All the ways to watch Miami Grand Prix 2026 live streams online and from anywhere, as Mercedes look to continue their winning start to the 2026 F1 season.
It's all doom and gloom in the Android world, with reports of OnePlus' imminent demise swirling — but looking forward, this could actually be a great development.
AMD’s preparing to deliver a “full implementation” of HDMI 2.1 on its Open Source Linux drivers Phoronix has confirmed that AMD has officially implemented HDMI Fixed Rate Link (FRL) into its Open Source Linux GPU drivers. HDMI FRL is part of the HDMI 2.1 standard and enables higher bandwidth display connections. This bandwidth, in turn, […]
Jason Ronald directs fans to a community voting site for backward compatibility requests, hinting that player feedback could play a role in future Xbox game preservation efforts.
Microsoft's original Secure Boot certificates, first issued in 2011, are set to expire in June 2026, effectively leaving your PC in a degraded security state. Here's what you can do to prevent any issues.
If readers recall, AMD has been trying to get the HDMI Forum, the governing body behind the development of the HDMI standard, to approve open-source HDMI 2.1 support on Linux but faced strong rejection. However, today the situation appears to be different. An AMD Linux developer hinted that the company is preparing full HDMI 2.1 support for the AMDGPU driver, bringing a complete open-source implementation after years of work. Helping this effort is Valve, whose Steam Machine runs on the SteamOS Linux operating system and uses AMD graphics. Late last year, we reported that Valve was reportedly attempting to persuade the HDMI Forum to approve AMD's efforts to bring this implementation to the open-source Linux stack, but we haven't received an update since.
Today, the situation looks a bit different as AMD has submitted the first set of Linux kernel patches, focusing on the Fixed Rate Link (FRL) feature, exclusive to the HDMI 2.1 standard. This feature enables higher bandwidth over the port, effectively supporting 4K at 120 Hz and 5K at 240 Hz resolutions on AMD GPUs running Linux-based operating systems. As these resolutions require higher data bandwidth, it is necessary to use the newer HDMI 2.1 standard over the currently supported HDMI 2.0 in AMDGPU open-source graphics drivers.
The unibody aluminum chassis of Apple’s MacBook family offers sufficient durability, but it’s always a good practice to carry a bag with plenty of padding for that extra layer of cushioning when you go through airport security. Unfortunately, one event that cannot be avoided is when you’re forced to offload laptops onto a bin, which then goes through a belt during the security check. Sadly, one owner has shown evidence that his MacBook was dented after it fell off that very belt, and the airport staff were the least accommodating about damaging expensive hardware. Fortunately, there’s a way in which […]
LG Japan has disclosed the official prices for its high-end OLED gaming monitors, as well as specifications on the official Japanese website. LG Japan Starts Taking Pre-Orders for UltraGear 45GX950B-B 5K OLED, Starting at $1,653 and 32GX870B-B at $1081 The LG UltraGear EVO lineup introduced at CES this year is now starting to hit shelves, at least in a few regions. While not available globally at the moment, LG Japan has started taking pre-orders for two models in the LG UltraGear EVO lineup. This includes the flagship 45-inch UltraGear EVO AI 5K2K 45GX950B-B gaming monitor, as well as the 32GX870B-B, […]
TSMC's next-generation A16 or 1.6nm process tech will be the start of its "Angstrom Era" journey, delivering improved performance/power profiles versus 2nm. Angstrom Era For TSMC - A16 Process Tech Offers Better Performance/Power Profiles Versus 2nm While Adding Backside Power At the 2026 VLSI symposium, TSMC will be presenting its A16 process node technology. A16 is part of TSMC's Angstrom era family of nodes, which includes A14 and the recently announced A13 & A12. In a preview provided by VLSI of the upcoming paper titled "T1.5", TSMC restates the performance/power profile advantages. One of the biggest features for A16 will […]
Gigabyte’s Z890 Aorus Elite Duo X lands square in the mid-range sweet spot, offering ample connectivity, five M.2 sockets, native Arrow Lake Refresh support, and CQDIMM compatibility, all for a compelling sub-$280 price.
YTVidHub lets you download and clean YouTube subtitles at scale. Use the Chrome extension for one-click downloads, or paste video, playlist, or channel links on the site to bulk extract transcripts, generate AI summaries or mind maps, and export SRT, VTT, or clean TXT for research and editing. It strips timestamps and formatting to produce model-ready text, supports multiple languages, and includes daily free credits so you can test the pipeline before upgrading.
Rankoup is a community-ranked marketplace where listings rise through votes, interest, and quality. Buyers can upvote listings, discover standout items across categories, and message sellers directly. Sellers gain early exposure and visibility without relying on ad budgets, making it easier to reach engaged buyers globally.
Nikon is being tipped to release a fixed-lens full-frame compact camera that could rival the Fujifilm X100VI, Ricoh GR IV, Sony RX1R III, and Leica Q3, but its rumored specs make for, let's just say, interesting reading
Apple’s Mac Mini just became a lot less affordable Apple has removed the cheapest Mac Mini option from its global storefront, significantly raising the baseline pricing for the system. Previously, Apple’s baseline Mac Mini had 16GB of unified memory and a 256GB SSD and cost £599/$599. Now, the system’s baseline configuration has 16GB of memory […]
Valve's Steam Machine was supposed to be an affordable gaming PC for the living room. Rising memory and storage prices have turned that dream into a pricing nightmare.
Tenstorrent made a bold claim during their TT-Deploy livestream, saying they are going to crush everyone at everything, including AI, with their Galaxy servers. Tenstorrent Galaxy Supercluster Offers 10x Faster GenAI Video, And Destroys Current-Gen GPUs With "Blitz Mode", Offering 350+ Tokens/s In DeepSeek R1 Jim Keller and his Tenstorrent are on a mission to challenge the existing AI hierarchy with their RISC-V-powered platforms. As such, the company unveiled its latest Galaxy Blackhole servers for AI at scale. With Galaxy Blackhole, Tenstorrent offers a fully Networked and native AI solution that includes compute, memory, and networking, all unified into a […]
CPUs or GPUs, but require lots of memory for running Agentic AI, and this demand is spiraling to unseen levels as DRAM constraints persist. CPUs Running Agentic AI Will Be Equipped With Up to 400 GB of Memory, Further Crushing The DRAM Supply Chain Memory makers are earning big profits but are also unable to meet the demand. We have seen reports on how major manufacturers are rapidly expanding their production facilities, but these are yet to become operational, and Samsung itself has stated that 2027 will be worse for the DRAM industry than 2026, so it's looking like a […]
We're testing the impact of using a dedicated secondary RTX 5060 GPU to boost the performance of an RTX 5090 in a few classic Batman Arkham titles that support 32-bit PhysX.
Apple CEO Tim Cook warns Mac mini and Mac Studio shortages could continue for months as developers rush to buy high-memory Apple Silicon systems for running local AI models and agentic AI workloads.
A Reddit user tried their luck with a $20 4TB external HDD, and, to no surprise, they received a microSD card strapped inside a card reader and hot-glued to the back of the plastic case of an "external hard drive."
Rehinged Healthcare helps post-acute sales teams identify providers that need their products by ranking facilities using 150+ CMS and Medicare clinical, staffing, and operational signals. Describe your ideal account, then filter, score, and export prioritized nursing home and prescriber lists in seconds.
The platform updates monthly with verified datasets, requires no IT integration, and covers over 80,000 post-acute providers and 1.1 million Medicare prescribers, so you can focus outreach on high-fit accounts.
Domily is a rental platform for Germany that treats landlords and tenants fairly. You can list properties or find apartments with one-time, pay-on-success pricing—no subscriptions or auto-renewals. Create listings in plain English, schedule viewings, and review applications with clear summaries and verified documents. Manage everything from a single dashboard with real-time notifications, capped applications, and direct dispute resolution. Launching Q2 2026, credits never expire and only active, verified listings go live.
The Netherlands has launched a self-hosted Git platform to gain control over code infrastructure, reduce reliance on external providers, and support collaboration.
All the ways to watch Leinster vs Toulon live streams online – including for FREE – as Dublin's Aviva Stadium hosts the 2025/26 Champions Cup semi-final.
ChatGPT Free lets you chat with advanced AI models without login or limits. Use it to write content, translate languages, research topics, and get coding help. Access ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, and Qwen in one place for fast, accurate responses on mobile or desktop.
Surmado offers Scout, an AI research analyst that checks how search engines and AI models talk about your business, then sends clear reports, fixes, and content ideas by email. You can ask for site audits or AI visibility checks and get prioritized recommendations without learning a new dashboard. Scout also rebuilds your existing website by applying fixes, tweaking content, optimizing SEO, and tightening your messaging so your brand shows up more clearly in AI results and customer searches. Plans work for small businesses and agencies, with pay‑as‑you‑go or monthly options. White label and API are available.
StudyPass helps you pass your citizenship test on the first try. It uses official government questions and matches real exam formats, then explains each answer to help you understand the civics behind it.
You can track your strengths and weaknesses, practice by category, and save progress across devices. Start free for the US, UK, Canada, and Australia with up-to-date 2026 question banks, with more countries coming soon.
Most privacy scanners only list cookies. SecureSpells analyzes real runtime behavior to detect GDPR risks they miss, like pre-consent scripts, hidden trackers, and risky third-party flows. Each issue includes a clear risk score, technical fix instructions, and direct GDPR references. Built for developers, agencies, SMEs, and DIY website owners who care about GDPR compliance and want real answers, not just cookie lists. Run a free scan in seconds with no signup required.
Cybersecurity company Trellix has announced that it suffered a breach that enabled unauthorized access to a "portion" of its source code.
It said it "recently identified" the compromise of its source code repository and that it began working with "leading forensic experts" to resolve the matter immediately. It also said it has notified law enforcement of the matter.
Trellix did not disclose the
Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber's chief technology officer, revealed the plan in an interview at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, describing it as a natural extension of a nascent program the company announced in late January called AV Labs.
emailho.me centralizes your team's project emails in shared rooms you CC on messages. Each room gathers threads into a searchable timeline where everyone stays aligned, with notes, @mentions, instant notifications, and daily digests. With Pro, you can reply from the timeline via your Gmail, use AI to summarize long threads and auto-tag messages, and manage attachments. Data is encrypted with AES-256, hosted in the EU, and fully GDPR compliant.
Validue exists because too many founders spend six months building something nobody wants, often due to untested assumptions. You assumed people would pay, assumed they'd switch, or assumed the problem was urgent enough. Validue makes those bets visible before you build. Describe your idea in plain English, and AI extracts the specific assumptions you're betting on.
Photo Poodle is a guest photo sharing platform for weddings and events that turns attendees into active contributors. Instead of passively asking people to upload photos, Photo Poodle uses fun, real-time prompts and challenges to guide guests on what to capture, making it easy and engaging to collect every moment.
Guests simply scan a QR code, follow playful photo ideas, and upload instantly — no app required. The result is a complete, shared album filled with candid, diverse perspectives, without chasing guests or hiring a professional photographer.
See how to watch Naoya Inoue vs Junto Nakatani live streams online from anywhere, in a massive all-Japanese fight for the undisputed super-bantamweight title.
Lego is celebrating May the 4th early, and turning it into a weekend event, with double points for Insider members, new sets, and some especially nice sets that land as a free gift with purchase.
Claimful lets you create simple and beautiful claim pages that deliver files or links instantly after signup and capture emails without a website. It offers indexed profile pages to showcase all shared resources beautifully. Share a clean link anywhere, watch leads flow in, and track views, signups, and conversions. Get alerted on new signups and export your email lists for your use case.
Real Estate Ledger is a digital property document management platform, like a CARFAX for homes. Upload any record, such as warranties, permits, leases, inspections, invoices, or maintenance logs, and AI automatically categorizes it. The Property Guidebook generates professional, shareable reports for buyers, lenders, and insurers. Every document is fingerprinted with Digital Evidence to create an immutable, tamper-evident history that builds trust and increases property value.
It is built for homeowners, real estate investors, builders, agents, and HOAs. The free plan covers up to 10 properties with all core features and requires no credit card.
Keep your groups connected—family, friends, and teams—in one app. Grūps brings together group chat, calendaring, communications, events, bookings, maps, and more. Run threaded conversations, create newsletters and announcements, share albums, and make quick decisions with polls and Q&As. Configure your notifications for push, email, or SMS.
Built for iOS, Android, and web on a web-native stack, Grūps gives group admins full control: add or remove features, customize the look and feel, set role-based permissions, and decide what's public versus private. Everything is behind authentication by default. No ads. No data mining. No tracking.
Garmin’s smartwatches generally have a more expensive upfront cost, but this deal on the entry-level Vivoactive 6 tears that barrier down a bit, if health and fitness are your priorities over smarts.
At TechCrunch's sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, we covered a lot of ground in a short time, beginning with the question everyone in the industry is asking right now: in a world where rival Cursor is reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion, is Replit also bound to sell?
Gemini Pro is an AI image and video generator that turns text prompts and photos into 4K images and cinematic videos. The platform includes models like Veo, Sora, Kling, Wan, Flux, Seedream, and GPT Image, supporting text-to-image, image-to-image, text-to-video, and image-to-video workflows. You can guide results with reference images and aspect ratios, create quickly, and download outputs for commercial or personal use.
Tanso helps AI companies understand which customers and features are truly profitable. It wraps your LLM calls and joins usage costs with Stripe revenue to show margins per customer, per feature, and per model in real time. With a single instrumentation step, you get clear cost attribution, live revenue sync, and actionable alerts. Route traffic from expensive models, set cost thresholds, and flag at-risk customers to protect margins. Tanso integrates with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stripe to replace spreadsheets with decision-ready metrics.
Hackers used vehicle-mounted SMS blasters to impersonate networks, disrupt millions of connections, and infiltrate thousands of devices across Toronto streets.
Google's web.dev guidance advises developers to treat AI agents as a distinct visitor type and recommends practices similar to accessibility practices.
The quarter showed how dependent Apple has become on its silicon strategy. The iPhone 17 lineup, built on advanced processors made by TSMC using a variant of the manufacturing technology behind leading AI chips, continues to drive the bulk of revenue. iPhone sales reached $56.99 billion, slightly missing estimates, but...
The iPhone 20 will switch to a design that Apple has never attempted before, involving a quad-curved display that, when combined with the company’s Liquid Glass UI, introduces a seamless visual appearance that offers an illusion of a bezel-less form factor. As expected, developing this display is no easy feat, which is why only one manufacturer is taking on this responsibility. However, an exclusive OLED deal could make things expensive for Apple as it will require a premium that’s being paid to the supplier. Also, if things weren’t bad enough, Apple CEO Tim Cook has warned that its DRAM stockpile is […]
Since Asha Sharma took over as the new chief executive officer of Xbox, the most immediate change she made was to make Xbox far more communicative than it had previously been between its executives and Xbox players. Now, that same courtesy is being extended to developers, or at least it is in a more public fashion, and it's starting with a popular topic: Project Helix. Today, Xbox revealed the Game Dev Update, a new kind of premiere event that's not a showcase of upcoming games or hardware, but is instead speaking more directly to the game developers working with or […]
LeadClaw is an AI-powered outreach assistant for service businesses. It finds local prospects via Google Maps, directories, and web data, writes personalized emails in your voice, and follows up automatically. It handles replies around the clock and CCs you when a lead shows interest so you can close. You get daily briefings with opens, replies, and next steps, and setup takes minutes with a dedicated assistant email.
Meta expands its AWS partnership by renting tens of millions of Graviton cores, signaling a shift toward infrastructure over direct hardware ownership.
Microsoft has a problem with its Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and what it means for developers and consumers. Here is how they plan to fix that and why it means ignore phones.
Microsoft Advertising is expanding its Performance Max reporting with publisher-level conversion and spend data — giving advertisers more visibility into where results are actually coming from
What’s happening. According to Microsoft Ads Product liaison Navah Hopkins, the PMax Website Publisher URL report now includes conversion and spend metrics, moving beyond basic placement visibility into actionable performance data.
This gives advertisers clearer insight into which placements are driving real outcomes — not just impressions or clicks.
Why we care. This update gives advertisers visibility into which placements are actually driving conversions and spend — not just impressions. That means better optimisation decisions, from scaling winning inventory to cutting wasted spend. It also makes it easier to trust and justify Performance Max performance with concrete data, rather than relying on aggregated reporting.
How advertisers can use it. The update opens up several practical use cases. High-performing placements can now inform Audience Ads strategies, such as building remarketing campaigns or impression-based audiences from winning inventory.
At the same time, advertisers can identify poor-fit placements and exclude them using account-level URL exclusion lists, helping protect brand safety and improve efficiency.
Between the lines. This is another step toward making automated campaigns more transparent. Rather than replacing control entirely, platforms are starting to give advertisers clearer signals on what’s working — and where to act.
What to watch:
Whether this level of transparency expands further across PMax reporting
How advertisers balance automation with manual optimisation
If similar reporting features roll out across other platforms
Tracked as CVE-2026-31431, Copy Fail could represent a significant security risk in the making. The vulnerability was discovered by researchers at Theori, who investigated the Linux kernel's authencesn cryptographic template using an AI-assisted scanning process. The team also developed a 732-byte Python script capable of escalating privileges and granting an...
After revealing its release date yesterday, Subnautica 2 developer Unknown Worlds has revealed the PC system requirements for its upcoming underwater deep-sea exploration survival adventure. Overall, the requirements arrive at a sort of middle ground for today's games, but they are far above what you'd need to play the first game. So much so that depending on when you last upgraded your PC, you might have to go diving for some extra RAM just to meet its requirements for the recommended minimum settings. Subnautica 2's minimum requirements call for a base of 12GB of RAM, to play the game at […]
Just a day after warning about Mac Studio and Mac mini supply remaining constrained for a number of months ahead, Apple has apparently discontinued the base Mac mini globally, as advanced node capacity and memory price inflation emerge as potent bottlenecks. Apple discontinues the base Mac mini as TSMC's advanced node capacity and the ongoing memory inflation begin to bite The base variant of the Apple Mac mini, which sported the M4 chip, 16GB RAM, 256GB of storage, and a retail price of $599, has now been pulled from the configurator in the US and other key global markets. Do […]
APX or Advanced Performance Extensions are the next evolution of x86 as Intel & AMD co-develop new standards for the architecture. APX Expands the x86 Instruction Set, Bringing Faster Performance & New Features That Will Benefit Both Intel and AMD's Next-Gen Chips Two days ago, we talked about ACE (AI Compute Extensions), which is a unified instruction set that aims to increase matrix-multiply performance for next-gen x86 chips. ACE is just one part of the grander scheme in which both Intel and AMD are working together to evolve the x86 architecture under a single unified framework through the recently established […]
After KRAFTON's disappearance from the Subnautica 2 Steam page spurred speculation that KRAFTON would no longer be publishing the game and that perhaps developer Unknown Worlds could be looking to split from the publisher in the future, the studio has cleared the air. In an interview with Eurogamer, two members of the Unknown Worlds team were able to provide some clarity and insight on the situation, the long and short of which is that yes, KRAFTON is still co-publishing the game. We can only speculate what will happen between Unknown Worlds and KRAFTON in the long-term now that the CEO […]
Filla helps Airtable teams build forms that do more than collect submissions. Forms sync with your Airtable schema, support linked records, and use conditional logic so submissions can create or update records correctly. Filla also includes built-in processors to validate emails, detect duplicates, transform data, and trigger follow-up actions automatically. That lets teams move from form submission to a completed workflow without using extra tools.
Fingine models your business and personal money to turn any decision into clear runway math. It keeps a typed model of cash, MRR, headcount, opex, and fundraise plans, and runs every what-if through a deterministic server-side calculator. You get a transparent “show the math” breakdown of cash, burn, and formulas, with consistent results, strong security, and support for multiple currencies. Use it for founder finance or life decisions, all on the same engine.
A newly discovered Vietnamese-linked operation has been observed using a Google AppSheet as a "phishing relay" to distribute phishing emails with an aim to compromise Facebook accounts.
The activity has been codenamed AccountDumpling by Guardio, with the scheme selling the stolen accounts back through an illicit storefront run by the threat actors. In all, roughly 30,000 Facebook accounts are
Elon Musk spent the better part of three days on the witness stand this week in his lawsuit against OpenAI, and it’s already getting messy. Emails, texts, and his own tweets are surfacing in court, and there are plenty more witnesses to come. Musk’s argument against OpenAI? By converting the company to a for-profit model, Sam Altman betrayed the “nonprofit for the […]
A new Windows 11 preview build has confirmed that the OS will soon hide the MSN feed by default, replacing it with a new default behavior that opens straight to your widgets instead.
Commodore has announced the C64C Ultimate, a new variant of its well-received Commodore 64 Ultimate edition from 2025 that swaps the original 1982 "bread-bin" case for the sleeker C64C form factor introduced in 1986. The standout detail here is the case manufacturing. Commodore tracked down and reacquired the original injection molds used to produce the C64C plastic housing back in the '80s. The tooling has had quite a journey. Originally used in Japan, then at Commodore's Pennsylvania and Dallas operations, the molds were discovered at auction in 2014, survived a factory fire, and eventually ended up at Individual Computers before Commodore bought them back from IComp.de. The cases produced from these molds even carry the original subtle flow marks caused by a two-point plastic cooling pattern from the 1986 production run, an unintentional quirk that Commodore is now treating as a mark of authenticity.
Under the hood, the C64C Ultimate is identical to the existing "bread-bin" model, FPGA-based, cycle-accurate C64 emulation, bundled demos and games, and a spiral-bound user guide covering everything from basic use to BASIC programming. Three editions are available for pre-order with shipping expected in late 2026. The standard BASIC Beige is $299.99, the Starlight Edition adds a translucent case with game-reactive LED lighting at $349.99, and the Founder's Edition goes all out with PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) gold keycaps, 24k gold-plated badges, and a translucent white case at $499.99. Commodore says that this announcement is the first of several new products planned for 2026.
Microsoft has published an updated support document outlining what the company believes the best Windows 11 gaming PC systems have in common. Among the listed specifications, Microsoft makes an interesting note about the system's RAM capacity configuration. The document suggests that 16 GB is a baseline for a modern PC, describing it as a good "starting point." However, the company recommends that gamers aim to surpass this baseline, as it now suggests 32 GB as a "no worries" upgrade for gaming PCs. This higher RAM capacity makes running multiple workloads much easier, which is naturally true, but raises question about the feasibility of Microsoft's future plans to bring more optimizations to the operating system.
Most TechPowerUp readers are PC enthusiasts who understand how a RAM-limited system performs and know that more RAM is almost always better. However, in an era where the DRAM shortage is making it difficult for enthusiasts to easily buy more RAM, many are turning to more optimized operating systems like Linux-based distributions or even macOS, which is an entirely different platform. Microsoft now recommends a 32 GB capacity, stating it "helps if you run Discord, browsers, or streaming tools alongside your games." The extra memory also provides newer titles with more breathing room as memory demands continue to rise. This might also indicate that Microsoft's operating system is more RAM-hungry these days than it used to be, during a challenging time for RAM upgrades.
Arch Linux has released its May 2026 ISO snapshot, version 2026.05.01, the first Arch ISO to ship with the Linux 7.0 kernel series, version 7.0.3 to be more precise. The new kernel brings improved hardware detection, particularly useful on newer machines but also on older hardware where previous ISOs sometimes failed to detect certain components. Linux 6.18.25 LTS is still available for those who prefer to remain on the long-term support branch. The updated Archinstall 4.3 installer introduces a new "Additional Fonts" section in the Applications menu. From there, users can pick from Noto Unicode for broad language coverage, Noto Emoji for color emoji support in browsers and apps, and Noto CJK variants for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. The installer now also automatically enables power management services after package installation, fixes bugs with encrypted partition selection and file copying, and adds a completed Hindi translation locale.
