.8% of global ad spend.
Google is projected to take 26.4%.
It would be the first time Google has lost the top spot in digital ad revenue.
Why we care. Metaโs growth suggests brands are getting more value from automated, performance-focused tools, which could influence how they split budgets between Meta and Google. Itโs also a reminder that platform dynamics are changing fast, so media strategies need to stay flexible.
Catch up quick: Google has long dominated digital advertising through Search ads, Display ads across the web, and YouTube.
But its core ad business is growing more slowly than in previous years.
Meanwhile, Meta has benefited from AI-powered ad automation, stronger performance measurement tools, and continued scale across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Why Meta is winning now. Advertisers are increasingly prioritizing platforms that can deliver both reach and measurable return.
Metaโs advantage has been its ability to automate creative and targeting faster, optimize campaigns with less manual input, and make it easier for brands to prove ROI.
Thatโs especially appealing in a tighter economic environment where marketers are under pressure to do more with less.
Yes, but. Google is still enormous โ and still growing.
Its search business remains one of the most profitable ad engines in the world, and YouTube continues to attract brand budgets. But the company faces more pressure from, AI search disruption, antitrust scrutiny, and slowing growth in traditional search advertising.
A growing number of advertisers say their Google Ads campaigns were suddenly hit with mass disapprovals tied to DNS and 500 server errors โ even when their sites appeared to be working normally. The issue is raising fresh concerns about platform reliability and the risk of sudden performance disruptions.
Driving the news. PPC advertisers began flagging widespread problems this week across Google Ads accounts, with multiple agency leaders saying clients were affected at the same time.
Managing Director at Cornerhouse Media, Ryan Berry, said more than 1,500 ads were disapproved in a single account around 1:30 p.m. UTC.
Others said they received overnight emails warning that ads had been disapproved.
Why we care. Sudden mass disapprovals can instantly pause traffic, leads, and revenue โ even if nothing is actually wrong with their website. If Googleโs systems are incorrectly flagging DNS or server errors, brands could lose performance and spend valuable time troubleshooting an issue they didnโt cause. It also highlights the need for closer monitoring and faster escalation when platform glitches happen.
What advertisers are seeing:
DNS errors, even when internal IT teams found no website issue.
Google Ads trainer, Charlotte Osborne said she saw two separate cases this week โ one tied to a DNS error and another to a 500 error โ with no issues found on the client side.
Google Advertising specialist Joshua Barr said he received โlots of emails overnightโ about disapproved ads and has been dealing with similar problems for weeks.
Several Paid Search experts also said they were seeing the same issue across accounts.
Whatโs likely happening. Googleโs ad review systems use automated crawlers to test landing pages. If Googlebot encounters temporary server issues, DNS lookup failures, redirects, or timeout errors, ads can be automatically disapproved under the platformโs โdestination not workingโ policy.
That means advertisers can be penalized even if:
their site is live for users,
the issue is temporary,
or the problem is on Googleโs crawler side.
What to do now:
Check Google Ads policy manager for exact disapproval reasons.
Test landing pages using multiple locations and devices.
Review DNS uptime, redirects, and CDN/firewall settings.
Submit appeals for clearly incorrect disapprovals.
Document account-level impacts in case the issue proves platform-wide.
The bottom line. For advertisers, this is a reminder that campaign performance can be derailed by platform glitches as much as by strategy โ and when Googleโs systems misfire, spend and leads can disappear fast.
Fedora 44 was meant to be launched today, April 14, 2026, but a gander at the Fedora developer mailing list reveals that the workstation Linux distribution will be delayed to April 21 at the earliest. Adam Williamson, the Fedora QA developer who made the announcement clarified in the email that the reason for the delay is a long list of outstanding blockersโbugs or broken features that are big enough to break the experience or prevent the launch of the OSโthat nobody is willing to waive. These bugs include issues with KDE's plasma-setup network setup, the NVIDIA Mesa driver setup, KDE keyboard layout selection, the systemd-oomd.service, and Grub breaking booting to Windows systems with BitLocker enabled.
On the one hand, this means that gamers and workstation users on Fedora, and all of its various iterations, like Bazzite, Nobara, and Rocky Linux, will have to wait a longer for the new version, along with all of its bug fixes, the new kernel version 6.19, and promised new features. On the other hand, the delay will give the project's developers extra time to iron out those experience-breaking bugs and deliver a working operating system. Some of the highlights of Fedora 44 are a move to Gnome 50 and KDE Plasma 6.6, a streamlined install process, finalizing the move to Plasma Login Manager on KDE spins, and adding support for Budgie 10.10.
Each week, new games and apps integrating NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex, and advanced ray-traced effects are released or announced, delivering the definitive PC experience for GeForce RTX players. This week, PRAGMATA launches with path-traced effects, DLSS Multi Frame Generation and DLSS Ray Reconstruction, giving GeForce RTX gamers the definitive experience. Additionally, DLSS comes to Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, MONGIL: STAR DIVE, and Windrose this week. And INDUSTRIA 2 launches with DLSS 4.5 this month. And a new sci-fi first-person shooter called Fragmentary Order has been announced, which will launch with DLSS 4.5.
PRAGMATA GeForce RTX 50 Series Bundle Available Now, Ahead Of April 17th Launch, Featuring Path Tracing & DLSS
Set in the near future, CAPCOM's PRAGMATA transports players to a lunar research station. In the years since the discovery of Lunam Ore, humanity has developed Lunafilament, a material capable of replicating almost anything. One day without warning, Earth lost contact with the station dedicated to this Lunafilament, as all signals went dark.
Sony Electronics Inc. expands its INZONE gaming gear lineup with two new models: the INZONE H6 Wired Air open-back headset and the INZONE M10S II 27" QHD 540 Hz OLED gaming monitor, designed for players who prioritize precision and speed. The INZONE H6 Air introduces an open-back acoustic structure that delivers a more natural and expansive sound field. Paired with custom drivers and integrated back ducts, the headset produces controlled low frequencies and detailed spatial audio that helps players better track in-game environments.
Engineered in collaboration with Fnatic, the leading esports team, the INZONE M10S II combines a next-generation tandem-structured OLED display with Dual Mode (QHD 540 Hz or HD 720 Hz), an ultra-fast 0.02 ms response time, advanced Motion Blur Reduction (MBR) and a Super Anti-glare Filmโall designed to ensure peak esports performance.
STORMCRAFT PC, the Southern California gaming PC brand founded by gamers and engineers, today announced the launch and retail availability of its new Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus gaming desktop lineup. Designed for gaming, streaming, content creation, and PC upgrades, the new prebuilt gaming PC family combines the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processor with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5070, and RTX 5060 Ti graphics across four STORMCRAFT series: WIZARD WHITE, PHANTOM, SKYHAWK, and FALCON. With up to 24 cores, up to 5.5 GHz max turbo frequency, Intel AI Boost, DDR5 memory, Gen 4 SSD storage, and premium cooling, the lineup is built to give gamers, creators, enthusiasts, and hardcore players a stronger path to next-generation desktop performance.
"With this Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus launch, we wanted to bring customers a meaningful upgrade for better gaming and multitasking experiences," said Frank Lee, Founder of STORMCRAFT PC. "This new lineup combines the latest Intel platform with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics, giving gamers and creators more performance, faster responsiveness, and a wider range of system options across different price points. From our flagship WIZARD WHITE build to more accessible upgrade-ready desktops, every STORMCRAFT PC is built in Southern California and backed by lifetime tech support from our team."
Microsoft recently released a new preview build of Windows 11 for the Windows Insider channels. Users enrolled in the Insider program can now test a somewhat historic change: a new "hard" size limit for disk volumes formatted with the FAT32 file system. This long-anticipated update may improve compatibility and flexibility...
Festus leaders pitched the project, set to span roughly 360 acres north of Highway 67 and Route CC, as a once-in-a-generation windfall, but many residents saw it as a massive development being pushed through over local objections.
