Google published a guide to optimizing for its generative AI features, last updated in July 2026, and most of the AI-SEO industry appears not to have read it. Its position is blunt: optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the…
Twelve UX Fixes That Lift Conversion Rate — With the Evidence Labelled
Most articles listing UX fixes attach a confident percentage to each one. Almost none of those percentages exist. Here is the same kind of list with the evidence stated honestly, including which items have measured effects behind them and which are…
Should You Rebuild in React or Headless in 2026? A Decision Framework
For most businesses, no. But the reasons have changed, and they are more specific than the performance arguments usually offered on either side. There are now two kinds of machine reading your website, and they fail in opposite ways. AI crawlers,…
AI-Generated Ad Creative: What Converts and What Gets Scrolled Past
The best available research on AI-generated ads found that consumers rate them about the same as human-made ads on nine of eleven effectiveness measures. What they penalise is ads they believe are AI-made — and that penalty applies on every measure,…
Topical Authority in the AI Era: What the Evidence Actually Shows
Both sides of the topical authority argument are running on bad evidence. The people selling you a thirty-article content cluster cannot point to a study. The people telling you Google debunked topical authority are citing a one-word Reddit reply from 2023….
Cart Abandonment: Seven Fixes, Only Two Are Automation
Before you buy an AI tool to recover abandoned carts, two numbers from the best independent research on the subject. Forty-two percent of US online shoppers who abandoned a cart say they were just browsing and not ready to buy. Of…
In-House vs Agency for AI Search in 2026: A Cost and Capability Breakdown
One in-house marketing hire costs between roughly $9,100 and $14,400 per month once you account for what employment actually costs, against agency retainers of $1,500 to $8,000. So for most US businesses, the honest answer is that a single hire is…
Bot Traffic Is Eating Your Google Ads Budget. Here’s How to Find It.
If a click-fraud tool has shown you a dashboard claiming thousands of dollars of bot traffic in your Google Ads account, here is the first thing to know: Google says much of what those tools flag was already filtered and never…
Digital PR for AI Citations: Why Being Mentioned Beats Being Linked
In the largest study available on what correlates with being mentioned by AI platforms, branded web mentions scored between 0.66 and 0.71. Backlinks scored, in the researchers’ own words, very weak. So yes, the claim going around is directionally right: mentions…
Branded Search Was the Safe Harbour in AI Search. September Closed It.
In September 2026, Google started showing AI Overviews on most searches for brand names. Two independent trackers agree it ended the month above 80%. They disagree substantially about where it started, nobody has measured what it costs in clicks, and neither…