On the desktop side, KDE gets updated to Plasma 6.6.4 with KDE Frameworks 6.25 and KDE Gear 26.04, while GNOME is at version 50.1 across Shell, Mutter, and core components. Other environments include Cinnamon 6.6.8, Hyprland 0.54.3, and COSMIC 1.0.11. Graphics and audio come through Mesa 26.0.6, PipeWire 1.6.4 and BlueZ 5.86. Firefox 150, LibreOffice 26.2.3 and Blender 5.1.1 are among the updated apps in this new Arch Linux ISO snapshot. Worth mentioning that this is not a reinstallation situation for existing Arch users, a full system upgrade getting everything from the new ISO. The snapshot is mainly useful as a current starting point for fresh installs, with all packages updated through April 2026.
"On the Mac Mini and Mac Studio, both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools," Cook said. "And customer adoption of that is happening faster than we expected."
AMD's powerful Ryzen AI Halo Mini PC is reportedly launching in June and features the top Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 SoC. AMD's Powerful & Compact "Ryzen AI Halo" Mini PC Is Expected To Launch Next Month AMD recently hosted its AI Dev Day in San Francisco, where it once again showcased the Ryzen AI Halo Mini PC. A Reddit user, 1ncehost, has posted pictures from the event where Jack Hyuh was holding in the Mini PC, and based on the information, AMD is expected to launch the Mini PC in June, which is next month. The company didn't state any […]
Kingdom Come: Deliverance makers Warhorse Studios hosted a Reddit AMA yesterday, and while the positive side of the event included confirmation that it is working on "a huge immersive RPG," several of the questions instead focused on allegations that the studio fired one of its translators after his role was made "obsolete in favor of using AI for all translations going forward." At the time of the allegations, Warhorse's response was that it "has always been a talent-driven studio, and we deeply value the people who shape our work. Out of respect for the privacy and dignity of both current […]
A few weeks ago, Mundfish released Blood and Crystal, the fourth and final DLC for its debut game, the single player first-person shooter Atomic Heart. The game was very successful (it surpassed 10 million users about a year ago) and opened up a whole franchise, with an MMORPG spin-off titled The Cube and a full-fledged sequel with a much bigger world and an expanded RPG layer, as we discovered in our previous interview with Mundfish founder and CEO Robert Bagratuni. Today, we have a fresh Q&A to publish. This time, it's focused on Blood and Crystal, the significance of Atomic […]
GetTheGists is a Chrome extension that reads any article, paper, or post and delivers the gist, why it matters, and the few parts worth your time. It processes pages securely, previews locally, and never stores content or trains on your data. Start with 3 free summaries, then upgrade for higher limits and follow-up questions. Use it to decide what to skip, what to read in full, and save hours across compliance docs, academic papers, and long-form web content.
Scientists break the telecom wavelength barrier that previously blocked long distance quantum communication over existing optical fiber infrastructure.
SteamOS is on the verge of huge growth to its player base with the Steam Machine's arrival, and that's why this one factor can't be ignored by game developers.
Important Stories launched the IStories mobile app in February to make sure information would reach Russians despite widespread internet censorship and VPN restrictions.
The Samsung S90H is the LG C6's rival and while the latter has set a high bar, my first impressions with the S90H suggest it's more than able to reach that bar.
The deals come as the DOD has doubled down on diversifying its exposure to AI vendors in the wake of its controversial dispute with Anthropic over usage terms of its AI models.
Microsoft… Now’s a bad time to ask Windows users to upgrade their memory Microsoft has raised the bar. 16GB of RAM is no longer what’s recommended for gaming. Now, 16GB is a “practical starting point“, with Microsoft recommending 32GB for a “no worries” gaming experience. This documentation was first spotted by Windows Latest. Microsoft now […]
Google is enforcing a hard cutoff for older API versions, meaning advertisers and developers who don’t upgrade risk losing access to critical campaign management tools.
What’s happening. Google Ads API v20 will officially sunset on June 10, 2026. From that date onward, all requests to v20 will fail, requiring migration to a newer version to maintain uninterrupted API access.
Why we care. If you rely on the Google Ads API and don’t upgrade in time, automated workflows — including reporting, bidding and campaign management — could suddenly stop working. This could lead to data gaps, performance issues and operational disruption. Migrating early ensures continuity and avoids last-minute fixes that can impact campaign performance.
What to do. Google is urging users to upgrade as soon as possible and provides resources like release notes and upgrade guides to support the transition. Developers can also use the Google Cloud Console to review recent API activity, including which methods and versions their projects are calling.
Between the lines. API sunsets are routine, but the impact can be significant for advertisers relying on custom scripts, tools or third-party platforms. Missing the deadline could disrupt reporting, bidding or campaign automation workflows.
Xbox has begun rolling out new dynamic backgrounds, profile backgrounds, and gamer pics featuring its recently revealed logo, following a quick turnaround from Asha Sharma’s public confirmation.
WD_Black's SN7100 is a solid M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD suitable for PC gaming, and although it normally costs more than $1,000 due to the RAMpocalypse, it's now down to just $500 at Best Buy for a limited time. 1TB and 2TB models are also on sale.
AMD previewed its Ryzen AI Halo mini-PC during the CES 2026 showcase, and the machine is set to be released as soon as June arrives. According to a Reddit user, AMD presented a Ryzen AI Halo box during AMD AI Dev Day, showcasing the system in its full glory. This machine is powered by a Ryzen AI Max 395+ APU, featuring a 16-core/32-thread "Zen 5" CPU, a large integrated GPU based on the RDNA 3.5 graphics architecture with 40 compute units, and a Microsoft Copilot+ ready NPU with 50 TOPS. It supports up to 128 GB of unified LPDDR5X memory, is compatible with Windows 11 and Linux, and comes with pre-loaded AI models optimized for the hardware. At the AI Dev Day, AMD demonstrated the device running on the Ubuntu operating system, which is likely to be the preferred OS for many AI developers targeted by this system.
AMD has developed an innovative cooling solution for the "Strix Halo" SoC, which includes a baseplate, a network of direct-touch flat heatpipes, an aluminium channel heatsink, and two lateral airflow blowers. AMD stated that the Ryzen AI Halo AI developer platform will be available from Q2 2026 which matches this supposed June launch. Interestingly, the price of this 128 GB model remains unknown, which is the biggest mystery, but don't expect it to come cheap. Below are some of the first real-life pictures, showcasing the design illuminated by a programmable RGB strip surrounding the box.
The launch of the Epic Games Store follows the full implementation of the Mobile Software Competition Act, which was passed by lawmakers in Japan in December 2025. The new law is similar to the Digital Markets Act, requiring support for alternative app distribution and payment systems across digital platforms.
Operating profit in semiconductors climbed to 53.7 trillion won ($36.15 billion) for the January – March period, up sharply from 1.1 trillion won a year earlier. The figure accounted for roughly 94% of Samsung's total operating profit of 57.2 trillion won. Revenue rose 69% year over year to 133.9 trillion won.
As we officially move closer towards 2026 being half-over, global analytics firm Newzoo's latest monthly report provides an insight into which of the biggest releases in March 2026 drove engagement and revenue, and which of this year's releases are at the top of the charts one quarter into the year. Unsurprisingly, it's Crimson Desert, Pokémon Pokopia, and Resident Evil Requiem at the top of the charts. All three games are at the top of the chart for best-selling games by revenue between January and March 2026. Requiem sits at the top, followed by Crimson Desert in second and Pokopia in […]
NVIDIA is discontinuing its older Jetson developer modules due to shortages and rising prices of LPDDR4 memory. Higher LPDDR4 Prices & Memory Shortages Affect SBCs Too, as Older NVIDIA Jetson Modules Now Being Phased Out NVIDIA's Jetson modules are embedded platforms that are designed for robotics and Edge AI workloads. Think of them as NVIDIA's Raspberry Pi solutions. These SBCs or Single-Board Computers come in various shapes and sizes, all featuring a compact form factor. But in light of recent memory shortages & increasing prices, NVIDIA's partners are now phasing out older Jetson modules. The models that have been affected […]
Although Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 3 has yet to be formally announced, there's a very solid chance the conclusion of the remake trilogy will not release too far in the future. Director Naoki Hamaguchi recently confirmed to Nintendo Life that the team wants to capitalize on the momentum of the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S ports of the first two entries in the series. "With large-scale titles like this one, it’s common for a long gap to exist between the first and second instalments. However, because they were ports, we decided we could deliver […]
Greedfall and Steelrising maker Spiders having to close its doors after its parent company Nacon reportedly failed to find a buyer for the studio can seem like just a really unfortunate breakdown for the French studios from an external view when looking at the last few months. But that's not the case, at least according to French union Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV), who claim that the shutdown has less to do with the recent insolvency filings and more to do with alleged willful mismanagement. "Spiders' liquidation has been ordered on April 29. In a few weeks, the […]
The bar has been raised and the 16 GB is no longer the "recommended" RAM capacity for PC gaming, at least as per Microsoft. Microsoft Recommends 32 GB for No-Compromise Gaming Experience; Calls 16 GB RAM as "Baseline" Nearly 10 years ago, 8 GB RAM would be sufficient for gaming systems, but as games, apps, and OS became more memory hungry, the bar was raised to 16 GB. 16 GB RAM is still a decent capacity for most gaming PCs, considering such systems don't have many problems with executing background tasks while more intensive tasks, such as games, are running […]
The Biwin M350 is a budget PCIe 4.0 SSD done right. It has good performance where it matters and good power efficiency, too. But it still has the weaknesses of QLC flash, like poor sustained performance.
The U.S. Department of War announced agreements with seven AI providers, allowing it to deploy multiple LLMs for its use and avoiding lock up with a single vendor.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta plan to spend a combined $725 billion on capital expenditure in 2026, a 77% increase over last year's record $410 billion.
Warmly.cards is an AI-powered platform for creating and sending deeply personal digital cards quickly. Instead of picking generic templates, you describe the moment — a birthday, a tough day, or a random “thinking of you” — and Warmly helps you craft a message and design that feels like you. Each card is unique, combining AI-written content with customizable visuals to create something meaningful, not mass-produced. Warmly helps you show up for people with authenticity, even when you don’t have the perfect words.
Mako is an all-in-one business management platform for service-based businesses. It combines booking and scheduling, CRM, invoicing and online payments, team tracking, and an AI receptionist in one place. You can track revenue, expenses, cash flow, and job profitability without separate accounting tools, and see KPIs in real time. Use the customer portal, online booking pages, and automated reminders to reduce no-shows and get paid faster.
Mindraft helps people capture ideas before they disappear. Instead of forcing structure too early, it lets you save the rough thought first, clarify it when ready, and attach one next step so the idea can move forward. It is built to feel calm, minimal, and fast rather than like a heavy productivity suite.
Cybersecurity researchers are warning of two cybercrime groups that are carrying out "rapid, high-impact attacks" operating almost within the confines of SaaS environments, while leaving minimal traces of their actions.
The clusters, Cordial Spider (aka BlackFile, CL-CRI-1116, O-UNC-045, and UNC6671) and Snarky Spider (aka O-UNC-025 and UNC6661), have been attributed to high-speed data theft and
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new China-aligned espionage campaign targeting government and defense sectors across South, East, and Southeast Asia, along with one European government belonging to NATO.
Trend Micro has attributed the activity to a threat activity cluster it tracks under the temporary designation SHADOW-EARTH-053. The adversarial collective is assessed to
Apple’s upcoming AI photo tools are less about innovation for its own sake and more about catching up in a space where competitors have already reset expectations
A group of hacktivists have claimed responsibility for a distributed denial-of-service attack, which has affected several Ubuntu and Canonical websites, and prevented users from updating the Linux-based operating system.
Resident Evil’s getting a new live-action film The Resident Evil series is incredible, at least when it comes to video games. When it comes to movies, especially live-action ones, the series is very hit-or-miss. This year, a new live-action Resident Evil movie is in the works, directed by Zach Cregger, the director of the critically […]
I’ve built 10+ SEO agent skills in 34 days. Six worked on the first try. The other four taught me everything I’m about to show you about the folder structure most LinkedIn posts about AI SEO skills gloss over.
What makes these agents reliable isn’t better prompts. It’s the architecture behind them. Here’s how to build an agent from scratch, test it, fix it, and ship it with confidence.
Why most AI SEO skills fail
Here’s what a typical “AI SEO prompt” looks like on LinkedIn:
You are an SEO expert. Analyze the following website and provide a comprehensive audit with recommendations.
That’s it. One prompt. Maybe some formatting instructions. The person posts a screenshot of the output, gets 500 likes, and moves on. The output looks professional. It reads well. It’s also 40% wrong.
I know because I tried this exact approach. Early in the build, I pointed an agent at a website and said, “find SEO issues.” It came back with 20 findings. Eight didn’t exist. The agent had never visited some of the URLs it was reporting on.
Three problems kill single-prompt skills:
No tools: The agent has no way to actually check the website. It’s working from training data and guessing. When you ask, “Does this site have canonical tags?” the agent imagines what the site probably looks like rather than fetching the HTML and parsing it.
No verification: Nobody checks if the output is true. The agent says, “missing meta descriptions on 15 pages.” Which 15? Are those pages even indexed? Are they noindexed on purpose? No one asks. No one verifies.
No memory: Run the same skill twice, you get different output. Different structure. Different severity labels. Sometimes different findings entirely. There’s no consistency because there’s no template, no schema, no record of past runs.
If your skill is a prompt in a single file, you don’t have a skill. You have a coin flip.
Every agent in our system has a workspace. Think of it like a new hire’s desk, stocked with everything they need. Here’s what the workspace looks like for the agent that crawls websites and maps their architecture:
agent-workspace/
AGENTS.md instructions, rules, output format
SOUL.md personality, principles, quality bar
scripts/
crawl_site.js tool the agent calls to crawl
parse_sitemap.sh tool to read XML sitemaps
references/
criteria.md what counts as an issue vs noise
gotchas.md known false positives to watch for
memory/
runs.log past execution history
templates/
output.md expected output structure
Six components. One prompt file would cover maybe 20% of this.
AGENTS.md is the instruction manual
I wrote thousands of words of methodology into AGENTS.md. Instead of “crawl the site,” I laid out the steps: “Start with the sitemap. If no sitemap exists, check /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, and robots.txt for sitemap references.
Respect crawl-delay. Use a browser user-agent string, never a bare request. If you get 403s, note the pattern and try with different headers before reporting it as a block.”
Scripts are the agent’s tools
The agent calls node crawl_site.js –url to analyze website data. It doesn’t write curl commands from scratch every time. That’s the difference between giving someone a toolbox and telling them to forge their own wrench.
References are the judgment calls
This contains criteria for what counts as an issue. Known false positives to watch for. Edge cases that took me 20 years to learn. The agent reads these when it encounters something ambiguous.
Memory is institutional knowledge
Here I keep a log of past runs:
What it found last time.
How long the crawl took.
What broke.
The next execution benefits from the last.
Templates enforce consistency
This is where I get specific about the output I want: “Use this exact structure. These exact fields. This severity scale.” Output templates are the difference between getting the same quality in run 14 as you did in run 1.
Walkthrough: Building the crawler from scratch
Let me show you exactly how I built the crawler. It maps a site’s architecture, discovers every page, and reports what it finds.
Version 1: The naive approach
I provided the instruction: “Crawl this website and list all pages.”
The agent wrote its own HTTP requests, used bare curl, and got blocked by the first site it touched. Every modern CDN blocks requests without a browser user-agent string, so it was dead on arrival.
Version 2: Added a script
I built crawl_site.js using Playwright. This version used a headless browser and a real user-agent. The agent calls the script instead of writing its own requests.
This worked on small sites, but it crashed on anything over 200 pages. Because there was no rate limiting and no resume capability, it hammered servers until they blocked us.
Version 3: Introducing rate limiting and resume
I added throttling with a two requests per second default and never every two seconds for CDN-protected sites. The agent reads robots.txt and adjusts its speed without asking permission. I also added checkpoint files so a crashed crawl can resume from where it stopped.
This worked on most sites, but it failed on sites that require JavaScript rendering.
Version 4: JavaSript rendering
This time, I added a browser rendering mode. The agent detects whether a site is a single-page app (React, Next.js, Angular) and automatically switches to full browser rendering.
It also compares rendered HTML against source HTML, and I found real issues this way: Sites where the source HTML was an empty shell but the rendered page was full of content. Google might or might not render it properly. Now we check both.
This version worked on everything, but the output was inconsistent between runs.
Version 5: Time for templates and memory
For this version, I added templates/output.md with exact fields: URL count, sitemap coverage, blocked paths, response code distribution, render mode used, and issues found. This way every run produces the same structure.
I also added memory/runs.log. The agent appends a summary after every execution. Next time it runs, it reads the log and can compare results, like “Last crawl found 485 pages. This crawl found 487. Two new pages added.”
Version 5 is what we run today. Five iterations in one day of building.
THE CRAWLER'S EVOLUTION
v1: Raw curl → blocked everywhere
v2: Playwright script → crashed on large sites
v3: Rate limiting → couldn't handle JS sites
v4: Browser rendering → inconsistent output
v5: Templates + memory → stable, consistent, reliable
Time: 1 day. Lesson: the first version never works.
The pattern is always the same: Start small, hit a wall, fix the wall, hit the next wall.
Five versions in one day doesn’t mean five failures. It means five lessons that are now permanently encoded. I’ve rebuilt delivery systems four times over 20 years. The process doesn’t change. You start with what’s elegant, then reality hits, and you end up with what works.
Tip: Don’t try to build the perfect skill on the first attempt. Build the simplest thing that could possibly work. Run it on real data and watch it fail. The failures tell you exactly what to add next. Every version of our crawler was a direct response to a specific failure. Not a feature we imagined. A problem we hit.
This is the most important architectural decision I made.
When you write “use curl to fetch the sitemap” in your instructions, the agent generates a curl command from scratch every time. Sometimes it adds the right headers. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it follows redirects. Sometimes it forgets.
When you give the agent a script called parse_sitemap.sh, it calls the script. The script always has the right headers, always follows redirects, and always handles edge cases. The agent’s judgment goes into WHEN to call the tool and WHAT to do with the results. The tool handles HOW.
Our agents have tools for everything:
crawl_site.js: Playwright-based crawler with rate limiting, resume, and rendering
parse_sitemap.sh: Fetches and parses XML sitemaps, counts URLs, detects nested indexes
check_status.sh: Tests HTTP response codes with proper user-agent strings
extract_links.sh: Pulls internal and external links from page HTML
The agent decides which tools to use and what parameters to set. The crawler chooses its own crawl speed based on what it encounters. It reads robots.txt and adjusts. It has judgment within guardrails.
Think of it this way: You give a new hire a CRM, not instructions on how to build a database. The tools are the CRM. The instructions are the process for using them.
Progressive disclosure: Don’t dump everything at once
Here’s a mistake I made early: I put everything in AGENTS.md. Every rule. Every edge case. Every gotcha. Thousands of words.
The agent got confused. It had too much context and it started prioritizing obscure edge cases over common tasks. It would spend time checking for hash routing issues on a WordPress blog.
The fix: progressive disclosure.
Core rules that affect the 80% case go in AGENTS.md. This is what the agent needs to know for every single run.
Edge cases go in references/gotchas.md. The agent reads this file when it encounters something ambiguous. Not before every task. Only when it needs it.
Criteria for severity scoring go in references/criteria.md. The agent checks this when it finds an issue and needs to decide how bad it is. Not upfront.
This is the same way a skilled employee operates. They know the core process by heart. They check the handbook when something weird comes up. They don’t re-read the entire handbook before answering every email.
If your agent output is inconsistent but your instructions are detailed, the problem is usually too much context. Agents, like new hires, perform better with clear priorities and a reference shelf than with a 50-page manual they have to digest before every task.
The 10 gotchas: Failure modes that will burn you
Every one of these lessons cost me hours. They’re now encoded in our agents’ references/gotchas.md files so they can’t happen again.
Agents hallucinate data they can’t verify
I asked the research agent to find law firms and count their attorneys. It made every number up. It had never visited any of their websites.
Only ask agents to produce data they can actually fetch and verify. Separate what they know (training data) from what they can prove (fetched data).
Knowledge doesn’t transfer between agents
This fix I figured out on day one (use a browser user-agent string to avoid CDN blocks) had to be re-taught to every new agent. Day 34, a brand new agent hit the exact same problem.
Agents don’t share memories. Encode shared lessons in a common gotchas file that multiple agents can reference.
Output format drifts between runs
The same prompt can result in different field names: “note” vs. “assessment.” “lead_score” vs. “qualification_rating.” If you run it twice, get two different schemas.
The fix: Create strict output templates with exact field names. Not “write a report.” “Use this exact template with these exact fields.”
Agents confidently report issues that don’t exist
The first three audits delivered false positives with total confidence.
The fix wasn’t a better prompt. It was a better boss. A dedicated reviewer agent whose only job is to verify everyone else’s work. The same reason code review exists for human developers.
Bare HTTP requests get blocked everywhere
Every modern CDN blocks requests without a browser user-agent string. The crawler learned this on audit number two when an entire site returned 403s.
All it required was a one-line fix, and now it’s in the gotchas file. Every new agent reads it on day one.
Don’t guess URL paths
Agents love to construct URLs they think should exist: /about-us, /blog, /contact. Half the time, those URLs 404.
My rule is: Fetch the homepage first, read the navigation, follow real links. Never guess.
‘Done’ vs. ‘in review’ matters
Agents marked tasks as “done” when posting their findings. Wrong. “Done” means approved. “In review” means waiting for human verification.
This small distinction has a huge impact on workflow clarity when you have 10 agents posting work simultaneously.
Categories must be hyper-specific
“Fintech” is useless for prospecting because it’s too broad. “PI law firms in Houston” works. Every company in a category should directly compete with every other company.
My first attempt at sales categories was “Personal finance & fintech.” A crypto exchange doesn’t compete with a budgeting app. Lesson learned in 20 minutes.
Never ask an LLM to compile data
Unless you want fabricated results. I asked an agent to summarize findings from five separate reports into one document. It invented findings that weren’t in any of the source reports.
Always build data compilations programmatically. Script it. Never prompt it.
Agents will try things you never planned
The research agent tried to call an API we never set up. It assumed we had access because it knew the API existed.
The fix: Be explicit about what tools are available. If a script doesn’t exist in the scripts folder, the agent can’t use it. Boundaries prevent creative failures.
Build the reviewer first
This is counterintuitive. When you’re excited about building, you want to build the workers. The crawler. The analyzers. The fun parts.
Build the reviewer first. Without a review layer, you have no way to measure quality. You ship the first audit and it looks great. But 40% of the findings are wrong. You don’t know that until a client or a colleague spots it.
Our review agent reads every finding from every specialist agent. It checks:
Does the evidence support the claim?
Is the severity appropriate for the actual impact?
Are there duplicates across different specialists?
Did the agent check what it says it checked?
That single agent was the biggest quality improvement I made. Bigger than any prompt tweak. Bigger than any new tool.
The human approval rate across 270 internal linking recommendations: 99.6%. That number exists because a reviewer verifies every single one.
I’ve seen the same pattern with human SEO teams for 20 years. The teams that produce great work aren’t the ones with the best analysts. They’re the ones with the best review process. The analysis is table stakes. The review is the product.
BUILD ORDER (WHAT I LEARNED THE HARD WAY)
What I did first: Build workers → Ship output → Discover quality problems → Build reviewer
What I should have done: Build reviewer → Build workers → Ship reviewed output → Iterate both
The reviewer defines quality. Build it first. Everything else gets measured against it.