Apple's smart investment in Globalstar now stands to yield a sizable return, while allowing for a significant expansion in the iPhone's satellite-based connectivity features further down the line, courtesy of the $11.5 billion acquisition deal between Amazon and Globalstar. Apple will not only recoup its investments in Globalstar and then some, but also benefit from the upcoming expansion in Amazon's Leo-branded constellation of satellites For the benefit of those who might not be aware, Apple acquired a 20 percent stake in Globalstar back in 2023 for $400 million, while also committing to injecting $1.1 billion in cash-based liquidity to expand [โฆ]
EA and Full Circle have revealed a new Nike SB collab for Skate, as one of the most highly anticipated collabs finally joins the game. It also comes with a complete Nike-themed makeover to the Isle of Grom skatepark, and the introduction of Grom at night. The Nike event will be on from April 14 to May 5, during which all players will have access to the Isle of Grom. Afterwards, it's back to having to either buy a day pass to the island, or buy the premium Skate pass to access it. Which was the bit of the Isle [โฆ]
A new report published today by market analyst firm Newzoo suggests a structural shift in the PC and console gaming market: while the biggest AAA titles still dominate, a growing share of both playtime and revenue is flowing to games ranked outside the Top 20, with the trend most pronounced on the PC platform. The headline figure is striking. In Western markets (US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain), titles ranked 21st and below accounted for 56% of total PC gaming revenue in 2025, up from 48% in 2022. That means the majority of money spent on PC games now goes [โฆ]
Anthropic's Mythos might be the best cybersecurity AI ever, but it's not the only one and it may well be the most expensive, raising questions about how useful it actually is, when weighed against the competition.
LogDB is a developer-first observability platform for modern teams that need speed, privacy, and control. It lets you search, analyze, and investigate logs, metrics, and threats in one unified environment with local control, encrypted storage, and AI-assisted workflows. Built for engineering, DevOps, and security teams, LogDB helps you turn complex telemetry into fast answers without sacrificing data ownership or trust.
Two high-severity security vulnerabilitiesย have been disclosed in Composer, a packageย manager forย PHP, that, if successfully exploited, could result in arbitrary command execution.
The vulnerabilitiesย have beenย described as command injection flaws affecting the Perforce VCS (version control software) driver. Details of the two flaws are belowย -
CVE-2026-40176 (CVSS
Press freedom advocates are demanding urgent answers from US lawmakers after revelations that using a VPN might strip American citizens of their constitutional rights. Here's why the Freedom of the Press Foundation wants immediate limits on warrantless spy powers.
If you're struggling to stay connected in heavily restricted countries like Iran, Russia, or China, Windscribe's latest mobile app updates might be exactly what you need. Here's how the provider is fighting back against the censors.
The device could help address multiple neurological conditions if it proves successful. One early use could be delivering gentle electrical stimulation to damaged brain or spinal cord cells to encourage healing.
Google is adding โSkillsโ to Chrome, letting users save and reuse AI prompts across websites. The feature builds on Geminiโs browser integration.
Pillar hopes to offer sophisticated, institutional-grade tools to small and medium-sized enterprises. "Our goal is to make hedging as accessible and ubiquitous as payments or accounting software," he said.
Theย first StrictlyVC of the yearย will be coming to San Francisco before you know it.
There are still a few tickets available to join us and our stacked speaker lineup April 30, so register today!
Googleโs legal troubles over its search and ad tech businesses are entering a new phase โ one that could expose the company to billions in payouts from advertisers seeking damages after U.S. courts found it illegally monopolized key digital ad markets.
Driving the news. A growing group of advertisers is preparing to file mass arbitration claims against Google, according to attorney Ashley Keller, who said the first filings are expected this week.
Keller says he has already signed up a โsignificant numberโ of advertisers.
He estimates potential claims tied to online search and display advertising could exceed $218 billion, based on economic analysis his firm commissioned.
Similar mass arbitration cases typically take 12 to 24 months to resolve.
Catch up quick. Courts in 2024 dealt Google major antitrust blows.
Why we care. This case could open a path to recover money advertisers believe they overpaid for search and display ads due to Googleโs alleged monopoly power. Mass arbitration may give businesses more leverage than individual claims and could pressure Google into settlements.
It also signals growing legal scrutiny of the digital ad market, which could eventually lead to more competition and lower costs.
Why arbitration matters. Most advertisers canโt simply sue Google in court because their contracts require disputes to go through arbitration.
That usually favors large companies when claims are handled one by one. But mass arbitration โ which bundles 25 or more similar claims โ can shift leverage back toward claimants.
It increases pressure to settle.
It can lower legal costs for smaller businesses.
It allows companies with relatively modest individual claims to pursue damages collectively.
Whatโs new. This case could break new ground because most mass arbitrations to date have involved consumers or workers โ not corporate plaintiffs.
A large-scale advertiser action against Google would be among the first major efforts to use the strategy for business-to-business claims.
What Google says. In a recent filing, Google said it faces private damages claims tied to global antitrust cases but cannot yet estimate potential losses.
The company said it believes it has โstrong argumentsโ and plans to defend itself aggressively.
Nvidia plans to adopt 3GB GDDR7 memory modules for new GPUs A new report from Board Channels (via Videocardz), Nvidia is reportedly planning to utilise 3GB GDDR7 memory modules to create several new graphics cards. DRAM manufacturers are ramping up production of 3GB GDDR7 memory, leading Nvidia to introduce new 9GB versions of its RTX [โฆ]
Retro Bethesda-style RPG mechanics get a fresh new life in Dread Delusion, a bite-sized RPG that shakes off the aesthetics and mechanics of modern RPGs and embraces nostalgia and low-poly visuals.
Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH (Toshiba) has unveiled a metallic blue casing for its Canvio Flex 2.5-inch portable hard disk drive (HDD). The new color adds a fresh look to the range, alongside the original warm silver option. The new metallic blue model will be available exclusively across EMEA.
Available in 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB capacities, the Canvio Flex is designed for easy storage across multiple devices. Pre-formatted with exFAT, it works seamlessly with Windows PCs and Macs, as well as with compatible Android and iOS tablets and smartphones, without requiring reformatting.
NVIDIA today announced that it is bundling "Pragmata," the new Sci-Fi action adventure game, with new purchases of GeForce RTX 50-series "Blackwell" graphics cards from its various add-in card partners, new notebooks with RTX 50-series gaming GPUs, and pre-built desktops with RTX 50-series graphics cards. From a technical standpoint, "Pragmata" is a pioneering game as it is the first to implement path-tracing with Neural Rendering for more visual realism. It also implements DLSS 4 upscaling, and multi-frame generation. The giveaway is available to select markets, select brands, and through participating retailers.
The offer is limited to one Steam code per customer (buying multiple graphics cards don't get you multiple keys). Eligible products include GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 on the desktop platform; and RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, RTX 5080 Laptop GPU, RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU, and RTX 5070 Laptop GPU, for gaming notebooks with discrete GPUs. Certain pre-built desktops with eligible graphics cards may also be part of the offer.
Kensington, a worldwide leader of desktop computing and mobility solutions for IT, business, and home office professionals, today announced the expansion of its VeriMark security portfolio with the launch of two new NFC+ hardware security keys: VeriMark NFC+ USB-C Security Key (K64739WW) and VeriMark NFC+ USB-A Security Key (K64738WW).
Both models are FIDO2 Level 2 certified and support the latest FIDO CTAP 2.1 protocol, delivering enterprise-grade, phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA) and passwordless login protection across modern cloud and web-based services.
Endorfy expands its lineup with the brand's first-ever showcase-style cases, featuring tempered glass panels (a flat side panel and a curved front). Inspired by 1960s design, the Aquarius 8000 series combines a distinctive look with extensive configuration options, from gaming setups to modern workstations. The lineup includes the Aquarius 8000 Corona and Aquarius 8000 Flex. Both stand out with a slim profile and broad compatibility, supporting graphics cards up to 450 mm, radiators up to 420 mm, and up to ten fans. This level of flexibility allows you to build advanced cooling systems tailored to different use cases. The Aquarius 8000 Corona variant comes equipped with four of the latest Endorfy Corona 120 ARGB fans: three Reverse and one standard which launch alongside the cases and are also available separately. The designs support motherboards in SSI-CEB (E-ATX up to 280 mm), ATX, microATX, and Mini-ITX formats.
The Aquarius 8000 series sets a new standard for showcase PC case design, combining its signature form with the ease of installation known from classic layouts with a bottom-mounted PSU. The design is built around a balance of form and function: large, perforated surfaces and fans work together to deliver both efficient airflow and a striking visual effect. Additional space in the lower section is dedicated to a tool-free drive mounting system with vibration damping; ideal for users who value refined acoustics and thoughtful design.
