Search Engine Journal

The holiday this year brings more competition than ever, but the shopper journey is also shifting. Consumers begin research weeks earlier, often starting in October, and rely on conversational AI or chatbot-style searches to compare products. Microsoft’s holiday insights show that shopping behavior kicks off in October, with many November and December conversions originating from clicks made weeks earlier.

The funnel is changing shape: wider at the top as more shoppers browse early, but shorter at the bottom as they move quickly once urgency kicks…

The latest Ahrefs podcast shares data showing that brand mentions on third-party websites help improve visibility across AI search surfaces. What they found is that brand mentions correlate strongly with ranking better in AI search, indicating that we are firmly in a new era of off-page SEO.

Training Data Gets Cited

Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs, said that off-page activity that increases being mentioned on other sites improves visibility in AI search results, both those based on training data and those drawing from live search results. The benefits of…

Apple is reportedly paying Google to build a custom Gemini AI model that will power a major Siri upgrade targeted for spring 2026, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

The custom Gemini model is expected to run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure. Neither Apple nor Google has officially announced the partnership.

What’s Being Reported

Bloomberg reports Apple conducted an internal evaluation comparing AI models from Google and Anthropic for the next-generation Siri.

Google’s Gemini won based largely on financial terms. Bloomberg…

In my last article, we covered strategies that turn a founder’s voice into a pipeline driver. The most common follow-up question I get then is about how to do it consistently without burning out.

Every minute a founder spends on LinkedIn is a minute they aren’t building, hiring, or selling. This is the number one reason most founder-led content strategies fail: They start strong, then disappear. Many fail to make it past 90 days.

The data from our LinkedIn (my employer) playbook confirms the stakes: startup director+ who post at least 9x a year…

Benjamin Houy shut down Lorelight, a generative engine optimization (GEO) platform designed to track brand visibility in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, after concluding most brands don’t need a specialized tool for AI search visibility.

Houy writes that, after reviewing hundreds of AI answers, the brands mentioned most often share familiar traits: quality content, mentions in authoritative publications, strong reputation, and genuine expertise.

He claims:

“There’s no such thing as ‘GEO strategy’ or ‘AI optimization’ separate from…

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) covers topics that affect people’s health, financial stability, safety, or general welfare, and rightly so Google applies measurably stricter algorithmic standards to these topics.

AI writing tools might promise to scale content production, but as writing for YMYL requires more consideration and author credibility than other content, can an LLM write content that is acceptable for this niche?

The bottom line is that AI systems fail at YMYL content, offering bland sameness where unique expertise and authority matter…

Google’s VP of Product for Google Search confirmed that PR activities may be helpful for ranking better in certain contexts and offered an explanation of how AI search works and what content creators should focus on to stay relevant to users.

PR Helps Sites Get Recommended By AI

Something interesting that was said in the podcast was that it could be beneficial to be mentioned by other sites if you want your site to be recommended by AI. Robby Stein didn’t say that this is a ranking factor. He said this in the context of showing how AI search…

When it comes to thought leadership and great opportunities, professionals are missing out if they’re not on LinkedIn. It’s the world’s largest professional network with over 1.2 billion members in 200 countries and regions worldwide.

LinkedIn’s popularity rose following a significant turn away from X (formerly Twitter), and users looked for continuation with their established audience and exiting network, but news feeds are now full of AI-generated posts and very noisy with self-promotional shouting.

Also, there have been changes to the…

ChatGPT Go, OpenAI’s heavily discounted version of ChatGPT, is now available in 98 countries, including eight European countries and five Latin American countries.

ChatGPT Go offers everything that’s included in the Free plan but more. So there’s more access to GPT-5, image generation, extended file upload capabilities, a larger context window, and collaboration features. ChatGPT Go is available on both Android and Apple mobile apps and on the macOS and Windows desktop environments.

The eight new European countries where ChatGPT Go is now…

The footprint of large language models keeps expanding. You see it in productivity suites, CRM, ERP, and now in the browser itself. When the browser thinks and acts, the surface you optimize for changes. That has consequences for how people find, decide, and buy.

Microsoft shows how quickly this footprint can spread across daily work. Microsoft says nearly 70% of the Fortune 500 now use Microsoft 365 Copilot. The company also reports momentum through 2025 customer stories and events. These numbers do not represent unique daily users across every…