Tip: If you’re building multiple agents, the reviewer should be the first agent you build. Define what “good output” looks like before you build the thing that produces output. Otherwise, you’re shipping hallucinations with formatting. I learned this across three audits that were embarrassing in hindsight.
The validation standard (Our unfair advantage)
The reviewer catches technical errors. But there’s a higher bar than “technically correct.”
We have a real SEO agency with real clients and a team with 50 years of combined experience. Every agent finding gets validated against one question: “Would we stake our reputation on this?”
Would we actually send this to a client, put our name on the report, and tell the developer to build it?
Below are four tests we use for every finding:
The Google engineer test: If this client’s cousin works at Google, would they read this finding and nod? Would they say, “Yes, this is a real issue, this makes sense”? If the answer is no, it doesn’t ship.
The developer test: Can a developer reproduce this without asking a single follow-up question? “Fix your canonicals” fails. “Change CANONICAL_BASE_URL from http to https in your production .env” passes.
The agency reputation test: Would we defend this finding in a client meeting? If I’d be embarrassed explaining it to a technical CMO, it gets cut.
The implementation test: Is this specific enough to actually fix? Not “improve your page speed” but “your hero video is 3.4MB, which is 72% of total page weight. Serve a compressed version to mobile. Here’s the file.”
This is our unfair advantage. We’re not building agents in a vacuum. Most people building AI SEO tools have never run a real audit. They don’t know what “good” looks like. We do. We’ve been delivering it for 20 years with real clients. That’s why our approval rate is 99.6%.
Sandbox testing: Train on planted bugs
You don’t train an agent on real client sites. You build a test environment where you KNOW the answers. We built two sandbox websites with SEO issues we planted on purpose:
A WordPress-style site with 27+ planted issues: missing canonicals, redirect chains, orphan pages, duplicate content, broken schema markup.
A Node.js site simulating React/Next.js/Angular patterns with ~90 planted issues: empty SPA shells, hash routing, stale cached pages, hydration mismatches, cloaking.
The training loop:
Run agent against sandbox.
Compare agent’s findings to known issues.
Agent missed something? Fix the instructions.
Agent reported a false positive? Add it to gotchas.md.
Re-run. Compare again.
Only when it passes the sandbox consistently does it touch real data.
Think of it like a driving test course. Every accident on real roads becomes a new obstacle on the course. New drivers face every known challenge before they hit the highway.
The sandbox is a living test suite. Every verified issue from a real audit gets baked back in. It only gets harder. The agents only get better.
Consistency: The unsexy secret
Nobody writes about this because it’s boring. But consistency is what separates a demo from a product.
Three things that make output consistent:
Templates: Every agent has an output template in templates/output.md: Exact fields, structure, and severity scale. If the output looks different every run, you don’t need a better prompt. You need a template file.
Run logs: After every execution, the agent appends a summary to memory/runs.log. Timestamp, site, pages crawled, issues found, duration. The next run reads this log. It knows what happened last time. It can compare and provide outputs like, “Found 14 issues last run. Found 16 this run. 2 new issues identified.”
Schema enforcement: Field names are locked: “severity” not “priority,” “url” not “page_url,” “description” not “summary.” When you let field names drift, downstream tooling breaks. Templates solve this permanently.
If your agent output looks different every run, you need a template file, not a better prompt. I cannot stress this enough. The single fastest way to improve quality for any agent is a strict output template.
The stack that makes it work
A quick note on infrastructure, because the tools matter.
Our agents run on OpenClaw. It’s the runtime that handles wake-ups, sessions, memory, and tool routing. Think of it as the operating system the agents run on. When an agent finishes one task and needs to pick up the next, OpenClaw handles that transition. When an agent needs to remember what it did last session, OpenClaw provides that memory.
Paperclip is the company OS. Org charts, goals, issue tracking, task assignments. It’s where agents coordinate. When the crawler finishes mapping a site and needs to hand off to the specialist agents, Paperclip manages that handoff through its issue system. Agents create tasks for each other. Auto-wake on assignment.
Claude Code is the builder. Every script, every agent instruction file, every tool was built with Claude Code running Opus 4.6. I’m a vibe coder with 20 years of SEO expertise and zero traditional programming training. Claude Code turns domain knowledge into working software.
The combination: OpenClaw runs the agents. Paperclip coordinates them. Claude Code builds everything.
This process resulted in 14+ audits completed with 12 to 20 developer-ready tickets per audit, including exact URLs and fix instructions. All produced in hours, not weeks.
We have a 99.6% approval rate on internal linking recommendations on 270 links across two sites, verified by a dedicated review process.
We completed more than 80 SEO checks mapped across seven specialist agents. Each check has expected outcomes, evidence requirements, and false positive rules. Every finding is specific (i.e., “the main app JavaScript bundle is 78% unused. Here are the exact files to fix”).
That level of specificity comes from the skill architecture. The folder structure. The tools. The references. The templates. The review layer. Not the prompt.
If you want to build SEO agent skills that actually work, stop writing prompts and start building workspaces. Give your agents tools, not instructions. Test on sandboxes, not clients.
Build the reviewer first. Enforce templates. Log everything. The first version will fail. The fifth version will surprise you.
This is how you turn agent output into something repeatable. The same system produces the same quality — whether it’s the first audit or the 14th — because every step is structured, verified, and encoded.
Not because the AI is smarter. Because the architecture is.
Over the past few years, Performance Max has gone from an opaque experiment to a more capable — though still imperfect — campaign type for B2B marketers.
The fundamentals haven’t changed: skepticism still matters, first-party data is critical, experimentation is non-negotiable, and actionable reporting drives optimization. What has changed is how much better Google has gotten at operationalizing those inputs.
That means your Performance Max strategy needs to adapt. Here are five best practices for running more effective PMax campaigns for B2B today.
1. Guide AI with the right inputs
In 2022, given the automated nature of PMax campaigns and the aggressive way Google reps were pushing them, I predicted we’d see an accelerated move toward AI integration. That’s certainly played out, probably in part because of competitive pressures introduced by ChatGPT and the like.
AI Max for Search (launched in 2025) and PMax are both being prioritized by Google, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing since Google hasn’t deprecated standard Search campaign for B2B and has provided a slew of helpful updates that make PMax more viable for B2B.
Three updates worth using include:
Search themes, which are useful for more precise targeting.
Brand exclusions, which help minimize CPC inflation and over-investment on less-incremental queries.
Account-level channel reporting, which gives you a single dashboard look at performance across campaigns. For this feature, segment by conversion metrics to drill down on ROI by channel. You’ll quickly see overperformers where you can increase investment and underperformers that cry out for further optimization or reduced budget.
B2B lead quality in search campaigns has always been a challenge, and PMax’s relative lack of advertiser control makes that challenge tougher. I’ve pushed offline conversion tracking (OCT) since we’ve had that capability, but it’s an absolute non-negotiable for B2B campaigns.
Citing the phase-out of third-party cookies that still hasn’t happened (!), Google officially sunsetted Similar Audiences in 2023, which — well, it was a big loss for advertisers.
To compensate, understand and adapt according to the nature of PMax targeting, which is based on audience signals. Feed the AI high-quality first-party data (CRM lists) and let the algorithm find “lookalikes” through its own internal signals.
CRM lists for B2B are obviously critical, and this should give you even more incentive to clean up and segment CRM data, with audience lists closest to the point of revenue (e.g., SQLs or revenue if you don’t have enough closed-won data to send strong signals), especially valuable for finding high-value new users.
Creative is an important part of the puzzle for PMax. Good creative can prompt the right audience to engage, and great creative can deter the wrong audience from engaging.
Because YouTube is now a massive part of PMax campaigns, video — which has never been a B2B strength — should be prioritized more than ever for performance marketing.
Google has made this easier by adding the ability to build AI-generated assets right in the Google Ads interface. Just recently, they launched an important complementary feature in beta: PMax A/B creative testing to help advertisers understand which creatives are actually driving performance, and to use test-and-control structures to surface winning (and losing) elements.
A major source of frustration with PMax has been a lack of transparency into results. Over the last few years, Google has introduced reporting updates to address some of those concerns.
Search term insights and auction insights in the Insights tab provide more visibility into performance. Search term insights show how your ads perform for the queries users actually type, including how those ads are being matched and served. This added nuance makes optimization more precise.
Auction insights add competitive context, showing how your campaigns perform against others in the same auctions through metrics like impression share and outranking share.
Finally, asset-level reporting brings visibility to creative performance, with data on impressions, clicks, cost, and conversions for each asset.
Together, these updates give you a clearer view into what’s driving performance — and where to focus optimization efforts.
Taken together, recent updates make PMax more viable for B2B marketers than it used to be, especially for those with strong first-party data to train bidding algorithms and a need to find new customer pockets.
After more than 10 years in marketing, I still prefer having controllable levers — and I’m not willing to fully trust Google to act more in my (or my clients’) best interests than its own. Use everything at your disposal to make PMax campaigns work for you, and keep an eye out for new features Google releases that can give you more visibility and control over your account performance.
Roblox has introduced what it calls "Roblox Reality," and it's aiming to provide AI-powered, photorealistic upscaling akin to NVIDIA's DLSS 5. Here's how it won't require a heavy-duty gaming PC to run, if it ever makes it to market.
Although Xbox controllers work perfectly with Windows PCs out of the box, some prefer the feel of the PS5's DualSense. Without a wired connection, however, the DualSense lacks some features. That changes with this ingenious fix, requiring only a $7 Raspberry Pi to get going.
Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed an alkaline all-iron flow battery capable of more than 6,000 charge-discharge cycles without measurable capacity decay, according to a paper published in Advanced Energy Materials. The team estimates that performance is equivalent to around 16 years of daily use.
In one case, a patient came into the emergency department with a pulmonary embolism. The condition initially improved with treatment, then worsened. Doctors suspected the medication was failing. The AI model, using the same electronic health records available at the time, flagged a possible history of lupus – an autoimmune...
Kingdom Come: Deliverance makers Warhorse Studios is indeed working on its next project now that all of the DLC for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is out the door. Unsurprisingly, it'll be another "huge immersive RPG" from the studio, according to the team's content director Ondřej Bittner in a Reddit AMA. But that doesn't totally tell us what the game is. The obvious guess is that it's just the next entry in the Kingdom Come series, but the other popular guess is that the team is working on an RPG set in the Lord of the Rings. That's a rumour that […]
JEDEC continues the development of DDR5 MRDIMM memory for next-gen datacenters, now offering increased bandwidth. MRDIMM DDR5 Memory is designed to meet the growing bandwidth & Capacity Demands of AI Datacenters & JEDEC just unleashed its fastest design yet Two years ago, the first DDR5 MRDIMM memory was announced, offering up to 256 GB capacities per module and 8800 MT/s speeds. Now, as AI & datacenter requirements continue to grow, JEDEC is advancing its MRDIMM roadmap ahead with faster modules that operate at speeds of up to 12,800 MT/s, marking a 45% uplift over the initial design. Press Release: JEDEC […]
The adoption of emergency features on smartphones is made possible thanks to the use of advanced modems, multiple sensors, and improved processing power, but despite Android handsets having access to all three, they are unable to offer the same life-saving additions as Apple quickly enough, which is adversely affecting their market share. According to the latest research, the iPhone maker leads the pack in satellite connectivity, which has become a strong base for getting people out of hairy situations, with the company currently sitting comfortably with a 71.6 percent market share. With nearly one in two smartphones expected to support […]
SoftBank is planning to launch an AI and robotics startup in the U.S. to build data centers. The firm is gunning for a $100 billion valuation and aims to list the startup this year.
Huawei is reportedly on track to become China’s top AI chip supplier as Nvidia faces export restrictions and customs delays. Analysts forecast China’s domestic AI chip market could hit $67 billion by 2030.
VoiceDash converts your speech into structured, edited text in real time so you can communicate at the speed of thought. It removes filler words, fixes grammar, and drops your text directly into any app. Use a hotkey, speak naturally, and see clean copy appear on Mac, Windows, Android, and iPhone. Pro features include unlimited words, a personal dictionary, and snippet libraries, with privacy-first design and a free trial to get started.
After ongoing attempts in Europe, Canada is the latest country pushing for "lawful access" to data for law enforcement. This, despite cybersecurity experts warning that breaking encryption would threaten everyone's privacy and security.
The 11th annual DJI and SkyPixel photo and video contest winners have been revealed, selected from over 95,000 entries, and you wouldn't believe what drone pilots are able to create with affordable gear
You can treat yourself to some top tech for less this weekend, thanks to the Amazon bank holiday sale, so I've hand-picked 21 of the best deals that are worth buying.
Runway Magazine nearly got bought out by an AI company in The Devil Wears Prada 2 ending — so I asked ChatGPT to work what would shake out if the deal happened in real life.
Want behind-the-scenes access to our TV test bench? Here’s your chance to ask our expert reviewers everything you want to know about the LG C6 OLED TV.
IO Interactive has addressed criticism of the design of the 007 First Light limited-edition DualSense wireless controller, confirming it's not what some fans think.
Nvidia’s RTX 3060 12GB will resume production in June, report claims According to a new post on Board Channels (via Videocardz), Nvidia’s RTX 3060 12GB graphics card could return to production in June. The report claims that Nvidia partners like Colorful, ASUS, MSI, and Galax plan to produce new RTX 3060 graphics cards, with mass production starting […]
Programmatic SEO (pSEO) has been viewed with suspicion by the market. For many SEOs, the term is synonymous with low-quality pages, duplicate content, and the old tactic of “find and replace” city names in static templates.
Google’s spam policies on scaled content abuse are clear: generating vast amounts of unoriginal content primarily to manipulate search rankings is a violation.
Modern pSEO replaces mass page generation with an infrastructure that answers thousands of specific search intents with local nuance and semantic depth at a scale that isn’t possible manually.
This blueprint shows how to evolve from syntax-based pSEO (swapping keywords) to semantics-based pSEO (meaning and context), using a methodology we’ve applied to major players in Brazil.
The fallacy of the static template vs. semantic granularity
The most common mistake when starting a pSEO project is starting with the template, not the data. The old mindset said: “I have a template for ‘Best Hotel in [City].’ I’ll replicate this for 500 cities.”
The problem? The search intent for “Best Hotel in [Las Vegas]” (focused on nightlife, casinos, and luxury) can be radically different from the intent for “Best Hotel in [Orlando]” (focused on family suites, park shuttles, and pools). The user priorities, amenities sought, and decision-making criteria change completely.
The semantic approach requires us to use AI to granularize content. Instead of just swapping the {{City}} variable, we use LLMs to rewrite entire sections of the page based on the specific travel intent of that destination.
We don’t want to create 1,000 pages that say the same thing. We want 1,000 pages that answer 1,000 unique travel needs while maintaining a scalable technical structure.
Before writing a single line of content, you must answer a critical question: Where do I have permission to rank?
Many pSEO projects fail because they try to cover topics where the domain lacks historical authority. The solution we developed involves a deep analysis of topic clusters based on real Google Search Console (GSC) data, not just third-party search volume.
The authority map methodology works in three stages:
Cluster audit: Identify which topics the domain already dominates, which are opportunities, and where semantic gaps exist.
Priority definition: pSEO should be used surgically to fill these gaps and strengthen topical authority, not to shoot in all directions.
Connection with the calendar: The pSEO strategy must be born from this data. If GSC shows you have growing authority in a topic like “Mortgage Credit,” that is where scale should be applied first.
From there, AI suggests themes and direction, taking into account seasonality and brand guide specifications. This approach transforms pSEO from a “gamble” into a tactic of territorial defense and expansion based on proprietary data.
Solving ‘brand hallucination’: Context governance
The biggest barrier to AI adoption in enterprise companies is brand consistency. How do you ensure that 500 AI-generated articles don’t sound generic or, even worse, hallucinate information outside the company’s tone of voice?
The answer lies in context governance. Instead of relying on isolated prompts, the pSEO architecture must include a brand guidelines layer that acts as a guardian before text generation. This means systematically injecting:
Brand persona: (e.g., “We are technical, but accessible”).
Negative constraints: (e.g., “Never use the word ‘cheap,’ use ‘affordable’”).
Proprietary data: Institutional information that AI doesn’t have in its training data.
By centralizing these guidelines in a digital brand guide that feeds all AI agents, we ensure that multiple sites within the same corporate group (such as a retail conglomerate) maintain their distinct verbal identities, even when producing content on the same topic (like Black Friday) simultaneously.
The AI stops being a “junior copywriter” and starts acting as a specialist trained in the company’s culture.
The architecture: The semantic mesh (internal linking)
You’ve created 1,000 excellent pages. How do you ensure Google finds and values all of them? The answer isn’t using “related posts” plugins that only look for matching tags. You need to create a strategy based on real data.
The end of the ‘dead end’
You don’t want the user to land on a page and leave. You want to offer the next logical step. Cross-reference search intent with the destination:
The practical example: If a user lands on the site searching for “What is a CRM,” they are in the discovery phase. If that page doesn’t link semantically to “Advantages of [your company’s] CRM,” the user journey “dies” there. The semantic mesh connects the question to the solution.
Strategic reasoning in practice
Instead of randomness, our analysis works based on semantic meaning. The AI identifies:
“I noticed you are about to write about ‘customer retention.’ We have an older article about ‘churn rate’ that complements this topic perfectly. Insert a link to it.”
The tool suggests links between these pages because the context is relevant, strengthening the site’s Topical Mesh.
In programmatic SEO projects, where site depth can grow rapidly, this automation via vectors is the only way to ensure no good page gets forgotten at the bottom of the index.
This closes the loop of topical authority, ensuring no page generated at scale becomes an orphan page.
Case study: Regionalization and seasonality at scale
Theory is nice, but seeing it in practice is even better. Let’s analyze the case of Ânima Educação, one of the largest private education players in Brazil, with about 310,000 students and 18 higher education institutions.
The challenge
The National High School Exam (ENEM) is the “Black Friday” of Brazilian education. Search volume explodes in a short period, competition is brutal, and search intents shift rapidly (from “how to study” to “what is my score good for”). Furthermore, Brazil has continental dimensions; the questions of a student in the Northeast are different from those of a student in the extreme South.
The execution
Using the semantic pSEO methodology and the brand governance mentioned above, it was possible to structure complete coverage of the candidate journey — from exam preparation to the release of grades.
We ensured that all 18 brands were positioned to answer student questions at the exact moment of the search, respecting local nuances.
The results
Scale with precision: During five months, hundreds of undergraduate course pages and articles were optimized or created with granular local relevance.
Business impact: Surpassed the organic revenue target by 110% during the critical ENEM season.
Omnichannel dominance: Visibility across Google Search, Google Discover, and AI Overviews, and LLMs like Gemini and ChatGPT.
Strategic shift: The SEO team transitioned from repetitive manual tasks to high-level strategic oversight.
The technical guardian: Conversational monitoring
Scaling content without scaling technical monitoring is a recipe for disaster. Publishing 500 pages that result in 404 errors, redirect loops, or poor Core Web Vitals (CWV) can destroy the site’s crawl budget.
Modern pSEO requires a layer of real-time technical SEO. It isn’t enough to wait for the monthly report. You need to connect data to the workflow.
The trend now is the use of technical SEO agents — conversational interfaces that allow the professional to ask the data: “Of the 200 pages published today, which ones have indexing issues?” or “Which clusters are suffering from high LCP?”
This closes the cycle:
Planning (authority map).
Execution (pSEO with brand governance and semantic linking).
Programmatic SEO has ceased to be about volume to become about relevance. Success won’t come from publishing 10,000 pages tomorrow, but from building an infrastructure that delivers genuine value at scale.
You can use this semantic pSEO roadmap to start your transformation:
Start with data, not templates: Use your authority map (GSC) to identify where you already have permission to grow. Don’t waste resources attacking territories where your brand has no history.
Implement context governance: Before scaling, create the “rules of the game.” Inject your brand guidelines and proprietary data into prompts to avoid generic content and hallucinations. The AI should sound like your best expert.
Build bridges, not islands: Ensure every new page is integrated into a robust semantic mesh. Use internal linking to transfer authority and guide the user toward conversion, avoiding dead ends.
Monitor with AI: Abandon sporadic manual audits. Adopt technical agents that monitor your site’s health in real time as you scale.
The future of SEO isn’t about who creates the most content. It’s about who can unite the scale of the machine with the sensitivity of the human to deliver the best answer, at the right moment, for each individual user.
Chinese Board Channels now confirm that NVIDIA's upcoming resurrection of the GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB edition will take place in June, with many of NVIDIA's existing add-in-card (AIC) partners assisting in relaunching this five-year-old GPU. Interestingly, there are rumors that the recently integrated GALAX within the Palit group will be among these partners. Other AIC partners include NVIDIA's usual launch partners like ASUS, Colorful, and MSI. It will be interesting to see whether these AIC partners design new PCBs for the GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB relaunch or use their older designs, which they probably stopped producing years ago. We have already reported that NVIDIA is reintroducing the GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB SKU with a 192-bit wide memory bus.
For this, NVIDIA will once again use Samsung's 8 nm DUV node, as it has in the past. The entire NVIDIA "Ampere" architecture lineup was produced on the 8 nm DUV node, and its return after several years was unexpected. We also reported that the rumored RTX 5050 9 GB edition is reportedly on hold, as NVIDIA is pausing the transition from its 8 GB RTX 5050 "Blackwell" version to a 9 GB model due to the reintroduction of the GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB "Ampere" GPU. Since both of these GPUs compete in the budget segment, the company will reportedly only release the older GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB SKU as its primary entry-level design.
The new claims come from the Chinese forum Board Channels. A user writes that production of the RTX 3060 12GB GPUs (as opposed to the 8GB variant) will resume in June before being allocated to add-in card manufacturers, with the retail (re)launch coming in July. The card was originally discontinued...
Roblox Reality combines the popular game creation platform's real-time graphics engine with an AI-powered video generator to dramatically increase the visual quality of user creations. The hybrid architecture does not yet run in real time, but Roblox aims to launch the first iteration in late 2026 or early 2027.
A blind test was conducted by Computer Base, which revealed that gamers often prefer DLSS 4.5 image quality to be superior to FSR 4.1. Out of Seven Games, NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Wins Six Times in Blind Test Conducted by Computer Base, Suggesting Gamers Believe DLSS 4.5 is Superior to FSR 4.1 NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 is the leading upscaling technology from Team Green, while FSR 4.1 remains the flagship upscaler by Team Red. We have seen how incredibly powerful these upscaling technologies are in terms of visual quality. Unlike previous versions, both offer the best possible visuals through better sharpening, reduction […]
NVIDIA pulling out from China's AI market has boosted the share of domestic firms, with Huawei winning the biggest chunk. Huawei's China Market Share in AI to Reach 60% as NVIDIA CEO Confirms Zero Chip Share in China After US Policy Shift The US Government has moved to ban all leading-edge AI chip sales in China. NVIDIA, being the biggest name in the AI industry, has seen its share drop to zero after the policy shift, prompting an increased reliance on domestically produced chips in China. Currently, the situation has prompted China's AI chipmakers to double down on production and […]
One of the most popular RTX 30 series GPUs will arrive in nearly two months as NVIDIA's board partners prepare for the launch. MSI, Galax, ASUS, and Colorful to Receive RTX 3060 Chips Soon, As NVIDIA Prepares to Launch the Card in July to Tackle the Shortage As reported by Board Channels, NVIDIA is about to launch the Ampere-based RTX 3060 12 GB GPU in July, and it's not to clear the existing inventory, but to fulfill the current market demand due to GPU shortages. We know that the RAMpocalypse has caused a surge in GPU prices as well, and […]
This week, Roblox Corporation has unveiled Roblox Reality, an ambitious project that aims to deliver a DLSS 5-like AI powered model to level up the visuals available in the popular game creation platform. In the announcement blog post, Senior Vice President of Engineering Anupam Singh described Roblox Reality as a hybrid architecture that splits responsibilities between two components: the existing Roblox Game Engine (running on cloud servers), which handles all authoritative game logic like physics, collision, state synchronization, and player positions, while a new Video World Model (called "Super Upsampler") runs on edge infrastructure powered by H200/B200-class GPUs and handles the visual output, generating […]
NVIDIA's CEO has reaffirmed that AI will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, while reacting to the US's policy shift towards China. NVIDIA's China Share Has Dropped To 0, Says Jensen Huang, But Says That AI Will Bring Trillions Into The United States Economy Speaking at the latest episode of "Memos to the President", NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang once again strengthened the fact that AI will bring a boost to the US economy, rather than destroying existing jobs. This follows Jensen's recent statements on how AI in the Industrial Era of the modern world will bring manufacturing jobs back to […]
ASML shipped 48 EUV lithography systems and 131 immersion DUV tools in 2025, generating €32.7 billion in total revenue and ending the year with a €38.8 billion order backlog.
