Leon County is stepping into a bold new era of sports—one that secures our reputation as the world’s undisputed Capital of Cross Country. On Saturday, January 10, 2026, our community will open its arms to the world as we welcome the World Athletics Cross Country Championships Tallahassee 26 to Leon County’s Apalachee Regional Park (ARP).

Essentially the Olympics of the sport of cross country, this event marks the very first world championship sporting event ever to be held in Leon County.

When more than 500 elite athletes representing 65 countries arrive to chase world titles, it will mark a milestone over 15 years in the making—and a moment that will define Leon County’s legacy as a destination capable of hosting the world’s most prestigious sports competitions. This moment did not happen overnight. It is the result of vision, persistence, and collaboration that began in 2009 with an idea and a belief: that our community could build a world-class cross-country venue unlike anything in the nation.

Leon County invested in that vision at Apalachee Regional Park, and now the world’s greatest athletes are coming here to make history in our community. 

For this championship event, Leon County government’s tourism team, Visit Tallahassee, leveraged the strength of Florida’s global brand: sunshine, blue waters, natural landscapes, and world-renowned attractions.

The world championship course itself is a tribute to Florida’s natural beauty. There will be six custom-designed elements that bring Tallahassee, Leon County and Florida’s identity to life: a replica of our historic Capitol building; a rollercoaster honoring the state’s world-famous attractions; a sand pit representing 100 miles of coastline; a water feature symbolizing Florida’s oceans, springs, lakes, and rivers; Alligator Alley, where runners will navigate alligator-shaped logs carved from fallen trees at Apalachee Regional Park; and a mud section paying homage to the Florida Everglades.

As one of the most important international sporting events to be held in the U.S.A. in 2026, this is Leon County’s chance to put our best foot forward. Thousands of spectators, coaches, officials, and fans will travel from around the world, generating an estimated $4.3 million in economic impact. From hotels and restaurants to attractions, shops, and both large and small businesses, the community will feel the energy and economic lift.

We also want our residents to be at the heart of this moment. We invite everyone to join us for all the action—come see the championship races of the world’s fastest runners and, better yet, put a team together and join the Worlds Fun Run: Florida Edition. Choose the 2K or 4K, and all finishers receive a spectacular medal. For those unable to attend in person, the event will be broadcast in 70 countries worldwide on NBC/Peacock, showcasing Leon County to millions of viewers.

A portion of event proceeds will support Leon County Schools’ cross country and track & field programs, ensuring the next generation of runners benefit from this global stage. When you buy a ticket or register a team, you’re not just watching history—you’re investing in our kids and our local economy.

And there’s more. On Sunday following the World Championships, Tallahassee will host the USA Track & Field Club Cross Country Championships, bringing in hundreds more athletes and teams for a weekend that will further elevate our destination and showcase our capacity to host premier sporting events.

Here’s how to get involved:

• Purchase spectator tickets to experience the fastest runners on the planet race for a world title.
• Register for the Worlds Fun Run: Florida Edition. Families, community groups, schools, and businesses are encouraged to form teams and participate in the 2K or 4K.

January 10, 2026, is our moment. The course is ready. Leon County is ready. And together, we will welcome the world to Leon County.

Learn more about the World Athletics Cross Country Championships Tallahassee 26, purchase tickets, and join the excitement at VisitTallahassee.com/WXC26.

Christian Caban was elected to the Leon County Commission to represent District 2 in 2022 and currently serves as 2025-2026 chairman. 

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Leon County is about to enter the World Championship era | Opinion

After more than 15 years in enterprise SEO across six major corporations, I’ve seen more careers derailed by internal politics than by Google updates. 

Many SEOs moving from agency to in-house assume that staying current with algorithms and improving rankings will be enough. 

In reality, the harder work is navigating the organization and the people within it.

Agency life rewards deliverables and reports. Corporate life runs on relationships, repeatable processes, the right platforms, and visible performance – all carrying equal weight with technical skill. 

The following lessons reflect where SEOs can grow, avoid common pitfalls, and build sustainable careers inside complex enterprises.

Job searching

Landing an SEO role in the corporate world today is less about chasing postings and more about positioning yourself as the obvious choice before you ever apply. 

Hiring teams look for someone who connects well, presents a clear professional narrative, and shows measurable impact.

Don’t apply online

Most resumes submitted through job portals get filtered out by automated systems before a recruiter ever sees them. 

Job boards like LinkedIn can be research tools. 

When you find a role that fits, look for someone inside the company who can refer you – internal referrals dramatically increase your chances of an interview.

If you’re early in your career, build relationships long before you need them. 

Find mentors through ADPList, attend local meetups, and join SEO and AI workshops or virtual conferences. 

These touchpoints often matter more than submitting formal applications. In today’s market, your network is your application.

Optimize for you

You’re an SEO – use the same skills you apply to websites on your own professional presence. 

Start by choosing two “primary keywords” for your career: a job title and an industry. 

If you already have experience in a specific vertical, lean into it.

If you don’t, pick an industry you genuinely understand or care about so you can speak to its audience and problems with credibility.

Use LinkedIn as a search engine. Include your soft skills, technical strengths, marketing competencies, and the industry terms hiring managers are scanning for. 

Keep unrelated hobbies off your profile unless they support the roles you want. 

If you wouldn’t include “yoga enthusiast” on a landing page targeting enterprise SaaS buyers, it shouldn’t be on your LinkedIn unless your goal is to work for a yoga brand.

And learn to talk about yourself clearly. Many SEOs are introverted or default to giving full credit to the team. That’s admirable in the workplace, but interviews require precision about what you led, influenced, or delivered. You can stay humble while still being direct.

Make sure all your touchpoints – resume, LinkedIn, portfolio, GitHub if relevant, personal site – align. 

Recruiters and hiring managers will check multiple sources. 

Consistency helps them see your strengths quickly and positions you as someone who understands how to present a unified brand.

The SEO resume of 2026

Resumes today need to be concise, scannable, and impact-driven. 

One page is ideal unless you have 10+ years of experience or leadership roles that warrant a second page. 

Lead with outcomes instead of responsibilities: 

• Growth percentages.
• Traffic lifts.
• Rankings that mattered. 
• Core Web Vitals improvements.
• Structured data implementations.
• Migrations you guided without losses.

Use action verbs that convey ownership – led, optimized, increased, launched – and tailor each bullet to the role you’re applying for. 

Hiring managers want to see how your experience connects to their specific challenges, whether that’s:

• Scaling content.
• Improving site performance.
• Fixing crawl issues at scale.
• Shaping cross-functional SEO strategy.

List the tools that matter for enterprise SEO, but keep the list purposeful. 

A handful of relevant platforms – Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, Semrush, Botify, BrightEdge – shows breadth without turning your resume into an acronym block.

Your summary should point forward. Highlight your:

• Cross-functional skills.
• Comfort with enterprise complexity.
• Ability to adapt to search evolution, including AI discovery and LLM-driven surfaces. 

Make it clear that you think beyond rankings – that you understand SEO’s role in product, content, and business outcomes.

Formatting still matters. Use white space, short bullets, and metric-first phrasing so your biggest wins stand out instantly. 

Save the file as your full name. Little details help you look polished in a crowded field.

Leave out:

• Objectives: They waste space a summary can use better.
• Home address: No longer needed.
• First-person language: Resumes are marketing documents, not narratives.
• Irrelevant hobbies or side interests – unless they directly support your industry target.

Get to know it all

To build a long-term career in SEO, you have to become a student of how everything connects. 

Search isn’t just algorithms or rankings – it’s the intersection of people, technology, and business. 

You don’t need to master every discipline, but you do need to understand how they influence one another: 

• How content shapes user experience.
• How technical health enables discovery.
• How every decision ties back to business outcomes.

For instance:

• People: Build partnerships with product, engineering, marketing, and analytics. SEO only works when teams align around shared goals.
• Process: Create structure that scales. Clear workflows and documentation reduce confusion and keep priorities moving.
• Platforms: Use tools that support crawling, automation, and performance tracking. Strong data visibility improves decisions and communication.
• Performance: Tie your work to impact – conversions, visibility, and revenue, not just rankings or traffic.

You move from executor to strategist when you connect these pillars. That’s when SEO becomes more than optimization – it becomes influence.

Dig deeper: Enterprise SEO is built to bleed – Here’s how to build it right

Career defining

A career isn’t shaped only by what you know – it’s shaped by how you grow. 

In corporate SEO, growth comes from navigating people, priorities, and pace as much as mastering algorithms. 

These lessons reflect the choices that determine whether your career moves forward or stalls:

• When to move on.
• When to speak or listen.
• How to make your impact visible in environments where results alone aren’t always enough.

Do not overstay

Growth often happens when you change environments, not when you stay in one too long. 

After a few years in the same company, it’s easy to get typecast as “the SEO person” instead of a strategic partner. 

Organizations anchor you to the role they hired you for, even as your skills expand. 

Moving every one to three years exposes you to new leadership styles, challenges, and technologies – all of which sharpen your instincts and broaden your range. 

For SEOs, each transition teaches you what actually drives growth and how to earn credibility quickly by aligning teams and delivering impact.

No need to respond

Not every meeting needs your voice. 

Early in my career, I believed credibility came from speaking first and often. I later learned that listening is one of the strongest leadership skills. 

It reveals what drives decisions, who holds influence, and where priorities truly sit. 

For SEOs, understanding the room before jumping in often leads to sharper, more relevant recommendations – and they’re harder for stakeholders to dismiss because you’re grounding them in what the team already values.

Speak up when it matters

The opposite of constant talking isn’t silence – it’s strategy. 

Knowing when to speak is an underrated professional skill, especially in large organizations where timing and tone matter as much as insight. 

A well-placed comment that bridges teams, clarifies a decision, or protects performance can shift the entire conversation. 

Speak with intention, not frequency, and your influence will grow even when your airtime doesn’t.

Surface your success

Results only matter if the right people see them. 

Many SEOs assume that hard work will naturally lead to recognition, but visibility is a skill. 

Frame your wins in terms leaders care about – revenue impact, efficiency gains, customer experience improvements. 

Bring them to leadership reviews, all-hands meetings, and retrospectives so others understand how SEO supports bigger goals. 

Build relationships with people who can advocate for you when opportunities arise. Influence isn’t just about execution – it’s about making your impact legible and memorable.

Weekly and monthly updates

Keep a running log of your work, conversations, and metrics. 

I block time every Friday to summarize the week across three areas: meeting outcomes, task updates, and wins. 

Some managers want these updates – others don’t. 

Either way, they help you track progress and build a record you can reference later.

Tools can help – I’ve used GitHub Issues, simple .txt files, and, more recently, a Chat Agent that compiles my notes into summaries. 

These logs save hours when someone asks about a past decision or when you’re updating your resume for a job search. 

Whether you share them or keep them for yourself, they create clarity and evidence of your contributions over time.

Manage your time

Meetings can quickly overtake your day. 

The most effective SEOs protect time for analysis, writing, and strategic thinking – the work that actually moves projects forward. 

Block dedicated focus time, decline meetings where your presence isn’t essential, and suggest asynchronous updates when appropriate. 

Protecting your time isn’t selfish. It prevents burnout and keeps you delivering work that matters.

Leave the past behind

It’s natural to reference past employers, but constant comparison can make you seem resistant to new ideas or unaware of context. 

Every organization has its own culture, pace, and priorities. 

Share relevant frameworks when they help, but adapt to the environment you’re in. 

Your credibility grows when you focus on what works here – not on what worked there.

Dig deeper: The top 5 strategic SEO mistakes enterprises make (and how to avoid them)

Working with others

No SEO operates in isolation. 

In enterprise environments, success depends on engineers who make optimizations possible, analysts who surface insights, and product managers who balance priorities. 

Navigating these relationships requires empathy, patience, and strategy. 

Often, your ability to guide discussions, document decisions, and build trust matters more than technical skill. 

When you collaborate with intention, SEO becomes less about convincing others to care and more about creating shared ownership of the outcome.

Guide through questions

Some of the most effective leadership moments come from asking the right questions rather than supplying the answer. 

Many of my biggest wins happened when I helped stakeholders arrive at the solution themselves. 

When people believe they’ve discovered the path forward, they take greater ownership and champion the outcome. 

This is especially powerful in SEO, where teams may be hesitant to adopt recommendations. 

Asking questions shifts conversations from resistance to curiosity and reframes SEO as a shared opportunity instead of an external directive. 

Influence grows when collaboration feels like discovery, not pressure.

Document everything

In large organizations, memory fades quickly. 

Document ideas, decisions, experiments, and notable conversations so you have a clear record when questions resurface months later. 

Documentation turns “I think” into “I know,” strengthening your credibility and protecting your work. 

Whether you keep notes in shared documents, project tools, or automation-assisted summaries, the goal is the same – create a defensible trail of how decisions were made and what impact followed. 

When leadership asks about traffic shifts or delayed recommendations, your written history becomes both insight and insurance.

Trust carefully

Collaboration matters, but discernment protects your momentum. 

Not everyone who agrees in a meeting is invested in follow-through. 

Politics, shifting priorities, or competing metrics often influence behavior more than logic. 

Learn who reliably delivers and who disappears when accountability is needed. 

