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The GRADIENT: Why Taste Is the New Moat

How To Engineer Cross-Channel Synergy

When your search and social strategies are intertwined, they work together like a well-oiled machine, and your search visibility can multiply. For years, SEO and social media teams more often than not operated in silos, rarely engaging with each other and never working in tandem. SEO focused on optimizing for the latest Google algorithm update

Inside Georgia-Pacific’s push to clean up the bidstream

A packaging and pulp manufacturer is not the obvious answer when the conversation turns to programmatic advertisers. That assumption, it turns out, would be a mistake. Georgia-Pacific sits at the more advanced end of the spectrum, with an in-house programmatic team, lower ad tech costs and media dollars concentrated across a smaller set of buying

Stocksy sees signs of life in its optimistic 2026 Visual Trends Report

Returning to the optimistic perspective in which Signs of Life was curated, it seems that this return to personability is equally happening on the creative production side as well, with more work not needing to optimally perform on-screen. “It isn’t crafted for the algorithm or for metrics; it isn’t performative,” Genevieve says, “there’s a tone

Google Files DMCA Suit Targeting SerpApi’s SERP Scraping

Google sued SerpApi in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging the company developed methods to bypass protections Google deployed to prevent automated scraping of Search results and the licensed content they contain. Why This Case Is Different Unlike previous cases that focused on terms-of-service violations or broader scraping methods, Google’s

3 Ways Consolidation Will Hit Commerce Media in 2026

Dealmaking in commerce media is likely to heat up in 2026. Commerce media ad spend has surged in recent years, reaching nearly $59 billion in the U.S. this year, according to Emarketer. And while growth is expected to slow over the next few years, the market analysis firm predicts that it will account for a

10 ways 2026 will be a turning point for game design, according to indie devs

A new year is always a time for optimism, but as we approach 2026, it’s hard not to acknowledge that 2025 has largely been a repeat of 2024 as the games industry continued its implosion with more layoffs and studio closures. Yet it’s also not been without its successes: most triumphant of these has been

More Apple Search Inventory, Exact Match Limits In AI Overviews

In this week’s PPC Pulse: updates include an inventory expansion for Apple Ads, and Google confirms that Exact match keywords are not eligible to serve for Ads in AI Overviews. Apple announced additional ad placements coming to App Store search results in early 2026. Google confirmed that exact match keywords cannot serve in AI Overviews,

Salesforce buys Qualified to accelerate its AI‑driven GTM strategy

Salesforce is making another move to turn its “agentic enterprise” vision into reality — this time by acquiring Qualified, a long-time partner focused on AI-driven sales engagement. Announced this week, the deal brings Qualified’s real-time AI agents directly into Salesforce’s Agentforce platform. These agents specialize in the early stages of customer interaction — chatting with

Review of the Year 2025

2025: A dazzling year where technology and analogue creativity shared the spotlight. This year, creativity took two distinct, divergent paths. We saw work that pushed boundaries of tech innovation, with a host of intriguing and inventive digital projects making it into our top slots. But – as always – this technological advancement was met with

AI Mode Hits 75M Users, Gemini 3 Flash Launches

In this week’s Pulse: updates include AI Mode’s growth and missing features, what Google’s latest model brings to search, and what drives citations across different AI experiences. Google’s Nick Fox confirmed that AI Mode has reached 75 million daily active users, but the personal context features promised at I/O are still in internal testing. Google

Gen AI is not killing creativity. It’s normalizing ‘just good enough’

The real risk of generative AI for marketers isn’t bad creative. It’s the rise of the “just good enough” economy. If that wasn’t already clear, Disney’s deal with OpenAI last week brought it into sharp focus. Yes, the headlines fixated on the billion dollar investment. Yes, there was plenty of speculation about why Disney chose

Apple’s SHARP can turn a photo into a 3D scene in under a second

Apple‘s AI developments have been much mocked, but could the Cupertino giant emerge as a surprise leader in AI-driven 3D? A host of tech companies are researching tools for simpler, faster creation of 3D scenes, environments and digital twins, and Apple’s just made a pretty big leap. SHARP is an experimental AI model that can

Microsoft Explains How Duplicate Content Affects AI Search Visibility

Microsoft has shared new guidance on duplicate content that’s aimed at AI-powered search. The post on the Bing Webmaster Blog discusses which URL serves as the “source page” for AI answers when several similar URLs exist. Microsoft describes how “near-duplicate” pages can end up grouped together for AI systems, and how that grouping can influence

Streaming Ratings, Week of November 17: Viewers Get Stranger

With fans rewatching past episodes of Stranger Things, momentum continues to build for the Netflix series, which remained No. 1 on Nielsen’s Top 10 Overall Streaming chart for the week of November 17. Stranger Things led the way with 1.683 billion viewing minutes, improving on its previous week’s showing by +25% as audiences geared up

Top 15 Nicer Tuesdays Talks

Whiplash! Another year of Nicer Tuesdays has passed by so quickly, but here’s your catch-up on another incredible year, with our monthly talk events staying strong in London and New York, as well as debuting in Los Angeles! In 2025, we caught up with the most interesting and boundary-pushing creatives on stage, whilst getting the

Open Source Versus Proprietary Platforms

The Core Web Vitals Technology Report by the open source HTTPArchive community ranks content management systems by how well they perform on Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV). The November 2025 data shows a significant gap between platforms with the highest ranked CMS scoring 84.87% of sites passing CWV, while the lowest ranked CMS scored 46.28%.

How marketing leaders stay visible in AI-driven search

Does it feel like your organic traffic is disappearing? You aren’t imagining it. AI Overviews and answer engines are sidelining classic SEO results. To stay visible, brands need to adapt – fast. The good news: you don’t need to rewrite your entire SEO playbook. With a few smart tweaks, you can shift from SEO to GEO

This head-spinning optical illusion is causing mayhem online

Five years ago we published an optical illusion that millions of you were completely bamboozled by, and today I’ve found a brand-new version of that illusion. Of course, I’m referring to the rotating horse, which remains a puzzle to this day (just tell me which way it’s spinning!). This illusion is an x-ray style image

Provenance & Trust In Information

When Emily Epstein shared her perspective on LinkedIn about how “people didn’t stop reading books when encyclopedias came out,” it sparked a conversation about the future of primary sources in an AI-driven world. In this episode, Katie Morton, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal, and Emily Anne Epstein, Director of Content at Sigma, dig into her

Consumer confidence edges up but marketers warned it’s ‘nothing to get excited about’

With consumer confidence at the same level as this time last year, 2025 has been a “year of no progress”, according to GfK. UK consumer confidence ticked up slightly in December, though the overall picture suggests households remain under pressure and uncertain about the year ahead. The GfK Consumer Confidence Barometer powered by NIM shows

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