Best Buy has slashed the cost of this Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI laptop with an RTX 5070 Ti, 32 GB of RAM, 240 Hz OLED display, and a Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, knocking it down to $1,799.99 and saving you $400.
The managed security services market is projected to grow from $38.31 billion in 2025 to $69.16 billion by 2030[1], with cybersecurity being the fastest-growing sector[2]. Despite this opportunity, many MSPs leave revenue on the table because their go-to-market strategy fails to connect technical expertise with business needs.
This execution gap is where most deals stall. MSPs often focus on
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday announced the sentencing of two cybersecurity professionals to four years each in prison for their role in facilitating BlackCat ransomware attacks in 2023.
Ryan Goldberg, 40, of Georgia, and Kevin Martin, 36, of Texas, were accused of deploying the ransomware against multiple victims located throughout the U.S. between April and December 2023.
EZ Grader is an online grading calculator for teachers that converts totals and wrong answers into percentages and letter grades in seconds. Enter the number of questions, track wrong responses with a +1 button or keyboard shortcuts, and see the score update instantly with a quick chart for fast reference. Use it on any device to speed through quizzes, tests, and assignments while reducing errors.
SportSignals delivers AI-driven football betting tips, match previews, live scores, and odds comparison across global leagues. It analyzes data to generate predictions and flag value bets, while rankings and a World Cup hub keep you up to speed. Dive into in-depth news, transfer coverage, and resources on odds and bankroll management. Explore player performance valuations in the Market and track results to refine your strategy.
Epic Games has released the roadmap for its month-long Fortnite x Star Wars Day celebrations, which includes a "galaxy of new Star Wars games" and more to keep fans busy.
Utah is set to become the first US state to penalize websites for failing to verify the age of users who mask their location with a VPN, sparking outrage from digital privacy experts.
A dramatic courtroom clash between Elon Musk and Sam Altman briefly turned into a stark warning about AI extinction risk — before the judge shut it down.
All the ways to watch UCI Mountain Bike World Series 2026 live streams online and from anywhere, as Valentina Höll and Jackson Goldstone defend their crowns.
The trial is live, limited to the U.S. for now, and moving faster than you likely expected. ChatGPT ads launched Feb. 9 for logged-in users on Free and Go tiers, with 600+ advertisers already in.
With 800 million weekly active users, a global rollout of ChatGPT ads is a matter of when, not if.
OpenAI has confirmed the next expansion to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The latest update from Adthena trialists suggests the UK could see ads as early as mid-May.
We’ve tracked ChatGPT ad placements since rollout. With an index of 50,000+ daily placements across B2B software, ecommerce, fintech, and consumer verticals, we’ve had a front-row view of how this format is evolving. Here’s what we’ve found.
What ChatGPT ads actually look like
ChatGPT ads appear inline within conversation responses. When you ask something with commercial intent like “best weekend getaway” or “top running shoes under $100,” a sponsored result can appear alongside the AI’s answer, clearly labeled “Sponsored.”
This isn’t a search bar. It’s a conversation. Users arrive already engaged, already researching, often close to a decision.
The format is tighter than traditional search: no sitelinks or extensions — just a headline, short body copy, and a destination.
But here’s what we didn’t expect. Our data shows what we’re calling the Adthena “Double Parked” phenomenon: a single brand appearing twice in the same response.
We spotted New Balance with two separate sponsored placements in one ChatGPT answer. This raises a key question around visibility, frequency, and what it means to own a conversation on this platform.
10 things we’ve learned from 50,000+ daily placements
If you move fast, this is a rare moment: a new format, an uncontested landscape, and data most competitors don’t have yet. Here’s what it shows.
Headlines follow a “Brand: Benefit” formula. A name, a colon, a value claim. Think “Betterment: 5.25% APY Cash Account.” Dominant across top performers.
Almost every ad leads with the brand name. Awareness thinking for a format where users are already deep in a conversation, not just entering a search bar.
Headlines average just 30 characters, with a ceiling around 36. The constraint forces hyper-concise messaging and every word earns its place.
Body copy runs around 19 words, structured as two tight sentences. One lead proof point, one offer or nudge. One reason to click.
Context mirroring is a defining feature. The strongest ads echo the user’s query directly. A running shoe ad referencing “the transition from 5k to 21.1k” isn’t a coincidence.
The $ symbol drives conversion. Specific dollar figures, precise APY rates, credit amounts. Concrete claims consistently outperform vague promises in intent-heavy environments.
Numbers dominate body copy. Specs, trial lengths, rates. Hard numbers feel more native and trustworthy than soft superlatives in a research-led environment.
“Free” is the most common conversion lever. It removes friction for users already in research mode and close to a decision.
CTAs are action-specific and generic “Learn More” is virtually absent. “Open Account,” “Shop Cell Phones,” “Claim Credits.” Every CTA names the brand, offer, or next step.
Tone is confident and measured. Exclamation marks are rare. The best ads mirror ChatGPT’s calm register—hype punctuation kills trust here.
What this means for your paid search strategy
Top-performing brands in ChatGPT don’t repurpose Google ad copy and hope for the best. They write for a conversational, intent-rich environment where users are already halfway through a decision before the ad appears.
Lead with your brand name. Anchor value in specifics. Make low-friction offers central to your creative. If you’re not thinking about context mirroring, you’re leaving performance on the table.
The bigger question is visibility. If your competitors show up in ChatGPT conversations and you don’t, you’re not just missing clicks — you’re missing the conversation.
See exactly what’s happening with Adthena’s ChatGPT Ads Intelligence
Knowing the trends is one thing. Knowing what your competitors are doing on your exact prompts is another. That’s the problem we set out to solve.
Right now, ChatGPT ads give you impressions and clicks — nothing more. No competitive context, no prompt-level visibility, no insight into who else appears in the same conversations or where you’re missing coverage. You’re optimizing blind.
Adthena’s ChatGPT Ads Intelligence changes that. Here’s what you get.
Your performance, in context
The Ads Performance tab gives you a live snapshot of your ChatGPT activity: ad presence rate, top-performing intent group, total impressions, average CTR, and unique competitors detected. The trend chart shows your presence over time so you can clearly see whether you’re gaining or losing momentum.
Know which topics you’re winning and where to close the gap
The Topics and Keywords Analysis view breaks down performance by intent group, showing your ad presence rate against the competitor average. Each group includes a built-in tactical recommendation, so you always know your next move.
See your own ads as users see them
The Ads Sampling tab shows all your ChatGPT creatives with their headline, description, image, and format. The insight panel highlights your top-performing creative and surfaces optimization opportunities, like pairing a price anchor with a time-limited offer.
Understand exactly what competitors are running
The Competitor Creative Analysis panel breaks down rival ads across your tracked prompts: the images they use, the dominant copy themes, and their format mix. No more guessing what your competition is doing.
Never miss a shift in the competitive landscape
The Ads Benchmarking tab shows who’s advertising on your prompts and how their presence changes week to week. The “What changed this week?” feed flags new entrants and share shifts in plain language before your next campaign review.
Find the gaps before your competitors do
The Competitor Gap Analysis table shows every prompt where competitors have presence and you don’t, flagged by intent group and competitor count. A clear, prioritized view of where to expand your ChatGPT coverage.
The first prompt is the new first click
We’re tracking early-stage data from a platform still in limited rollout. As OpenAI expands to new countries and the advertiser base grows, the competitive landscape will shift fast. Brands building their ChatGPT presence now — learning the format, testing creative, mapping competitive gaps — will have a meaningful head start over those who wait.
Don’t let competitors win the first prompt. Join the product waitlist to uncover your ChatGPT ads landscape.
In the meantime, get your ads ready with Adthena’s free ChatGPT AdBridge. Connect your Google Ads account and we’ll build your ChatGPT ads setup with AI-enriched campaigns and smarter negative keywords — delivered to your inbox, ready to import.
Xbox Mode has started rolling out to all Windows 11 PCs Microsoft has officially started rolling out “Xbox Mode” to all Windows 11 PCs, laptops, and tablets in selected regions. This new mode is what Microsoft originally called the “Xbox Full Screen Experience“, which provides a more console-like experience to PC gamers. This mode gives […]
During Microsoft's fiscal Q3 2026 earnings call, Nadella put consumer Windows front and center. As part of Microsoft's broader push to reconnect with users across its platforms, he framed the Windows strategy as a back-to-basics project around performance, quality and core UX. "When it comes to our consumer business, we...
In the past few years, we have seen the number of console exclusives shrink considerably. While Nintendo continued to keep its games confined to its systems, Sony and Microsoft began releasing their tentpole PlayStation and Xbox franchises to PC and other consoles, respectively, signaling that the era of console exclusives was coming to an end. However, both seem to be pivoting away from their multiplatform strategies, and the reason couldn't be clearer: for many gamers, exclusives are the main reason to get a console over another. As spotted by Idle Sloth on Bluesky, The Game Business' Chris Dring recently reported […]
With the development of Mortal Kombat 1 winding down, there was no doubt that NetherRealm Studios was hard at work on a new game. In the past, many, including voice actors for Superman and Green Lantern, suggested that the studio's next game would be Injustice 3, and earlier this week, a WB Games Artist listed the game among those they have worked on. However, it seems like the next game from the Mortal Kombat series developer may be more of a DC fighters of sorts, rather than a continuation of the series. Yesterday, known fighting games YouTuber Rooflemonger (who corroborated […]
According to reputable Hollywood online magazine TheWrap, the upcoming Battlefield movie is already locked in what could become the biggest bidding war of the year between almost all the major production studios: Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon MGM Studios, Sony, and Universal. The Battlefield movie adaptation was officially announced last week and already has two big names attached: recent Oscar-winning actor Michael B. Jordan, who will produce and potentially star in the film, and filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie, another Oscar winner who will write and direct. Jordan is known mostly for his roles in Black Panther, Creed, and last year's Sinners. […]
New Pentagon FY2027 budget documents reveal the Joint Laser Weapon System, a containerized 300kW+ laser weapon designed to intercept cruise missiles as part of the US military’s Golden Dome missile-defense initiative.
A new software supply chain attack campaign has been observed using sleeper packages as a conduit to subsequently push malicious payloads that enabled credential theft, GitHub Actions tampering, and SSH persistence.
The activity has been attributed to the GitHub account "BufferZoneCorp," which has published a set of repositories that are associated with malicious Ruby gems and Go modules. As of
AutoSift lets you search car listings and parts prices across major marketplaces in one place. Enter a year, make, model, and optional filters, and it fetches results from Autotrader, CarGurus, Cars.com, Carvana, TrueCar, Facebook Marketplace, and leading parts retailers like Amazon, eBay, AutoZone, RockAuto, Advance Auto, and O’Reilly. Compare options side by side, verify fitment for your vehicle, and click through to the best deal.
Vendors set deadlines, analysts warn of falling behind, and the rhetoric is relentless – much of it built on a misconception about what security and compliance actually require.
The cybersecurity industry has spent years talking about a talent and skills shortage. Turns out the talent and skills exist. It's just being recruited by the other side.
Microsoft’s Spring 2026 Xbox Game Dev update includes an “Introduction to Project Helix” Microsoft is hosting a new “Game Dev Update” event on May 7th, with Xbox calling this event their “first episode”, suggesting that there are more events to come. This developer-focused event will give developers a glimpse at the future of Xbox. This […]
Microsoft delivered another strong quarter with results that beat expectations, driven by cloud and AI demand. But an analyst says the key issue is whether Microsoft can turn its rising AI infrastructure spending into long‑term profit.
Austrian fan maker Noctua has published a technical blog explaining why it sometimes takes a long time for the company to release the dark-edition chromax.black fans after the initial beige and brown design is out. The company compares the level of engineering required for a new color code to painting a Formula 1 car, rather than a simple color change like you would typically do with a wooden fence. Noctua is known for its scientific testing, rigorous performance evaluations, highly detailed lab experiments, and more, which make its fans worthwhile. This has created a massive fan base within the enthusiast community over the years, who now eagerly await each new product release. When it comes to manufacturing, the company applies that same rigor everywhere, and a simple color change is not taken lightly. For example, Noctua produces its fans using injection molding, where plastic is melted and forced into a steel mold. However, when a new pigment is used, the entire calculation can be disrupted.
Noctua designs its fans with high precision to maximize airflow performance. This means that blade impellers have a tip clearance before hitting the fan frame of only a few tenths of a millimeter, about 0.5 mm for 120 mm fans and about 0.7 mm for 140 mm fans. Introducing any third-party pigment into this process could disrupt the structure of this fan tip clearance and potentially interfere with Noctua's Sterrox liquid-crystal polymer (LCP) material used in its fans. Specifically, color pigments have particles that directly affect how the injection mold behaves, as they carry their own particle imperfections. This negatively impacts the hundreds of thousands of performance tests that Noctua conducts in the lab and significantly delays the chromax.black product launch.
Earlier this week, Canonical VP Engineering Jon Seager unveiled the company's plan for integrating AI solutions into Ubuntu. The open source operating system, one of the most popular Linux distros for general desktop usage and cloud instances, is going to adopt many AI-based features for accessibility and other tasks. Users...
During Final Fantasy XIV Fan Fest 2026, Game Director and Producer Naoki Yoshida answered questions about the newly announced Nintendo Switch 2 version in a roundtable interview. As reported by IGN, Yoshida-san revealed the technical specs: the game will target 30 frames per second. I've already noticed some comments on the social channels talking about the specs and how does it compare to the other more robust systems… I want to be honest to you, we are really working hard on the optimization for the platform and we are striving to get the best performance. In towns, you may see […]
Prop24AI creates custom landing pages for real estate agents using AI, tailored to their city, property type, and target buyer. Each page is delivered as ready-to-use HTML in 24 hours.
Plans start at $59. We serve agents in Norway, the UK, Spain, and the USA. No templates, every page is built from scratch based on your brief.
Storyloft is a writing platform built for authors to draft, revise, design, and publish in one place. It pairs a manuscript editor with focus mode, voice-aware AI editing, notes, and research so you can keep momentum. Create illustrations and covers inside your manuscript, then export to print-ready PDFs and EPUBs with customizable themes. Track goals and streaks, invite beta readers, and manage characters and visuals to keep your book consistent.
UK organisations still run decade-old vulnerable systems as attackers exploit them relentlessly, driving millions of attacks and increasing successful breaches nationwide.
TellDone is a voice planning app for iPhone and Apple Watch. Speak naturally and it creates tasks, calendar events, and notes automatically, synced to Todoist, Notion, Things 3, Apple Calendar, Google Tasks, and Reminders. Say "finished the report" and the matching task gets checked off. It supports 60+ languages with mid-sentence switching. The free plan includes 50 notes per month. Paid plans add AI reports, webhooks, and MCP for AI agents.
Laddro helps European job seekers build ATS-optimized resumes, tailor them to job descriptions using AI, generate cover letters, and track applications. It works natively in eight languages. The platform is free to start, GDPR compliant, and built in Germany.
Meta has quietly ended its relationship with a vendor that helped train its generative AI systems using footage captured through Ray-Ban smart glasses. The contractor, Sama, subsequently announced the termination of 1,108 employees – some of whom alleged they were punished after coming forward about the sensitive nature of the...
ConateApp is a Windows chat platform built for gamers who don't want to sacrifice RAM. It uses about 5MB while idle and 120-150MB during active calls, compared to Discord's 781MB even when idle. Build communities with servers, channels, roles, and file uploads—all free. The closed beta launches in 2026, with mobile, macOS, and Linux versions to follow.
The UI is familiar, especially if you’ve used Discord, so you'll navigate easily. It has core features you need, and since it’s early, the developer is reachable. Feature requests are seen and acted on, not lost in a corporate backlog. If something’s missing, just reach out!
Shunshi.AI is an AI-powered BaZi (Chinese Four Pillars of Destiny) reading tool calibrated to true solar time for minute-level accuracy. Enter your birth date and time to get a full chart with plain-language insights on personality, career, wealth, relationships, and yearly fortune. It supports English, Traditional/Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Free to start, results in seconds.
The Apple Watch Series 11 is a fantastic health and fitness addition to pair with your iPhone, offering plenty of insight into your activity levels – it's on sale now with a starting price of just AU$497.
LeadHunt is a lead intelligence and outreach platform for local markets. Choose a city and industry, and it scans businesses, runs a 29-point website audit, enriches contacts, and scores every lead from 0 to 100. Launch outreach via email, WhatsApp, SMS, and voice, and track deals in the built-in CRM.
LeadHunt also provides AI call coaching, branded SEO audit PDFs, and open infrastructure you can self-host or use in the managed cloud.
Windows 11's optional non-security preview update for April 2026 has finally been released, and includes a number of quality of life improvements and changes that are now rolling out.
Memory supply constraints aren’t the only problem that Apple is facing, as during its Q2 2026 earnings call, the company revealed it didn’t anticipate agentic AI use cases like OpenClaw would pick up in popularity, causing its Mac mini and Mac Studio stock to run out. Additionally, the company didn’t expect that its aggressive pricing strategy with the MacBook Neo meant that it would run out of advanced chip supply for its most affordable portable Mac. In short, the California-based giant is suffering from a problem its competitors wish they had, but that also means Apple has missed out on potentially millions […]
Key Person Insurance UK helps businesses compare and understand key person cover from specialist UK providers. Use the calculator to estimate the right cover amount, explore guides on costs, tax treatment, and industry-specific risks, and review life-only or life-plus critical illness options. The site is a comparison and information platform, not an insurer, designed to help directors and founders choose tax-efficient, appropriate protection and reassure lenders and investors.
Brightcast is a hope platform that tracks global progress and positive development across innovation, health, environment, and community. Every story is verified and scored by our proprietary Brightcast Impact Score (BIS). Your reading directly funds real-world projects through Hope Coins. Available on iOS, Android, and web.
The platform’s B2B marketing and artificial intelligence-powered recruiter tools helped drive business, while paid video posts grew nearly 30% year over year
The company will allow external providers to plug data into another system, such as Claude or ChatGPT, without using API setups or developer credentials.
Brad Lynch, the same VR industry insider who revealed that Valve was preparing for the Steam Controller launch just two weeks before the controller actually launched, has just revealed in a post on X that Valve may be preparing to launch the Steam Machine in the coming weeks. Like last time with the Steam Controller, it seems as though Valve has been receiving "a ton of 'Game Consoles'" in the US in recent weeks, according to recent shipping manifests. According to Lynch, Valve is stocking its US distribution warehouses, indicating that it is preparing whatever it is importing for an imminent batch of orders.
Admittedly, the shipping manifests simply list the imported hardware as "Game Consoles," so it could also be referring to something like the Steam Deck. However, there are no upcoming large-scale shopping, holidays, or regular discount periods, like Black Friday, that Valve would need to increase Steam Deck supply in order to prepare for. It's also entirely possible that this is around the time Valve had originally planned to ship the Steam Machine, and it is simply following the plan to make logistics and storage cheaper by keeping the hardware in its own warehouses where it already pays for space.
A new looter shooter set in an alternate timeline Wild West, titled "Far Far West," launched on Steam in Early Access, and, but a day after launch, the game has rocketed to second place in Steam's Top Sellers chart, which measures game performance based on revenue earned. That is in spite of its $19.99 launch pricing and 10% launch discount—or maybe it's because of the fairly aggressive pricing. According to SteamDB, the game has peaked at 30,288 concurrent players the day after it launched, which is solid performance for a mid-week launch of a new indie IP from a small studio. Far Far West also seems to sit well with gamers, with an Overwhelmingly Positive 98% review rating on Steam.
The game mixes traditional Western aesthetics and co-op looter shooter mechanics with fantasy elements, like magic and monsters. The game sees players, in teams of up to four, take on bounties to hunt down dangerous foes in the Far Far West. The game offers in-depth customization of weapons, spells, and abilities, and the developer's Early Access roadmap promises a healthy helping of new content in the coming months. The plans include new spells, weapons, melee weapons, in-game events, new objectives, improved replayability, and weekly challenges, among others.
With retail leaks revealing a new MSI Claw handheld slated to arrive soon with Intel's Arc G3 Extreme dedicated handheld CPU onboard, it's no surprise to see the CPU, and its Arc B380 iGPU, appear in early benchmarks. According to a recent PassMark run, the Intel Arc G3 Extreme will put up impressive numbers in terms of both CPU and GPU performance, with multicore CPU tests resulting in 29,622 points and single-core tests coming in at 4,288 points.
In comparison, the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme that has become ubiquitous in the handheld gaming space, manages 23,649 in multicore CPU testing and 3,964 points in single-core tests—just over 20% slower than Intel's upcoming chip. To be fair, the TDP of the 14-core Intel chip during the test is unknown, and performance at lower power has been one of Intel's weaknesses when it comes to gaming handhelds. GPU tests have not yet been recorded by PassMark, but the Arc B380 is slated to be built on the same 12-core Xe3 silicon with a minor 200 MHz decrease in GPU clock, so performance is expected to be quite similar to the Arc B390, which we tested to be significantly faster than AMD's Radeon 890M.
Microsoft has officially announced a Spring 2026 Game Dev Update event scheduled for May 7 at 18:00 UTC. This is a new event by Microsoft—likely part of its new initiative to make Xbox more welcoming to developers, as promised by CEO Asha Sharma recently—and the company will show off a host of updates to projects like DirectX, DirectStorage, Xbox developer tools, and the future of the Xbox Marketplace. Most importantly for consumers, though, Xbox will give us our next look at the upcoming Xbox Helix game console, slated to launch somewhere around late 2027 to 2028.
The Xbox Helix update will cover "details shared at GDC, offering a closer look at Project Helix and what it represents for the future of Xbox," so we may find out more about how Microsoft plans to integrate the more PC-centric features of the Xbox Helix. It seems unlikely that we'll hear anything material about pricing or exact hardware or performance at the event though. Further, Xbox may provide more details about how it plans to handle things like Xbox exclusives in future console generations. The event will be streamed on the Microsoft Game Dev YouTube channel.
Microsoft has so far been mum on the prospect of new Surface hardware featuring Intel's Panther Lake CPUs, although leakers have started reporting that that's exactly what is on the horizon, mere weeks ahead of the supposed launch date. Now, we have two Geekbench listings backing up those early leak and revealing two versions of an upcoming Microsoft Surface Pro 12 and a new Surface Laptop 8 (via Notebookcheck). The two Surface Pro 12 variants, which will be thin-and-light convertible devices, be available with both the Intel Core Ultra 5 325 and Core Ultra 5 335 CPUs, which are both eight-core chips with a small 100 MHz difference in clock speed. It also looks as though the Pro 12 will be available with up to 32 GB of memory.
