Issue 41

Latest News

Apple Selects Google's Gemini For New AI-Powered Siri

Apple and Google announce a multi-year AI partnership. Gemini models and cloud tech will underpin Apple Foundation Models and a more personalized Siri.

Apple determined Google's AI provides "the most capable foundation" for Apple Foundation Models after "careful evaluation."
The multi-year partnership will power future Apple Intelligence features, including an upgraded Siri expected later this year.
Apple Intelligence will continue running on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute while maintaining Apple's privacy standards.

Google expands Shopping promotion rules ahead of 2026

Google’s 2026 Shopping policy updates give advertisers more flexibility to promote subscriptions, modern offers, and localized payment incentives.

Google is broadening what counts as an eligible promotion in Shopping, giving merchants more flexibility heading into next year.

Google Tests “Analytics Advisor” Inside GA4, According To Reports

Some GA4 users report seeing “Analytics Advisor,” a conversational AI interface in Google Analytics.

SEO professionals report a new “Analytics Advisor” chat interface in GA4.
It appears to offer data analysis, report finding, and education features.
Google hasn't published rollout details or help documentation yet.

Helpful Guides

How to optimize content for AI search engines: A step-by-step guide

AI-powered search isn’t coming. It’s already here:

Google’s AI Overviews now reach 2 billion monthly users.
ChatGPT serves 800 million users each week.
Perplexity processed 780 million queries in a single month.

As rankings and clicks matter less, citations matter more. Businesses now need content that AI engines trust and reference when answering questions. That’s the role of AI content optimization.

Search Marketing’s Insight Gap: When Automation Replaces Understanding

In just a few short years, automated bidding strategies, AI-generated content, AI-driven research, and platform-generated “insights” have changed the way we work, including the tools we use, and many of our expectations for how we do search marketing and digital marketing in a broader sense.

With all of this automation and new ways of getting things done, a gap has emerged. I’ll call it an “insights gap.” I contend that teams can see performance changes, but struggle to explain why. This can be serious and, for marketing leaders, can result in a loss of confidence in decision-making due to outcomes not being what was planned, projected, or desired.

The social-to-search halo effect: Why social content drives branded search

As search marketers, we tend to focus on what we can control: keywords, links, Core Web Vitals, indexed pages. We have dashboards for our dashboards.

But not everything that shapes search behavior lives inside GSC, GA4, or your favorite rank tracker.

One of the most influential forces sits just outside traditional SEO reporting: the social media halo effect.

Data & Insights

Survey: Publishers Expect Search Traffic To Fall Over 40%

A Reuters Institute survey finds publishers expect search traffic to drop over 40% in three years as AI answer engines expand.

The Reuters Institute surveyed 280 senior media leaders across 51 countries.
Leaders say they'll prioritize original reporting and analysis.
Subscriptions are the top revenue priority.

What 107,000 pages reveal about Core Web Vitals and AI search

As AI-led search becomes a real driver of discovery, an old assumption is back with new urgency. If AI systems infer quality from user experience, and Core Web Vitals (CWV) are Google’s most visible proxy for experience, then strong CWV performance should correlate with strong AI visibility. The logic makes sense.

But logic is not evidence. To test this properly, I analysed 107,352 webpages that appear prominently in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, examining the distribution of Core Web Vitals at the page level and comparing them against patterns of performance in AI-driven search and answer systems.

AI Overview fan-out rankings boost citation odds by 161%: Study

Pages that rank for Google’s AI Overview “fan-out” queries are much more likely to be cited than those that rank only for the main search query, according to data from Surfer SEO.

An analysis of 10,000 keywords found a strong correlation (Spearman 0.77) between how many fan-out queries a page ranks for and its likelihood of being cited in Google’s AI Overviews.

Good Read

Stop the SEO Imposter Syndrome: It's All Just SEO (Here's Why)

Feeling overwhelmed by AEO, GEO, and AI search? You're not alone. Learn why SEO for AI search is still just SEO, and how your existing skills already prepare you to succeed.

Eventbrite Social Study 2026: Event Trends Shaping the Year Ahead

We talked to ticket buyers, then compiled the data, crunched the numbers, and made the charts. Now you can reap the rewards. See which way the event culture winds are blowing in 2026—and stay one step ahead.

Why Paid Search Foundations Still Matter In An AI-Focused World

At this point in time, AI search products such as Google and Microsoft’s PMax (and now AI Max) have firmly woven themselves into the toolkits of search marketers around the globe. But as many search marketers rush to not only test new products but also scale paid search activity, there is an increasing tendency to neglect the core elements of what makes a successful paid search account: audience, structure, and intent.

Within this article, I’ll aim to throw paid search foundations back into the limelight, placing an emphasis on why core concepts remain important and highlighting the fact that AI products don’t necessarily replace foundations but only serve to enhance them.

Issue 41 19th January 2026