Blackmagic Design today announced DaVinci Resolve 21, a significant update introducing the new Photo page, which enables colorists and photographers to use Hollywood's most advanced color tools for still photos. Other updates include new AI tools such as IntelliSearch for fast content searching, CineFocus for focal point adjustment, tools for facial refinement, and more. The Krokodove toolset adds over 70 new graphics to Fusion, Fairlight folders simplify audio track management, plus there are improvements to keyframing, MultiMaster trim passes, layer list node graphs and more. DaVinci Resolve 21 public beta is available for download now from the Blackmagic Design web site.
DaVinci Resolve's powerful post-production workflow now fully integrates photo image editing. The new Photo page lets customers import and manage photographs, integrating with the color page for node based grading. Now colorists and photographers can use Hollywood color grading tools on still images. Use primary color correction, curves, qualifiers, power windows and node editor to adjust color in artistic ways across an entire project. Plus, customers can use a DaVinci color panel to adjust multiple parameters at once.
Developed by PCI-SIG for high-bandwidth enterprise use, CopprLink provides a full PCIe 5.0 x16 interface with throughput of 32 GT/s per lane, or 64 GB/s of total bandwidth. That is four times the throughput of an OCuLink connection using PCIe 4.0 x8, one of the fastest eGPU options currently available alongside Thunderbolt.
In a post on the Google Developers blog, the company said it is designating back button hijacking as a malicious practice. It added that engaging in any activity that alters the default back button behavior of web browsers will be considered an "explicit violation" of its spam policies, potentially leading...
Another batch of games has been confirmed to include support for NVIDIA's DLSS upscaling technology, with this list including some games that are out in a matter of days, like Pragmata, and others that have just been announced and won't release for a while, but will still arrive with support for the upscaler at launch. Starting with the games due to release soon, as previously mentioned, Capcom's latest release, Pragmata, will launch with support for NVIDIA's DLSS Multi-Frame Gen support. It'll also support DLSS Ray Reconstruction and NVIDIA Reflex, all of which will be at their best on NVIDIA's latest [โฆ]
Last year, Samsung employees went on a strike for the first time in five decades. Now, these unionized workers are back at it, threatening a much longer, 18-day protest-led work hiatus. At the heart of this issue lies a perception mismatch, where Samsung is seen ripping off its workers to earn ginormous profits. The question remains: who will blink first? Samsung is seen as short-handing its workers, and those employees are now pushing back According to the Korea Herald, Samsung's union workers are currently demanding 15 percent of the company's annual operating profit, which amounts to around $30 billion, in [โฆ]
Last week, following an in-depth analysis of the PlayStation 6 bill of materials and potential pricing, speculation about aย PlayStation 6 "lite"ย model powered by the APU of theย Canis handheldย began circulating. Some suggested this model could launch at a lower price than both the home and portable consoles. However, the chances of this happening are nonexistent, as such a model would be aย โnightmareโย for developers, according toย what AMD leaker KeplerL2 saidย on the NeoGAF Forums. After reacting positively to a post from another user who highlighted how the existence of this third PlayStation 6 model is a complete fabrication, the leaker replied to a [โฆ]
Bungie has pushed its mid-season refresh update for Marathon, which comes with a lot of balance tweaks to weapons, Runner Shell abilities, equipment, and weapon mods, while also introducing tweaks to progression. There's also yet another experimental queue getting added to the game as the Duos experiment comes to a conclusion. If you want to dig into all of the tweaks and changes, big and small, you can check them out in the patch notes here. As you can imagine, there are several worth highlighting, so let's begin with some of the bigger changes impacting the game overall, before digging [โฆ]
Xbox's multiplatform pivot led to the successful release of multiple former console exclusives such as Starfield on other consoles, but it seems like the new company leadership is considering returning to console exclusives, so much so that โthere are very, very big discussions internallyโ on the matter, according to what Windows Central's Jez Corden said during the latest episode of the Xbox Two podcast. The debate stems from a growing perception that consumers are consistentlyย steered away from Xbox hardware because โall the games are on PlayStation.โ Corden noted that while releasing games on competing consoles works well, as some games [โฆ]
A new leak claims Intel is prepping a 16-core CPU featuring 12 Xe3P iGPU cores, likely targeting the Ryzen G-series APUs. AMD's latest desktop APUs top out at only 8 RDNA 3.5 CUs, while the Arc B390M in Panther Lake already beats the Radeon 890M in Strix Point. That means 12 Xe3P cores on an NVL-S chip would be a heaven-sent for gamers.
Nvidia said that it wasn't in talks with another PC manufacturer to acquire it, despite rumors saying that it has been discussing the possibility since 2024.
Fxroom is an AI creative studio for image and video creation powered by leading models, AI Agents, and community-driven creative effects called FX. Use rich, expressive FX to push creative possibilities further, turn your own creative ideas into FX others can use, and earn when your FX is used by others. We're just getting started.
Localith is a Google Business Profile management platform for multi-location teams. It centralizes listings, reviews, posts, and local SEO so you can run every location from one place. AI agents draft tone-aware review replies, suggest SEO actions, and automate updates like hours and bulk publishing. Audits flag duplicates and missing data, while heatmaps and reports help you focus. Integrations connect workflows to tools like n8n for routing and reporting.
Dishcount turns local grocery sales into practical meal plans. It aggregates weekly deals from over 80 grocery chains and uses AI to suggest recipes based on what's affordable near you.
Pick your stores, browse sales, and build smart shopping lists. If you shop at Kroger family stores, add ingredients to your online cart in one tap and check out for pickup or delivery.
Cybersecurity researchers have unmasked a novel ad fraud scheme that has been found to leverage search engine poisoning (SEO) techniques and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content to push deceptive news stories intoย Google's Discoverย feed and trick users into enabling persistent browser notifications that lead to scareware and financialย scams.
The campaign, which has been
'The AirPods Pro 3 deliver the quietest ANC Iโve ever experienced,' and Amazon just slashed $50 off the cost, bringing the price down to a near record low.
Jay Klaitz, the voice actor behind Grand Theft Auto 5's heist mastermind Lester Crest, has shut down the rumors that he's playing a character in Grand Theft Auto 6.
After too long a break, KEF is back in the Bluetooth speaker game. Itโs aiming for the upper end of the market though โ so does the Muo hit the mark?
Most organizations did not fail at cloud security because they misunderstood the technology, rather they failed because they tried to secure it afterwards.
It's not clear how many people were compromised by this hacking campaign, but a security researcher said the hackers were targeting victims since at least November 2025.
The acquisition will allow the company to expand its business into international markets without needing to launch a delivery network in those regions.
Topical authority is a key concept in SEO, but it doesnโt account for how search and AI systems choose between competing sources.
The missing layer isnโt in content or structure. Itโs in the signals that determine selection once a topic is understood โ the difference between being eligible and being chosen.
Topical authority explains content, not selection
Topical authority is foundational for SEO and now AEO and AAO. But the framework the industry calls topical authority is incomplete. It covers semantics, content, and structure, but thatโs just one part of a three-row, nine-cell model that defines topical ownership.
Topical authority describes what youโve built. Topical ownership describes whether the system picks you.
Search and AI systems donโt reward content for existing. They reward content for winning a selection process. At Recruitment (Gate 6 in the AI engine pipeline), the system selects candidate answers from everything it has indexed.
Topical ownership has three layers: coverage, architecture, and position.
Everything in this article builds on Koray Tuฤberk GรBรRโs foundation. He has engineered a rigorous methodology for building content architecture that signals genuine expertise to search engines, and his case studies prove it produces measurable results.
He coined โtopical mapโ as a standard SEO deliverable, engineered the semantic content network methodology, and brought mathematical rigor to what had been vague advice about writing comprehensively.ย
His own formula (topical authority equals topical coverage plus historical Data) already acknowledges the temporal dimension Iโll expand below. Heโs the authority on this subject. The expanded framework names the cells he already recognized and adds the one row he hasnโt yet formalized.
Topical authority, fully defined, is a three-by-three matrix.
As with everything in this series, the โstraight Cโ principle applies. To compete in any algorithmic selection process, you canโt afford a failing grade in any of the criteria that are being evaluated.ย
Excellence in some dimensions doesnโt compensate for absence in others. The system requires a passing grade for each criterion. The three rows arenโt equally weighted above that floor, and position is the dominant row, as weโll see.