According to the leaks, the new Surface Laptop 8 will follow the standard 13-inch laptop form factor we've come to expect from Microsoft and come with both the Intel Core Ultra X7 368H, with Intel's Arc B390 iGPU, and the Core Ultra 7 366H CPU, which features the much less powerful four-core iGPU. The now-removed Geekbench listing lists a single-core score of 2,833 points and a multicore score of 16,368 points, and the new Laptop 8 will feature 32 GB of LPDDR5-8532 memory. The same spec options are expected for the 15-inch version of the 8th-gen Surface Laptop 13. An exact release date has not yet been declared, but a mid-May launch seems likely, according to WinFuture.
Anthropic is asking investors to submit allocations for the AI company’s latest fundraise within the next 48 hours, according to sources familiar with the matter.
To no one’s surprise, Apple’s Q2 2026 earnings turned out to be an excellent quarter for the technology giant, but it might not always be sunshine and rainbows going forward, especially during the DRAM crisis, which threatens to crush the stability of the company’s prices, especially iPhones. During the quarterly earnings call, CEO Tim Cook warned that while the Cupertino firm will do its best to avert the problem, there’s a chance Apple may have to throw in the towel and pass the cost increases to customers. Still, the amount of resilience shown by the trillion-dollar entity is certainly praiseworthy. Tim […]
MaintainAbility helps homeowners stop guessing and start maintaining. It reads your calendar, checks your local weather forecast, and tells you exactly what to do and when, so nothing slips and nothing gets forced into a bad window. It unifies lawn and household tasks in one place, generates rolling supply lists so you're always prepared, and adapts to your home profile—grass type, climate zone, and home systems—so the plan fits your house.
Hogwarts Legacy is currently free on the Epic Games Store Until May 3rd, Hogwarts Legacy is available for free on PC on the Epic Games Store. This is a full-length RPG set in the Harry Potter Universe, offering gamers a wealth of content to explore. The game is set in the 1800s, long before the […]
New data shows that exclusive games are the "number one reason" people use consoles like Xbox, showing why Microsoft is considering bringing them back.
Microsoft has begun rolling out Xbox Mode on Windows 11, introducing a full screen, controller friendly interface designed to streamline PC gaming while reducing background system load.
World of Warcraft's housing system was a deep investment for the game, and is purely cosmetic offering no power or progression to players ... but, increasingly expensive additions have users questioning the value proposition here.
Microsoft has just announced a new set of features coming to the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally handheld gaming PCs, addressing game quality, docked mode quality-of-life, Game Bar improvements, and more. The most notable improvement coming to the ROG Xbox Ally is Auto Super Resolution, or Auto SR, which is now in Preview in the Xbox Game Bar. Auto SR, as the name suggests, is a similar to AMD and NVIDIA's FSR and DLSS, allowing game upscaling to increase frame rates without losing image quality. On the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X, Auto SR is only available in docked mode for now, where it will automatically upscale the game's image to deliver a sharper image, fit for a bigger screen, when docked to something like a TV. This should effectively make for a smoother transition between gaming on the TV and in handheld mode, since you won't have to change resolution or upscaling settings when plugging the ROG Xbox Ally in. Microsoft has an in-depth blog explaining Auto SR in more detail.
Aside from Auto SR, the ROG Xbox Ally also gets the gamepad cursor we previously covered, streamlined controller pairing for docked play, a display widget in Game Bar, where you can quickly adjust display settings, and a handful of automatic enhancements for smart TVs. For starters, when players connect to an external display or TV, the ROG Xbox Ally will now turn off the built-in screen and default to the TV for output. If the connected TV happens to be a smart TV from Samsung, LG, or Vizio, the ROG Xbox Ally will automatically enable certain features on the TV, like Auto Low Latency Mode, Auto Game Mode, or Game/PC Mode. The library consolidation features we previously covered have also officially been added to the Xbox PC App, allowing you to use the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally in handheld mode exclusively if you would like to.
Not long after Subnautica 2 studio, Unknown Worlds, ditched Krafton as its publisher, the development outfit has officially announced the Early Access release date for Subnautica 2. According to a new Early Access release cinematic trailer, Subnautica will officially launch on May 14, 2026 in Early Access on Steam and Epic Games and in Preview on the Xbox Game Store, and pricing is set at $29.99 during the Early Access period, with regional pricing applicable, too.
The release date trailer also gives us a glimpse at some of the alien life that players will encounter in Subnautica 2, including giant carnivorous clams and airborne molluscs that hang in the air somewhat eerily. The announcement follows a long legal battle after Krafton attempted to wrest control of Unknown Worlds away from its CEO and founders, seemingly as part of a bid to avoid paying the studio a bonus for hitting its target launch date. So far, this legal battle has culminated in Unknown Worlds's CEO, Ted Gill, being reinstated and taking over the Subnautica 2 announcement. The Subnautica 2 Early Access Release date trailer follows.
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2026 second quarter ended March 28, 2026. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $111.2 billion, up 17 percent year over year. Diluted earnings per share was $2.01, up 22 percent year over year.
"Today Apple is proud to report our best March quarter ever, with revenue of $111.2 billion and double-digit growth across every geographic segment," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "iPhone achieved a March quarter revenue record, fueled by such extraordinary demand for the iPhone 17 lineup. During the quarter, Services achieved yet another all-time record, and we were excited to introduce remarkable new products to our strongest lineup ever. That included the addition of the iPhone 17e and the M4-powered iPad Air, along with the launch of MacBook Neo, which is captivating customers all around the world."
PMM, the mouse mod company, has announced the latest iteration of its Razer Viper V3 Pro mod, which replaces the shell of the Viper V3 Pro with a 3D printed, carbon fiber-reinforced nylon shell in order to bring the weight down. Like the original Zen mod, Zen 2.0 brings the weight down to as little as 33 g if you opt for the wireless version, but with the pre-built version of the Zen 2.0, the mod is also available with three different lightweight batteries, offering wireless connectivity for an additional 3-5 g. The PMM Zen 2.0 mod itself—that is to say, just the 3D printed shell with PTFE skates, grip tape, tools, a 150 mAh battery, and two carbon fiber reinforcement rods—comes in at $132, while the pre-built version starts at $317. The pricing obviously makes this something that appeals almost exclusively to enthusiasts and highly dedicated esports gamers.
The Zen 2.0 mod kit replaces the original Zen on the PMM store, and PMM claims to have addressed many of the shortcomings of the original Zen with the new version, including click quality, sturdiness, and platforms for the mouse skates. Zen 2 is also only available with the smooth, grippy UltraGrip 3.0 coating and with either solid sides and holes in the rest of the body or as an entirely solid shell, which again increases the weight by 2 g. This means that if you want a solid shell with a 150 mAh for wireless connectivity, you're looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 38 g total weight, which is still an improvement over the Razer Viper V3 Pro's original 60 g weight.
The process relies on a patched vulnerability that allows the PS5 to boot into a Linux environment. It effectively turns the console into a temporary PC, with some obvious limitations. The modification is not permanent – every reboot wipes the setup, requiring users to reload Linux each time the system...
Apple was expected to continue to capitalize on its ongoing sales-related momentum during its second fiscal quarter of 2026, courtesy of the inordinately strong demand profile for the iPhone 17 lineup. And, in accordance with those expectations, Apple appears to have largely delivered via another record quarter. Apple earnings highlight for the second fiscal quarter of 2026 Here are the key highlights from Apple's latest quarterly earnings release: For the second fiscal quarter of 2026, Apple earned $111.18 billion in revenue, corresponding to a year-over-year increase of 16.6 percent relative to $95.36 billion that it earned in Q2 2025. Apple […]
As memory continues to dominate the AI hardware conversation, a research note from Korea Investment & Securities (KIS) outlines that prices might not drop. Since memory is directly tied to the productivity of an AI GPU, hyperscalers have placed long-term orders for capacity. KIS believes that even if this time period elapses, the impact of the shortage on memory prices might persist due to the chips' ability to drive key metrics of AI GPU performance. Memory Chips' Ability To Drive Up System Level Performance Could Keep Prices High, Says Research Firm The research note explains that since expanding memory capacity […]
LemonDash is a free mobile dashboard for Lemon Squeezy store owners. It tracks MRR, revenue, sales, and subscriptions in real time on iOS and Android, and sends instant push alerts on every purchase. Connect your API key to view interactive charts, monitor today’s sales, and browse transactions. Your key is encrypted and no sales data is stored.
The Site Book helps UK construction contractors create RAMS, Construction Phase Plans, COSHH assessments, site inductions, toolbox talks, and method statements in minutes. Enter your project details and it builds compliant documents aligned with CDM 2015 and HSE guidance, ready to download, share, and sign off.
It tracks worker certifications, records inductions, maintains an audit trail, and exports an audit pack. Use one plan for unlimited projects and connect with Google Drive, Xero, and Zapier to fit your workflow.
Attackers exploit trusted email platforms, user fatigue, and legitimate infrastructure to bypass defenses, making phishing attacks more effective and harder to detect.
Xbox Series X|S consoles and the Xbox on PC app just got big upgrades to customization and gameplay options, refining the user experience on these platforms.
Microsoft Flight Simulator adds PlayStation VR2 support on PS5 and PS5 Pro, highlighting Xbox’s continued absence from virtual reality and raising questions about missed opportunities.
Rivian has reworked its loan deal with the Department of Energy and now expects to borrow $4.5 billion to build its new factory in Georgia, down from the original amount of $6.6 billion.
"This quarter marks a fundamental inflection point for Sandisk—where our technology leadership is enabling a deliberate shift in our mix toward the highest-value end markets, led by Datacenter," said David Goeckeler, CEO of Sandisk. "We are also advancing to a new business model built on multi-year customer engagements backed by firm financial commitments. Together, this transformation is driving structurally higher and more durable earnings power," continued Mr. Goeckeler. "With a zero-debt balance sheet, strong cash generation, and a recently authorized share repurchase program, we are positioned to deliver substantial long-term value creation for our shareholders."
Western Digital Corporation (Nasdaq: WDC) today reported fiscal third quarter 2026 financial results for the period ended April 3, 2026.
"WD started calendar year 2026 with great execution, driving strong sequential and year-over-year revenue growth in all our end markets, while expanding gross and operating margins. Gross margin exceeded 50%, reflecting our continued delivery of innovation across an expanding set of customers. Given our confidence in the durability of our business, we are also announcing a 20% increase in the quarterly cash dividend on the company's common stock to $0.15 per share," said Irving Tan, CEO of WD. "The demand drivers are clear: Virtually every AI workload, from training, inference, agentic AI to physical AI, creates data that is stored persistently and cost-efficiently on HDDs."
Remedy Entertainment revealed Control Resonant near the end of 2025, later revealing that the sequel to the atmospheric, sci-fi, third-person action-adventure shooter would launch around Q2 2026. Now, presumably in the lead-up to the official launch of Resonant, Remedy has shown off some of what's to come in the game's New Game Plus gameplay. According to the PlayStation Blog post, Remedy will rely on more than just more power and increased damage counters for the New Game Plus gameplay, instead giving players more control over their builds in order to face off against more challenging enemies.
Instead, in Control Resonant, when players have finished the game and start a new playthrough in the same save, the game changes how the player and enemies interact, but players keep many of the upgrades they've earned—Aberrant upgrades, health improvements, supernatural abilities, talents, and artifacts will all still be there. "One of the goals for New Game Plus is to give players more room to experiment with builds that weren't possible during the first playthrough, as you cannot unlock everything in your arsenal in one go," Remedy explains. For starters, the player character has an extra artifact slot that allows for both increased damage output and more build diversity, and players will be able to equip more than one combat ability from the same boss for new synergies. The game also unlocks more artifacts and crafting options, making it easier to adapt builds to different scenarios and tougher enemies.
JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in standards development for the microelectronics industry, today announced milestones from its JC-40 and JC-45 Committees for Logic and DRAM Modules: the publication of a new DDR5 multiplexed rank data buffer (MDB) standard; progress toward a multiplexed rank registering clock driver (MRCD) standard; and continued work on the DDR5 multiplexed rank DIMM (MRDIMM) Gen 2 roadmap to enable higher-bandwidth DDR5 MRDIMM designs.
Published: JESD82-552 (DDR5MDB02) Multiplexed Rank Data Buffer
In progress: MRDIMM Gen 2 module standard nearing completion
In development: Gen 2 DDR5 MRDIMM raw card designs targeting 12,800 MT/s and MRDIMM Gen 3 module standard development, with the underlying memory interface logic nearing finalization
Microsoft has officially released another significant piece of DOS history. The "Paterson Listings" include the earliest known source code related to the DOS platform ever discovered, the company explained, providing scanned listings and several transcribed portions that have been converted into compilable source code.
Microsoft has just commenced the rollout of its Gaming-Focused "Xbox Mode" across all Windows 11 PCs and devices. Windows 11 PCs Will Now Get A Snappier Gaming Interface With Xbox Mode, Now Rolling Out Across All Devices Today, Microsoft has started rolling out its Xbox Game Mode across all Windows 11 PCs, including laptops, desktops, tablets, and more. With Xbox Mode, Windows 11 users can enjoy a console-like gaming interface that is snappier and more intuitive. Xbox mode is designed for the moments when you want your games to take center stage on Windows 11 PCs and handhelds. Inspired by […]
Marathon, the new extraction shooter from Bungie and its first non-Destiny release since the first Destiny game launched in 2014, has had a middling start, to say the least. While it is praised by critics (myself included), it seemingly hasn't had the commercial success to match, and constant conversation about its concurrent player count on Steam seems to only fuel negative discourse around the game. But a new report has given us a bit more insight into how it's done on the sales charts. Firstly, it's worth noting that while we've seen estimates about how much Marathon has sold, we […]
Samsung has officially discontinued older LPDDR4 memory production while hinting at "worse" shortages throughout 2027. Samsung Pulled Out Older Memory Production To Focus On Newer Technologies Required For Agentic AI, But Still Expects Worse Shortages In 2027 We have been hearing about Samsung pulling out from the production of older DRAM technologies such as LPDDR4X and LPDDR4. Now, the company has officially confirmed that both of these standards have been discontinued. At its official webpage, Samsung lists both LPDDR4X and LPDDR4 as "Discontinued". This move was made as the company wants to pool in more capacity towards the more profitable […]
In just a few days from the time of this writing, players across the world will be able to get their hands on Valve's new Steam Controller when it launches on May 4, 2026. It's the first of the three devices Valve revealed last year to make it to players, and while we've previously heard that all three - the Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame - would arrive at some point in 2026, a new bit of information spotted by a reliable Valve insider points to the next device, possibly the Steam Machine, launching sooner than later. Known […]
OneLivePage offers privacy-first, real-time analytics for founders managing multiple apps. Track page views, scroll depth, sources, UTM campaigns, countries, devices, and funnels from visitor to payment without cookies or IP storage.
Add unlimited apps, auto-detect forms, logins, and payments, and run hero A/B tests from one dashboard. Start free with up to 5K events, fast setup, and GDPR-friendly tracking.
Jobs by Culture helps you discover companies where you'll thrive by showing roles through the lens of culture, not just titles. It features tech employers with culture badges, candid quotes, ratings, and locations so you can see how teams work before you apply. Browse remote-friendly and in-office options, compare values like engineering-driven, open source, or work-life balance, and go straight to roles at companies that fit your priorities.
Windows Phone 8 is seeing a surprising revival through community efforts like 8Marketplace, which restores app downloads, alongside patched apps that connect to modern services like Bluesky.
OpenAI is launching additional opt-in protections for ChatGPT accounts. The new security initiative includes a new partnership with security key provider Yubico.
BioticsAI CEO Robhy Bustami joined Isabelle Johannessen on Build Mode to discuss how the company has navigated a highly regulated space and kept the team motivated while cutting through all the red tape.
After rumors swirled, Spiders, the French game studio known for making GreedFall and its successor, GreedFall: The Dying World, has officially announced that it will close down under liquidation. The studio made the announcement in a recent post to Bluesky, confirming that the company will "cease our functions immediately," and that Nacon, the studio's former parent company, would be responsible for any future support inquiries for Spiders's games. Spiders also confirmed that Nacon would be releasing the final planned Peren's Black Mass DLC for GreedFall: The Dying World on May 14, but there will likely be no other development or content added to GreedFall: The Dying World after that. The full announcement by Spiders reads:
Hello everyone,
First off, we apologise for the silence over the past month - it's been a while.
We're going to cut straight to the chase so you're not left wondering: After a long period without clear answers, we have received confirmation that Spiders is being liquidated.
What does it mean? This means the company as a whole no longer exists. We'll cease our functions immediately. The planned DLC will release via Nacon, and then-- well, that's it.
We're sorry that it's come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years. If you have any questions or run into issues with your games, please contact Nacon directly as we'll no longer be able to reply.
One of the biggest pain points of the Nintendo Switch 2 is that it still uses the drift-prone conventional analogue joysticks in the Joy-Cons. Now, GuliKit has revealed that it is working on a set of replacement joysticks for the Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Cons, utilizing TMR (tunnel magnetoresistance) tech instead of traditional potentiometers. GuliKit already makes joystick upgrades for the likes of the PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series, and Switch Pro controllers, as well as for the original Switch Joy-Cons. The benefits of TMR include reduced wear, resistance to drift, and improved sensing accuracy. Pricing and a launch date for the upgrade kit have not yet been revealed, but GuliKit says that the upgrade kit is "coming soon."
Like the old Joy-Con upgrade kits, you will need to disassemble the Switch 2's Joy-Cons to install the upgraded TMR sticks. Fortunately, it will be a drop-in kit, meaning it will not require any soldering or specific tools other than what is necessary to tear down the Joy-Cons. Judging by the iFixit teardown of the Switch 2 Joy-Cons, you will need at least an opening pick and an electronics screwdriver set to open and install the GuliKit upgrade kit.
MSI's Claw line-up of gaming handhelds has gone from being overpriced and underperforming in the original Intel-powered Claw 8 A1M to being widely regarded as solid performers in both the new AMD- and Intel-powered variants. Now, however, an Italian retail listing on Ollo Store has tipped an updated version of the Intel-powered Claw handheld, this time appearing as the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ for a price of €1,599, which is €300 more than the current-gen Claw 8 AI+ A2VM with the same memory and storage specs on the same site.
The new Claw 8 EX AI+ will feature Intel's new Arc G3 Extreme CPU, which has been reported to be a 14-core (2× P-Core, 8× E-Core, 4× LPE-Core) CPU. The G3 Extreme's graphics will rely on the Intel Arc B380 iGPU, which is slated to have 12 Xe3 cores at 2.3 GHz. The only real difference between the B390 and the B380 is the GPU core clocks, which are 200 MHz lower on the B380, so performance shouldn't be too far off what we've seen on the flagship Intel Core Ultra X9 388H in our recent Intel Panther Lake review. The rest of the Claw 8 EX AI+ looks to be pretty standard fare for MSI's gaming handhelds these days, with 32 GB of RAM, an 8-inch, 16:10 IPS display with 500 nits of brightness and 100% sRGB coverage, an 80 WHr battery, Wi-Fi 7, and an included carrying case.
The DMA, which took effect in May 2023, currently applies to companies including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Booking.com, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. These firms are designated as "gatekeepers," a status that comes with rules intended to prevent them from using their scale to block competition.
With PC games growing increasingly complex nowadays — especially ones built on Epic Games's infamous Unreal Engine 5 — default/maxed-out graphics settings rarely (if at all) strike the optimal balance between visual fidelity and performance that most PC gamers seek, and early access sensation Windrose is no exception to this rule. As a demanding UE5 game, it should come as no surprise to many that the game's maxed-out Epic graphics settings will be very GPU-heavy and thus should require some tweaking to achieve better performance on most rigs, without completely sacrificing visual fidelity. This guide should hopefully help you strike […]
Weapons director Zach Cregger is set to make his mark on the Resident Evil franchise with his own cinematic take on the popular horror franchise, and today we got our first proper peek at what that'll look like with the film's first teaser trailer. The trailer reveal also arrived alongside Cregger diving a little more into his thought process on developing the film in different interviews, particularly answering why he didn't just try and adapt a pre-existing Resident Evil story. "I wanted to tell a story that could take place in the Resident Evil world, but wasn't telling a story […]
Choosing a CPU or a GPU used to be the most expensive part of building a PC from scratch or even for an upgrade. With RAMpocalypse that started in Q4 2025, everything changed. Building a PC became so difficult that the RAM and SSD alone now cost over half the combined cost of the rest of the parts, including CPU, GPU, motherboard, PSU, etc. Occasionally, we see some users getting a 10 or 20% discount, or if they get extremely lucky, they receive a free part or two with the bundle deals. Not everyone can wait for such luck, but […]
As Intel primes its 18A-P process technology at external customers, the company is sharing new insights into its enhanced performance & features. Intel's External Customer-Focused 18A-P Process Node Offers 9% Performance Boost or 18% Power Savings Versus 18A Intel's 18A process technology is ramping up well, with Panther Lake volume being increased significantly in the months ahead. As 18A becomes the standard for Intel's in-house chips, the company is also tuning its enhanced 18A-P node, which is a key technology aimed at attracting external Foundry customers. At VLSI, Intel will be sharing some more details about the features and enhancements […]
DomainDash watches the client websites you maintain and tells you when something breaks, before the client notices. Built for freelancers and small agencies tired of finding out about expired SSL certs and DNS issues from the people who pay them.
Checks uptime, SSL expiry, DNS changes, and domain registration across every site you manage. Alerts in plain English: Healthy, Slow, Down. Forward an alert to a non-technical client and they'll actually understand it. Email alerts on every plan; Slack and SMS on higher tiers. Free tier covers one site. Paid plans scale by site count rather than per-seat. Free public check tool at domaindash.io/check works without signup.
Lekh AI lets you run powerful AI models entirely on your Mac and iPhone, keeping data on-device. Chat with local LLMs like Llama, Qwen, Gemma, and Mistral, generate images and videos, make music, convert text to speech, and build audiobooks without the cloud. The Pro version adds a full creative suite with Flux image models, LTX video, and ACE-Step music. Use the Knowledge Hub for RAG, and enjoy Apple Silicon-optimized performance with MLX and GGUF support, Siri integration, and no tracking or analytics.
Google is trying to simplify one of its most complex products, helping advertisers and analysts get more value from Google Analytics without deep technical expertise.
What’s new. Google Analytics is rolling out Task Assistant, a guided workflow tool that surfaces tailored recommendations to improve property setup, data collection and reporting.
How it works. Available in the left-hand navigation, Task Assistant organizes recommendations into clear categories like connecting accounts, enhancing reporting and fixing data issues. Users can mark tasks as complete as they go or skip items that don’t align with their business goals, creating a more flexible setup experience.
Why we care. Google is making it easier to identify gaps in tracking and fix them quickly, which leads to more reliable data and better decision-making. Task Assistant helps ensure Analytics is properly configured without requiring deep expertise, reducing the risk of missed insights or inaccurate reporting. Ultimately, better data setup means more confident optimization of campaigns and budgets.
Between the lines. Analytics platforms are powerful but often underutilized due to poor configuration. Task Assistant is Google’s attempt to reduce that friction by turning setup into a step-by-step process rather than a manual audit.
The bottom line.Task Assistant aims to make Google Analytics more actionable, guiding users toward better data quality and more effective measurement with less guesswork.
In yet another software supply chain attack, threat actors have managed to compromise the popular Python package Lightning to push two malicious versions to conduct credential theft.