For SEOs, true allies in engineering, product, or analytics can make or break execution. 

Align with those who follow through and stay cautious around those who view SEO as competition. 

Protect your credibility by choosing collaboration with intention, not assumption.

Respect cross-team partners

The engineers, analysts, IT admins, and product managers beside you often carry projects across the finish line. 

Early in my career, I made the mistake of treating these partners as support rather than as collaborators. Their expertise is what turns strategy into action. 

Treat them as equals who share ownership of outcomes. Involve them early, respect their constraints, and acknowledge their contributions. 

When partners feel valued, they become advocates – raising SEO needs in rooms you may not be in. 

The strongest SEO wins aren’t solo efforts; they come from relationships built on mutual respect and shared momentum.

Dig deeper: The design thinking approach to enterprise SEO

Mental well-being

Sustaining a long-term SEO career requires more than technical skill – it requires balance, boundaries, and emotional resilience. 

Constant algorithm changes, shifting priorities, and cross-team dependencies can drain you if you don’t protect your energy. 

Mental well-being isn’t a luxury – it’s a strategy for longevity. 

When you manage your mindset with the same discipline you apply to a site audit, you gain clarity, patience, and perspective – all qualities that make you more effective.

Take your PTO

Early in my career, I worried rankings would collapse the moment I took time off. 

They never did – but my judgment did when exhaustion set in. 

Burnout distorts perspective, makes you reactive to data, and limits strategic thinking. 

Rest isn’t indulgence, it’s maintenance. 

Search is a long game measured in quarters, not days. 

A week offline is recoverable. Burnout is not. 

Protect your energy with the same discipline you protect a site’s uptime.

Save compliments

Much of SEO happens behind the scenes, and visibility doesn’t always follow impact. When someone praises your work, save it. 

Short notes from peers, partners, or managers become valuable artifacts during promotion cycles or job searches. 

Collecting this feedback isn’t about ego – it’s about building equity and giving yourself a factual record of how you support the business.

Positive goes a long way

Every team has someone whose burnout becomes contagious. Don’t become that person. 

Positivity doesn’t mean ignoring problems – it means creating space for solutions. 

I once put a direct report on a performance improvement plan after his frustration began affecting morale. 

After delivering the notice, I took him to lunch for an honest, empathetic conversation. That moment shifted everything. 

His attitude improved, he worked his way off the PIP, and he later became a director at another company. 

Compassion doesn’t replace accountability, but it makes growth possible. Leadership is as much about tone as it is about tactics.

Buffer your estimates

In corporate life, meetings multiply faster than progress. Dependencies shift. 

Priorities change without warning. Build a cushion into your timelines. If you think something will take a week, plan for 10 days. 

For SEOs, many delays sit outside your control – engineering queues, content operations bottlenecks, competing releases. 

A buffer protects your credibility and keeps expectations grounded. Underpromise and overdeliver isn’t cliché – it’s survival.

Detach emotionally

Leadership skepticism about SEO is rarely personal. It’s usually about budgets, bandwidth, or competing bets. 

Early in my career, I saw every pushback as a critique of my competence. 

Over time, I learned it was part of the negotiation process. 

When an initiative is deprioritized, it doesn’t mean your expertise has lost value – it means resources moved elsewhere. 

Anchor conversations in business impact, not identity. Influence lasts longer when driven by logic rather than frustration.

Avoid gossip and SEO fights

There was a time when I wasted energy debating SEO theories or venting about internal politics. 

It felt good in the moment but changed nothing. My credibility grew the day I stopped trying to win arguments and started aiming for outcomes. 

When disagreements arise, document your position, present the data clearly, and move on. 

Rising above gossip doesn’t mean disengagement – it means choosing professionalism over noise.

Keep perspective

SEO isn’t emergency medicine, though corporate urgency can make it feel that way. 

Most “crises” come from impatience with the slow, cumulative nature of search. Daily fluctuations rarely matter when the trendline is healthy. 

Remind stakeholders – and yourself – that meaningful growth takes time. 

When pressure for overnight results rises, stay grounded. The long game always wins.

Work isn’t life

Work can challenge and fulfill you, but it shouldn’t define you. 

The most effective professionals invest in relationships and interests outside the company. 

Detaching your identity from your job doesn’t weaken your ambition – it stabilizes it. 

When your sense of worth isn’t tied to the next quarterly metric, you lead with more confidence and less fear. 

Success becomes sustainable when life stays bigger than work.

Dig deeper: SEO’s future isn’t content. It’s governance

From optimizer to organizational catalyst

Fifteen years in corporate SEO have taught me that technical skill is only half the job. 

The other half is navigating people, priorities, and perspective. 

Algorithms will evolve, tools will change, and org charts will shift, but your ability to adapt, communicate, and lead determines how far you go. 

Success in SEO isn’t about chasing every update or proving you’re the smartest person in the room. 

It’s about building trust, creating clarity, and sustaining momentum through both wins and setbacks.

The most impactful SEOs aren’t just tacticians. 

They’re translators, connecting data to business strategy, ideas to execution, and people to purpose. 

When you recognize that your influence extends beyond rankings, you move from contributor to catalyst. 

SEO may begin with optimization, but the real work is shaping how organizations think, act, and grow. That’s the craft worth mastering.

When a TV commercial makes people feel something, it doesn’t just win in the moment – it sparks curiosity, drives searches, and fuels conversions.

That’s why the “Breaking TV Ads Report,” jointly launched by Kinetiq and DAIVID, deserves a spot on every search marketer’s radar.

The monthly report ranks the top-performing new TV ads in the U.S., blending Kinetiq’s real-time TV ad detection with DAIVID’s AI-driven creative analytics to uncover which ads broke through, why they resonated, and what brands can learn from their success.

It’s a powerful reminder that search doesn’t start on Google – it starts in the mind.

As Barney Worfolk-Smith, chief growth officer at DAIVID, recently told me in an email:

• “Search + TV matter – together. TV can increase search volume by up to 60%, and even more in well-coordinated campaigns. AI has already changed, and will continue to change, the TV-to-search relationship, but the principle remains the same: impactful, emotive TV advertising drives all desirable brand outcomes – with search being one of them. It’s also worth noting that search volume itself is a valuable measure of TV ad effectiveness.”

How LeBron James and Indeed captured attention

The first edition of the “Breaking TV Ads Report” highlighted a commercial that checks every emotional and strategic box: Indeed’s “What If LeBron James’ Skills Were Never Seen?”

The ad traces James’s journey from his early life to his work with the LeBron James Family Foundation, connecting it to Indeed’s “skills-first” hiring message. 

It resonated not only because of its star power but because it made viewers feel something authentic.

The ad generated 11% higher intense positive emotion and 7% higher attention than the average U.S. TV ad, per DAIVID’s data. 

It was joined in the top 10 by campaigns from TikTok (twice), Subaru, and Taco Bell, with emotional themes centered on family, mentorship, and belonging.

These aren’t just nice stories – they’re search triggers.

When people connect emotionally with a brand message, they’re more likely to act on it – often by turning to Google or YouTube for more information, reviews, or purchase options.

Dig deeper: Brand + performance: The secret to maximizing ad ROI

TV still drives search

Back in 2011, Google introduced the concept of “The Zero Moment of Truth.” 

But the ZMOT stage in the buying journey – when consumers research a product or service online before making a purchase – was the “new” second step. 

The first step remained “stimulus,” and it could be “a TV ad.”

Many search marketers focus on what happens in the second ZMOT stage, because we can measure impressions, clicks, and conversions on mobile and laptop screens. 

And we ignore the stimulus step because it is sucking money out of our marketing budgets.

But several studies over the past decade have shown that the impact of TV advertising extends directly into search behavior:

• In 2015, a joint study by Google and Nielsen found that TV ads can boost branded search queries by up to 20%, especially within the first few hours after an ad airs.
• In 2022, Thinkbox discovered that TV advertising in the UK generates the strongest multiplier effect on search, social, and web traffic of any medium.
• And in 2024, Comscore research found that when TV and digital are coordinated, cross-channel campaigns deliver stronger engagement, with TV ads prompting “second-screen” behavior – audiences searching, scanning QR codes, or engaging on social media in real time.

Put simply: when a campaign captures attention on TV, search demand spikes – often within minutes.

For SEO and PPC professionals, this presents a clear opportunity to anticipate and capitalize on those moments.

How brands have integrated TV and search

Several major brands have already proven that when TV storytelling and search strategy work together, both channels perform better.

Apple: Creating curiosity that fuels search

Apple’s product launches are masterclasses in cross-channel momentum. 

Every time a new iPhone ad airs, search volume for terms like “iPhone 17 Pro Max” or “iPhone 17 release date” skyrockets.

Apple’s branded search traffic increases by up to 40% in the days following a major campaign, according to Semrush.

Apple intentionally designs its TV creative to generate questions – not answer them – encouraging viewers to seek out more details online. 

That’s where Apple’s search-optimized landing pages, YouTube product videos, and paid search campaigns complete the journey.

Progressive: Connecting humor to searchable characters

Progressive’s long-running “Flo” campaign shows how consistent creative storytelling translates into search intent. 

The insurance brand’s TV spots spark curiosity around characters, slogans, and offers – leading to measurable spikes in branded searches such as “Progressive car insurance” and “Flo from Progressive.”

The brand’s media team aligns paid search and display campaigns with national TV flighting schedules, ensuring that when interest peaks, search ads and organic results are ready to capture demand.

Coca-Cola: The shareable, searchable ad

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign is another classic case of TV leading to search. 

The original “Share a Coke” campaign was launched in Australia in 2011 and involved replacing the Coca-Cola logo on bottles with hundreds of popular first names. 

This personalization strategy was a global success, encouraging consumers to find bottles with their names and share them with friends and loved ones, which boosted sales and created emotional connections with the brand.

The latest “Share a Coke” campaign is a global relaunch targeting Gen Z with a focus on digital experiences and authentic, in-person connections. 

It features personalized cans, a digital “Memory Maker” tool for creating shareable videos, and a partnership with McDonald’s. 

Consumers can find names on bottles or use a QR code to customize bottles – a creative hook that’s sent millions to Google searching “custom Coke” or “share a Coke names.”

The campaign’s success wasn’t just creative; it was data-driven. 

By tracking spikes in branded search and social mentions, Coca-Cola refined its targeting and extended the campaign’s life cycle online.

Dig deeper: Hyper-personalization in PPC: Using data to deliver tailored ad experiences

Measuring creative effectiveness with real audience signals

What makes the new “Breaking TV Ads” report particularly valuable is its data-driven framework for measuring creative effectiveness.

Kinetiq’s proprietary ad detection technology identifies every ad that first airs across 210 U.S. DMAs and 15 streaming apps, capturing over a million daily detections. 

DAIVID’s AI then evaluates each ad’s emotional response, attention, and brand recall, creating a creative effectiveness score (CES) – a composite metric that mirrors how audiences actually experience content.

In a media landscape increasingly defined by short attention spans and fragmented screens, this data provides a rare window into why certain stories break through – and how that resonance correlates with downstream behaviors like search and site visits.

As Kinetiq CEO Kevin Kohn put it, the partnership “gives marketers a holistic view of the TV and CTV advertising landscape – not just what aired, but why it resonated.”

That’s exactly the kind of insight performance marketers need to connect the dots between creative resonance and measurable outcomes.

Dig deeper: Your ads are dying: How to spot and stop creative fatigue before it tanks performance

What this means for SEO and PPC strategy

In February 2025, Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, revealed that: 

• “TV has surpassed mobile and is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S. (by watch time), and according to Nielsen, YouTube has been #1 in streaming watch time in the U.S. for two years.”

So, search marketers can apply the latest findings from the Breaking TV Ads Report in several ways:

• Anticipate search spikes: When a high-emotion or celebrity-driven TV ad launches, expect branded searches to rise. Align PPC budgets, ad copy, and keyword targeting around campaign themes and taglines.
• Optimize for intent moments: TV ads often generate “navigational” queries (brand name) and “informational” ones (product details, offers, or reviews). Ensure that organic content – landing pages, FAQs, and YouTube videos – are optimized to match these queries.
• Sync search campaigns with TV flighting: Use ad scheduling to mirror TV airtime or streaming rollouts. Research from Nielsen Catalina Solutions shows that coordinated campaigns can deliver up to 60% higher conversion lift compared to siloed efforts.
• Track branded search as a creative KPI: Branded search volume is one of the most reliable proxies for ad impact. Use tools like Google Trends or Search Console to monitor shifts after major media bursts.
• Leverage emotional triggers in copy: DAIVID’s data shows that ads evoking strong positive emotions drive higher attention and brand recall. Translate those emotional cues into ad extensions, headlines, and meta descriptions that mirror what audiences feel after seeing the TV spot.

Why the future of performance marketing is cross-channel

Search has long been viewed as a response channel – the final step in a consumer journey. But that view is outdated.

Today’s most successful campaigns use search as a connective tissue between offline inspiration and online action. 

Whether it’s a QR code at the end of a TV ad, a YouTube masthead following a primetime spot, or a Google Shopping ad that captures post-broadcast demand – search is the bridge between storytelling and sales.

As more brands invest in connected TV (CTV) and streaming, the line between “brand” and “performance” marketing will continue to blur. 