Row 1: Coverage is the entry ticket, not the destination
Coverage in one sentence: Go deep enough that nothingโs left to add, cover every adjacent angle, and bring a perspective nobody else has.
Coverage describes the content itself.ย
Depth is vertical exhaustiveness and is often underestimated.ย
Breadth is the horizontal range across subtopics and adjacent areas. GรBรRโs topical map concept is the engineering discipline that makes breadth systematic rather than accidental.
Original thought is the dimension that is almost always overlooked. Pushing the boundaries of a topic is what makes your coverage non-interchangeable.
An entity that covers a topic with perfect depth and breadth but says nothing new is an encyclopedia: comprehensive, correct, and structurally identical to any other comprehensive source. Thatโs an advantage that you will lose over time since it will become prior knowledge in the training data of the AI sooner or later. Youโre no longer needed and wonโt be cited.
Original thought is the key to retaining the attention of the AI โ a new framework, a novel angle, and a perspective no one else has articulated is a good reason to come back again and again, and ultimately cite.
Importantly, original thought doesnโt require being revolutionary, nor do you need to be original on every page. Often it will be as simple as a fresh way of framing a familiar concept.
Define your brandโs specific perspective on specific vocabulary. When done properly, thatโs enough.
There are two kinds of original thought, and they carry different risk profiles.ย
Reframing connects two existing validated truths that nobody has explicitly joined before. Both components are already corroborated; the system can verify them independently, and the originality lives in the framing.
True invention is different. Thereโs nothing for the system to cross-reference and nothing thatโs already established to anchor the new claim. The result is that you look fringe until the world catches up.
The window between being right and being recognized can be long and uncomfortable, and to take that risk credibly, you need absolute conviction not only that youโre right, but that youโll be proven right, and the patience to survive looking wrong in the meantime.
The reframe carries a fraction of that risk: the source truths are already verifiable, so the connection is credible from the moment itโs published.
Row 2: All architecture decisions begin with source context
Architecture in one sentence: Write sentences clearly, make your content flow in a logical manner, and link intelligently.
The three cells in the architecture row are GรBรRโs terms, and Iโm using them as he defined them.
Source context determines everything that follows:
The publisherโs angle.
The identity and purpose that shapes what the topical map should contain.ย
How the semantic network should be constructed.ย
GรBรRโs insight that a casino affiliate and a casino technology provider need fundamentally different topical maps for the same subject captures the principle: structure follows identity.
Topical map is the structural design of the content: core sections and outer sections, which attributes become standalone pages and which merge together, the direction of internal linking, and the identification and elimination of information gaps.
Semantic network is the interconnected execution that makes the structure machine-readable: contextual flow between sentences and paragraphs, semantic distance minimized between related concepts, and cost of retrieval optimized so that the system can extract facts without unnecessary computational effort.
Good architecture makes coverage legible to the system. You can have thorough coverage that the algorithm canโt parse, and the result is the same as not having the content at all. Architecture is the bridge between what exists and what the system understands.
Where architecture falls short as a complete model is that itโs entirely within what you control. It describes how to organize your own house. It doesnโt address who the neighborhood knows you as.
Row 3: Position is why two equally thorough sources produce different results
Position in one sentence: Be first to stake the claim, be recognized by others as the best at what you do, and do things that ensure you are the person everyone refers to when they talk about your topic.
Position is the competitive layer. Itโs the only row that describes the entity rather than the content. That distinction makes it the dominant row, for the same structural reason links were the dominant signal in traditional SEO: external validation at the entity level breaks ties that content quality alone canโt.
Because youโre building entity reputation, the position row requires the greatest investment of resources and must be maintained over time. Because most brands are looking for quick, easy wins and are unwilling to commit to long-term investment in their position, this is where your competitive advantage lies and where youโll see a real difference.
Two entities can have identical coverage and architecture, and yet one will be treated as the authority and the other wonโt. The current definition of topical authority canโt explain why. Position is the huge missing piece.
Temporal position is about when you said it. The source that established a claim, coined a term, or described a mechanism before anyone else has a structurally different relationship to that topic than a source that repeated it later.ย
GรBรRโs formula already acknowledges this: โHistorical dataโ in his equation is the accumulated proof of chronological priority. First-mover advantage in knowledge graphs is an architectural phenomenon we see over and over in our data.
Hierarchical position is about dominance: being recognized by others as the top voice on the topic. Primary sources, practitioners who work in the field, researchers who run studies, and experts who generate knowledge. This isnโt self-declared. Others assign it. When Matt Diggity describes GรBรR as โone of the most knowledgeable peopleโ in semantic SEO, thatโs a hierarchical position being conferred by a peer.
Narrative position is about centrality: being the person everyone refers to when they talk about the topic. The journalist credits you, the researcher cites you, and the conference features you as the reference voice.ย
All roads lead to Rome, and youโre Rome. The system reads these co-citation patterns and builds a picture of where you sit in the source landscape.ย
Narrative position canโt be manufactured with first-party content. Itโs earned by doing things in the world that others find worth referencing.
Topical authority, N-E-E-A-T-T, and topical ownership
N-E-E-A-T-Tย โ Googleโs experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) framework, extended with notability and transparency โ describes the credibility signals that drive algorithmic confidence and are rightly a huge focus of the industry.
N-E-E-A-T-T describes inputs, not structure. Those signals donโt exist in a vacuum. They attach to an entity that the system has already understood.
I made this argument in a Semrush webinar with Lily Ray, Nik Ranger, and Andrea Volpini in 2020, when we were still talking about E-A-T: entity understanding is a prerequisite to leveraging credibility signals, not an optional layer on top.
The nine-cell matrix shows where each signal lands.
The coverage row provides the source material for AI to evaluate your knowledge on your claimed topic.ย
The architecture row is where your content gets classified and positioned relative to a topic.ย
The position row is where strong N-E-E-A-T-T signals translate into a competitive advantage because N-E-E-A-T-T is an entity framework: it measures the publisher and author, not the content. Position is the entity row.
Note on the diagram: It could be argued that the four gaps in the diagram are partially covered by inference.ย
Expertise implies the knowledge to build a topical map and the depth that produces original thought.
Experience implies the first-hand involvement that creates temporal priority.
Transparency implies the clear structural identity that shapes a semantic network.ย
Those arguments arenโt wrong. N-E-E-A-T-T evaluates the person primarily โ what they built is an indirect signal.
N-E-E-A-T-T maps onto two of the three position dimensions.ย
Hierarchical position is, in structural terms, what Authoritativeness and expertise measure โ your level of knowledge and peer recognition of your standing on a topic.ย
Narrative position is what notability captures. The co-citation patterns that tell the system youโre the reference voice.
Temporal position sits outside N-E-E-A-T-T. No credibility signal changes just because you said something first.ย
Original thought sits outside it, too. The framework thatโs supposed to reward quality has no mechanism for recognizing originality โ at least not in the short term. It can reward reframing immediately, because both source truths are already verifiable.ย
True invention only registers retroactively, once corroboration has accumulated to the point where assertion becomes position.
That structural gap points to a practical problem. Most practitioners build N-E-E-A-T-T credibility as a general brand exercise โ demonstrate expertise, earn trust, and accumulate signals. However, credibility without topical position is a credential without context. The fix is to audit all nine dimensions and focus your work on building N-E-E-A-T-T credibility to improve your weakest.
My own situation is a good example of the difficulties of original thought:
Temporal position is well-documented. Brand SERP in 2012, Entity home in 2015, answer engine Optimization in 2017, the algorithmic trinity and untrained salesforce in 2024, and now assistive agent optimization in 2025. The chronological priority is established and verifiable.ย
Hierarchical position has partial coverage. Iโm recognized within specific circles as the reference voice on brand SERPs and algorithmic brand optimization, but not yet broadly enough to call it dominance.
Narrative position is the biggest gap. Many people use the terms I coined, but few third-party sources cite me unprompted, and more articles on my own properties wonโt change that. The fix I am implementing is doing things in the world that others find worth referencing: keynotes, independent collaborations, corroboration with partners, and articles like this one.