According to Aikido Security, OX Security, Socket, and StepSecurity, the two malicious versions are versions 2.6.2 and 2.6.3, both of which were published on April 30, 2026. The campaign is assessed to be an
A new critical severity vulnerability can give attackers full control over WHM servers, allowing them to steal data, upload malware, and delete websites.
AdGuard VPN for Mac v2.9 introduces accessibility improvements for users with visual impairments, along with a new dark app icon for better macOS integration.
If you're excited for Outlander season 8 episode 9 airing this week. Hold your horses... the latest installment of the hit Starz series has a new release date.
Samsung expects the memory shortage to get worse in 2027 The global memory crisis has seen Samsung’s memory profits soar. The company has seen its profits jump by almost 50X, from 1.1 trillion won to 53.7 billion won. For 2027, Samsung expects worsening conditions for the memory market, which is great news for them and […]
The promised auto super resolution features appear on Xbox Ally X today, with other major enhancements to the Xbox Ally connected TV experience. Here's what's new.
The new hub features dedicated college group chats and personalized feeds designed to help students stay connected with their campus communities, even while they’re away for the summer.
Razer today announced the availability of two new configurations of the Razer Blade 16, expanding its flagship ultraportable gaming laptop lineup with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 Laptop GPU options paired with a new 64 GB memory tier. The new models join the previously announced RTX 5080 and 5090 32 GB configurations and are available now, exclusively at Razer.com and select RazerStores.
Pricing and availability for the new Razer Blade 16 (2026) configurations:
The new HUDIMM memory modules are expected to significantly reduce memory bandwidth and I/O throughput, but the change should not affect overall performance in gaming-focused systems. According to benchmark sessions recorded by YouTuber Bryan B., a "simulated" HUDIMM DDR5 module appears capable of competing with two standard DDR5 UDIMM sticks....
Earlier this year, YouTuber Simon Sörensen built a compact two-seat solar car using parts from two electric bikes. Instead of developing a full automotive platform, he reused existing e-bike drivetrains and built a lightweight vehicle around them. The approach keeps both cost and complexity down while making better use of...
The ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X handheld PCs just got a major update that addresses several elements of the experience that those who bought into the expensive new handhelds have gotten used to. When I reviewed the ROG Xbox Ally X at launch, one of the chief issues with it was how it lacked any kind of plug-and-play experience, and each update, including today's, has been another step towards giving it that console-quality convenience. The most significant parts of today's update are meant to make the experience as seamless as possible, particularly when you're docking the device to […]
There's a new media blowout for 007 First Light ahead of the game's launch, which is planned in less than a month on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, and Nintendo Switch 2. IO Interactive's Global Brand Manager, Laurine Deschamps, was interviewed by Inven Global and revealed how combat and stealth in this licensed James Bond game differ greatly from the studio's HITMAN franchise: combat is not a failure, and returning to stealth is possible even after entering combat. We wanted to give players various opportunities to achieve their goals. That's why we designed stealth and combat to flow naturally […]
Intel's crucial EMIB technology has achieved a phenomenal yield rate, showing its readiness for upcoming adoptions in AI datacenter chips. Intel EMIB Is The Single Most Crucial Foundry Tech From Chipzilla, Which Will Set It As An Advanced Packaging Competitor to TSMC We recently discussed how EMIB is being eyed by AI firms for their next-generation AI chips. The tech has one simple purpose: to provide a cost-effective and scalable alternative to TSMC's CoWoS technology. The advanced packaging tech from Intel is set to be used by Google in its next-generation TPUs, and we have also cited NVIDIA using it […]
Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra is currently equipped with two telephoto cameras, with the less capable one being a 3x unit that’s often criticized by tipsters like Ice Universe for its lack of imaging prowess when compared to rivals. Now, with Apple adopting variable aperture technology to the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, a drastic decision could be made with the Galaxy S27 Ultra involving the removal of the aforementioned camera. The 3x telephoto camera is rumored to disappear from the Galaxy S27 Ultra, but there’s no telling what will arrive in its place The tipster has been a […]
Pearl Abyss, the developer of the commercially successful open world game Crimson Desert (and also known for the MMORPG Black Desert), has announced its decision to sell EVE Online and its studio back to CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson for around $120 million. A rumor about Pearl Abyss selling CCP Games originally circulated almost a year ago, though back then it suggested the goal was to shop the studio around. Clearly, that option failed, and selling back to the original owners was the most sensible choice. In a statement to Korean media Inven Global, a Pearl Abyss spokesperson explained: […]
Today, Funcom has announced that Update 1.4 for Dune: Awakening will arrive on May 19, alongside The Water Wars DLC, the final piece of the game's Season Pass. The free update adds two new Overland Map locations: Wind Pass, described as an old Harkonnen tech hub where players will encounter the Water Shippers faction, and The Old Quarry Testing Station, a scalable endgame area where a devious character named Dr. Jalanta awaits in a secret lab. Additional Landsraad Missions are also included, expanding the new endgame framework introduced in Chapter 3. Notably, Funcom has been upfront that Update 1.4 does […]
Unknown Worlds highly anticipated sequel to its beloved indie hit and the most wishlisted game on Steam, Subnautica 2, finally has an exact release date. It'll arrive in Early Access on PC in just two weeks from the time of this writing on May 14, 2026. The release date reveal arrives alongside a new cinematic trailer that teases a bit of what players can expect from Subnautica 2, as it looks to up the ante as far as the creatures you'll face in the uncharted alien waters and what mysteries could be lurking underneath and above the ocean. The news […]
ASUS has just broken three 3DMark World Records with its ROG Astral RTX 5090 GPU, breaking past 50K points in Port Royal. ASUS Secures Three World Records With Its OC-Ready ROG Astral RTX 5090 GPU You might have thought that ASUS would be breaking some world records with its ROG Matrix 5090 GPU, but the company has achieved three new world records in 3DMark, all using its second-best 5090 variant, the ROG Astral. We have seen the NVIDIA RTX 5090 breaking several world records. Most of the records are being set by variants such as MSI's Lighting, GALAX's HOF, and […]
Major firms are finding the rising costs of AI hard to manage, as human workers are now often more affordable alternatives to AI within certain contexts. With many platforms switching to per-token billing and rising model costs, we may be reaching an inflection point where human workers are a more efficient way to spend.
Gamers have reported that Windrose is consuming abnormally high disk I/O while playing, with up to 30 MB/s of constant read/write activity to the drive across most areas of the game world.
Bad weather has caused a shipwreck to shift from its original position on the seafloor, severing a crucial undersea link between Dongyin and Beigan islands. These two islands are strategically located near the Chinese coast and the northern mouth of the Taiwan Strait and reportedly have a heavy military presence of Taiwanese troops.
Flint lets you build AI-driven product recommenders, service suggesters, and quote calculators that capture qualified leads and deliver personalized results. Describe your use case to the Flint Assistant, import your knowledge base, and publish an on-brand tool in minutes with no code.
Flint embeds on your site or hosted page, integrates with HubSpot, Slack, and webhooks, and includes A/B testing, analytics, GDPR compliance, and automated follow-up emails so every submission reaches your CRM with rich, structured data.
Thanks to deep integrations with both your vehicle and your apps, Gemini in cars with Google built-in will help drivers do more safely while still focusing on the road.
Google is filling a key measurement gap between awareness and consideration, giving advertisers a clearer view of how their brand is actually perceived — not just remembered.
What’s new. Google Ads has introduced a new “Association” metric within Brand Lift Studies. Advertisers can define a concept, category or attribute, and Google will ask users a survey-style question: which brands they associate with that specific idea.
How it works. Instead of measuring simple recall, the metric evaluates whether audiences connect your brand to a desired positioning. That could mean “premium,” “sustainable,” or even a product category — offering a more nuanced read on brand perception.
Why we care. Google is giving you a way to measure brand positioning, not just awareness or recall. The new Association metric helps determine whether campaigns are actually shaping how consumers perceive a brand — a critical step between being known and being chosen. It also enables more strategic optimization of creative and messaging, especially for brands trying to own specific attributes or categories.
Between the lines. Brand Lift has traditionally focused on awareness, recall and consideration. Association sits in between, helping advertisers understand whether their messaging is shaping how people think about the brand, not just whether they recognize it.
The catch. There’s still a constraint: advertisers can only select three Brand Lift metrics per study, so adding Association means making trade-offs with existing KPIs.
The bottom line. Association gives advertisers a more strategic lens on brand building — measuring not just visibility, but whether campaigns are landing the intended message.
First seen. This update was first spotted by Google Ads expert, Thomas Eccel who shared the update on LinkedIn.
Reddit is quickly becoming a powerful platform shaping how people discover and perceive brands. As AI search engines increasingly surface Reddit threads and comments, these conversations now influence visibility.
To understand this shift, I analyzed 117 SaaS brands on Reddit. People reveal what they really think there, which doesn’t always match polished marketing.
As communities shape brand perception, Reddit is no longer optional.
Here’s my analysis, plus how you can use Reddit to your advantage.
How I analyzed 117 SaaS brands: The methodology
My analysis of 117 brands across the SaaS industry started with identifying the verticals to address:
Development and software development and IT operations (DevOps) (12 brands)
AI (12 brands)
Customer support and engagement (10 brands)
Analytics and data (10 brands)
Sales and revenue (8 brands)
Collaboration and communication (10 brands)
From there, I created a Google Spreadsheet with the brand names for each vertical. Then, I mapped out the following details for each brand:
Link: A direct link to the brand’s subreddit.
Brand subreddit: When the brand’s subreddit was created, the number of weekly visitors and the number of weekly contributors.
Subreddit features: The number of moderators and whether they were branded moderators.
Topics: Common topics in the subreddit, including tips, use cases, compliments, criticisms, and subscription cost.
Across all 117 brands, I analyzed over 300 Reddit threads, including brand mentions, sentiment, community engagement, and brand participation.
Let’s dive into the key findings.
1. Reddit rewards authentic brands
One thing became clear early on: people respond to people, not corporate brands.
Brands run by moderators who were helpful, honest, and non-promotional were received more favorably than those using a polished, corporate tone. Redditors tended to ignore or downvote obvious marketing copy.
In general, redditors don’t want to be marketed to. They want real opinions and real experiences.
As a result, peer recommendations felt more credible than brand messaging. When redditors asked questions or shared frustrations, the most authentic answers came from other users.
When brands stepped in with scripted or promotional responses, they often struggled to gain traction.
However, when brands answered directly, acknowledged limitations, and used conversational language, responses improved. In some cases, brand moderators even earned upvotes and thanks.
2. Brands not on Reddit are missing out
Redditors talk about brands, whether or not they’re present on the platform. In many cases, brands simply aren’t there.
Thirty of the 117 brands I analyzed have no Reddit presence. Another 23 are on Reddit, but their subreddits are abandoned.
In several instances, users asked direct questions like:
“Anyone here used this?”
“What should I use instead of X?
“Best alternative to X?”
They received responses from other redditors sharing experiences, opinions, recommendations, and problems.
When brands aren’t there, the conversation continues without them. Over time, their reputation on Reddit exists outside the brand’s control.
Other negative outcomes can follow. When brands aren’t present, others can take their place.
In one instance, I found a community using a popular brand name that had nothing to do with the brand. This shows how easily brand presence can be shaped or misrepresented.
Redditors are already discussing your brand. The only question is whether you’re part of that conversation.
3. Reddit is a customer research goldmine
Reddit is an incredible source of unfiltered customer insights.
If you want to know what drives people away, what people value, and how people compare tools, you’ll find the answers on Reddit.
Here are some ways Reddit helps with customer research.
Reddit captures feedback that traditional methods miss
On Reddit, you’ll find people asking questions and sharing:
Onboarding struggles.
Integration challenges.
Complaints about mobile usability.
Frustrations with AI features.
Confusion around updates.
Users building alternative tools.
Reddit users tend to say exactly what they think. This kind of honesty is hard to find anywhere else.
These insights are critical for improving SaaS products. Traditional feedback methods don’t always capture these comments — but Reddit does.
Reddit supports brand advocates
Your Reddit community is a good place for happy customers to advocate for your brand. For example, this Reddit post by Monday shares a brand ambassador program.
In the comments, some brand advocates share insights into their experience, helping elevate the post.
Some brands have self-sustaining Reddit communities
When discussing some community-led brands, redditors often highlight solutions to problems and help fill brand gaps. For example, I noticed users helped each other with troubleshooting, sharing fixes, and recommending integrations.
In some cases, these communities were almost fully self-sustaining, requiring little brand involvement.
Redditors highlight preferred competitor features and pricing frustrations
Across the topics I reviewed, redditors often expressed negative sentiment about pricing and suggested alternatives, especially for enterprise SaaS tools.
As a result, SaaS brands are often associated with soaring costs and limited pricing transparency, which can hurt perception. When users highlight competitor features, they surface gaps and alternative tools to consider.
Redditors share their actual use cases
Reddit attracts people who discuss how they use software. In my analysis, I observed that users shared:
Workflows
Screenshots and builds
Tutorials and guides
These posts and comments give brands insight into real use cases they can use to improve products.
Reddit is essential for brand visibility and perception
Reddit is no longer a side conversation. It’s where brand perception is shaped in real time.
Across the 117 brands I analyzed, conversations are happening on Reddit — even when the brand isn’t present. Increasingly, those conversations feed into AI search, influencing what people see, trust, and choose.
Smart brands shouldn’t ignore Reddit. They should track mentions, listen closely, show up where it matters, and treat Reddit as both a reputation channel and a product insight engine.
India's IT Ministry has issued a stern warning to VPN providers: block access to banned betting platforms like Polymarket, or risk losing crucial legal protections.
Volume-based pricing, real-time team editing, and a developer-friendly API make Mailjet a smart pick for SMBs and teams that care about deliverability.
Fuse Games has announced the release date for Star Wars: Galactic Racer, alongside a new trailer and preorder details for a very pricey collector's edition.
007 First Light is shaping up to be an excellent James Bond game that could win over Bond sceptics like myself - but can it escape the shadow of Hitman?
NordVPN's latest macOS update brings a major quality-of-life improvement, extending P2P support to all standard servers so you can torrent securely with just one click.
Rebel Wolves CEO and The Blood of Dawnwalker director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has said players don't need to worry about the game's time-limit mechanic and will have plenty of time to explore.
Why does it take Noctua so long to release Chromax Black fans? Noctua is preparing to release its Chromax Black NF-A12x25 G2 fans, which will arrive around 10 months after the release of its standard brown/beige versions. Ahead of this release, Noctua has decided to give its fans a glimpse behind the curtain and explain […]
LIAN LI Industrial Co. Ltd., a leading manufacturer of chassis and PC accessories, announces the VECTOR V150 INF, a compact microATX chassis featuring a tempered glass infinity-mirror front panel, two pre-installed 140 mm ARGB PWM front fans, and a 120 mm rear fan. The V150 INF delivers both visual impact and effective cooling out of the box. A built-in hub enables fan and lighting control via standard motherboard software or Wireless mode, which, when paired with an L-Wireless controller (sold separately), allows full customization through L-Connect 3. Inside, a customizable side bracket offers a choice between additional cooling or expanded storage, while a pre-installed adjustable GPU anti-sag bracket ensures stable support for modern graphics cards. With support for standard and back-connect microATX motherboards, 400 mm of GPU clearance, and clean cable management, the V150 INF provides a refined and visually striking platform for compact gaming builds.
Infinity Mirror Design with Precision Airflow
The VECTOR V150 INF features a tempered glass front panel with a built-in infinity mirror, creating a strong, immersive visual effect. The panel includes precision-cutouts for the two pre-installed 140 mm front fans, ensuring direct airflow intake. These intakes are protected by removable mesh filters that can be easily detached by turning them left and pulling away, making maintenance simple and tool-free
StarTech.com, a global provider of performance connectivity solutions for IT professionals, announces the launch of its Driverless Dual 4K USB4 Universal Docking Station (208N-USB4-DOCK), an industry-first solution designed to deliver driverless dual-display support for MacBook users while enabling seamless compatibility across Windows and Linux laptops.
The new dock gives IT teams a single solution to standardize across their entire fleet. Native driverless compatibility removes the need for software installation, eliminating common deployment challenges and ensuring consistent performance across Mac, Windows, and Linux environments.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer, the high-stakes, runs-based Star Wars racing adventure, will be inviting budding pilots to shunt, slam, and takedown their rivals when the game launches on October 6th, 2026. Pre-orders open today, with digital Standard and Deluxe Editions, as well as a physical Collector's Edition, available across PlayStation 5 (PS5), Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Physical Standard and Deluxe Editions will also be available on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Pricing begins at an SRP of $59.99/£49.99/€59.99 for the Standard Edition.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer invites race fans to join the Galactic League, an unsanctioned racing circuit born in the lawless Outer Rim of the Star Wars galaxy. Step into the cockpit as mysterious pilot Shade in a thrilling singleplayer campaign where alliances will be forged, rivalries reignited, and old grudges will be settled. Experiment with your build strategies across three distinct styles of repulsorcraft to create your ultimate vehicle. Get behind the controls of podracers and put your skills to the test in this iconic vehicle class. Take your talents online in exciting multiplayer races to prove yourself as an elite racing pilot. No Force. No prophecy. Just skill, strategy, and the will to rise.
Hooded Horse, Unfrozen Studio, and Ubisoft are excited to share that the highly anticipated turn-based strategy game Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is out now in early access for PC via Steam, the Microsoft Store (via Game Preview), and PC Game Pass.
The first new Heroes of Might and Magic game in over ten years, this next entry is made for series veterans and newcomers alike, built on the familiar foundations of one of the most critically acclaimed strategy series of all time. Engage in strategic empire building, epic turn-based tactical battles, and in-depth RPG mechanics, all while exploring a vibrant land brimming with secrets and dangers.
The trumpets of war ring out with praise for the latest instalment of the WWII real-time strategy game, Sudden Strike 5. Following the global release on April 23, the first wave of critics has hailed the game as a worthy successor, commending the development team at Kite Games for faithfully carrying forward the spirit of the series. Publisher Kalypso Media and Kite Games are proud to share these early reactions as players across the globe experience the game firsthand.
DualShockers commends the newest iteration of the franchise for preserving the Sudden Strike experience and carrying forward its long-standing tradition - "the Sudden Strike series has established itself as one of the best real-time strategy titles available, and Sudden Strike 5 keeps this legacy alive and well."
AV Access, a global leader in Pro AV and conferencing devices, proudly unveils the iDock B23, the newest flagship model in its iDock series. Engineered for competitive gamers and streamers who demand uncompromising visual performance, the iDock B23 delivers 8K @ 60 Hz output, triple-monitor support, and a 12-in-1 docking design—making it an all-in-one solution for high-refresh-rate gaming, live streaming, and seamless switching between devices.
"Professional gamers and creators often struggle with complex setups, cable clutter, and the need to switch between multiple systems," said Bill Liao, CTO of AV Access. "The iDock B23 solves these challenges by combining triple-monitor output, 8K clarity, and a full docking station into one streamlined device."
Today, HP Inc. announced new additions to its HyperX portfolio, designed to give players control, personalization, and comfort. Built for how you play, the new lineup introduces the HyperX Clutch Talon Controller, the HyperX Cloud Stinger 3 headset family, and enhanced HyperX NGENUITY software -empowering gamers to fine-tune their setup and perform their best across platforms.
HyperX solutions prioritize combining player experience and machine performance to unlock maximum potential. With a continued focus on performance, personalization and play, NGENUITY software and the latest peripherals deliver precision, flexibility, and reliability players need to stay competitive and connected.
Google says Wardrobe will be perfect for streamlining those "nothing to wear" mornings, evenings, and vacations. Essentially, the feature catalogs the clothes you're wearing in Google Photos to create a so-called digital closet.
Parents who gain access to usage logs can see just how much time their children spend inside YouTube's recommendation engine on school-issued devices. In Wichita, Kan., one seventh grader watched more than 13,000 videos on his school account from December 2024 through February 2025, according to data his mother, My...
Speaking to reporters at the Interactive Innovation video game conference in Las Vegas this week, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick said the company aims to deliver value to its customers, adding that Grand Theft Auto VI will launch with a "very reasonable" price tag.
Another Intel Wildcat Lake CPU arrives on PassMark, showing equivalent performance to its smaller sibling. PassMark Reveals Intel Core 5 330 Delivers 4,215 Points in Single and 14,947 Points in Multi-Core Tests Some of the Intel Wildcat Lake CPUs have now appeared on popular benchmarking platforms like PassMark and Geekbench. We first saw a glimpse of the only 1+4 Core CPU, Core 3 304, on Geekbench, and then the Core 5 320 appeared a few days ago on the popular platform PassMark. We saw the Core 5 320 competing with the Apple A19 Pro in MT, but trailing in single-threaded […]
NVIDIA has revealed the games it plans to add to the GeForce NOW cloud streaming library for the month of May 2026, but what's arguably more significant this month is how NVIDIA is expanding the list of games that are classed as RTX 5080-ready. Beginning today, "across nearly the entire GeForce NOW Ready-to-Play library," players subscribed to GeForce NOW Ultimate can play their games with the power of an RTX 5080 behind them. It's a massive expansion of the list of RTX 5080-ready games, which had previously expanded in trickles of a select few games getting added to GeForce NOW […]
People find new ways of building PCs, but this one caught our attention as fitting regular-sized components in a CRT chassis is challenging. Redditor Builds a Whole PC Inside a CRT Monitor Using Desktop Parts; Replaces Display With a Laptop Panel and Deploys Several Case Fans Decades-old CRT display just became a fully functional computer, thanks to u/Discipline_Great, who, even though he couldn't revive the old CRT monitor, had some other plans. He says he picked it up from an e-waste, and it was already broken. So, he decided to turn it into a PC building project, which appears challenging, […]
Benchmarks of Intel's upcoming and fastest gaming handheld SoC, the Arc G3 Extreme, have been leaked, surpassing the Ryzen Z2 by 25%. Intel Packs Its Strongest Battlemage GPU, & 14 CPU Cores Inside the Arc G3 Extreme Gaming Handheld SoC We recently covered Intel's first Arc G3 gaming handheld, which has been listed by online retailers. While the retailer listing was void of details for the SoC itself, we now have more specs and even benchmarks of the upcoming chip & they look phenomenal. Starting with the CPU, the Intel Arc G3 Extreme is going to be the top offering […]
Yesterday, after reports that it would be shutting down, Greedfall and Steelrising makers Spiders, a studio that had survived in the video game industry for nearly two decades, officially closed its doors after its parent company Nacon failed to find a buyer after Spiders had filed for insolvency. While Nacon itself and three more of its subsidiaries have all filed for insolvency, Nacon continues to truck onward and reveals its Nacon Connect event will indeed return in May 2026, as it previously promised when the event was postponed earlier this year. The showcase event will premiere on May 7, 2026, […]
Samsung and SK hynix warn that severe AI-driven memory shortages could persist through 2027 as exploding HBM demand overwhelms supply, tightens the broader DRAM market, and fuels record profits
Get $239.98 off this Newegg Intel bundle - Score a Core Ultra 270K Plus, 32GB G.Skill Trident Z5 RAM, and an ASRock Z890 Pro RS motherboard for only $768.34
Spaiky is like Duolingo for AI learning: it teaches AI literacy through bite-size, gamified lessons on your phone. Explore modules like Mastering AI Prompts and How LLMs Work, and learn in five minutes a day with quizzes, analogies, and no jargon. Earn XP, keep streaks, and collect trophies while tracking progress across 80+ interactive lessons. The app is free to start and is available now on Android, with iPhone coming soon.
The Spool List is a peer-to-peer fabrication marketplace that connects buyers with verified makers in 3D printing, laser cutting, CNC, embroidery, metalwork, and more. Post a job, get fixed-price quotes or open bids, and pay securely through escrow. Track progress in real time, message your maker, and release funds only when satisfied. The platform supports card and USDC payments, has zero buyer fees, and includes dispute resolution, making it easy to source anything from a single prototype to small-batch production.