Creative effectiveness data helps close that gap – showing which emotional and visual cues are most likely to drive measurable search and conversion behavior.

Ultimately, reports like “Breaking TV Ads” remind us that the most powerful search strategy begins long before the query. 

It begins with attention and emotion, and, increasingly, on the biggest screen in the house.

Dig deeper: How connected TV advertising drives search demand

We’ve established the AI resume as the new C-suite-level asset that defines your brand at the bottom of the funnel, and we’ve mapped the strategic landscape that shows how it operates across explicit, implicit, and ambient research modes.

So, how do you build this asset to thrive in a three-part environment?

The answer is shifting from ranking in search results to the discipline of brand-focused algorithmic education – a multi-speed strategy aligned with the trio of technologies powering all modern recommendation engines.

The digital marketing ecosystem has been reshaped by AI assistive engines – platforms like Google AI, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot that no longer provide links but deliver synthesized, conversational answers. 

Understanding how to influence these engines is the new frontier of our industry.

Conversations I had in 2020 with Gary Illyes at Google and with Frédéric Dubut, Nathan Chalmers, and Fabrice Canel at Bing revealed that these engines – and, by extension, modern AI – all rely on the same three foundational technologies.

I call this the algorithmic trinity. Mastering it is the key to your future success.

The algorithmic trinity: The new operating system for search

Stop thinking of Google or ChatGPT as monolithic black boxes. 

See them instead as dynamic blends of three connected technologies. 

Every AI assistive engine is built from a unique mix of these components.

Traditional search engines

This is the foundation – the vast, real-time index of the web. 

It provides the fresh, up-to-the-minute information AI needs to answer questions about current events or niche topics. It is the engine’s window to the “here and now.”

Knowledge graphs

This is the AI’s brain – a machine-readable encyclopedia of verified facts about the world. 

Google’s Knowledge Graph is at least 10,000 times bigger than Wikipedia. 

This is where your brand’s core identity is stored. It provides the factual certainty and context AI needs to avoid hallucinating.

Large language models (LLMs)

This is the AI’s voice – the conversational interface that generates human-like text. 

The LLM synthesizes information from the search index and the knowledge graph to create the final answer delivered to the user.

Your brand strategy must operate on three timelines

Each part of the algorithmic trinity learns and updates at a different speed, which means your optimization strategy must be layered. 

Short-term tactics and long-term goals need to align with the technical “digestion speed” of each component.

Short term (weeks): Win the search results

Influencing traditional search results is your fastest path to visibility. 

By creating helpful, valuable content and packaging it for Google with simple SEO techniques, you can begin appearing in AI-powered search results within weeks. 

While it doesn’t build deep trust, it puts your brand into the real-time consideration set that AI assistive engines use to construct answers for niche or time-sensitive queries. 

Think of it as getting your daily talking points and hyper-niche answers into the conversation.

Mid term (months): Build the factual foundation

Educating the Knowledge Graph is how you build your permanent, factual record, a process that typically takes three to six months. 

It requires establishing your entity home – the definitive source of truth about you – and creating consistent, corroborating information across your digital footprint. 

When Google’s foundational understanding of me was wrong (“the voice of Boowa the Blue Dog”), it cost me countless opportunities. 

This is the work that corrects those errors.

Long term (years): Become foundational data

The ultimate goal is inclusion in an LLM’s foundational training data. 

This is a long game, often nine months to a year or more. 

It means your brand’s narrative, expertise, and authority have been so consistently present across the web that you’re incorporated into the next major training cycle. 

Once you’re part of that foundational knowledge, the AI doesn’t need to “look you up.” It already knows you. 

This is the holy grail of algorithmic authority.

The unifying principle: Entity and authority

Whether you are aiming for a short-term win in a search result or a long-term legacy in an LLM, the underlying requirement is the same. The algorithm is always asking three questions: 

• Who is this entity?
• Can I trust them?
• Are they an authority?

This is why your strategy must be built on the bedrock of entity SEO, N-E-E-A-T-T – my expansion of Google’s E-E-A-T framework that adds notability and transparency – and grounded in topical authority. 

Every signal you create across your digital ecosystem must work to answer those three questions with overwhelming clarity and proof.

The next frontiers: AI walled gardens and AI assistive agents

The game is already evolving. AI is moving beyond simply answering questions to acting on our behalf. 

I saw this firsthand when I used ChatGPT to help me buy guitar pedals.

Within 15 minutes, it took me from awareness to a confident decision and a final purchase. It acted as my personal shopping assistant.

This is the future of AI assistive agents. 

Soon, agents will autonomously book flights, schedule appointments, and purchase products. 

For an agent to execute a task on your behalf, its algorithmic confidence in a brand cannot be probabilistic – it must be absolute. 

The brand that has built the deepest foundation of understanding and credibility within the algorithmic trinity will be the one the agent chooses.

What’s the takeaway here?

In this new era, as the legendary football manager Peter Reid memorably put it, “to stand still is to move backwards.” 

Your digital strategy must evolve. Stop chasing blue links and start the work of brand-focused algorithmic education.

The key is understanding that the traditional web index is the fuel that feeds all three components of the algorithmic trinity. 

Your entire digital footprint must be organized to be frictionless for bots to discover, select, crawl, and render, digestible for them to confidently extract, index, and annotate, and irresistibly tasty for the algorithms that follow.

• “Frictionless” is the technical SEO strategy: This is the infrastructure. It ensures the bot can discover, select, crawl, and render your content without technical barriers.
• “Digestible” is the semantic SEO strategy: This is the structure. It uses semantic HTML, clear language, and structured data so the bot can extract content into dependable “chunks,” index it, and annotate it with near-certainty.
• “Tasty” is the brand and authority strategy: This is the quality, substance, and context of the content – the part that proves why you are the best answer. It reflects your topical authority, your positive third-party corroboration, and your clear digital brand echo.

Importantly, the algorithm evaluates N-E-E-A-T-T on three levels:

• The content: Is this piece of information helpful, accurate, and well-supported?
• The author: Is the person who wrote this a demonstrable, credible expert on this topic?
• The publisher: Is the platform publisher a recognized authority in this field?

Why the annotation layer determines who wins

This brings us to the most critical part of the process. 

You must understand the bot’s seven fundamental steps – discover, select, crawl, render, extract, index, and annotate – because this is the only path into the web index and the only way to reach the top of the pile for the algorithmic trinity.

As I learned from my conversations with Bing’s Canel, the annotation phase is essential. 

Algorithms do not select content by re-reading the content itself. They select it by reading the annotations – the “post-its” the bot created. 

They prioritize those annotations based on two factors: 

• Their relevancy to the specific need (populating the Knowledge Graph, inclusion in training data, or answering a query).
• The confidence score assigned to them.

This is why the “digestible” and “tasty” parts of the strategy are non-negotiable.

• The digestible (semantic SEO) work ensures the annotations are factually correct.
• The tasty (brand and authority) work generates the confidence score that determines whether the algorithm chooses you.

To thrive in the explicit, implicit, and ambient landscape, you must execute this holistic strategy and become the trusted, top-of-algorithmic-mind answer. 

The AI resume – especially one that holds up to a deep “rabbit hole” of explicit research – is not the goal. It is a byproduct of doing the work correctly.

The brands that succeed will be those that treat algorithms as powerful entities to be taught through a methodical curriculum. 

Start building that curriculum today, because the AI assistive agents of tomorrow are already studying.

I expected the dark-themed landing page to lose. 

Everything I knew about conversion optimization said the light background should win. 

Light themes are standard for B2B lead generation pages because they offer better readability, cleaner visual hierarchy, and align with accessibility standards. 

Unbounce’s analysis of 41,000 landing pages establishes baseline patterns favoring light backgrounds. It seemed like a safe bet.

But after splitting paid traffic 50/50 between a dark landing page and a light landing page for our industrial fleet repair SaaS, the light variant achieved a 16.62% higher CTR yet delivered 42% fewer total conversions.

This isn’t an argument for universal adoption of dark themes. 

It’s a case study in why audience context and industry-specific psychological associations matter more than following aggregate best practices derived from different populations.

Why light seemed like the obvious choice

We operate in a niche B2B SaaS vertical serving the transportation industry – specifically businesses that maintain commercial vehicles and equipment. 

Our target buyers are shop owners and operators who spend their days in industrial environments managing technicians, equipment, and demanding commercial customers.

Going into this test, I had specific expectations.

• Light backgrounds would convert better for text-heavy lead generation pages. Professional B2B landing page design principles emphasize whitespace and visual hierarchy. For our 7-field form targeting busy shop operators, light mode with dark text should provide superior readability.
• Blue CTAs would outperform. Blue is commonly associated with trust and security, which are critical for B2B software purchases. Our treatment used a blue CTA button for this reason.

I was wrong on both counts.

Dig deeper: 5 tips for creating a high-converting PPC landing page

The test: Isolating visual design

We ran a standard 50/50 split test through Google Ads and Meta, directing traffic to two landing pages with identical copy but drastically different visual presentations.

The control featured a dark theme: 

• Black background throughout.
• White text overlay.
• High-contrast white form fields on the dark backdrop.
• A black CTA button with a red outline.
• A dark overlay on the background image (trucks and an industrial environment). 
• No brand logo in the header.

The treatment used a light theme: 

• White and light gray background.
• Dark text on the light background.
• Light gray form fields on white.
• A blue CTA button.
• A lighter overlay on the same background image. 

The brand logo was prominently displayed in the header.

We kept everything else identical, particularly the:

• Headline.
• Body copy. 
• Value proposition. 
• 7-field form structure (email, name, business name, phone, shop type, technician count). 
• Page layout. 

This variable isolation is critical. If you change multiple elements, you cannot attribute results to any single change.

The test ran for 3 to 4 weeks on Google Ads search campaigns and Meta (Facebook and Instagram). 

The total spend on Google was $8,205.97, resulting in 767 clicks and 30 conversions.

What happened: The light theme’s CTR advantage was misleading

The results from Google Ads:

Dark theme:

• 10,250 impressions.
• 466 clicks (4.55% CTR).
• 19 conversions (4.08% conversion rate). 
• Cost per conversion: $274.67.

Light theme: 

• 5,677 impressions (44.6% fewer). 
• 301 clicks (5.30% CTR).
• 11 conversions (3.65% conversion rate). 
• Cost per conversion: $271.56.

The light theme’s CTR was 16.62% higher, which would typically be interpreted as a win. 

But it attracted lower-quality traffic that converted at comparable or worse rates. 

Meanwhile, Google’s algorithm allocated 44.6% fewer impressions to the light variant, resulting in 42% fewer total conversions despite essentially identical cost per conversion.

We ran the same test simultaneously on Meta, and the results were even more definitive. 

The dark theme significantly outperformed the light theme in conversions, with the light variant rarely generating conversions at all. 

This cross-platform consistency suggested the finding wasn’t an algorithmic quirk – it was an audience preference.

Note: Google’s algorithm allocated significantly fewer impressions to the light theme, likely detecting lower engagement signals that affected Quality Score.

Dig deeper: Dynamic landing pages: What works, what fails, and how to test

Why the dark theme won: Audience psychology over design theory

The result makes sense when you consider who we’re targeting and what they respond to psychologically.

Identity alignment: ‘This is for people like me’

Commercial transportation businesses are industrial workplaces. 

The aesthetic is functional, not decorative. Dark colors, metal surfaces, concrete floors, and equipment with black housings. 

The environmental psychology of these spaces shapes what feels trustworthy to the people who work in them.

The dark landing page matched that identity. It signaled “built for your industry” without explicitly stating it. 

The light theme, with its clean, modern aesthetic and prominent branding, resembled consumer SaaS: professional, polished, and aimed at someone else.

This pattern consistently appears in optimization testing: designs that reflect the visitor’s environment convert better than those that aspire to a different aesthetic standard.

Form contrast: Making interaction obvious

The white form fields on the dark background created exceptional contrast. They were visually unmissable. 

The form demanded attention not through size or position, but through contrast that made it impossible to ignore.

The light theme’s gray-on-white form fields blended into the page. They required conscious visual search. 

For a 7-field B2B form targeting busy shop operators, reducing cognitive load through clarity matters more than aesthetic refinement.

Tonal weight: Seriousness signals value

Dark backgrounds communicate weight, substance, seriousness, and luxury. They feel significant. 

Light backgrounds communicate ease, accessibility, and friendliness. 

All valuable qualities for many products, but potentially wrong for expensive B2B software aimed at industrial buyers.

Industrial software is a significant operational investment. It touches every part of the business: scheduling, invoicing, inventory, and customer relationships. 

Buyers need to feel that the software is substantial enough to handle that responsibility. 

The dark theme’s visual gravity supported that perception. The light theme’s brightness worked against it.

Category conventions: The familiar is trustworthy

Most heavy equipment, repair tools, and industrial software use dark interfaces. 

Parts catalogs, diagnostic software, and inventory systems typically trend toward dark themes with high-contrast elements. 

This isn’t random. It’s a category convention that has emerged because it works in these contexts.

Category conventions matter. Violating them can signal innovation, but it can also signal unfamiliarity. 