This is why crediting GรBรR for source context, topical map, and semantic network is intentional. Accurate attribution from a credible source builds the narrative position of the person being credited (GรBรR), and giving credit accurately signals to the system that my own claims are likely to be equally well-founded.ย
Crediting well is a position signal, and itโs one most practitioners consistently underuse. My take is that citing the original source is the same as linking out. People resisted for years to protect the mysterious โlink juice,โ but itโs now accepted that linking out to provide supporting evidence is worth more than the PageRank cost. The same logic applies to citations: the value it brings you is greater than the loss.
This article is itself a demonstration.ย
GรBรRโs architecture framework is validated and extensively corroborated.
The AI engine pipeline argument runs across the previous eight articles in this series.
The nine-cell connection is new.ย
For the original thought in this article, Iโm using the safer form of original thought: the reframe-cite-and-add technique. I invite you to do the same.
Recruitment (Gate 6) is where position determines the winner
Article 8 in this series covered annotation (Gate 5) โ the gate where youโre alone with the machine, where the system classifies your content based on your signals alone, and with no competitor in the frame. Annotation is the last absolute gate. From recruitment onward, youโre always being compared with your competition.
So, recruitment (Gate 6) is where the game changes. Every source that reaches recruitment has cleared the infrastructure gates and survived annotation (hopefully in a healthy, competition-ready state). Now the system is selecting between candidates, and itโs selecting based on relative standing, not absolute quality.
This is the moment the entire matrix resolves into a single question: when the algorithm culls candidates at the recruitment gate, is your entityโs position strong enough to be one of the survivors in that selection?ย
In my three-by-three topical ownership grid, coverage gets you into the candidate pool, architecture makes the system confident it understands your content, and position determines whether it picks you ahead of the competition.
Coverage and architecture are content rows. They describe what you published. Position is the entity row. It describes who published it.
At recruitment, the system evaluates the content, and selection is heavily influenced by its assessment of the entity in the context of the topic. You can rewrite the content, but you canโt quickly rewrite who you are.
Darwin described natural selection as the mechanism by which organisms best adapted to their environment survive. An entity that occupies a strong position is an entity best adapted to the systemโs selection criteria: temporal priority, hierarchical standing, and narrative centrality.
ย The system isnโt being arbitrary when it selects one well-structured, comprehensive source over another equally well-structured, equally comprehensive one. Itโs selecting the entity best adapted to the queryโs requirements, and best adapted means best positioned, not best written.
The signals behind each row have never been equally weighted, and entity is the clearest illustration of that. In traditional SEO, inbound links were the dominant signal. They could sometimes overcome very weak criteria and were almost a guarantee of victory when all other signals were roughly equal.
That dominance gradually diminished as links became one signal among many, table stakes rather than differentiator. Entity has followed the inverse trajectory. It began as a minor signal with the introduction of the knowledge graph and knowledge panels, and has grown steadily in structural importance ever since.ย
N-E-E-A-T-T attaches to an entity. Topical ownership attaches to an entity. Agential behavior requires a resolvable entity to function. Co-citation and co-occurrence patterns are only meaningful when the system has an entity to attach them to.ย
The AI engine pipeline stalls at the annotation stage (Gate 5) without a resolved entity. That gate is entity classification, and everything downstream depends on it. Brand SERPs, Knowledge panels, and AI rรฉsumรฉs are entity constructs. Without a resolved entity, they donโt exist in a meaningful way.ย
The future will be more entity-dependent, not less, and the gap between brands that have invested in their entity and those that havenโt will compound. Entity is no longer simply a signal. Itโs the substrate that other signals require to operate, and the most important single investment you can make in your long-term search and AI strategy.
To update a common saying: the best time to start was 10 years ago, the next best time is today, and the time it wonโt be worth starting is tomorrow.
Topical ownership requires all nine cells, all three rows
Topical ownership is the state where an entity dominates all nine cells of the matrix for a given topic. Not just comprehensive, not just well-structured, but the entity others reference when they write about the subject โ ideally the one that got there first, and the one peers defer to by name.
Coverage tells the system youโre eligible.
Architecture tells the system youโre legible.
Position tells the system youโre the right answer.
The industry has been actively optimizing for six of those nine cells.ย
Understandability work builds the entity. N-E-E-A-T-T builds credibility. But the position row โ the one that determines who wins at recruitment โ has been built largely without intent. Practitioners accumulate N-E-E-A-T-T signals as a general credibility exercise and assume that covers the entity layer.ย
Position requires deliberate engineering of temporal, hierarchical, and narrative standing on specific topics. Being intentional about all nine, knowing which row each piece of work serves and why, is where the competitive advantage lives now.ย
Simply becoming conscious of the grid and the three rows will make your topical ownership, SEO, and N-E-E-A-T-T work more purposeful across all nine cells, because you will implement each signal with specific intent rather than general ambition.
The brands AI consistently recommends arenโt just covering their topics well. They own them.
This is the ninth piece in my AI authority series.ย
Despite all the shiny new capabilities at our disposal, many professionals seem stuck in a cycle of โAI Groundhog Day.โย
You open a chat window, carefully craft a prompt, paste in your context, and get a great result. An hour later, you do it all over again. If this is how you use AI to automate, youโre still doing manual work โ youโre just doing it in a chat box.
To move from using AI to building with it, you need to shift from a human doer to a true human orchestrator. That means stopping one-off prompts and starting to build systems. In this new phase of AI automation, what you really need are AI skills.
I explore this shift in my new book, โThe AI Amplified Marketer,โ where I look at how the human element of marketing remains vital even as new AI tools and shifting expectations evolve at a breakneck pace.
Below, Iโll show how to use Skills, a newer AI capability, to make you more efficient when managing PPC.
Whatโs a Claude Skill?
While many marketers have used ChatGPTโs Custom Instructions to set a general approach for how their AI works, a Skill is a more rigorous definition of how the AI needs to do things. These instructions can help it deliver more predictable outcomes that fit your expectations.
For example, I recently used a standard chat to rate search terms. While the AIโs logic was sound, the output was inconsistent: one session returned letter grades, another gave a percentage out of 100, and a third used a 1-10 scale.
In a professional setting, this inconsistency is a problem. It makes it difficult to integrate that prompt into a larger workflow where unpredictable grading might confuse other tools or team members.
A Skill solves this by providing a reusable set of instructions. It defines which tools and logic to use for a complex task and ensures the results are formatted exactly the same way every time.
Itโs what turns the AI from a temperamental assistant into a reliable professional teammate.
And thanks to more recent agentic capabilities in Claude, a Skill is like turning your best multi-step PPC playbook into something an AI can execute on demand by delegating the various tasks to the right tools and subagents.
Whether itโs your agencyโs proprietary account audit checklist or your framework for mining search query reports, a Skill encodes that process. It turns your PPC expertise into a scalable system that anyone on your team can use with their AI.
Creating a Skill is more straightforward than it might sound and you can do it through a simple chat session with your AI. Provide an account audit checklist, a standard operating procedure (SOP) from your team, or a blueprint to Claude. You can then ask it to convert that process into the formal structure of a Skill.
Interestingly, when you ask Claude to help build a Skill, it uses a specialized Skill-building protocol. This ensures your final output is structured correctly, follows best practices, and remains consistent with Anthropicโs underlying architecture.
Technically, a Skill is saved as a Markdown (.md) file that contains the playbook for the task at hand.
This file can be stored locally on your computer if youโre concerned about data privacy. Alternatively, you can share it in a central cloud repository. This makes it easy for your team to update and deploy best practices across your entire organization.
You donโt have to start from zero. Many pre-built Skills are available on platforms like GitHub. You can find examples for various marketing tasks, download them, and adapt them to fit your specific needs and workflows.
How to use a Skill in PPC
To use a skill, first make sure there are some available in your account.
Then, just tell the AI the task you want to do.
The AI will look through connected Skills and, if it finds one that matches the task, it will use those instructions to perform the work.
Sidenote: This means it is important not to have competing skills in your account. Imagine what could go wrong if you did: with two skills that both do Google Ads audits, you lose the predictability a Skill was supposed to give you in the first place, because it may randomly pick a different one and do the work in different ways as a result.
A Skill provides powerful logic, but without access to live account data, it remains theoretical.
A Skill can define an analysis, such as โreview search terms from the last 14 days with costs over $50 and zero conversions.โ However, it doesnโt know how to pull that data from Google Ads on its own.
In the past, the workaround was to manually download static data, like a CSV from the Google Ads interface or a Google Ads Editor file. You would then feed this file to the AI as context. This works, but itโs slow, manual, and the data is outdated the moment you download it.