Google’s Preferred Sources now supports all languages, not just the English language. “Preferred Sources is now rolling out globally in all supported languages,” Google wrote on its blog this morning.
“This feature gives you more control over the news you see on Search by letting you choose the outlets and sites you want to appear more often in Top Stories,” Google added.
In December, Google rolled out preferred sources globally but it only supported English. Now it supports all languages globally as well.
Stats. Google added some interesting data including:
“Readers are twice as likely to click through to a site after marking it as a Preferred Source”
“People have already selected over 200,000 unique sites — from niche local blogs to global news desks”
Preferred Sources. Preferred Sources let searchers star publications in the Top Stories section of Google Search, and Google uses that signal to show more stories from those starred outlets. The feature entered beta in June, rolled out in the U.S. and India in August, and is now expanding globally.
How it works. You click the star icon to the right of the Top Stories header in search results. After that, you can choose your preferred sources – assuming the site is publishing fresh content.
Google will then start to show you more of the latest updates from your selected sites in Top Stories “when they have new articles or posts that are relevant to your search,” Google added.
Why we care. Traffic from Google Search is hard and if you can get your readers, loyal readers, to make your site a preferred source, that can help. Google said those users are twice as likely to click, which can help drive more traffic.
So add the preferred source icon to your site and encourage users to sign up. You can make Search Engine Land a preferred source by clicking here.
The difference between a 2% margin and a 20% margin increasingly comes down to whether you’re renting attention or owning the answer.
For years, search rewarded the ability to buy visibility. That model is weakening.
As AI systems increasingly resolve queries without a click, the value shifts from traffic acquisition to answer formation.
When you move from buying clicks to engineering answers (i.e., structuring content so it can be surfaced, cited, and trusted by AI systems), you change what you own. Instead of renting placement, you build answer equity: durable inclusion in the outputs that shape decisions.
The goal isn’t to turn off paid search. It’s to stop relying on it as your primary source of demand. Over time, this can lower acquisition costs and reduce volatility, because you’re not competing for every impression.
An atomic sandwich
To operationalize this shift, you need a content structure that maximizes what AI systems can extract. Think of it as an “atomic sandwich.”
An atomic sandwich content structure shifts the focus from chasing traffic to maximizing intent density. Here’s how:
The atomic fact (top bun)
Most organizations treat their search budget like a high-interest payday loan.
You keep pouring cash into the paid bucket for that immediate hit of traffic, and it feels like you’re winning.
But the moment you stop feeding the meter, your brand disappears.
The forensic proof (the meat)
For many organizations, this isn’t just marketing inefficiency — it’s an organizational risk.
In the emerging Answer Economy, your rented audience is evaporating. Data from Seer Interactive (Sept 2025) shows paid CTR on informational queries has dropped 68% when Google’s AI Overviews are present.
You’re not just paying for clicks. In many cases, your paid traffic contributes to awareness that AI systems can later satisfy without requiring a click.
The structural directive (bottom bun)
The “box” has changed.
Here’s the structural leak in your balance sheet: to survive 2026, you must stop buying a crowd and start engineering the answer.
If your brand isn’t among the trusted sources behind the machine’s answer, your visibility — and influence — shrinks significantly.
The new “box”: From librarian to forensic auditor
We’ve moved from a search engine that directs users to a generative engine that validates information. Every dollar you spend on ads to cover a lack of E-E-A-T is money you’re burning.
The data is clear: appearing in search results is no longer a viable model on its own.
The organic collapse: A SISTRIX (March 2026) analysis found that when an AI Overview is present, position 1 CTR drops from 27% to 11% — a 59% decline.
The global impact:Ahrefs (Dec 2025) found AI Overviews correlate with a 58% lower average CTR for the top-ranking page.
The goal is no longer just to rank in search, but to be consistently included among the sources AI systems rely on.
Without trust, you’re paying for ghost impressions.
In the old box, you could survive by being loud. In the new box, you survive by being certain.
The search addiction cycle (why your org can’t quit)
Most companies are in organizational denial.
You see the cost of rented clicks rising and quality falling, but you’re too afraid to stop because you’ve neglected your information architecture and have no foundation. That’s a balance sheet liability.
Stage 1 — the vanity hit: early paid search wins made you feel like a genius. You mistook traffic volume for business health.
Stage 2 — tolerance building: As the Answer Economy evolved, keywords got more expensive. Instead of fixing structural integrity, you upped the dose.
Stage 3 — the context-debt overdose: You’re paying for zombie facts — content an AI can summarize in seconds. Zero-click searches have surged to 69%. Your expensive awareness is consumed for free by AI.
Stage 4 — total dependency: Your marketing manager becomes a budget operator rather than a builder of durable demand. They aren’t building answer equity; they’re managing cash transfer to Google.
The forensic intervention: The 7-point organizational health check
Use this checklist in your next review to find where your Answer Equity is leaking.
The Information Gain test: Ask Gemini to summarize your page. If it adds nothing beyond common results, you’re in violation of Google’s Information Gain patent. You have a zombie fact with zero value.
The entity audit: Does your brand have a verified Google Knowledge Graph ID? Without it, you’re not an asset — you’re just text.
Source of ground truth: Are you cited in AI Overviews? BrightEdge (Sept 2025) shows that without a citation, your visibility is effectively zero.
The faucet test: If you cut PPC spend by 20%, does lead volume drop 20%? If so, you have no foundation — you’re renting revenue.
Schema and provenance: Are you using Schema.org/Person to link experts to your brand? Unverified content is untrusted noise to a retriever.
The “meat” ratio: Review your top 10 posts. Do they include primary research? If not, they’re fodder for the AI’s top bun with no reason to click.
Machine-readable graph adoption: Is your team moving toward W3C RDF-star (RDF 1.2) or ISO/IEC GQL standards? These are the 2026 blueprints for verifying Answer Equity.
The recovery plan: From rented clicks to owned authority
1. Purge the zombie facts (the information gain protocol)
Stop rewarding word count. Every piece of content must deliver a “meat” layer — information gain a retriever can’t synthesize from the rest of the web. That’s how you reclaim your margins.
2. Build your “E-E-A-T engine” (the trust infrastructure)
Stop treating schema as a technical extra. It’s your trust score on the digital exchange. Ensure your authors have strong provenance so AI retrievers can instantly crawl and confirm your expertise.
3. Measure ‘intent density’ (the scoreboard shift)
If your traffic drops but lead quality holds, you’re winning. Focus on users who bypass the summary because they need the deep, forensic expertise only you provide.
The shift from renting an audience to owning the answer is the most significant strategic pivot your organization will make this decade. It moves you from a marketing expense to a balance sheet asset.
The paid trap offers a temporary high but leads to a fiscal dead end. Every dollar spent there is consumable — used once and gone when the auction ends.
When you move that capital into your information infrastructure, you stop paying for the privilege of being ignored. You start building a digital entity that owns its facts, earns trust, and controls its future in the Answer Economy.
Your first step: don’t boil the ocean.
Take your top-performing paid landing page and run the seven-point health check. If it’s a “zombie fact” environment, engineer information gain back into the page.
Stop asking for a ranking report; start asking for an entity audit.
The 2026 organization isn’t defined by how much it spends to rent an audience, but by how much it proves it owns the answer.
You have the blueprints. You have the data. Now stop funding the payday loan and start building answer equity.
Across 90 prompts we tested in ChatGPT, commercial prompts triggered web searches 78.3% of the time. Informational prompts did so just 3.1%.
That gap changes what you should write if you want to appear in a ChatGPT answer.
ChatGPT doesn’t pull every response from the same place. Some answers come from training data; others use live web search — a behavior called query fan-out. The model expands your prompt into multiple background searches, then retrieves and synthesizes across those subtopics. If your page isn’t on those branches, it won’t be pulled in.
So the question is no longer just how to rank. It’s which pages open the fan-out door in the first place.
In our sample, informational pages didn’t. Read on to discover where the system went instead.
We tested 90 prompts across three industries: beauty, legaltech/regtech, and IT. We analyzed prompt intent, downstream query expansion, and the intent those expansions reflected.
Here’s the breakdown and the core finding: most queries aligned with commercial intent, not purely informational prompts.
Why this question matters now and how query fan-outs come into play
Query fan-outs change the content game because the system isn’t limited to the literal prompt.
It expands the request into multiple background searches, then retrieves and synthesizes across those subtopics.
Fan-outs trigger parallel web searches tied to the initial prompt, creating opportunities for retrieval, mention, and link citation.
Multi-query expansion is a core design pattern in modern generative search systems. Google describes AI Mode this way: it breaks a question into subtopics, searches them in parallel across multiple sources, then combines the results into a single response.
That raises a strategic SEO question: should you invest more in top-of-funnel educational content, or in lower-funnel comparison, shortlist, and recommendation content?
This experiment framed that problem.
The objective was to test, across selected industries, where fan-out appears by intent category: informational, commercial, transactional, or branded.
The initial hypothesis was direct: informational prompts wouldn’t trigger fan-out, while commercial prompts would, and those fan-outs would stay at the same funnel level or move lower.
We found that ChatGPT-generated fan-outs are overwhelmingly associated with commercial intent.
Disclaimer: This experiment measures observed prompt expansion behavior in ChatGPT. Google AI Mode is cited only as context to show multi-query expansion as a broader pattern in generative search, not as proof of ChatGPT’s internal architecture.
The setup: what we tested
The core sample includes 90 numbered prompts, heavily weighted toward informational intent.
Prompt intent
Prompts
Share of sample
Prompts with fan-out
Fan-out rate
Informational
65
72.2%
2
3.1%
Commercial
23
25.6%
18
78.3%
Branded
1
1.1%
0
0.0%
Transactional
1
1.1%
0
0.0%
The sample skews heavily toward informational prompts, with some commercial ones and minimal branded and transactional queries.
We structured the experiment around the sectors in the brief: beauty/personal care, legaltech/regtech, and IT/tech.
The result: commercial prompts triggered almost everything
The main finding is clear.
Out of 90 prompts, 20 triggered fan-out. Of those, 18 were commercial and 2 informational.
Informational prompts made up about 10% of fan-out triggers (2 of 20). When they did trigger expansion, they were rewritten into more evaluative, solution-seeking subqueries.
In other words, 90% of fan-out-triggering prompts in the core sample came from commercial intent.
The contrast is stronger than the raw totals suggest. Commercial prompts triggered fan-out 78.3% of the time; informational prompts did so just 3.1%.
This supports the working hypothesis: in this sample, fan-out was overwhelmingly a commercial phenomenon.
Those 20 prompts produced 42 fan-out queries — an average of 2.1 per triggered prompt.
Of those 42 fan-out queries:
39 were commercial.
2 were branded.
1 was informational.
Even when a prompt triggered expansion, the system usually shifted toward comparison, product evaluation, feature filtering, shortlist creation, or brand-specific exploration — not broad educational discovery.
Methodology: how we performed the analysis
The experiment used 90 prompts across three industries, mostly informational, with a smaller set of commercial prompts and minimal branded and transactional queries.
In the analysis, we have:
Selected a representative battery of prompts.
Identified the fan-outs.
Classified each fan-out by intent.
Observed distribution by prompt metadata.
The analysis then followed three steps:
Each prompt was classified according to prompt-intent labels.
We counted the prompts triggering fan-out (at least one).
We inspected the observed expansion queries and their assigned fan-out intent labels.
That produced two distinct but complementary views:
A prompt-level view, asking whether a given prompt triggered fan-out at all.
A fan-out-query view, asking what kind of intent the downstream expansion actually took.
That distinction matters: the first shows which prompts open the fan-out path, while the second shows where the system goes once it opens.
Interpreting the results: fan-out tends to move down-funnel
The cleanest interpretation is that, in this sample, fan-outs behave less like open-ended topic expansion and more like assisted decision support.
Commercial prompts almost always opened the door.
Once they did, fan-outs usually stayed commercial.
The system expanded into comparisons, feature-based filtering, product lists, pricing-adjacent queries, and brand-specific evaluations.
A few examples make that concrete.
“Suggest the best accounting software for small business and explain why” expanded into a commercial comparison query around features.
“What are the top AI document management systems for lawyers?” expanded into multiple product-oriented legaltech queries.
“What are the best products for skin care?” expanded into a shortlist-style query around product categories and reviews.
The two informational exceptions are even more revealing than the rule.
“I need an open-source document management system. What can you suggest?” was labeled informational at prompt level, but the resulting fan-out moved into solution recommendation.
“AI tools for legal research and document automation” also moved into a clearly commercial/evaluative downstream query.
So, even when the prompt starts broad, fan-out often translates that breadth into a lower-funnel retrieval path.
What this means for content strategy
The takeaway isn’t to stop writing informational content.
It’s this: informational content alone is unlikely to align consistently with fan-out expansion, at least in this dataset.
If your goal is visibility in AI answers tied to product selection, vendor discovery, or option narrowing, you need stronger coverage of pages and passages that match those downstream commercial branches.
In practical terms, your content model shouldn’t be just ToFU or BoFU, but ToFU with commercial bridges.
A broad article can still help, but it should include passages the system can easily reformulate into decision-support subqueries.
A purely educational piece that explains a category without naming products, tradeoffs, features, use cases, pricing logic, or selection criteria is much less likely to align with the fan-out paths seen here.
Put simply: Don’t just answer the obvious question — anticipate the next evaluative step the system is likely to generate in the background.
Limitations
This result is directional, not universal.
90 prompts reveal a pattern, but not a stable law of AI retrieval behavior.
The prompt mix is uneven. Informational prompts dominate the sample, while branded and transactional prompts are barely represented. That means those findings aren’t proof of absence.
The dataset spans industries but isn’t normalized by brand, wording style, or use case. Some sectors may be easier to express in product-discovery language.
This is an observational analysis of recorded fan-outs, not a controlled platform-level test. It shows what happened in this prompt set, not how ChatGPT always behaves.
Google’s description of fan-out provides context, but this isn’t a Google AI Mode test. It’s a ChatGPT-focused prompt and fan-out dataset. The takeaway is strategic, not architectural.
What to test next
The next version of this experiment should isolate the question more aggressively and expand the dataset.
A follow-up should map triggered fan-outs back to specific content formats.
The goal isn’t just to confirm that commercial intent wins. It’s to identify which page templates and passage structures best cover the fan-out branches AI systems prefer.
I keep hearing people say AI understands their brand. It doesn’t. Let’s get that out of the way first.
What it does is pattern-match at scale. It compresses your positioning, product, proof, and tone into a bundle of signals it can retrieve and remix at speed.
Those patterns come from two places:
Training: What the model absorbed historically.
Retrieval: What it can fetch at answer time from the live web and other sources.
So “AI SEO” isn’t a new channel. It’s a new representation problem: which version of your brand gets encoded, retrieved, and repeated.
Most brands are already in the game. They’re just not playing with purpose.
The internet is no longer a library
Classic SEO was a library problem. You publish a URL. Google indexed it. A human searched and found it.
AI search is a conversation that stretches out the demand curve. Head terms still drive the majority of visibility, but, ever so slowly, more volume is moving into context-heavy prompts.
“With these constraints”
“Like this competitor but cheaper”
“Which tool fits a team like mine with these requirements?”
“Given what you know about me, recommend…”
Your job is to be the most relevant match inside a model’s memory and retrieval pipeline.
Not by being ranked. But by being represented.
AI doesn’t run on opinions. It runs on associations.
From keywords to entities to embeddings
Classic SEO competed for keywords. Then it shifted to entities. AI systems go one layer deeper. They turn entities into vectors.
Your brand becomes a coordinate in dimensional space. Close to some concepts. Distant from others. Pulled by whatever your content and mentions repeatedly associate you to.
If your brand is consistently associated with “enterprise analytics”, “real-time dashboards” and “data governance”, your vector lives near those clusters.
If your messaging sprawls into adjacent territory because someone got bored of writing about the same things, the vector spreads. Precision drops. The model still has a position for you. It’s just fuzzier, less confident, and easier to swap for a competitor with cleaner signals.
Three layers of AI brand visibility
Before you “fix AI SEO,” identify which layer your brand is failing on. The same tactics don’t work everywhere.
Training layer
Your historical footprint. Press, blogs, documentation, reviews, every old thread on a forum you forgot existed.
You can’t fully control it.
But you can reduce fragmentation by finding and editing all possible past mentions (social profiles, directory listings, wikis, etc) to create a consistent identity across the internet.
Understand the training layer by asking an AI chatbot to describe your brand with web search turned off.
Retrieval layer
Your live surface area. Indexed pages, product feeds, APIs. This is where traditional technical SEO of crawling, indexing and rendering matter most. It defines what the AI system can access for citations.
Understand the retrieval layer by running branded intent and market category intents prompts daily using a LLM tracker and reviewing which sources are consistently cited.
Generation layer
That is the output seen in AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT or whatever your brand gets reassembled in front of an actual customer. Your brand will be written into the answer only if it’s a must.
So ask yourself, what unique, quotable, additive content forces the LLM to mention you?
Understand the generation layer by using the same LLM tracker data, but reviewing brand mentions within responses and their semantic associations.
Four mechanics that decide what AI says
Think of these as the forces quietly shaping your representation across the layers.
1. Consolidation (identity resolution)
AI systems merge different references to the same brand if it’s obvious they belong together.
Most brands don’t have one clear identity. They often have:
A brand name (spaced or cased inconsistently).
A legal name.
A domain name.
An abbreviation.
A legacy name.
Humans merge that automatically. Models don’t. They consolidate by pattern, not intent. Every inconsistent self-reference is a vote for fragmentation.
Allow your brand to be written five different ways and split your visibility signals five times.
2. Co-occurrence (association formation)
Models learn what appears together:
Brand + category
Brand + use case
Brand + audience
Brand + competitor
Repeat the right pairings, and the association strengthens. Be inconsistent, and it weakens. It’s genuinely that simple.
3. Attribution (who says it, where)
Models track who is being described, by whom, in what context.
Your own site is one layer. Third-party mentions are another. High-trust sources carry more weight.
Not because of “authority” in the classic SEO sense, but because they appear frequently inside reliable contexts in the training data and retrieval corpora. Similar outcome. Different mechanisms.
4. Retrieval weighting (what gets used in AI answers)
When generating answers, AI systems decide which information to use. That decision depends on clarity, relevance, uniqueness, and ease of extraction.
If key facts are buried in narrative copy, implied through metaphor, scattered across sections, the model will simply pull from somewhere else.
On the other hand, if you repeat them, structure them, and make them explicit, you are more likely to be chosen by the model.
You’re not writing poetry, you’re building a graph
In your content, on-page and off-page, make the core entities unmissable. Your brand. Your products. Your categories. Your audience. Your differentiators.
Craft a clear, consistent, canonical positioning that the machine can’t misread by creating a canonical brand bio:
[Brand] is a [market category] for [audience] who need [use case], differentiated by [proof].
Then, honestly ask yourself if your answer could also describe your competition. Or better, ask AI that question. If the answer is yes, rewrite it’s unmistakably you.
Then roll out that positioning everywhere. On-page with “retrieval-ready” chunks, in structured data, in “sameAs” references, industry publications, partner sites, user reviews, community discussions, social posts.
Repeat key associations deliberately across pages until it feels excessive. Reduce unnecessary variation in terminology. Then the associations strengthen. Are reinforced. Compound.
Beware brand drift,where inconsistencies allow misrepresentations, and a lack of information allows hallucination to creep in. Police all the edges. Consolidate or kill the pages that introduce conflicting descriptions of your brand.
This is not about gaming AI. It is about reducing entropy.
If that sounds boring, good. The brands that win the AI era are not going to win it with cleverness. They are going to win it with discipline.
Because if answers are inconsistent across sources, your brand won’t be cleanly encoded. And the version of you that AI systems are quietly passing along to customers won’t be the one you intended.
First 5 steps to AI brand visibility
Write your canonical brand bio: Lock-in spacing, casing, abbreviation rules for the brand name, and clear positioning.
Implement graph-based schema: Define relationships between your brand (consolidated by sameAs) and other key entities.
Make proof easy to quote: Ensure awards, benchmarks, customer numbers, policies, all notable brand information is explicit and extractable.
Fix historical identity fragmentation: Clean up past mentions and enforce canonical positioning everywhere possible.
Repeat key associations with intention: Brand + category, use case, audience, vs competitor. Not only on your own site, but also build coverage on high-trust third parties.
It’s not about you
If AI systems can’t confidently represent your brand, they will default to a safer option. Usually, it’s a competitor with cleaner signals. Not because that competitor is “better”. Because that competitor is easier for the machine to use.
AI doesn’t need to understand your brand perfectly. It needs to approximate it well enough to recommend you. Your job is to control that approximation through consistency, structure, and distribution.
Not by publishing more. By making your brand impossible to misunderstand.
Google is doubling down on AI-driven ads just as search behavior shifts toward conversational queries, giving advertisers more automation while trying to preserve control.
What’s new.
AI Max expands beyond Search: Now rolling out to Shopping campaigns and travel-specific formats, broadening reach across more advertiser types.
AI Brief (powered by Gemini): A new interface that lets advertisers steer AI using natural language inputs.
Text disclaimers + URL automation: Compliance-friendly updates to pair with automated landing page selection.
Why we care. Google is making AI Max a core layer across Search, Shopping and Travel, meaning automation will increasingly determine how ads are matched to user intent. This update expands reach into more conversational, high-intent queries that traditional keyword strategies miss, helping brands capture demand earlier in the journey.
At the same time, tools like AI Brief and new compliance features give advertisers more control over messaging and targeting, reducing the risk of fully automated campaigns feeling like a “black box.”
Shopping gets smarter. For retailers, AI Max for Shopping uses Merchant Center data to generate more adaptive ads that can respond to long-tail and exploratory queries, helping brands appear earlier in the discovery phase rather than only at the point of purchase. The rollout is positioned as a simple upgrade for existing Shopping campaigns, suggesting Google wants rapid adoption.
Travel gets consolidated. Travel advertisers get a consolidation play. Search Campaigns for Travel bring previously fragmented formats into a single interface with unified reporting and integrated AI Max capabilities. The move reduces operational complexity while reinforcing Google’s push toward centralized, AI-driven campaign management.
More control with AI Brief. The most notable addition is AI Brief, which attempts to solve a long-standing advertiser concern: lack of compliance control in automated systems. Advertisers can define messaging rules, specify which queries to prioritize or avoid, and shape how different audiences are addressed. The system then generates previews, allowing feedback before campaigns go live.
Automation meets compliance. Google is refining how traffic is directed to websites. Final URL expansion uses AI to select the most relevant landing page for each query, and the new text disclaimer feature ensures required legal messaging remains intact even when automation is active. This signals a push to make AI usable in more regulated industries without sacrificing compliance.
The internet is noisy this week. We are seeing some wild new tactics, like people using fake cell towers to send scam texts, while some developers are accidentally downloading tools that peek into their private files during a simple install. It is definitely a busy time to be online.
Security is always a moving target. Millions of servers are currently sitting online without any passwords, and
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a stealthy Python-based backdoor framework called DEEP#DOOR that comes with capabilities to establish persistent access and harvest a wide range of sensitive information from compromised hosts.
"The intrusion chain begins with execution of a batch script ('install_obf.bat') that disables Windows security controls, dynamically extracts an
Intro
A sophisticated, high-resilience malicious campaign was identified by Atos Threat Research Center (TRC) in March 2026. This operation specifically targets the high-privilege professional accounts of enterprise administrators, DevOps engineers, and security analysts by impersonating administrative utilities they rely on for daily operations. By integrating Search Engine Order (SEO)
The Currys bank holiday sale is here, with savings of up to 40% available across thousands of tech items, so I've looked through and picked out the 25 best deals on TVs, laptops, appliances, vacuums, headphones, and more.