For risk-averse buyers making expensive B2B purchases, the familiar aesthetic reduced perceived risk rather than creating it.

The CTA color lesson

Despite following best practices by using a blue CTA button on the light theme (the color associated with trust in B2B contexts), it underperformed against the black button with red outline on the dark theme.

This violated conventional color psychology, but the explanation is straightforward: contrast matters more than color choice. 

The black-and-red button created a dramatic contrast against the dark background and white form fields, making it impossible to miss. 

The blue button, while theoretically the “correct” choice, blended into the light design’s overall aesthetic, reducing its visual prominence despite proper color selection.

Dig deeper: How to design landing pages that boost SEO and maximize conversions

The real lesson: Test design psychology, not just design

The lesson isn’t “dark beats light.” 

It’s that design is a carrier for psychological signals that vary by context. 

Your test hypothesis should be about the message your design sends, not the design itself.

Before your next test, ask:

• What does this design signal about who the product is for? Does it match your buyer’s identity, or create distance?
• What emotional response does it create? Weight/seriousness versus lightness/ease? Trust versus skepticism? Familiarity versus novelty?
• How does it fit category conventions? Are you violating expectations intentionally (differentiation) or accidentally causing confusion?
• What does it demand of the visitor? Does high contrast reduce cognitive load, or does darkness create strain?
• How does it connect to the previous step? Are you maintaining aesthetic continuity from ad/email/referral source?

These questions matter more than “which color converts better” because the answer to that question is always “it depends.”

Dig deeper: PPC landing pages: How to craft a winning post-click experience

How to run your own landing page design test

If you want to run a similar experiment, here’s what I learned about proper test structure.

Create true visual opposites

Don’t test shades of the same approach. Develop genuinely distinct aesthetic treatments that represent unique psychological perspectives. 

Dark versus light is a clear contrast. Light blue versus light green is not.

Keep everything else identical

Same copy, form, value prop, CTA, page structure, and URL parameters. Change only the visual treatment. 

If you change multiple variables, you can’t attribute results to any single change. 

Proper A/B testing requires variable isolation to draw valid conclusions.

Monitor both ad and landing page performance

Track CTR separately from conversion rate. 

If one variation gets higher CTR but lower conversion rate, you’ve discovered a message-match problem – the ad is attracting the wrong traffic.

Also, monitor if Google’s algorithm allocates impressions differently. 

If one variation gets significantly fewer impressions, the algorithm may be detecting lower quality scores or engagement signals.

Calculate true cost per conversion

Don’t just compare conversion rates. 

Calculate actual cost per conversion including ad spend. 

A variation with slightly lower conversion rate but significantly lower CPC might win on efficiency.

Look at confidence intervals, not just point estimates

With smaller conversion volumes, confidence intervals matter more than point estimates. 

The conversion rates were too close to call a definitive winner based on the sample size. 

Consider audience segmentation

If possible, segment results by device, geography, time of day, or other demographic factors. 

Dark themes might perform differently for mobile versus desktop, or for different age ranges.

Run qualitative analysis

Use heatmaps to see where users focus attention on each variation. Run session recordings to watch actual navigation behavior. 

Survey converters and non-converters to understand perception differences. We didn’t do this for this test, but it would strengthen the analysis significantly.

Dig deeper: Audience targeting in Google Ads Search campaigns: How to layer data for better results

Why audience context trumps best practices

The dangerous part of best practices in optimization is the implicit universality claim. 

“Light backgrounds convert better” becomes “light backgrounds always convert better for everyone,” which leads to cargo cult optimization, copying tactics without understanding context.

Light backgrounds do tend to outperform in aggregate data. But averages hide variation. Industry-specific contexts reveal massive differences. 

What works for SaaS doesn’t work for events. What works for ecommerce doesn’t work for B2B services.

Your optimization framework should start with “who is my audience and what signals do they respond to?” – not “what does research say works on average?”

The most successful tests challenge assumptions rather than confirm them. 

This test challenged the assumption that modern, clean, light design is universally superior. It wasn’t, at least not for this audience.

Dig deeper: Top 6 B2B paid media platforms: Where and how to advertise effectively

Clarity in your tests creates clarity in your decisions

Industrial B2B is just one example, but the principle holds everywhere: design only works when its signals match the audience. 

When you ground your tests in that question – not in aesthetics – you get cleaner data and clearer decisions. 

That shift turns every experiment into a reliable read on what your audience actually values, and that’s what drives consistent, defensible gains over time.

One of the major things we talk about with large language models (LLMs) is content creation at scale, and it’s easy for that to become a crutch. 

We’re all time poor and looking for ways to make our lives easier – so what if you could use tools like Claude and ChatGPT to frame your processes in a way that humanizes your website work and eases your day, rather than taking the creativity out of it?

This article tackles how to:

• Analyze customer feedback and questions at scale.
• Automate getting detailed and unique information from subject matter experts.
• Analyze competitors.

These are all tasks we could do manually, and sometimes still might, but they’re large-scale, data-based efforts that lend themselves well to at least some level of automation. 

And having this information will help ground you in the customer, or in the market, rather than creating your own echo chamber.

Analyzing customer feedback at scale

One of the fantastic features of LLMs is their ability to:

• Process data at scale.
• Find patterns.
• Uncover trends that might otherwise take a human hours, days, or weeks. 

Unless you’re at a global enterprise, it’s unlikely you’d have a data team with that capability, so the next best thing is an LLM.

And for this particular opportunity, we’re looking at customer feedback – because who wants to read through 10,000 NPS surveys or free text feedback forms? 

Not me. Probably not you, either.

You could upload the raw data directly into the project knowledge and have your LLM of choice analyze the information within its own interface.

However, my preference is to upload all the raw data into BigQuery (or similar if you have another platform you prefer) and then work with your LLM to write relevant SQL queries to slice and analyze your raw data.

I do this for two reasons: 

• It gives me a peek behind the curtain, offering me the opportunity to learn a bit of the base language (here, SQL) by osmosis.
• It’s another barrier or failsafe for hallucinations.

When raw data is uploaded directly into an LLM and analysis questions are asked directly into the interface, I tend to trust the analysis less. 

It’s much more likely it could just be making stuff up. 

When you have the raw data separated out and are working with the LLM to create queries to interrogate the data, it’s more likely to end up real and true with insights that will help your business rather than lead you on a wild goose chase.

Practically, unless you’re dealing with terrifyingly large datasets, BigQuery is free (though to set up a project, you might need to add a credit card). 

And no need to fear SQL either when you’re pair programming with an LLM – it will be able to give you the full query function. 

My workflow in this tends to be:

• Use SQL function from LLM.
• Debug and check data.
• Input results from SQL query into LLM.
• Generate visualizations either in an LLM or with SQL query.
• Rinse and repeat.

Dig deeper: 7 focus areas as AI transforms search and the customer journey in 2026

Automating subject matter expert interviews

It seems to be a common trait among subject matter experts that they’re time poor. 

They really don’t want to spend an hour talking with the marketing person about a new feature they’ve already discussed with the manufacturer for the last eight months. 

And who could blame them? They’ve probably talked it to death. 

And yet we still need that information, as marketing folk, to strategize how we present that feature on the website and give customers helpful detail that isn’t on the spec sheet.

So how do we get ahold of our experts? 

Create a custom GPT that acts as an interviewer. 

Fair warning, to get the most out of this process, you’ll want a unique version for each launch, product, or service you’re working on. 

It may not need to be as granular as per the article, but it may end up being that specific.

To do this, you’ll need at least a ChatGPT Plus subscription. 

Instructions will depend on your industry and the personality of your subject matter experts or sales team. 

They should include:

• Role and tone: How the “interviewer” should come across.
• Context: What you’re trying to learn and why.
• Interview structure: How to open, topics, how to probe more deeply.
• Pacing: Single question, wait for response, expanding questions.
• Closing: how to wrap and what to deliver at the end.

Once we do that, we’ll want to test it ourselves and pretend to be an SME. Then we refine the instructions from there.

This way, you’ll be able to reach your SMEs in the five minutes they have between calls. 

And you can use an LLM to extrapolate the major points, or even an article draft, from their answers.

Dig deeper: SEO personas for AI search: How to go beyond static profiles

Analyzing competitors for strategic insights

This one may be a bit sneaky and may require a bit of gray thinking. 

But there are a few things you can do with competitive data at scale that can help you understand the competitive landscape and your gaps within it, like:

• If you were able to gather your competitors’ reviews, you could see themes such as benefits, values, common complaints, and weaknesses.
• If you were able to gather their website copy, you could identify their positioning, implied audience, and any claims they may be making, as well as the industries they might be targeting, extrapolated through case studies.
  • With their website copy and support from Wayback Machine, you’d be able to identify with an LLM how their messaging has shifted over time.
  • Job postings could tell you what their strategic priorities are or where they may be looking to test.
  • Once we have their positioning, we’d be able to compare us and them. Where are we saying the same thing, and where are we differentiating?
• If you were able to gather their social interactions and engagement, we might be able to understand, again at scale, where they’re able to answer customer needs and where they might be falling down. What questions aren’t they able to answer?

Dig deeper: How to use competitive audits for AI SERP optimization

Scaling research without losing the human thread

Pair programming with an LLM to ground yourself in your customer with large data sets can be an endless opportunity to get actionable, specific information relatively quickly. 

These three opportunities are solid places to start, but they’re by no means the end. 

To extrapolate further, think about other data sources you own or have access to, like:

• Sales call transcripts.
• Google Search Console query data.
• On-site search.
• Heatmapping from user journey tools.

While it may be tempting to include Google Analytics or other analytics data in this, err on the side of caution and stick with qualitative or specifically customer-led data rather than quantitative data. 

Happy hunting!

Most brands don’t realize how much traffic they lose each day to unauthorized bidding, affiliate violations, and ad hijacking. 

Industry data shows ad fraud reached an estimated $84 billion of global digital ad spend in 2023. 

If your branded CPCs keep rising or competitors keep appearing above you in searches for your own name, this PPC brand protection guide can help you understand why – and what to do next.

What is brand protection in PPC?

Brand protection is the practice of defending your brand from unauthorized use of your branded search terms in PPC and from deceptive or fraudulent ad placements. 

The goal: make sure people searching for your brand or product name land on your official pages – not a competitor’s, affiliate’s, or reseller’s. 

When done well, brand protection safeguards traffic while strengthening your brand image and customer loyalty.

Without a brand protection strategy, you’ll face steep losses – higher CPCs, rising affiliate costs, and a drop in customer acquisition.

Activities tied to PPC brand protection include:

• Monitoring who bids on your branded keywords.
• Spotting unusual spikes in CPCs or impression share.
• Identifying unauthorized trademark use in paid search.
• Detecting hidden, geo-targeted ads meant to avoid detection.
• Enforcing compliance rules for affiliates and partners.

Core threats and risks

The three main sources of threats are:

• Competitors: Targeting your branded searches is an easy way for them to tap into high-intent traffic and intercept your audience.
• Affiliates: If you miss dishonest tactics, you end up paying for leads you would have won on your own – driving up costs without adding customers.
• Fraudsters: Their increasingly opaque tactics can cause serious financial and reputational damage to your brand.

If you don’t protect your brand in paid search, you’re likely to face these common risks:

• Brand bidding: Others bid on your branded queries to capture high-intent searches, drive up CPCs, and cut into your impression share. Over time, you’re forced to spend more to regain position, lowering your ROI.
• Ad hijacking: Competitors or fraudsters mimic your messaging, ad structure, or landing pages to make users think they’re clicking your official ad.
• Malicious redirects: Clicks on “brand-looking” ads lead to phishing, malware, or low-quality pages.
• Ad copy misalignment: Affiliates use unapproved messaging, outdated claims, or promotions you’re not running, which erodes trust and harms your brand image.
• Comparative or misleading ad copies: Copy that positions another product as a direct replacement for yours to divert conversions.

These risks demand a dedicated PPC protection strategy. Left unchecked, they drive up acquisition costs and cause you to lose customers at the final decision stage.

Why you need to protect your brand in today’s PPC landscape

Failing to protect your brand in PPC erodes trust, skews attribution, and weakens your marketing over time. As a result, conversions drop, ROI slips, and your paid media becomes less effective.

Key facts:

• Global ad fraud costs are projected to grow to $172 billion by 2028 (Statista)
• 69.7% of marketers reported problems with “spam or fake lead submissions” coming from their paid media campaigns (Lunio)
• Cross-industry anti-fraud initiatives saved U.S. advertisers $10.8 billion in 2023 (TAG)

Essential components of a strong brand protection strategy

PPC tactics for effective PPC protection

When your campaigns are organized clearly and systematically, you can control risks more easily and respond faster to unauthorized activity.

Key elements of a well-planned brand protection strategy include:

• Account structure: Keep your campaigns clearly segmented. Separate branded ads so you can spot anomalies in CPCs and impression share.
• Negative keyword strategy: Use targeted negatives—partner names, resellers, and irrelevant variations—to cut noise and prevent unwanted triggers around your brand.
• Rules for affiliates: Set clear policies to prevent most violations and make it easier to detect risks and enforce compliance.