A more modern approach uses a Model Context Protocol (MCP) to connect your AI and its Skills to other systems, such as live data sources. For example, using the Optmyzr MCP, your Skill can dynamically pull the exact Google Ads data it needs, when it needs it. This connection turns a static set of instructions into a living, responsive tool. (Disclosure: Iโm the cofounder and CEO of Optmyzr.)
How Skills tell AI how to do things, and how tools and MCP enable it to do those things more reliably
Combining a Skill with a tool like an MCP is where the real transformation happens. Your AI moves from being an assistant that requires constant direction to a system that can manage a process. It transitions from giving you ideas to executing your vision.
Letโs look at a common PPC task:
Task: Search Term Analysis to Eliminate Irrelevant Clicks
A Skill without tools is a task-oriented assistant: It might instruct you: โPaste in your search term report as a CSV, and I will identify potential negative keywords.โ Youโre still the one doing the grunt work of retrieving data and implementing the findings.
A Skill with tools acts as a junior manager for that specific process: It can be configured to: โPull the search term report for the last 7 days via the MCP, identify terms with high spend and no conversions, and apply them as exact match negatives to the appropriate campaign.โ The entire workflow is handled, and your role shifts to one of oversight.
When you combine structured logic (Skills) with live data and execution capabilities (tools), youโre building more than a chatbot; youโre building a reliable teammate. Itโs a grounded, practical system that handles defined tasks, freeing you up to be the orchestrator of your strategy.
To move from theory to practice, letโs look at four concrete examples of PPC Skills. In each case, notice how connecting these Skills to live tools transforms the AI from a passive analyst into an active participant.
1. Search term mining
This Skillโs logic guides the AI to analyze a search query report to find wasted spend and opportunities.
Without tools: You provide a CSV. The Skill returns a structured list of recommended negative keywords and new keyword ideas. You have to implement them manually.
With tools (MCP): The Skill automatically pulls the latest search query report data, identifies the negative keywords, and uses a tool function to apply them directly to your Google Ads account.
2. Ad copy generation
This Skill takes a landing page URL and target keywords to generate ad copy variations based on value propositions and user intent.
Without tools: The Skill produces headlines and descriptions in a text format. You copy and paste them into Google Ads.
With tools (MCP): The Skill finds underperforming ad assets in your account, and then generates the ad copy and pushes the new ads directly into the correct ad groups, potentially even setting up a new ad experiment.
3. Account auditing
This Skill runs a predefined checklist against an account, looking for issues like missing ad extensions, campaigns limited by budget, or ad groups with low CTR.
Without tools: The Skill generates a report that lists all the problems it found. You then have to log in to the account and fix each one.
With tools (MCP): The Skill not only identifies that an ad group is missing a callout extension but can also apply a relevant, pre-approved extension from extensions used elsewhere in the account. It doesnโt just report the problem; it fixes it.
4. Budget reallocation
This Skill analyzes campaign performance data to find opportunities to shift budget from underperforming campaigns to those with higher potential returns.
Without tools: The Skill provides a recommendation, such as: โDecrease Campaign Aโs budget by 20% and increase Campaign Bโs budget by 15%.โ
With tTools (MCP): The Skill performs a dynamic analysis, pulling in exactly the right data with the appropriate lookback and time segmentation, and then executes the budget change directly, ensuring budgets are optimized as soon as the opportunity is identified.
The future of your role: From PPC doer to PPC designer
The combination of Skills and tools enables you to move from playing with AI to having AI do meaningful work. For years, AI has been good at generating ideas but weak at executing them inside the ad platforms. This solves the โlast mile problemโ by giving AI the logic, data, and permissions to act.
This also signals a change in the role of the PPC professional. Your job will shift from doing the repetitive work to designing the systems that do the work. Instead of manually analyzing reports and making changes, you will spend more time designing Skills, defining the rules and guardrails for automation, and reviewing the outcomes.
Weโre at a point where the large language models are capable, the tools for connecting them to platforms are available, and the interfaces make it possible for non-developers to build. Itโs time to rethink your processes and get AI to be a real teammate.
The cycle of endless prompting is a dead end. It keeps you in the role of a manual operator when you should be a systems designer. By embracing Claude Skills, youโre doing more than just working faster; youโre changing the very nature of your job. Youโre moving from โdoing PPC workโ to โdesigning the PPC systemsโ that perform that work with predictability and at scale.
This is the ultimate expression of the AI-amplified marketer: building a true partner that codifies your expertise into a reliable, efficient engine.
The first step is to look at your daily tasks through the lens of a designer. What repetitive process is ready to be turned into your first Skill?
Pragmata launches this week with DLSS and Path Tracing on PC Nvidia has launched a new game bundle for its RTX 50 series GPUs, giving away free copies of Capcomโs newest game, Pragmata, with select GPU models. At launch, Pragmata will support all of Nvidiaโs advanced RTX features. This includes DLSS Super Resolution, DLSS Multi-Frame [โฆ]
A new Full HD gaming monitor joins the Philips Evnia 5000 series with a focus on high refresh performance, motion clarity, and an immersive lighting experience.
Philips Evnia adds the 27M2N5201P to its line-up, targeting competitive gamers who want high frame rates without moving beyond Full HD. The monitor features a 27-inch Fast IPS panel with a refresh rate of up to 260 Hz. With up to 1 ms GtG response time and 0.3 ms Smart MBR, it ensures maximum visibility during high-speed action. The feature set is completed by HDR10 support, AdaptiveSync, Low Input Lag, and the Philips Evnia Precision Center software.
The industrial world is transforming fast. As AI moves from the cloud to the edge, demand is rising for high-performance, low-latency computing that can operate reliably in real environmentsโpowering everything from real-time defect detection in smart factories to advanced patient monitoring in healthcare. Edge AI needs hardware that's both intelligent and resilient. To meet this shift, GIGAIPC introduces a versatile lineup of motherboards based on Intel Core Ultra desktop processors (Series 2), enabling flexible system designs across diverse industrial scenarios and helping businesses deploy AI-ready solutions at scale.
Accelerating Industrial AI with Intel Core Ultra Series
Built around the Intel Core Ultra desktop processor (Series 2), this platform brings higher efficiency, stronger performance, and expanded connectivity to industrial and edge applications. This new architecture reduces package power by up to 58% in typical workloads, enabling IPC and embedded system developers to build more energy-efficient, thermally optimized, and reliable products for space-constrained and demanding environments. At the same time, performance improves over the previous generation, with up to 6% faster single-thread and up to 14% faster multi-thread performance to support real-time control, edge analytics, and multitasking workloads. Furthermore, the Intel 800 Series chipset extends platform compatibility with up to 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes, 8 SATA 3.0 ports, and 10 USB 3.2 ports, empowering industrial systems with superior scalability for I/O expansion, storage, and diverse connectivity.
ADATA Technology Co., Ltd., a leading global provider of memory and storage solutions, today announced the launch of the URBAN TAPSAFE External SSD, marking the debut of its new URBAN series. Inspired by the rhythm of modern urban life, the URBAN series is designed to deliver flexible, efficient storage tailored to today's mobile users. The URBAN TAPSAFE combines high-speed performance with an intuitive NFC tap unlock mechanism, integrating powerful data protection into a compact and lightweight design. It enables users to securely access and manage important data with ease across a wide range of on-the-go scenarios.
Intuitive and Secure Sharing: NFC Tap Unlock and Multi-User Management
As mobile work and real-time content creation continue to grow, the need for both data security and seamless access has become increasingly critical. The URBAN TAPSAFE uses a dedicated companion app to transform your smartphone into a personalized security key. Users can unlock the drive with a simple tap, eliminating the hassle of passwords and streamlining workflows. It also supports multi-user management for up to nine people, with customizable 'Read-Only' or 'Read/Write' permissions. Whether for personal use or team collaboration, it ensures both convenience and data protection. For added security, the device automatically locks when disconnected from the smartphone, effectively preventing unauthorized access.
Behind the breakthrough is JX Metals Circular Solutions, a subsidiary of one of Japan's largest non-ferrous metal companies. While it was announced back in April 2025, it really started grabbing headlines this month after some Japanese publications revealed the actual process at the company's plant in Tsuruga.