OpenAI has given the web interface a rejig for Plus, Pro and Business users, making it easier to choose between Instant and Thinking when you talk to ChatGPT.
LG delivers ultra-sharpness with its 5K Hyper Mini LED 27GM950B monitor LG has officially released its new UltraGear Evo AI GM9 (27GM950B) 5K Hyper Mini LED monitor. This new 27-inch gaming screen boasts a 5K resolution with a maximum refresh rate of 165Hz. Furthermore, with Dual Mode, this screen also supports 1440p at up to […]
Spotify looks for an identifiable artist presence both on and off platform, like concert dates, merch, and linked social accounts on their artist profile.
Netflix is redesigning its mobile app and introducing Clips, a vertical video feed intended to help users discover new content by sharing highlights from original Netflix programming.
Aleyda Solis's Similarweb analysis of 10 markets shows that AI search clicks frequently redirect to local domains, with the distribution differing by industry.
Google adds AI Brief and text disclaimers to AI Max. See how new controls help regulated advertisers adopt automation while maintaining compliance and messaging accuracy.
Google expands AI Max to Shopping and Travel campaigns. Learn what’s changing, how it works, and what advertisers should prepare for ahead of broader rollout.
A Japanese developer behind Sakuna: Of Rice and Rain explains why the game is not on Xbox, citing limited manpower and the platform’s lack of retail presence in Japan.
After Warcraft 3: Reforged effectively ruined Warcraft 3 for so many players about six years ago, Blizzard has now added a "Legacy" version to Battle.net. Here's what you need to know.
LG Electronics USA today announced U.S. availability for its 2026 LG gram laptop lineup. All four new series of laptops—LG gram Pro, LG gram Pro 2-in-1, LG gram and LG gram Book—are now available at LG.com and LG-authorized retailers. To celebrate the 2026 lineup launch, LG is offering a 1-year Premium Care service plan on select LG gram laptops for only $1 until May 10, 2026.
Powered by next-generation Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen AI processors, the 2026 gram lineup combines ultra-light portability, military-grade durability and Dual AI capabilities for professionals, creators, students and everyday users.
Samsung Electronics today introduced Galaxy Book6 Enterprise Edition, the first Galaxy Book designed specifically for an enterprise environment. Powered by the latest Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors with Intel vPro, Galaxy Book6 Enterprise Edition combines the reliable performance, security and manageability required for modern enterprise environments.
"Galaxy Book6 Enterprise Edition marks an important step in expanding the Galaxy Book series into enterprise computing," said Andrew Chun, CVP & Head of B2B NPC Group, Mobile eXperience (MX) Business at Samsung Electronics. "We're excited to bring the connected Galaxy experience to enterprise IT environments to help enable seamless workflows across devices and businesses."
Samsung has reported a record quarterly profit for Q1 2026, with chip division operating income jumping to 53.7 trillion won ($36.15 billion), a 49% increase from the 1.1 trillion won ($745 million) posted in the same quarter last year. That figure accounted for 94% of the company's total operating profit of 57.2 trillion won ($38.7 billion), which itself was up from 6.69 trillion won a year prior. Overall revenue rose 69% year over year to 133.9 trillion won ($90.6 billion). Its record profit came mostly from the AI data center sector that pushed demand for advanced memory well beyond what Samsung and its peers can supply. The company has signed multi-year binding supply contracts with customers looking to lock in capacity, though it hasn't disclosed names or terms. Samsung's memory chief Kim Jaejune told analysts that supply is already falling well short of demand, and that based on orders already received, the gap in 2027 is expected to be even wider than in 2026.
On HBM specifically, Samsung said it began mass-production sales of HBM4 for NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform in February and is on track to more than triple HBM revenue this year versus last. However, rising memory prices are affecting the profit of other Samsung businesses. Mobile and network division profit fell 35% to 2.8 trillion won, due to higher component costs, and the display division saw operating profit drop 20% to 400 billion won ($270 million). Reuters also reports the risk of a strike, with unions representing a large portion of Samsung's South Korean chip workforce considering work stoppages over pay disputes. For the rest of 2026, Samsung expects that increasing demand will keep pushing memory, foundry, and display businesses.
As data sovereignty and compute performance become strategic differentiators for enterprises adopting AI, the demand for private, on-premises AI infrastructure continues to grow. In response to this shift, QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading innovator in computing, networking, and storage solutions, today introduced the QAI-h1290FX, a next-generation Edge AI storage server designed to empower private deployment of large language models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) search engines, and generative AI applications.
Built with server-grade AMD EPYC processing, with support for NVIDIA RTX GPU acceleration, and twelve U.2 NVMe/SATA SSD slots, the QAI-h1290FX delivers a high-performance, on-prem AI infrastructure for organizations that demand low-latency inference, full data privacy, and operational control—without relying on the cloud.
According to The Texas Tribune, Abilene builder Gene Lantrip has seen his construction schedules slide since work began on the massive Stargate AI campus nearby.
Much of Alphabet's momentum is tied to AI, particularly inside Google Cloud. The division brought in $20 billion in revenue, ahead of the $18.4 billion analysts had projected, and showed what the company called a "meaningful acceleration in growth." Just as notable, its backlog – future revenue under contract –...
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said most of Meta's spending increase was due to higher component costs and additional data center costs to "support future-year capacity."
Sources have informed MacRumors that Apple has ceased development of the Vision Pro after last year's upgraded model failed to lift lukewarm sales. Apple reportedly cut production dramatically soon after launching the AR headset in 2024 and sold only a few hundred thousand units in total.
After a slip-up by Fuse Games spoiled the surprise a few days early, we officially learned today that Star Wars Galactic Racer will arrive on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on October 6, 2026. We also got a full breakdown of the different editions of the game that'll be available, and something that didn't leak, which was the full release date trailer with some incredible-looking fast-paced gameplay. After Fuse Games quelled any fears that Star Wars Galactic Racer wouldn't include pod racers, today's official release date trailer is sure to put the iconic vehicles front and center, with several […]
MSI's upcoming Claw 8 EX AI+ Gaming handheld, which will be powered by the Intel Arc G3 Extreme SoC, has been listed online. MSI's Next-Gen Claw Handheld Spotted At Italian Retailer: Features Intel Arc G3 Extreme SoC, 32 GB Memory & 1 TB Storage Intel will soon be introducing its next-generation handheld SoCs called Arc G3. These will come in two flavors: a standard G3 and a high-end G3 Extreme. The Arc G3 series is Intel's big entry into the gaming handheld through dedicated SoCs, similar to what AMD does with its Ryzen Z series SoCs. Now, the first handheld […]
The new flagship motherboard boasts an all-white design, boasting incredible VRM, powerful connectivity, and a powerful feature-set for high-end and flagship Ryzen CPUs such as Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition. ASRock Introduces An All-White X870E Taichi White Motherboard, Featuring 27 Power Phase VRM, PCIe Gen 5.0 Support, and Modern Connectivity Popular hardware manufacturer, ASRock, has debuted a new flagship motherboard for the high-end Ryzen CPUs called X870E Taichi White. The X870E Taichi White is the first-ever all-white flagship Taichi series motherboards that brings a new color scheme to the lineup. The motherboard uses fully white PCB, white heatsinks, and white […]
Atomfall, a very British take on games like Fallout or STALKER from Rebellion that landed on PC and consoles in March 2025, is the latest recent release to get its own adaptation. Two Brothers Pictures, the production company behind hit shows like Fleabag and The Assassin will lead up a TV show adaptation of the game, which also just took home the BAFTA for Best British Game two weeks ago. News of the adaptation comes via a report from Deadline, who add that the Two Brothers Pictures founders, Harry and Jack Williams, will also be creative leads for the adaptation […]
We've known since the game's announcement that The Blood of Dawnwalker would not be quite as large as The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. This makes perfect sense, as Rebel Wolves is smaller than CD Projekt RED was when it made its masterpiece. However, what exactly is the scope that players can expect in the full game? As reported by Gamereactor, Creative Director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz revealed that The Blood of Dawnwalker turned out to be even bigger than the studio had originally planned. The goal was to target a 40-hour average playthrough, but now that all the content is in place […]
The supposed new DRM policy surrounding digital PS4 and PS5 games has been finally debunked by Sony. You don't need to check-in online every 30 days for your games to still be playable, rather, only one check-in is required right after the game has been downloaded to convert a temporary license into a permanent one.
An SaaS business got all its data back after its cloud data provider recovered critical databases that were ruthlessly wiped by an AI agent gone rogue.
PubQ is a scheduling tool built specifically for Substack Notes. Substack has no native scheduler for Notes, only for long-form posts. PubQ fills that gap: a Chrome extension captures your Substack session and posts your Notes automatically at your chosen time.
The workflow is simple: write your Notes in batches, set a schedule, and PubQ handles posting at peak times while you do other things. A free tier is available with no card required.
PRDFlow connects to your GitHub repo and auto-translates every code merge into stakeholder-ready updates, requiring no engineer effort. Founders see business impact like "Payment processing is live, start charging customers," PMs see roadmap progress such as "3 of 5 acceptance criteria met," and sales sees what's demo-ready like "SSO is live, safe to promise clients."
No more status meetings, Slack archaeology, or interrupting engineers in deep work. PRDFlow replaces the broken game of telephone between engineering and the rest of the company with a single source of truth pulled directly from the code.
AI may not see your brand the way you think it does, according to Scott Stouffer, co-founder and CTO at Market Brew.
Brands still publish content, optimize pages, build authority, and follow SEO best practices. But that may not be enough anymore.
Search has moved away from a simple battle over keywords, links, and page-level signals. It’s now shaped by meaning, intent, embeddings, and retrieval, Stouffer said during his SEO Week presentation.
In legacy SEO, a page could rank lower and still exist in the search results. In AI-driven systems, the first question isn’t whether you rank. It’s whether you’re ever retrieved.
“If you’re not retrieved, you do not exist to AI,” Stouffer said.
Your brand already exists inside AI systems as a mathematical object. You may call yourself one thing. Your homepage may say another. Your brand guidelines may promise a clear position. But AI systems build their own view of your brand from the content you have published.
That computed version of your brand may be different from the one you intended to build.
Retrieval now matters before ranking
AI visibility begins before ranking, Stouffer said.
In traditional SEO, marketers focus on positions — first, third, or tenth. But AI systems apply a filter earlier. Before anything is ranked, the system determines which content is eligible for consideration.
That is retrieval.
When a user asks a question, the system pulls a limited set of passages or chunks that best match the query. Those passages define the answer space.
If your content isn’t included, you get no impressions, no clicks, and no visibility at all, Stouffer said.
The real shift is moving from exclusion to inclusion.
“You don’t lose. You just never entered the game,” Stouffer said.
AI does not see pages the way SEOs do
AI systems don’t treat a webpage as one clean unit, Stouffer said. They don’t evaluate pages as whole objects or prioritize layout, structure, or formatting.
Content is broken apart. A page becomes chunks: passages, sections, and individual ideas.
Each chunk is evaluated independently. A paragraph deep in a guide can compete on its own. A single sentence can be selected if it aligns closely with the query.
This shifts competition from page versus page to passage versus passage.
Most of a page may never be considered. Only the most aligned chunks are evaluated.
Meaning becomes math
Each chunk is converted into a vector, Stouffer explained.
This vector represents meaning as a position in a high-dimensional space. It captures context and intent rather than exact wording.
Two pieces of content can use different words but sit close together if they express the same idea. Others can share keywords, but sit far apart if they represent different meanings.
“It’s comparing meaning, not wording, measuring distance, not keyword overlap,” Stouffer said.
Relevance is determined by proximity. The closer a chunk is to a query in this space, the more likely it is to be retrieved.
Your content forms clusters
As chunks are mapped into this space, they group together.
Content with similar meaning forms clusters, even across different pages. These clusters reflect how AI systems understand topics.
This understanding comes from how content naturally groups by meaning, not by site structure or labels, Stouffer said.
If content is consistent, clusters become dense and clear. If content is scattered, clusters become fragmented.
What matters is not what a brand intends to say, but what its content actually communicates.
The centroid is your brand to AI
Within these clusters, there is a center point — the centroid, Stouffer said.
The centroid represents the average position of all related content. It reflects the site’s core meaning.
Every page and paragraph influences that position. Consistent content creates a clear, stable centroid. Inconsistent content dilutes it.
That centroid is how AI understands your brand.
Not your homepage. Not your messaging. Not your brand guidelines.
Your centroid is the combined signal of everything you have published, Stouffer said.
“Your centroid doesn’t care about intent. It reflects the math of everything you’ve ever published,” Stouffer said.
Alignment beats isolated optimization
This changes how content should be evaluated.
The key question isn’t whether a page is optimized in isolation. It’s whether it aligns with the rest of the site.
Each page either strengthens the centroid or pulls it in a different direction.
“Optimization without alignment creates drift, and drift is what breaks consistency,” Stouffer said.
As drift increases, the site becomes harder for AI systems to interpret and retrieve.
“You don’t write pages, you project meaning,” Stouffer said.
Retrieval starts with proximity
When a query is entered, the system converts it into a vector, Stouffer said.
It then searches for the closest matches in meaning space.
This includes both individual chunks and the centroids that represent broader content clusters.
If your content is close enough, it enters the candidate set. If it is too far away, it is excluded.
Only after this stage do traditional ranking signals apply.
Content quality, links, and structure matter — but only if the content is first retrieved.
If not, those signals are never evaluated, he said.
Most brands look too similar to AI
Many brands follow similar strategies, use the same sources, and produce similar content.
As a result, their centroids converge in the same region, Stouffer said.
He described this as cluster collision.
When multiple brands occupy the same space, AI systems don’t select all of them. They choose a few and ignore the rest.
“They’re not failing best practices. They’re colliding with everyone else using them,” Stouffer said.
Distinct meaning is the new advantage
Producing more content or improving existing content isn’t enough. If content remains similar in meaning, it remains in the same space.
“You need a distinct centroid,” Stouffer said.
A clear, separate position in meaning space reduces competition and increases the likelihood of retrieval.
SEO becomes a control loop
This is not a one-time adjustment.
Every piece of content shifts the centroid.
That requires an ongoing process of measurement and adjustment, Stouffer said.
Teams need to monitor alignment continuously and correct drift as it occurs.
Over time, this creates a more stable system where new content reinforces the existing structure.
The visibility problem is really an observability problem
Most teams can’t see how their content exists in this system.
They can’t see clusters, centroids, or distances — or why content is excluded.
So they rely on trial and error, Stouffer said.
They publish, optimize, and wait for results. When nothing changes, they try something else.
Without visibility into the system, they react to outcomes rather than understanding causes.
Is AI seeing the brand you think you’ve built?
Your brand already exists as a mathematical object inside AI systems, Stouffer said.
You do not get to choose that.
You only choose whether to measure and control it or let it drift.
AI does not see your brand the way you describe it. It sees the aggregate meaning of your content.
“If you control your centroid, you control your visibility,” Stouffer said.
For more than two decades (nearly as long as I’ve been in SEO), backlinks have been core to SEO. Google’s PageRank changed search by using backlinks as a proxy for trust.
A link wasn’t just a pathway; it was a vote. The more votes you had and the more authoritative the voters were, the higher you ranked.
But as Google and AI systems matured, entity-based understanding emerged. AI models became better at understanding content, context, and credibility without always needing a hyperlink as a crutch.
Today, visibility isn’t driven solely by links. It’s strengthened by the broader signals your brand has earned: how often it’s mentioned, cited, and trusted across authoritative sources.
Search engines and AI platforms now prioritize these signals.
AI’s role in reducing reliance on links alone
Modern AI systems can evaluate trust and expertise in ways that were impossible a decade ago. AI has changed how authority, trust, and expertise are measured. It can now assess authority through signals once approximated mainly by backlinks.
AI can:
Identify entities and map their relationships across the web.
Interpret sentiment and contextual relevance.
Detect manufactured link patterns with near-perfect accuracy.
Understand brand prominence without a single hyperlink.
Evaluate reputation signals from reviews, mentions, and citations.
Cross-reference information across multimodal sources.
A brand mention in a reputable publication—even without a link—reinforces entity authority. Consistent expert citations validate expertise. These signals can’t be faked.
The result is a new era where links still matter, but they’re no longer the only star. Authority is now a network of signals.
The rise of entity‑first SEO
As Google relies less on raw link signals, something else has increased: entities — the people, brands, organizations, and concepts behind the content. Google increasingly showcases brands based on who they are and how they’re discussed across the web, alongside their backlink profile.
At its core, entity-first SEO means Google and LLMs are mapping relationships: identifying brands, understanding what they’re known for, and evaluating how they’re referenced in trusted sources.
For example, an outdoor gear company with a modest backlink profile began appearing in AI Overviews for “best hiking backpacks” after repeated mentions in Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, and a few expert roundups. Only some mentions included links, but the brand appeared consistently in trusted, topic-relevant conversations. Google interpreted those unlinked mentions as proof of real-world relevance.
If your brand consistently appears in a positive light in topic-related conversations, AI sees that as proof you’re relevant and trusted. The brands that win now have the strongest entity presence.
PR‑style links + editorial = off-page powerhouse
PR-style links and editorial coverage are earned mentions in reputable publications — the kind that signal real-world authority, not algorithmic manipulation.
Why editorially earned links outperform volume-based link building
Old-school, volume-based link building is less effective as AI improves at detecting manufactured patterns. But high-quality, relevance-driven link building—especially when paired with PR signals—is more valuable than ever.
Editorial PR links from journalists, analysts, and industry voices who choose to reference a brand because it’s newsworthy or authoritative reflect genuine credibility. They’re the digital equivalent of a trusted expert saying, “This brand matters.”
Authority-Based Link Building
Volume-Based Link Building
Strong editorial context
Thin or generic content
High topical relevance
Limited relevance
Natural language anchors
Over‑optimized anchors
Trusted authors and publications
Sites with weak editorial oversight
Clear entity associations
Obvious link‑selling footprints
AI doesn’t just look at the presence of a link; it evaluates the context around it. Models are trained to reward authenticity. Search aims to reward the most authoritative entities.
Creating multi‑signal authority
The real power comes from a combination of signals. As search has evolved, quality has become more powerful than quantity.
Now AI is driving another shift. You can grow traditional, relevance-focused links alongside new brand signals.
Secondary coverage as other sites pick up the story.
This is multi-signal authority — holistic credibility that AI systems are designed to reward. It tells Google and LLMs: you’re known, trusted, and relevant. You need to be part of the conversation.
As powerful as PR signals are, they’re only one part of a larger authority ecosystem. AI evaluates brands through a multi-signal trust profile that determines visibility.
Breaking down the new authority stack
Authority is now defined by the breadth and consistency of signals that validate who your brand is across the web. It’s evaluated as humans do: reputation, recognition, expertise, and prominence.
Authority is no longer a single metric tied to links. It’s a network of signals, including:
Brand strength: Rising branded search volume, navigational queries, and direct traffic patterns that signal real-world recognition.
Entity validation: Consistent NAP details, schema markup, and unified profiles help confirm your brand and connect references back to the same entity.
Topical authority: Depth of content, subject-matter experts, and external collaboration to show your brand is genuinely knowledgeable about the topics you discuss.
Reputation signals: Reviews, citations, third-party mentions, and sentiment patterns that reflect trustworthiness.
PR signals: News coverage, interviews, podcast appearances, and industry mentions that reinforce your brand’s relevance.
Together, these signals create a holistic authority profile that AI can interpret. The brands that win have the strongest multi-signal authority footprint.
Brand strength is the silent factor
Brand strength quietly outweighs other signals. The data shows it: brands in the top 25% for web mentions average 169 AI Overview citations, while the next quartile averages just 14.
That’s not a small gap.
This aligns with Ahrefs’ analysis of ~75,000 brands. The strongest correlations with appearing in AI Overviews were branded web mentions, branded anchors, and branded search volume—all signals of real-world brand presence.
Consider two competing fitness apps. One has thousands of backlinks from generic listicles. The other is frequently mentioned in Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, and TikTok “day in the life” videos. The second app appears consistently in AI Overviews because AI sees it as part of the real-world fitness conversation, not just the link graph.
The brands dominating AI Overviews have the strongest brand presence, supported by consistent links, mentions, citations, and contextual relevance.
Predictions for 2027 and beyond
By 2027, link building will undergo radical change. The shift from a numbers game to a confidence game will become the norm, and Share of Authority or Voice will be the new metric.
Here are my top three predictions for what’s next.
Prediction 1: Visibility will be measured by a “Share of Model” metric. AI rewards signal density, not link density.
Link building will expand to include “seeding” information in AI training hubs. Instead of mass outreach to low-tier blogs, strategies will target user-preferred sources like Reddit, LinkedIn, Substack, and GitHub, which LLMs use for high-quality, human-led data.
Brands that appear most often in training data, trusted sources, and high-authority conversations will earn visibility. This is the next step in a world where signals determine authority.
Traditional Metric
Predicted Metric
Why the Change
Backlink Count
Entity Citation Frequency
AI values brand mentions as much as links
Domain Authority (DA)
Source Reliability Score
Focus on the trustworthiness of the source
Anchor Text
Semantic Context
AI reads the intent around the link, not just the text
PageRank
Share of Model (SoM)
Success is being the AI’s preferred answer
Prediction 2: Brands will act as primary newsrooms as proprietary data generates the strongest authority signals.
As AI systems rely more on multi-signal authority, proprietary data becomes one of the most powerful assets a brand can produce. Data isn’t just content — it’s a signal engine. It naturally earns the signals AI trusts most:
PR coverage.
Citations.
Mentions.
Social discussion.
Co‑occurrence with authoritative entities.
Long‑tail references in future content.
Traditional link building still provides foundational authority, but data-driven assets are the accelerant. They create high-trust, high-context signals that AI models weigh heavily.
On a platform where visibility depends on how often your brand appears in authoritative contexts, proprietary data is the most scalable way to increase your Share of Authority.
Prediction 3: Unlinked brand mentions will become one of the most valuable authority signals
Traditional contextual links will continue to build the foundation. But beyond that, search engines will track every time your brand appears alongside specific topics. Links will need “semantic context.”
Every mention of your brand in news, podcasts, reviews, forums, social posts, and roundups becomes a signal that strengthens your entity.
AI isn’t replacing link building — it’s expanding it
The future of off-page SEO isn’t a battle between traditional link building and AI-driven signals. It’s the realization that links were always just one signal. Now search engines can understand dozens more.
Traditional link building still matters. It provides the foundational authority, crawl paths, and topical relevance every site needs.
AI has widened the field. It can read context, interpret sentiment, understand entities, and evaluate brand presence.
These signals don’t replace links — they amplify them.
Login
Thanks to deep integrations with both your vehicle and your apps, Gemini in cars with Google built-in will help drivers do more safely while still focusing on the road. 
Sundar Pichai is on the cover of Time magazine for its 100 most influential companies issue for 2026. 
In celebration of Route 66’s 100th anniversary, Google Maps is rolling out two new ways to help you explore it, virtually or IRL. 
Preferred Sources is now rolling out globally in all supported languages, giving users more control over the news they see on Search. 
Built for the next generation of Search, AI Max for Shopping campaigns helps retailers reach shoppers the moment discovery begins. 
Upgrade to AI Max to simplify your workflow and access our most advanced tools. 
As AI Max turns 1, we’re helping you capture even more opportunities in the expanding Search universe. 
A new agreement between Google and OG&E to protect energy affordability in Oklahoma. 