Monitoring and automation for PPC brand protection

Manual monitoring can’t keep up with competitors and fraudsters who constantly rotate tactics. A strong brand protection strategy relies on automated monitoring to catch threats early and resolve them before they affect your budget, CPCs, or conversions.

Core components of effective automation include:

• Monitoring systems: Continuously track and surface unauthorized bidders, affiliate violations, and unusual competitor activity.
• Real-time alerts: Get notified the moment issues appear so you can respond quickly.

Key metrics to measure your brand protection strategy

You can measure the effectiveness of your PPC brand protection efforts by tracking metrics that show the scale of violations and how efficiently you respond to them.

Key metrics include:

• Violations count: How many unauthorized activities were detected across branded searches during a set timeframe.
• Enforcement rate: How effectively you acted on those violations.
• Cost savings: The budget you recovered by reducing CPC inflation and stopping commission leakage.
• Branded CTR recovery: How much your visibility and click-through rate improved after removing violators.
  

Together, these metrics provide a clear view of how well your brand protection strategy is performing and where you may need to make improvements.

Industry cases of effective PPC brand protection

Automotive: Car.co.uk

UAWC agency shared a use case involving a car company that was losing branded traffic in paid search. The source of the problem turned out to be competitors’ aggressive brand bidding tactics. 

To recover the losses, the brand had to employ UAWC to audit competitors, identify branded keyword conflicts, restructure ad campaigns, and closely monitor auction dynamics. 

As a result, branded impression share rose to 95%, protecting high-intent traffic and stabilizing CPCs. 

iGaming: Rhino Affiliates

Rhino was grappling with affiliate fraud and unauthorized brand bidding on its flagship brand. With the help of Bluepear, they uncovered 105 violators. 

Using reports and screenshots as evidence, Rhino successfully disputed payments – ultimately saving €131,000 and restoring their branded search visibility. 

How Bluepear helps you protect your brand automatically

Monitoring is the operational backbone of brand protection – that’s exactly where Bluepear delivers the most impact.

After signing up: You create an account and fully customise it with the help of a built-in AI-assistant – it only takes 10 minutes. From there, you get instant access to automated brand monitoring. Bluepear reveals every violation, including: 

• Brand bidding: Identifies advertisers targeting your branded keywords across markets and devices.
• Affiliate violations: Flags partners who break program rules by bidding on brand terms, using unapproved messaging, or redirecting traffic.
• Hidden ads: Detects ads that are visible only in specific regions or time periods – a common tactic used by violators to evade detection.

Bluepear alerts you to every violation and backs each one with clear evidence and screenshots. This gives you airtight proof for fast escalation and cuts the time you spend disputing payments with affiliates and PPC platforms.

Impact: After removing unauthorized bidders, you gain cleaner attribution, lower acquisition costs, and stronger efficiency across all paid channels.

Final recommendations for scalable PPC protection

• Continuous monitoring: New violators can appear at any moment. Ongoing monitoring ensures you catch issues before they inflate CPCs or drain conversions.
• Strict affiliate rules: Well-defined rules reduce ambiguity and improve long-term compliance.
• Automation-first approach: Automation speeds detection, supports faster decisions, and scales protection across markets and campaigns.
• Consistent enforcement: Fast, repeatable enforcement maintains deterrence and keeps branded auctions clean.

Most of the damage to your branded traffic happens out of sight – hidden ads, affiliate rule breaks, and impersonation fraud. Bluepear uncovers it all instantly, starting at just $169 a month after a free trial.

See what’s been slipping through:

Try Bluepear’s solution for brand protection and detect hidden brand bidding in minutes.

Pinterest attracts users who want inspiration and solutions, not passive browsing. 

The platform now reaches 600 million monthly active users, many of whom arrive with clear intent to research, plan, or purchase. 

That makes its ad formats especially valuable for marketers who want to appear in moments when people are actively looking for ideas and products. 

Here’s how each format works and when to consider it.

Ad formats explained

Pinterest Ads offers a variety of ad formats, many of which aren’t available on other social media platforms.

Let’s take a look at what formats they offer and when you might want to consider using them.

Carousel ads

Carousel ads are an interactive format that showcase two to five cards (images), where users can swipe through the cards, tap a card to open a close-up view, or click through to a destination URL.

This format is a great way for advertisers to showcase multiple messages or products and encourage users to engage with the ad via the swipe capabilities.

Example: A wedding planner could use multiple cards to share statistics on the U.K. wedding market and rising costs of the average wedding, with the final card promoting an ebook on how to reduce costs, which is available to download for free on their website.

Collection ads

Similar to carousel ads, collection ads allow advertisers to show multiple products in one ad.

The ad starts with a “hero” creative (either an image, a video, or a slideshow), which sits above three smaller images. 

When the user clicks on the ad and opens close-up mode, they are presented with up to 24 additional images or products.

This format can be used by advertisers who want to showcase multiple products, such as a specific collection or a product catalog.

Example: A jewelry store could use a looping video of a woman putting on a gold set of jewelry, with the three smaller images showing product images of each item. 

Once the user clicks on the ad, they are presented with the full range of gold jewelry sold by the business.

Idea ads

Idea ads are made from a single full-screen image or video and appear on the homepage, in searches, and alongside related pins.

This is an ideal format for advertisers who want their ads to have a more native feel while still being shoppable or facilitating site visits.   

Standard ads

This is the most basic ad offering on Pinterest, with the ad made from a single static image.

Standard ads are a great option for advertisers looking for a simple format, can offer a visually compelling image, and want to take users directly to their site.

Example: A CrossFit gym could use a photo from a recent shoot of one of its classes in action, with clear, bold text stating “Join us,” the logo in the top right corner, and a call to action to “Book your free class.” 

Video ads

There are two types of video ads available on Pinterest: standard and max-width.

• Standard video ads are the same size as a standard pin and consist of a single video.
• Max-width video ads expand across both column feeds when viewed through the Pinterest app, making them twice the size of standard video ads.

Due to their autoplay nature, these formats are ideal for grabbing users’ attention and for advertisers who are able to tell a story with video content. 

Shopping ads 

Shopping ads use a single, static product image, but unlike standard ads, they also show product details including price.

This format is ideal for ecommerce brands looking to showcase products through a shoppable format and those with a dependable product feed.

Quiz ads

Quiz ads enable advertisers to build a quiz with two to three questions and, depending on the answers given, show users two to three results. 

The results consist of a visual asset, a headline, and a description, from which the user can click through to a website to continue their journey.

This is another interactive format, ideal for advertisers looking to offer users a more customized experience.

Example: A beauty brand could use the quiz format to guide users to the product page for the right range for their skincare needs. 

This helps address users’ wants and needs and provides a more personal experience than sending them to the website homepage.

Local inventory ads

Local inventory ads help advertisers promote their products alongside real-time pricing for in-stock items. 

They require advertisers to set up store locations and local product information via a store feed and a local inventory supplemental feed.

This format works well for advertisers looking to drive store visits and promote their convenience to local platform users.

Dig deeper: Cross-platform, not copy-paste: Smarter Meta, TikTok, and Pinterest ad creative

Ad formats in beta

Pinterest ads regularly offers new ad formats, with the following two currently in beta

Top of Search ads

In September 2025, Pinterest began testing Top of Search ads, which appear within the first 10 slots of search results and related pins.

Top of Search ads have a 29% higher average CTR than other campaigns, according to Pinterest’s test data. This is a promising format for advertisers looking to quickly and effectively capture the attention of high-intent users.

Lead ads

Lead ads are designed to help advertisers reach prospects on Pinterest by enabling them to collect information through a lead form, making them an ideal format for lead generation.

Advertisers can choose what text appears in the descriptions, questions, and confirmation card, giving them control over the information they want to collect.

The case for investing in Pinterest ads in 2026

Pinterest Ads offers a mix of visual and interactive formats that help brands stand out in front of a high-intent audience.

As the platform expands its ad lineup, marketers gain additional ways to support research, inspiration, and purchase journeys with creative built for how people use Pinterest.

With more formats in development and a growing user base, 2026 presents a clear opportunity for advertisers to build or deepen their investment in the channel.

Google isn’t rewarding whoever buys the most ads or uploads the glossiest photos. It’s rewarding the business that matches what people expect in the moment.

That’s why the old checklist approach to local SEO breaks down – it assumes every customer behaves the same.

In other words, Google does play favorites, the “signal-fit” kind. Google’s ranking system isn’t swinging blindly; it’s tuned to intent, behavior, and category nuance.

However, recent trends call that old assumption into question.

A single formula doesn’t guide Google’s Local Pack – it’s shaped by how people actually search.

The notion that a generic playbook can successfully deliver the same results for a burger joint and a dental office simply doesn’t pass muster, especially when search is continually being tailored to every individual.

What the data shows

Yext’s analysis of 8.7 million Google Business Profiles across five U.S. industries cuts through the myth that brand size or ad budget secures visibility. (Disclosure: I’m the senior director of Yext Research.)

What actually moves the needle is “signal fit” – how closely a listing aligns with local users’ expectations.

Review cadence, photo quality, and profile completeness all matter, but not in the same way everywhere. Google’s weighting of these features changes across industries and even geographical regions. 

These granular insights underscore the fundamental truth that Google is indeed exhibiting preferences, but these preferences are rooted in the listing’s ability to precisely match local context and the user’s immediate needs.

The takeaway for multi-location brands is simple: you can’t brute force your way into the Local Pack. Each industry requires a distinct strategy, tuned to the signals that matter most there.

The concept of “signal-fit” is perhaps best understood through its industry-specific expressions, where Google’s algorithm adapts to the unique expectations of consumers.

• Hospitality: Functional information carries more weight than aesthetics. Business hours, a well-written description, and a complete profile matter most. Photo volume beyond a reasonable threshold adds little advantage. Travelers care less about another angle of the pool and more about whether there’s parking when they arrive at midnight.
• Healthcare: Patient satisfaction and access to care carry the most weight. Frequent, high-quality reviews, accurate hours, and a clear location description drive visibility far more than photos or marketing copy. Patients make choices based on credibility and reliability, not polish. In healthcare, trust is built through consistency.
• Retail: When deciding whether a store is worth the trip, shoppers rely most on what other customers say. Review volume and sentiment are the strongest indicators of performance in this category, showing one of the sharpest divides between leaders and laggards, second only to healthcare. A polished, up-to-date listing signals a store that runs smoothly. A neglected one sends a different message: if you can’t manage your own details, what else are you missing?
• Food and Dining: Among all categories, this one is the tightest race. Review ratings and steady brand engagement with customers are the strongest signals. Profile completeness still matters, but contributes less to visibility than in other industries. Diners respond to signs of activity, like fresh feedback, prompt replies, and a consistent flow of reviews.
• Financial Services: In “Your Money, Your Life” categories, trust depends as much on reputation as on real-world experience. A professional photo can project stability, but a steady stream of authentic reviews and responses does far more to build confidence.

Regional differences don’t rewrite the rules, but they do bend them.

In the Northeast, restaurants see stronger results when social media links are present, while in some areas, healthcare listings benefit less from photos.

These patterns serve as a reminder that Google’s idea of “relevance” is always local.

How to align each location with local consumer signals

Google Business Profile optimizations vary by vertical.

Treating every location the same may simplify operations, but it costs visibility where it matters most.

Applying the same checklist across every location will cost you customers (and revenue). Marketers must continually re-evaluate their local SEO strategies.

The era of the universal checklist is over; the future belongs to the agile.

• Measure the localization effects: Observe each location in the context of its locale and what content and businesses users are seeking and engaging with.
• Prioritize relevant signals: Dial in the GBP features most impactful for your business category. Optimize for relevance, not routine.
• Implement continuous testing: Treat local SEO as an experiment. Set aside test markets and regional segments to compare approaches, track changes, and validate what actually works. The faster you detect shifts in signal fit, the faster you can adapt.
• Foster authentic engagement: Reviews only work if they’re part of a conversation. Responding quickly and sincerely shows customers – and Google – that you’re paying attention. Genuine engagement builds credibility that algorithms can measure.
• Maintain your digital footprint: Keep your Google Business Profile information up to date. Even incremental updates result in measurable gains. A 1% increase in updates corresponds to a 2.23% increase in Google clicks to brand websites. Detail continuity across third-party directories impacts Google validation grounding.

Why precision will decide who gets seen next

Google is always learning from its users’ behavior and dynamically adjusting to them.

Generic SEO playbooks have a natural limitation, and that limitation will ultimately cost you revenue.

“Best practices” may hedge against being invisible, but they won’t deliver steady wins in competitive environments.

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape the discovery process by condensing choices into concise answers and confident suggestions, the aperture on who gets seen will only narrow.

A hyper-localized GBP strategy will not merely be a competitive advantage; it will be a foundational differentiator. 

Google’s Local Pack algorithm already behaves like an AI-powered recommendation engine – rewarding relevance, not routine. For marketers, that means it’s time to transcend generic approaches and embrace the power of precision in local SEO.

The brands that align with localized consumer signals will keep winning visibility long after the playbook changes again.

The danger isn’t doing the wrong thing. It’s doing the same thing everywhere.

With generative AI tools attracting hundreds of millions of users and AI-enhanced results appearing in more search experiences, the way people discover brands is changing. Traditional SEO metrics alone no longer capture this full picture.