With every qualifying purchase of a GeForce RTX 50 series card, NVIDIA will now provide a free game code for PRAGMATA. NVIDIA to Bundle PRAGMATA With GeForce RTX 50 Series Graphics Cards, Including Desktop and Laptop Series GPUs If you have been waiting for a GPU upgrade, this might be an excellent time to buy a GeForce RTX 50 series GPU. While the prices for most RTX 50 series cards are high due to market volatility, with every qualifying purchase of the RTX 50 series cards, users will now get the latest game PRAGMATA for free. NVIDIA just announced the [โฆ]
WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers, the Soulslike action game from developer Leenzee Games and publisher 505 Games didn't exactly set the Soulslike world on fire when it arrived last year, but it wasn't the biggest disappointment either. Regardless, it seems like we won't see Leenzee take another kick at the can, as the studio's core development team has reportedly dissolved following the departure of its lead director. According to SavePoint Gaming (via Eurogamer), producer and director Xia Siyuan was let go from the studio amidst a change in its top-end leadership. Per multiple reports from Chinese outlets including GamerSky, the new regime [โฆ]
The new IPS gaming monitor caters to gamers who want to afford a high-refresh-rate operation without breaking the bank. Philips Introduces Evnia 27M2N5201P 27-inch IPS Gaming Monitor, Featuring 260 Hz Refresh Rate, 1ms GtG Response Time, and HDR10 Support at $215 Popular monitor maker, Philips, has introduced a new affordable offering for gamers that are on a tight budget, but want some competitive specifications for fast-paced gaming. Most budget gaming monitors these days offer over 200 Hz refresh rate under $200, and the newly launched Evnia 27M2N5201P can touch 260 Hz refresh rate for ultra smooth gaming experience. The Evnia [โฆ]
NVIDIA is reportedly preparing two new models of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti & RTX 5060 graphics cards, now equipped with 9 GB memory. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5060 Ti & RTX 5060 GPUs Will Soon Get 1 GB Extra Memory At The Expense of Bandwidth Recently, it was reported that NVIDIA is working on a 9 GB variant of the GeForce RTX 5050 graphics card, but it looks like more models are on the way with increased memory capacities. As per the latest report from Chinese Board Channel forums, NVIDIA is preparing to add two new models to its GeForce [โฆ]
Alienware smashes price barriers with the AW2726DM. Itโs a 27-inch QHD QD-OLED with 240 Hz, Adaptive-Sync, HDR10, and wide gamut color with an opening price of just $350.
Google has announced the integration of a Rust-based Domain Name System (DNS) parser into the modem firmware as part of its ongoing efforts to beef up the security of Pixel devices and push memory-safe code at a more foundationalย level.
"The new Rust-based DNS parser significantly reduces our security risk by mitigating an entire class of vulnerabilities in a risky area, while also laying
Following an icon of the 3D print world was never going to be easy, but the X2D impresses from the outset with its dual-nozzle tool head and mix of direct drive and Bowden extrusion.
GoPro unveils its Mission 1 series with a trio of new 'professional' action cams plus accessories, which represent the biggest product shake-up for GoPro in 20 years.
Today weโre announcing a wetland restoration and research project to restore a degraded salt pond and advance the science of carbon removal โ right in Googleโs backyard.โฆ
Googleโs Ask Maps feature does more than help users find nearby businesses.
Based on hands-on testing of local service queries for plumbers, electricians, and HVAC companies, Ask Maps often narrows the field, interprets user intent, and frames businesses around qualities such as responsiveness, specialization, honesty, and repair-first thinking.
In more complex prompts, it sometimes provides guidance before recommending businesses. This shows Google Maps moving beyond simple local retrieval and toward a more recommendation-driven experience.
To evaluate that shift, we tested Ask Maps across five levels of local intent โ starting with simple category searches and progressing toward conversational prompts involving uncertainty, trust, and decision-making.
A clear pattern emerged. As query nuance increased, Ask Maps shifted from listing businesses to interpreting which businesses fit and why.
This article draws from hands-on testing across a limited set of local service queries in one geographic area. Treat these findings as an early directional view, not a comprehensive representation across all markets or query types.
The testing framework
To evaluate progression, we built a five-level intent model based on how homeowners and local service customers actually search. Instead of organizing around traditional keyword categories, we structured the framework from simple retrieval toward conversational decision-making.
Level 1 focused on basic requests with minimal context.
Example: โLooking for an HVAC company near me.โย
Level 2 introduced more service specificity.
Example: โI need an electrician to upgrade my panel in an older home.โย
Level 3 moved into situational queries, where the user described a problem.
Example: โMy furnace is making a loud banging noise and Iโm not sure if it needs to be replaced or repaired.โย
Level 4 introduced trust and decision concerns.
Example: โI think my furnace might need to be replaced, but I donโt want to get overcharged. Who is honest about that?โย
Level 5 combined those elements into fully conversational prompts asking for guidance, validation, and recommendations in the same search.
Example: โI was told I need a full furnace replacement, but it feels expensive. How do I know if thatโs actually necessary, and who should I call for a second opinion in my area?โ
This framework allowed us to evaluate:
Which businesses appeared.
How Ask Maps interpreted prompts.
What attributes it emphasized.
When results started to resemble guided recommendations rather than search results.
Ask Maps narrows the field and adds interpretation
One of the clearest patterns across the testing was that Ask Maps consistently returned a relatively small set of businesses while increasing the amount of interpretation as the userโs search intent became more complex.
At Level 1, the average number of businesses shown was 3.6. Level 2 rose to 4.3. Level 3 dropped slightly to 3.3. Level 4 averaged 5, and Level 5 averaged 4.6. Across the full set, the range remained fairly tight, generally between three and eight businesses.
Thatโs a different experience from traditional Maps, where a user can scroll through a much broader set of options and do more of the evaluation work themselves.
Ask Maps narrows choices early and spends more effort explaining why those businesses fit the prompt, but stops short of being fully action-oriented. Even when a phone number is shown, thereโs no clickable call button directly in the Ask Maps response.ย
To call or access the full set of contact options, the user still has to click into the businessโs Google Business Profile. That matters because while Ask Maps is becoming more interpretive, the underlying GBP is still where action happens.
As prompts become more nuanced, uncertain, or trust-sensitive, Ask Maps draws on a broader range of sources. It shows fewer businesses, replacing breadth with interpretation.
Even the simplest queries donโt behave like a traditional Maps result.
At the baseline level, Ask Maps still relies heavily on Google Business Profile data, including:ย
Business descriptions.
Review content.
Ratings.
Hours.
In some cases, posts.ย
Website influence is minimal here, and thereโs little evidence of outside sourcing. But even within that mostly closed ecosystem, it goes beyond listing nearby businesses.
Instead of just showing names, ratings, and locations, Ask Maps:
Generates narrative summaries based on information in the Google Business Profile.ย
Describes businesses in terms of responsiveness, experience, specialization, or the kinds of situations they seem well-suited for.ย
Draws on reviews when framing businesses.
Even at the most basic level, Ask Maps isnโt neutral. Itโs beginning to interpret businesses for the user.
As queries become more specific, Ask Maps starts matching capability
Once the prompt shifts from a general service search to a specific type of job, Ask Maps becomes more selective in how it matches businesses to the request.
A query about an electrical panel upgrade doesnโt behave the same way as a query about urgent AC repair.ย
Replacement-oriented prompts emphasize installation and system expertise.ย
Repair-oriented prompts emphasize speed, availability, and responsiveness.ย
Queries tied to older homes or higher-risk work call for more evidence of specialization.
At this level, Google Business Profile and reviews still carry much of the weight, but websites matter more when the job is more complex or costly. A panel upgrade query produces stronger external link usage than a more straightforward AC repair prompt.
That doesnโt mean websites are always heavily used. It shows more selectivity. As decisions become more complex, Google looks for more supporting evidence before recommending businesses.
The more noticeable shift begins once the prompts move from service categories to real-world scenarios.
At Level 3, the user is no longer looking for a plumber, electrician, or HVAC company. Instead, theyโre describing a problem, such as a loud banging furnace, outdated electrical in an older home, or an AC unit that has stopped working during extreme heat. In those cases, Ask Maps increasingly interprets the problem before introducing businesses.
Some responses provide guidance or context first. Others identify the provider and clarify the work before making recommendations. The businesses that follow arenโt framed as generic providers. Theyโre framed as possible solutions to the situation.
Review content becomes important here. Rather than simply supporting a businessโs credibility, reviews act as evidence that the company has handled similar situations before. Fast arrival times, experience with older homes, communication during stressful repairs, and problem-solving ability all become more meaningful when describing businesses.
This is the point where Ask Maps moves more clearly from retrieval to interpretation.
Trust-oriented queries change what gets emphasized
When the prompts introduce fear, skepticism, or concern about making the wrong decision, Ask Maps changes again.
At Level 4, the focus is less on the service need itself and more on the emotional context around it. The user is worried about being overcharged, being pushed into unnecessary replacement, or hiring someone who would cut corners.ย
Ask Maps doesnโt just return businesses capable of doing the work. It organizes businesses around trust-related qualities such as honesty, transparency, careful workmanship, fairness, and second-opinion value.
This is one of the strongest patterns in the research. At this stage, review language is the primary signal shaping how businesses are framed. Specific phrases and anecdotes matter, elevating businesses that explain options clearly, donโt upsell, offer honest assessments, or deliver careful, professional work.
External sources become more relevant here. In addition to GBP information and reviews, Ask Maps shows more willingness to pull from company websites, testimonials, third-party platforms, and educational resources when the userโs concern involves decision risk rather than just service need.
Once the query becomes trust-driven, the recommendation no longer appears to be based only on who can do the job. It reflects who is most likely to handle the situation in a way that the user feels good about.
The strongest example of this progression came at Level 5. These are prompts where the user combines a problem, uncertainty, and a request for recommendations in a single query.ย
For example, someone might say they were told they needed a full furnace replacement but were unsure whether that was really necessary and wanted to know who to call for a second opinion. In these cases, Ask Maps moves most clearly into a decision-support role.
Instead of leading with local businesses, it often starts with an explanation, introducing frameworks, safety context, or ways to think about the decision.ย
Only after that does it recommend businesses, and those businesses are often grouped not just by rating or proximity, but by approach. Some are framed as repair-first options. Others are framed as second-opinion experts or safety-focused specialists.
This is where Ask Maps feels least like a directory and most like an advisor. The structure of the response looks more like a guided decision process than a traditional local search result.
That doesnโt mean the system is flawless or that every answer is equally strong. But it does suggest that when a prompt includes uncertainty and a need for validation, Ask Maps is trying to do more than match a category. Itโs trying to help the user think through what to do next.
Across the testing, several source patterns appear repeatedly, and the mix appears to shift depending on the type of query.
At the foundation, Google Business Profile does much of the early work. Business categories, service descriptions, hours, ratings, and review counts help determine which businesses are eligible to appear and how they are initially framed. In some cases, Ask Maps also pulls from GBP services and products, business descriptions, and occasionally posts when those help reinforce what the business does.
Reviews seem to be one of the most important inputs across nearly every query type. Not just in ratings, but in how review language shapes the summary.ย
Ask Maps often draws on review themes tied to:
Responsiveness.
Honesty.
Professionalism.
Fast arrival times.
Work on older homes.
Repair-versus-replace situations.
Whether customers feel the company explains options clearly or avoids unnecessary upselling.
In other words, reviews support reputation and help define how a business is positioned in the response.
Business websites matter more once the query becomes more specific, higher-stakes, or more tied to decision-making. In those cases, Ask Maps seems more likely to pull in service pages, testimonial pages, or other on-site business information that helps reinforce specialization, repair-first positioning, second-opinion value, or experience with a particular type of job.ย
Thatโs more noticeable in queries tied to things like panel upgrades, replacement decisions, or older-home electrical concerns than in simpler โnear meโ searches.
External sources are the most selective layer, but they become more visible when the query involves safety, diagnosis, pricing uncertainty, or broader decision support.ย
In those cases, Ask Maps pulls in:
Educational content around issues like repair-versus-replace decisions, quote validation, and electrical safety.ย
Third-party review and directory platforms such as Angi, HomeAdvisor, YouTube, and Facebook.
Other publicly available business information, when it helps reinforce trust, workmanship, or reputation.ย
In some of the trust-oriented electrician queries in particular, this outside sourcing is more prominent than in simpler local lookups, suggesting Google may broaden its evidence base when evaluating how a business is likely to operate, not just what services it offers.
Ask Maps isnโt relying on a single source of truth. It appears to be constructing an answer from a mix of Google Business Profile data, review language, business website content, and selectively chosen outside sources, with the balance shifting based on what the user is actually asking.
What this may mean for local visibility
If Ask Maps continues to develop in this direction, it could have meaningful implications for local visibility in Google Maps.
Inclusion alone may matter less than interpretation. If Ask Maps is consistently showing a smaller set of businesses and adding more explanation around them, the question is no longer just whether a business appears. Itโs also how that business is framed and whether Google has enough confidence to position it as a good fit for the situation.
Review content is becoming more important than many businesses realize. The language within reviews appears to influence not just credibility, but the actual way a business is described and recommended.
Website content plays a more targeted role than many local businesses assume. It may not be equally important for every prompt, but it matters more when the service is complex, expensive, or tied to greater uncertainty.
More broadly, Ask Maps points toward a version of local search in which retrieval, evaluation, and decision support occur much more closely together. Instead of searching, comparing, researching, and then deciding across several steps, the user may increasingly be guided through much of that process within a single AI-mediated Maps experience.
What businesses and SEOs should tighten up now
If Ask Maps continues moving in this direction, the practical response isnโt to chase a new tactic or treat it like a separate channel. Itโs to make the business easier for Google to understand and easier for customers to trust.
Keep the Google Business Profile current and specific
A Google Business Profile may play a bigger role when Ask Maps is trying to decide what a business does, what kinds of jobs it handles, and whether it fits a more nuanced prompt.
Review primary and secondary categories to make sure they reflect the core work accurately.
Tighten the business description so it clearly explains the services offered, the types of jobs handled, and any specialties or areas of focus.
Make sure hours, service areas, and contact details are complete and current.
Add photos that reinforce the kinds of jobs the business wants to be associated with.
Treat posts and profile updates as another way to reinforce services and activity, not just as optional extras.
Use the Services and Products sections fully, adding clear descriptions that reflect the specific jobs, specialties, and situations the business wants to be known for.
Pay closer attention to review language
If Ask Maps uses review language to shape how businesses are positioned, then the wording in reviews may matter more than many businesses realize.
Look beyond review volume and average rating.
Pay attention to whether reviews naturally mention specific jobs, customer concerns, and outcomes.
Watch for language around responsiveness, honesty, professionalism, repair-first thinking, and clear communication.
Encourage reviews that reflect real experiences rather than generic praise.
Use review trends to understand how the business is likely being framed by Google.
Revisit website content for higher-consideration services
Website content appears more likely to matter when the query is more complex, more expensive, or tied to more uncertainty.
Strengthen service pages for the higher-value or higher-risk work the business wants to be known for.
Add FAQs that address real decision points, not just basic definitions.
Include examples of the kinds of jobs handled, especially where context matters.
Reinforce trust signals such as experience, process, reviews, and proof of work.
Use language that helps explain situations like repair versus replace, older-home work, or second-opinion scenarios.
Think beyond ranking for a phrase
Thereโs a broader strategic shift here for local SEO. The question may no longer be only whether a business can rank for a phrase. It may also be whether Google has enough evidence to recommend that business in response to a real-world question.
Evaluate whether the business is easy to understand across GBP, reviews, website content, and broader digital mentions.
Look at whether the business is clearly associated with the jobs and situations it wants to win.
Think about trust and decision support, not just service relevance.
Focus on making the business more legible to both Google and potential customers.
Treat local optimization less like keyword matching alone and more like building a clear, consistent business profile across sources.
The main question behind this research was when Ask Maps stops behaving like a directory and starts behaving more like a recommendation engine. Based on this testing, that shift starts earlier than many might expect.
Even at the most basic level, Ask Maps narrows, summarizes, and interprets. As prompts become more specific, situational, and trust-driven, they move further toward guided recommendations. At the highest level of complexity, it begins to look less like traditional local search and more like a system designed to help users make decisions.
That doesnโt mean Google Maps has fully changed into something else. But it does suggest the direction is becoming clearer. For local businesses and the people who support them, that makes this worth watching closely. Visibility inside Maps may increasingly depend not just on being present, but on being understood well enough for Google to explain why the business fits the userโs needs.
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