Welcome to the era of generative engine optimization (GEO). If you aren’t tracking your brand’s visibility across AI search engines, you’re flying blind.

The AI search revolution is already here

The numbers are striking: 

• 58% of consumers have replaced traditional search engines with generative AI tools for product recommendations, according to Capgemini research.
• Traditional organic search traffic is expected to decline by 50% by 2028, per Gartner. 
• ChatGPT referrals now drive 10% of its new user sign-ups – up from less than 1% just six months prior, Vercel reported.

Unlike traditional search, where you fight for spots on a results page, AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity deliver direct answers and cite only a few sources. If your brand isn’t mentioned, you may be invisible to users who rely on AI-generated answers.

This is where a GEO rank tracker becomes essential. Tools like Geoptie’s free GEO Rank Tracker show you exactly where your brand stands across major AI platforms.

What is a GEO rank tracker?

A GEO rank tracker measures how often your brand appears, gets cited, and is recommended across AI-powered search platforms. Unlike traditional rank trackers that focus on your position on search engine results pages, GEO tracking zeroes in on these metrics that actually matter in the AI era:

• Brand mention frequency: How often AI engines reference your brand when answering relevant queries.
• Citation rates: Whether your website appears as a source in AI-generated responses.
• Share of voice: Your visibility compared to competitors within AI answers.
• Cross-platform performance: Your visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

In traditional SEO, you optimize for where you appear in a list of search results. In GEO, you optimize for whether AI mentions you at all – and what it says when it does. Geoptie helps brands navigate this shift with a full suite of GEO tools.

Why traditional rank tracking falls short

If you still rely on traditional rank tracking tools, you’re measuring yesterday’s game:

• Different discovery mechanisms: Traditional search engines rank pages using a variety of signals, such as backlinks and keywords. AI engines use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to pull from multiple sources and synthesize a single answer.
• Answers over clicks: Users are increasingly relying on AI-generated summaries without ever clicking through. A top-ranking page means nothing if AI doesn’t cite it.
• Variable outputs: AI responses shift from query to query. Tracking them requires consistent monitoring and statistical sampling – exactly what Geoptie’s GEO Rank Tracker is built to handle.
• Multi-platform fragmentation: Your brand might show up in ChatGPT yet be invisible in Perplexity. Each AI platform pulls from different data sources and uses its own retrieval methods.

Key metrics every GEO rank tracker should measure

When evaluating your AI search visibility, focus on these core metrics:

• Citation Frequency: How often your site or content gets cited in AI-generated answers. This is the GEO version of earning a backlink – only it directly shapes what millions of users see.
• Brand Visibility Score: A composite metric showing how prominently your brand appears across AI platforms for your target keywords and topics. High visibility means the AI reliably recognizes and references your brand as relevant.
• AI Share of Voice: Your brand’s mention rate compared to competitors in AI-generated answers. If a competitor shows up in 60% of relevant responses and you appear in only 15%, that gap represents a lost opportunity.
• Sentiment and Positioning: AI platforms don’t just mention brands – they characterize them. Understanding how AI describes your business helps identify perception gaps and optimization opportunities.
• Geographic Performance: AI responses can vary by location. A GEO rank tracker with location-based analysis shows how your visibility differs across markets.

How to track your brand’s AI search rankings

Getting started with GEO tracking requires a systematic approach:

Step 1: Identify your core prompts

Start by mapping the questions your potential customers ask at each stage of their journey. Unlike keyword research, prompt research focuses on the natural language questions people type into AI chatbots.

Step 2: Monitor across all major platforms

AI search is fragmented across multiple platforms, each with different strengths and user bases:

• ChatGPT: The dominant player with 800+ million weekly users.
• Google AI Overviews: Appearing on billions of Google searches.
• Claude: Growing rapidly with integration into Safari.
• Perplexity: Gaining traction for research-oriented queries.
• Gemini: Google’s standalone AI assistant is growing fast.

Step 3: Track by location and language

AI responses vary by geography. If you serve multiple markets, track your visibility in each target country.

Step 4: Benchmark against competitors

Understanding your share of voice against competitors shows whether you’re gaining or losing ground in AI search visibility.

For brands looking to get started fast, Geoptie’s free GEO Rank Tracker offers an easy entry point. Add your domain, target country, and keyword, and the tool shows your rankings across Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity – giving you an instant snapshot of your AI search presence.

Interpreting your GEO Rank Tracker results

Understanding what your AI visibility data means is crucial for taking action:

High visibility, low citations

If AI platforms often mention your brand but rarely cite your site, your content may not have the structured, authoritative format AI engines prefer. Strengthen it with statistics, expert quotes, and clear source attribution.

Strong on one platform, weak on others

Each AI platform draws from different data sources. If you’re visible in ChatGPT but absent in Perplexity, investigate which sources each platform favors and adjust your distribution strategy to match.

Declining visibility over time

AI systems continually retrain on new content. If your visibility slips, competitors may be creating more citation-worthy material, or your content may simply be getting stale. Regular updates and fresh publishing are essential.

Competitor visibility gaps

When you spot queries where competitors appear, but you don’t, you’ve found optimization opportunities. Analyze what makes their content citation-worthy, then create competing assets.

From tracking to optimization: Building your GEO strategy

A GEO rank tracker gives you the data, but turning those insights into stronger visibility takes strategic action:

• Expand your semantic footprint: Cover your core topics thoroughly, including adjacent concepts and the related questions users are likely to ask.
• Increase fact density: AI platforms prefer content packed with statistics and verifiable details. Research from Princeton University, Georgia Tech, and the Allen Institute for AI suggested that adding citations and quotes boosted AI visibility by more than 40%.
• Optimize for structure: Use clear headers, TL;DR summaries, and FAQ sections. AI engines often pull structured content directly into their answers.
• Build entity authority: Keep your brand’s information consistent across trusted, authoritative sources that AI platforms rely on.

For comprehensive AI search optimization beyond rank tracking, Geoptie’s GEO dashboard offers tools for content analysis, competitive intelligence, technical GEO audits, and ongoing performance monitoring.

The cost of ignoring GEO tracking

The shift to AI search is already here. Brands that ignore their AI visibility risk:

• Losing discovery opportunities as more users rely on AI for recommendations.
• Falling behind competitors who are already building their AI visibility.
• Misallocating resources without knowing whether content investments are paying off.
• Missing brand-perception blind spots in how AI describes and positions them.

Getting started today

The barrier to entry for GEO tracking is lower than you might expect. Here’s a simple plan to get started:

1. Run an initial visibility check: Use a free tool like Geoptie’s GEO Rank Tracker to see where you stand across major AI platforms.
2. Document your baseline: Record your mention rates, citation frequencies, and competitor comparisons.
3. Identify quick wins: Look for queries where you’re close to visibility or where small content improvements could earn citations.
4. Establish ongoing monitoring: AI visibility changes faster than traditional rankings. Geoptie’s comprehensive dashboard helps you spot trends early.
5. Integrate GEO into your broader strategy: The strongest approach pairs traditional SEO with GEO.

The future of AI search visibility

We’re still in the early days of GEO. Brands that start understanding and optimizing for AI search now will gain advantages that compound over time.

Key trends to watch:

• Multimodal search: AI platforms are starting to process images, voice, and video alongside text.
• Real-time integration: AI systems are connecting to live data sources for fresher, more accurate answers.
• Platform fragmentation: More AI search options are emerging and competing for user attention.

Your visibility in AI-generated answers will increasingly determine whether customers discover your brand. A reliable GEO rank tracker is becoming core infrastructure for modern marketing.

Key takeaways

• Traditional rank tracking doesn’t capture AI search visibility. Dedicated GEO tools like Geoptie are essential.
• Core GEO metrics include citation frequency, brand visibility score, AI share of voice, and geographic performance
• AI search varies by platform, so meaningful tracking requires monitoring ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.
• GEO data fuels smarter optimization – expanding your semantic footprint, increasing fact density, and building entity authority.
• Start with Geoptie’s free GEO Rank Tracker and scale to the full GEO dashboard for comprehensive optimization

Generative systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity are quietly taking over the early parts of discovery – the “what should I know?” stage that once sent millions of people to your website. 

Visibility now isn’t just about who ranks. It’s about who gets referenced inside the models that guide those decisions.

The metrics we’ve lived by – impressions, sessions, CTR – still matter, but they no longer tell the full story. 

Mentions, citations, and structured visibility signals are becoming the new levers of trust and the path to revenue.

This article pulls together data from Siege Media’s two-year content performance study, Grow and Convert’s conversion findings, Seer Interactive’s AI Overview research, and what we’re seeing firsthand inside generative platforms. 

Together, they offer a clearer view of where visibility, engagement, and buying intent are actually moving as AI takes over more of the user journey – and has its eye on even more.

Content type popularity and engagement trends

In a robust study, the folks at Siege Media analyzed two years of performance across various industry blogs, covering more than 7.2 million sessions. It’s an impressive dataset, and kudos to them for sharing it publicly.

A disclaimer worth noting: the data focuses on blog content, so these trends may not map directly to other formats such as videos, documentation, or landing pages.

With that in mind, here’s a run-through of what they surfaced.

TL;DR of the Siege Media study

Pricing and cost content saw the strongest growth over the past two years, while top-of-funnel guides and “how-to” posts declined sharply.

They suggest that pricing pages gained ground at the expense of TOFU content. I interpret this differently. 

Pricing content didn’t simply replace TOFU because the relationship isn’t zero-sum. 

As user patterns evolve, buyers increasingly start with generative research, then move to high-intent queries like pricing or comparisons as they get closer to a decision.

That distinction – correlation vs. causation – matters a lot in understanding what’s really changing.

The data shows major growth in pricing pages, calculators, and comparison content. 

Meanwhile, guides and tutorials – the backbone of legacy SEO – took a sharp hit. 

Keep that drop in mind. We’ll circle back to it later.

Interestingly, every major content category saw an increase in engagement. That makes sense. 

As users complete more of their research inside generative engines, they reach your site later in the journey or for additional details, when they’re already motivated and ready to act.

If you’re a data-driven SEO, this might sound like a green light to focus exclusively on bottom-of-funnel content. 

Why bother with top-of-funnel “traffic” that doesn’t convert? 

Leave that for the suckers chasing GEO visibility metrics for vanity, right?

But of course, this is SEO, so I have to say it …

Did you expect me to say, “It depends?”

Here’s a question instead: when that high-intent user typed the query that surfaced a case study, pricing page, or comparison page, where did they first learn the brand existed?

Dig deeper: AI agents in SEO: What you need to know

Don’t forget the TOFU!

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you’ll have to keep making TOFU content. 

You might need to make even more of it.

Let’s think about legacy SEO.

If we look back – waaaaay back – to 2023 and a study from Grow and Convert, we see that while there is far more TOFU traffic…

…it converts far worse.

Note: They only looked at one client, so take it with a grain of salt. However, the direction still aligns with other studies and our instincts.

This pattern also shows up across channels like PPC, which is why TOFU keywords are generally cheaper than BOFU.

The conversion rate is higher at the bottom of the funnel.

Now we’re seeing this shift carry over to generative engines, except that generative engines cover the TOFU journey almost entirely. 

Rather than clicking through a series of low-conversion content pieces as they move through the funnel, users stay inside the generative experience through TOFU and often MOFU, then click through or shift to another channel (search or direct) only when it’s time to convert.

For example, when I asked ChatGPT to help me plan a trip to the Outer Banks:

After a dozen back-and-forths planning a trip and deciding what to eat, I wanted to find out where to stay.

That journey took me through many steps and gave me multiple chances to encounter different brands and filtering or refinement options. 

I eventually landed on my BOFU prompt, “Some specific companies would be great.” 

From there, I might click the links or search for the company names on Google.

What matters about this journey – apart from the fact that my final query would be practically useless as insight in something like Search Console – is that throughout the TOFU and MOFU stages, I was seeing citations and encountering brands I would rely on later. 

Once I switched into conversion mode, I wanted help making decisions. That’s where I’m likely to click through to a few companies to find a rental.

So, when we read statistics like Pew’s finding that AI Overviews reduce CTR by upwards of 50%, and then consider what happens when AI Mode hits the browser, it’s easy to worry about where your traffic goes. Add to that ChatGPT’s 700 million weekly active users (and growing):

And according to their research on how users engage with it:

We can see a clear TOFU hit and very little BOFU usage.

So, on top of the ~50% hit you may be taking from AI Overviews, 700+ million people are going to ChatGPT and other generative platforms for their top-of-funnel needs. 

I did exactly that above with my trip planning to the OBX.

Dig deeper: 5 B2B content types AI search engines love

But wait!

The good news is that while that vacation rental company or blue widget manufacturer might not see me on their site when I’m figuring out what to do – or what a blue widget even is – I’m still going to take the same number of holidays and buy the same number of products I would have without AI Overviews or ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc.

Unless you’re a publisher or make money off impressions, you’ll still have the same amount of money to be made. 

It just might take fewer website visits to do it.

More about TOFU

Traffic at the bottom of the funnel is holding steady for now (more on that below), but the top of the funnel is being replaced quickly by generative conversations rather than visits. 

The question is whether being included in those conversations affects your CTR further down the funnel.

The folks at Seer Interactive found that organic clicks rose from 0.6% to 1.08% when a site was cited in AI Overviews. 

And while the traffic was far lower, ChatGPT had a conversion rate of 16% compared with Google organic’s 1.8%.

If we look at the conversion rate for organic traffic at the bottom of the funnel – which we saw above – it was 4.78%. 

Users who engage with generative engines clearly get further into their decision-making than users who reach BOFU queries through organic search. 

But why?

While I can’t be certain, I agree with Seer’s conclusion that AI-driven users are pre-sold during the TOFU stage. 

They’ve already encountered your brand and trust the system to interpret their needs. When it’s time to convert, they’re almost ready with their credit card.

Why bottom-funnel stability won’t last much longer

Above, I noted that “traffic at the bottom of the funnel is holding steady for now.”

It’s only fair to warn you that through 2026 and 2027, we’ll likely see this erode. 

The same number of people will still travel and still buy blue widgets. 

They just won’t book or buy them themselves. And at best, attribution will be even worse than it is today.

I spoke at SMX Advanced last spring about the rise of AI agents. 

I won’t get into all the gory details here, but the Cliff Notes are this:

Agents are AI systems with some autonomy that complete tasks humans otherwise would. 

They’re rising quickly – it’s the dominant topic for those of us working in AI – and that growth isn’t slowing anytime soon. You need to be ready.

A few concepts to familiarize yourself with, if you want to understand what’s coming, are:

• AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol): A standard that allows agents to securely execute payments on your behalf. Think of it as a digital letter of credit that ensures the agent can only buy the specific “blue widget” you approved within the price limit you set. Before you say, “But I’d never send a machine to do a human’s job,” let me tell you, you will. And if you somehow prove me wrong individually out of spite, your customers will.
• Gemini Computer Use Model API: A model with reasoning and image understanding that can navigate and engage with user interfaces like websites. While many agentic systems access data via APIs, this model (OpenAI has one too, as do others) lets the agent interact with visual interfaces to access information it normally couldn’t – navigating filters, logins, and more if given the power.
• MCP (Model Context Protocol): An emerging standard acting as a universal USB port for AI apps. It lets agents safely connect to your internal data (like checking your calendar or reading your emails) to make purchasing decisions with full context and to work interactively with other agents. Hat tip to Ahrefs for building an awesome MCP server.

Dig deeper: How Model Context Protocol is shaping the future of AI and search marketing

Why do these protocols matter to a content strategist?

Because once AP2 and Computer Use hit critical mass, the click – that sacred metric we’ve optimized for two decades – changes function. 

It stops being a navigation step for a human exploring a website and becomes a transactional step for a machine executing a task.

If an agent uses Computer Use to navigate your pricing page and AP2 to pay for the subscription, the human user never sees your bottom-of-the-funnel content. 

So in that world, who – or rather, what – are you optimizing for?

This brings us back to the Siege Media data. 

Right now, pricing pages and calculators are winning because humans are using AI to research (TOFU and MOFU) and then manually visiting sites to convert (BOFU). 

But as agents take over execution, that manual visit disappears. The “traffic” to your pricing page may be bots verifying costs, not humans persuaded by your copy.

The 2026 strategy

This reality pushes value back up the funnel. 

If the agent handles the purchase, the human decision – the “moment of truth” – happens entirely inside the chat interface or agentic system during the research phase.

In this world, you don’t win by having the flashiest pricing page. 

You win by being the brand the LLM recommends when the user asks, “Who should I trust?”

Your strategy for 2026 requires a two-pronged approach:

• For the agent (the execution): Ensure your BOFU content is technically flawless. Use clean schema, accessible APIs, and clear data structures so that when an agent arrives via MCP or Computer Use to execute a transaction, it encounters no friction.
• For the human (the selection): Double down on TOFU. Focus on mentions and citations. You need to be the entity referenced in the generative answer so that users – and agents – trust you.

As we move toward 2026 and then 2027 (it’ll be here sooner than you think), the “click” will become a commodity more often handled by machines. 

The mention, however, remains the domain of human trust. And in my opinion, that’s where your next battle for visibility will be fought.

Time to start – or hopefully keep – making the TOFU.

Evaluating SEO tools has never been more complicated. 

Costs keep rising, and promises for new AI features are everywhere.

This combination is hardly convincing when you need leadership to approve a new tool or expand the budget for an existing one. 

Your boss still expects SEO to show business impact – not how many keywords or prompts you can track, how fast you can optimize content, or what your visibility score is. 

That is exactly where most tools still fail miserably.

The landscape adds even more friction. 

Features are bundled into confusing packages and add-on models, and the number of solutions has grown sharply in the last 12 months. 

Teams can spend weeks or even months comparing platforms only to discover they still cannot demonstrate clear ROI or the tools are simply out of budget.

If this sounds familiar, keep reading.

This article outlines a practical framework for evaluating your SEO tool stack in 2026, focusing on:

• Must-have features.
• A faster way to compare multiple tools.
• How to approach vendor conversations.

The new realities of SEO tooling in 2026

Before evaluating vendors, it helps to understand the forces reshaping the SEO tooling landscape – and why many platforms are struggling to keep pace.

Leadership wants MQLs, not rankings

Both traditional and modern SEO tools still center on keyword and prompt tracking and visibility metrics. These are useful, but they are not enough to justify the rising prices.

In 2026, teams need a way to connect searches to traffic and then to MQLs and revenue. 

Almost no tool provides that link, which makes securing larger budgets nearly impossible. 

(I say “almost” because I have not tested every platform, so the unicorn may exist somewhere.)

AI agents raise expectations

With AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity – along with the ability to build custom GPTs, Gems, and Agents – teams can automate a wide range of tasks. 

That includes everything from simple content rewriting and keyword clustering to more complex competitor analysis and multi-step workflows.

Because of this, SEO tools now need to explain why they are better than a well-trained AI agent. 

Many can’t. This means that during evaluation, you inevitably end up asking a simple question: do you spend the time training your own agent, or do you buy a ready-made one?

Small teams need automation that truly saves time

If you want real impact, your automation shouldn’t be cosmetic. 

You can’t rely on generic checklists or basic AI recommendations, yet many tools still provide exactly that – fast checklists with no context.

Without context, automation becomes noise. It generates generic insights that are not tailored to your company, product, or market, and those insights will not save time or drive results.

Teams need automation that removes repetitive work and delivers better insights while genuinely giving time back.

Dig deeper: 11 of the best free tools every SEO should know about

A note on technical SEO tools

Technical SEO tools remain the most stable part of the SEO stack. 

The vendor landscape has not shifted dramatically, and most major platforms are innovating at a similar pace. 

Because of this, they do not require the same level of reevaluation as newer AI-driven categories.

That said, budgeting for them may still become challenging. 

Leadership often assumes AI can solve every problem, but we know that without strong technical performance, SEO, content, and AI efforts can easily fail.

I will also make one bold prediction – we should be prepared to expect the unexpected in this category. 

These platforms can crawl almost any site at scale and extract structured information, which could make them some of the most important and powerful tools in the stack.

Many already pull data from GA and GSC, and integrating with CRM or other data platforms may be only a matter of time. 

I see that as a likely 2026 development.

What must-have features actually look like in 2026

To evaluate tools effectively, it helps to focus on the capabilities that drive real impact. These are the ones worth prioritizing in 2026.

Advanced data analysis and blended data capabilities

Data analysis will play a much bigger role. 

Tools that let you blend data from GA, GSC, Salesforce, and similar sources will move you closer to the Holy Grail of SEO – understanding whether a prompt or search eventually leads to an MQL or a closed-won deal. 

This will never be a perfect science, but even a solid guesstimation is more useful than another visibility chart.

Integration maturity is becoming a competitive differentiator. 

Disconnected data remains the biggest barrier between SEO work and business attribution.

SERP intelligence for keywords and prompts

Traditional SERP intelligence remains essential. You still need:

• Topic research and insights for top-ranking pages.
• Competitor analysis.
• Content gap insights.
• Technical issues and ways to fix them.

You also need AI SERP intelligence, which analyzes:

• How AI tools answer specific prompts.
• What sources do they cite.
• If your brand appears, and if your competitors are also mentioned.

In an ideal world, these two groups should appear side by side and provide you with a 360-degree view of your performance.

Automation with real-time savings

Prioritize tools that:

• Cluster automatically.
• Detect anomalies.
• Provide prioritized recommendations for improvements.
• Turn data into easy-to-understand insights.

These are just some of the examples of practical AI that can really guide you and save you time.

Strong multilingual support

This applies to SEO experts who work with websites in languages other than English. 

Many tools are still heavily English-centric. Before choosing a tool, make sure the databases, SERP tracking, and AI insights work across languages, not just English.

Transparent pricing and clear feature lists

Hidden pricing, confusing bundles, and multiple add-ons make evaluation frustrating. 

Tools should communicate clearly:

• Which features they have.
• All related limitations.
• Whether a feature is part of the standard plan or an add-on.
• When something from the standard plan moves to an add-on. 

Many vendors change these things quietly, which makes calculating the investment you need difficult and hard to justify. 

Dig deeper: How to choose the best AI visibility tool

Plus, some features that might be overhyped

AI writing

If you can’t input detailed information about your brand, product, and persona, the content you produce will be the same as everyone else’s. 

Many tools already offer this and can make your content sound as if it were written by one of your writers. 

So the question is whether you need a specialized tool or if a custom GPT can do the job.

Prompt tracking 

It’s positioned as the new rank tracking, but it is like looking at one pixel of your monitor. 

It gives you only a tiny clue of the whole picture. 

AI answers change based on personalization and small differences in prompts, and the variations are endless.

Still, this tactic is helpful in:

• Providing directional signals.
• Helping you benchmark brand presence.
• Highlighting recurring themes AI platforms use.
• Allowing competitive analysis within a controlled sample.

Large keyword databases

They still matter for directional research, but are not a true competitive differentiator. 

Most modern tools have enough coverage to guide your strategy. 

The value now stems from the practical insights derived from the data.

How to compare 10 tools without wasting your time

Understanding features is only half the equation. 

The real challenge is knowing how to evaluate specialized tools and all-in-one platforms without losing your sanity or blocking your team for weeks. 

After going through this process for the tenth time, I’ve found an approach that works for me.

Step 1: Start with the pricing page

I always begin my evaluation on the pricing page. 

With one page, you can get a clear sense of: 

• All features.
• Limitations.
• Which ones fall under add-ons.
• The general structure of the pricing tiers. 

Even if you need a demo to get the exact price, the framework should still be relatively transparent.

Step 2: Test using your normal weekly work

No checklist will show you more than trying your regular BAU tasks with a couple of tools in parallel. 

This reveals:

• How long each task takes.
• What insights appear or disappear.
• What feels smoother or more clunky.

How difficult the setup is – including whether the learning curve is huge. 

I work in a small team, and a tool that takes many hours just to set up likely will not make my final list.

Not all evaluations can rely on BAU tasks. 

For example, when we researched tools for prompt and AI visibility tracking, we tested more than ten platforms. 

This capability did not exist in our stack, and at first, we had no idea what to check. 

In those cases, you need to define a small set of test scenarios from scratch and compare how each tool performs. 

Continue refining your scenarios, because each new evaluation will teach you something new.

Dig deeper: Want to improve rankings and traffic? Stop blindly following SEO tool recommendations

Step 3: Always get a free trial

Demos are polished. Reality often is not. 

If there is no option for a free trial, either walk away or, if the tool is not too expensive, pay for a month.

Step 4: Involve only the people who will actually use the tool

Always ask yourself who truly needs to be involved in the evaluation. 

For example, we are currently assessing a platform used not only by the SEO team but also by two other teams. 

We asked those teams for a brief summary of their requirements, but until we have a shortlist, there is no reason to involve them further or slow the process. 

And if your company has a heavy procurement or security review, involving too many people too early will slow everything down even more.

At the same time, involve the whole SEO team, because each person will see different strengths and weaknesses and everyone will rely on the tool.

Step 5: Evaluate results, not features

Many features sound like magic wands. 

In reality, the magic often works only sometimes, or it works but is very expensive. To understand what you truly need, always ask yourself:

• Did the tool save time?
• Did it surface insights that my current stack does not?
• Could a custom GPT do this instead?
• Does the price make sense for my team, and can I prove its ROI?

These questions turn the decision into a business conversation rather than a feature debate and help you prepare your “sales” pitch for your boss.

Step 6: Evaluate support quality, not just product features

Support has become one of the most overlooked parts of tool evaluation. 

Many platforms rely heavily on AI chat and automated replies, which can be extremely frustrating when you are dealing with a time-sensitive issue or have to explain your problem multiple times.

Support quality can significantly affect your team’s efficiency, especially in small teams with limited resources. 

When evaluating tools, check:

• How easy it is to reach a human.
• What response times look like.
• Whether the vendor offers onboarding or ongoing guidance. 

A great product with weak support can quickly become a bottleneck.

Once you have a shortlist, the quality of your vendor conversations will determine how quickly you can move forward. 

And this may be the hardest part – especially for the introverted SEO leads, myself included.

How to navigate vendor conversations

I’m practical, and I don’t like wasting anyone’s time. I have plenty of tasks waiting, so fluff conversations aren’t helpful. 

That’s why I start every vendor call by setting clear goals, limitations, a timeline, and next steps. 

Over time, I’ve learned that conversations run much more smoothly when I follow a few simple principles.

Be prepared for meetings

If you are evaluating a tool, come prepared to the demo. 

Ideally, you should have access to a free trial, tested the platform, and created a list of practical questions. 

Showing up unprepared is not a good sign, and that applies to both sides.

For example, I am always impressed when a vendor joins the conversation having already researched who we are, what we do, and who our competitors are. 

If you have spoken with the vendor before, directly ask what has changed since your last discussion.

Ask for competitor comparisons

When comparing a few tools, I always ask each vendor for a direct comparison. 

These comparisons will be biased, but collecting them from all sides can reveal insights I had not considered and give me ideas for specific things to test. 

Often, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Ask how annual contracts influence pricing

Annual contracts reduce administrative work and give vendors room to negotiate, which can lead to better pricing. 

Many tools include this information on their pricing pages, and we have all seen it. 

Ask about any other nuances that might affect the final price – such as additional user seats or add-ons.

Don’t start from scratch with vendors you know

Often, the most effective approach is simply to say:

“This is our budget. This is what we need. Can you support this?”

This works especially well with vendors you have used before because both sides already know each other.

What to consider from a business perspective

Even if you select a tool, that does not mean you will receive the budget for it.

Proving ROI is especially difficult with SEO tools. But there are a few things you can do to increase your chances of getting a yes.

Present at least three alternatives in every request

This shows you have done your homework, not just picked the first thing you found. Present your leadership with:

• The criteria you used in your evaluation.
• Pros and cons of each tool.
• The business case and why the capability is needed.
• What happens if you do not buy the tool.

Providing this view builds trust in your ability to make decisions.

Avoid overselling

Tools improve efficiency, but they cannot guarantee outcomes – especially in SEO, GEO, or whatever you call it. 

Spend time explaining how quickly things are changing and how many factors are outside your control. Managing expectations will strengthen your team’s credibility.

But even with thorough evaluation and negotiation, we still face the same issue: the SEO tooling market has not caught up with what companies now expect. 

Let’s hope the future brings something closer to the clarity we see in Google Ads.

Dig deeper: How to master the enterprise SEO procurement process

The future of the SEO tool stack

The next generation of SEO tools must move beyond vanity metrics. 

Trained AI agents and custom GPTs can already automate much of the work.

In a landscape where companies want to reduce employee and operational costs, you need concrete business numbers to justify high tool prices. 

The platforms that can connect searches, traffic, and revenue will become the new premium category in SEO technology.

For now, most SEO teams will continue to hear “no” when requesting budgets because that connection does not yet exist. 

And the moment a tool finally solves this attribution problem, it will redefine the entire SEO technology market.

In 2026 and well beyond, a core part of the performance marketer’s charter is learning to leverage AI to drive growth and efficiency. 

Anyone who isn’t actively evaluating new AI tools to improve or streamline their PPC work is doing their brand or clients a disservice.

The challenge is that keeping up with these tools has become almost a full-time job, which is why my agency has made AI a priority in our structured knowledge-sharing. 

As a team, we’ve honed in on favorites across creative, campaign management, and AI search measurement. 

This article breaks down key options in each category, with brief reviews and a callout of my current pick.

One overarching recommendation before we dive in: be cautious about signing long-term contracts for AI tools or platforms. 

At the pace things are moving, the tool that catches your eye in December could be an afterthought by April.

AI creative tools for paid social campaigns

There’s no shortage of tools that can generate creative assets, and each comes with benefits as well as the risks of producing AI slop. 

Regardless of the tool you choose, it must be thoroughly vetted and supported by a strong human-in-the-loop process to ensure quality, accuracy, and brand alignment.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the tools we’ve tested:

• AdCreative.ai: Auto-generates images, video creatives, ad copy, and headlines in multiple sizes, with data-backed scoring for outputs.
• Creatify: Particularly strong on video ads with multi-format support.
• WASK: Combines AI creative generation with campaign optimization and competitor analysis.
• Revid AI: Well-suited for story formats.
• ChatGPT: Free and widely familiar, giving marketers an edge in effective prompting.

Our current tool of choice is AdCreative.ai. It’s easy to use and especially helpful for quickly brainstorming creative angles and variations to test. 

Like its competitors, it offers meaningful advantages, including:

• Speed and scale that allow you to generate dozens or hundreds of variants in minutes to keep creative fresh and reduce ad fatigue.
• Less reliance on external designers or editors for routine or templated outputs.
• Rapid creative experimentation across images, copy, and layouts to find winning combinations faster.
• Data-driven insights, such as creative scores or performance predictions, when available.

The usual caveats apply across all creative tools:

• Build guardrails to avoid off-brand outputs by maintaining a strong voice guide, providing exemplar content, enforcing style rules and banned words, and ensuring human review at every step.
• Watch for accuracy issues or hallucinations and include verification in your process, especially for technical claims, data, or legal copy. 

Dig deeper: How to get smarter with AI in PPC

AI campaign management and workflow tools for performance campaigns

There are plenty of workflow automation tools on the market, including long-standing options, like Zapier, Workato, and Microsoft Power Automate. 

Our preferred choice, though, is n8n. Its agentic workflows and built-in connections across ad platforms, CRMs, and reporting tools have been invaluable in automating redundant tasks.

Here are my agency’s primary use cases for n8n:

• Lead management: Automatically enrich new leads from HubSpot or Salesforce with n8n’s Clearbit automation, then route them to the right rep or nurture sequence.
• UTM cleanup: When a form fill or ad conversion comes in, automatically normalize UTM parameters before pushing them to your CRM. Some systems, like HubSpot, store values in fields such as “first URL seen” that aren’t parsed into UTM fields, so UTMs remain associated with the user but aren’t stored properly and require reconciliation.
• Data reporting: Pull metrics from APIs, structure the data, and use AI to summarize insights. Reports can then be shared via Slack and email, or dropped into collaborative tools like Google Docs.

As with any tool, n8n comes with caveats to keep in mind:

• It requires some technical ability because it’s low-code, not no-code. You often need to understand APIs, JSON, and authentication, such as OAuth or API keys. Even basic automations may involve light logic or expressions. Integrations with less mainstream tools can require scripting.
• You need a deliberate setup to maintain security. There’s no built-in role-based access control in all configurations unless you use n8n Cloud Enterprise. Misconfigured webhooks can expose data if not handled properly.
• Its ad platform integrations aren’t as broad as those of some competitors. For example, it doesn’t include LinkedIn Ads, Reddit Ads, or TikTok Ads. These can be added via direct API calls, but that takes more manual work.

Dig deeper: Top AI tools and tactics you should be using in PPC

AI search visibility measurement tools

Most SEOs already have preferred platforms for measurement and insights – Semrush, Moz, SE Ranking, and others. 

While many now offer reports on brand visibility in AI search results from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and similar tools, these features are add-ons to products built for traditional SEO.

To track how our brands show up in AI search results, we use Profound. 

While other purpose-built tools exist, we’ve found that it offers differentiated persona-level and competitor-level analysis and ties its reporting to strategic levers like content and PR or sentiment, making it clear how to act on the data.

These platforms can provide near real-time insights such as:

• Performance benchmarks that show AI visibility against competitors to highlight strengths and weaknesses.
• Content and messaging intel, including the language AI uses to describe brands and their solutions, which can inform thought leadership and messaging refinement.
• Signals that show whether your efforts are improving the consistency and favorability of brand mentions in AI answers.
• Trends illustrating how generative AI is reshaping search results and user behavior.
• Insights beyond linear keyword rankings that reveal the narratives AI models generate about your company, competitors, and industry.
• Gaps and opportunities to address to influence how your brand appears in AI answers.

No matter which tool you choose, the key is to adopt one quickly. 

The more data you gather on rapidly evolving AI search trends, the more agile you can be in adjusting your strategy to capture the growing share of users turning to AI tools during their purchase journey.

Dig deeper: Scaling PPC with AI automation: Scripts, data, and custom tools

What remains true as the AI toolset keeps shifting

I like to think most of my content for this publication ages well, but I’m not expecting this one to follow suit. 

Anyone reading it a few months after it runs will likely see it as more of a time capsule than a set of current recommendations – and that’s fine.

What does feel evergreen is the need to:

• Monitor the AI landscape.
• Aggressively test new tools and features.
• Build or maintain a strong knowledge-sharing function across your team. 

We’re well past head-in-the-sand territory with AI in performance marketing, yet there’s still room for differentiation among teams that move quickly, test strategically, and pivot together as needed.

Dig deeper: AI agents in PPC: What to know and build today

In 1997, Apple launched a campaign that became cultural gospel. “Think Different” celebrated the rebels, the misfits, the troublemakers. The ones who saw things differently. The ones who changed the world. 

Apple understood something fundamental: the constraints that limited imagination weren’t real. They were inherited. Accepted. Assumed. And the people who broke through weren’t smarter or more talented. They simply refused to believe the constraints applied to them. 

Twenty-eight years later, marketing faces its own Think Different moment. 

The constraints are gone. Technology has removed them. AI can generate infinite variants. Data platforms deliver real-time insights. Orchestration tools coordinate across every channel instantly. The infrastructure that once required armies of specialists, weeks of coordination and endless approvals now exists in platforms accessible to any marketer willing to learn them. 

Yet most marketers still operate as if the box exists. 

They wait for the data team to run the analysis. They wait for creative to deliver the assets. They wait for engineering to build the integration. They operate within constraints that technology has already eliminated, not because they must, but because assembly-line marketing taught them that’s how it worked. 

Creative waits for data. Campaigns wait for creative. Launch waits for engineering. Move from station to station. Hand off to the next department. That was the assembly line. That was the box. 

And that box is gone. But the habits remain.  

Here’s to the marketers who refuse to wait for approval

The ones who see a customer signal at 3 p.m. and launch a personalized journey by 4 p.m., not because they asked permission but because the customer needed it now. 

The ones who don’t send briefs to three different teams. They access the data, generate the creative and orchestrate the campaign themselves. Not because they’re trying to eliminate specialists, but because waiting days for what they can deliver in hours wastes the moment. 

The ones who run experiments constantly, not occasionally. Who test 10 variants instead of two. Who measure lift instead of clicks. Who know that perfect insight arrives through iteration, not through analysis paralysis. 

Here’s to the ones who see campaigns where others see dependencies 

They don’t see a handoff to the analytics team. They see customer data they can access instantly to understand behavior, predict intent and target precisely. 

They don’t see a creative approval process. They see AI tools that generate channel-ready assets in minutes, allowing them to personalize at scale rather than compromise for efficiency. 

They don’t see an engineering backlog. They see orchestration platforms that automate journeys, test variations and optimize outcomes without a single ticket. 

They’re not reckless. They’re not cowboys  

They’re simply operating at the speed technology now enables, constrained only by strategy and judgment rather than structure and process.  

This is what Positionless Marketing means: Wielding Data Power, Creative Power and Optimization Power simultaneously. Not because you’ve eliminated everyone else, but because technology eliminated the dependencies that once made those handoffs necessary. 

And here’s what most people miss: This isn’t just about speed. It’s about potential 

When marketers were constrained by assembly-line marketing infrastructure, their job was to manage the line. Write the brief. Coordinate the teams. Navigate the approvals. Wait for each station to finish its work. The marketer’s skill was project management. Their value was orchestrating others. 

Now? Your job in marketing has changed entirely 

Your job is no longer to manage process. Your job is to enable potential. To help every person on your team (and yourself) realize what they’re capable of when the constraints disappear. To show them that the data they’ve been waiting for is accessible now. That the creative they’ve been briefing can be generated instantly. That the campaigns they’ve been coordinating can be orchestrated autonomously.  

Teach people to think outside the box by showing them there is no longer a box 

The data analyst who only ran reports can now build predictive models and operationalize them in real time. The campaign manager who only coordinated handoffs can now design, test and optimize end-to-end journeys independently. The creative strategist who only wrote briefs can now generate and deploy assets across every channel. 

This is the revolution: not that technology does the work, but that technology removes the barriers that prevented people from doing work they were always capable of. 

The misfits and rebels of 1997 saw possibilities where others saw limitations. They refused to accept that things had to be done the way they’d always been done. 

The Positionless Marketers of today are doing the same thing 

They’re refusing to wait when customers need action now. They’re refusing to accept that insight takes weeks when platforms deliver it in seconds. They’re refusing to operate within constraints that technology has already eliminated. 

They’re thinking differently. Not because they’re trying to be difficult. But because the old way of thinking no longer matches the new reality of what’s possible. 

In 1997, Apple told us: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”  

In 2025, the people crazy enough to think they can deliver personalized experiences at scale, launch campaigns in hours instead of weeks, and operate without dependencies are the ones who will. 

The constraints are gone. 

The assembly-line marketing box can no longer exist. 

Will fight again – and if so, against whom? We won’t get a clearer picture until next year, once the Mexican star has had time to process the third loss of his career. Terence Crawford followed Floyd Mayweather and Dmitry Bivol in outclassing Canelo – and, like those before him, was never in any real […]

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