Working notes on where search and marketing are heading with AI
Working notes on where search, marketing and the digital space are heading in the world of AI: what is live now, what is emerging and what it means for operators.
Research
- What answer-engine advertising actually is todayIt now spans two different models, existing ad systems extending into AI search and purpose-built conversational ad platforms, and the honest thing is to keep them apartPoint of view
- Google's AI-search guidance is mostly things to stop doingGoogle published official guidance on generative AI features and the substance of it is a mythbusting list, which is more useful than the reassurance it came wrapped inPoint of view
- Answer-engine visibility does not have a scoreboard yetEvery available source of AI visibility data is partial in a different direction, and the responsible move is to say so rather than to average them into a scorePoint of view
- AI answers are changing what a click is worthWhen an AI answer resolves the question on the results page, the clicks that still come through are fewer but more decided, which changes how you should value and bid on themField note
- What a growth partnership with Digital Traction looks likeAn example of the work, based on active client work and anonymized.Field note
- Google stopped letting your campaigns beat their targetBudget-limited campaigns used to quietly outperform their bid target, and that has stopped, which raises cost per lead in every account where the target was never really a decisionPlatform update
- Approved is not servingGoogle is extending impression caps based on account trust signals to every Ads product, and because nothing gets disapproved it looks like weak performance rather than a policy statePlatform update
- Your campaigns are being upgraded to AI Max in SeptemberAutomatically created assets and campaign-level broad match flip to AI Max from September 2026, which widens matching and hands text and landing-page choices to Google unless you set the controls firstPlatform update
- Why healthcare ads serve less than their settings implyGoogle labels many healthcare ads Eligible (limited), which is not a disapproval and does not appear as an error, so most practices experience it as unexplained low volumeGuide
- Business Agent for Leads changes what arrives in your CRMGoogle is replacing the lead form inside the ad with a Gemini chat grounded in your own site, which moves qualification in front of the conversion and breaks the metric most lead-gen accounts are managed onPlatform update
- Reddit is where high-consideration buyers compareFor considered purchases, people go to community threads to sanity-check their options, which makes Reddit a discovery surface worth reading, and a place to buy adsFinding
- Campaign-level lift is not account-level liftThe platform's own performance figure is measured per campaign, which is the level at which reallocated conversions look identical to new onesPoint of view
- Where AI traffic actually lands in GA4GA4's AI Assistant channel covers ChatGPT and its peers but explicitly excludes AI Overviews and AI Mode, which sit in Organic Search, so there is no single AI number to reportGuide
- When you cannot retarget, what you count becomes the whole strategySensitive-category rules remove the audience levers most accounts lean on, which leaves the conversion definition as the main thing an operator still controlsPoint of view
- What Search Console's AI report tells you, and what it leaves outThe generative AI performance report gives you impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode and nothing else, which makes it a visibility signal rather than a performance metricGuide
- Feeding real outcomes back to the platformForm fills teach automated bidding the wrong lesson; importing qualified leads and revenue from your CRM teaches it what a real opportunity looks likeGuide
Website relevance
- The August spam update changed enforcement, not the rulesNo new policies and no blog post, which means the rules held and the enforcement of them improved, and that is the harder version to be caught byPlatform update
- Query fan-out does not mean you need more pagesThe model generates related queries around yours before answering, and the common response of building a page per variation is the one thing Google explicitly warns againstPoint of view
- Almost nothing requests your llms.txt fileGoogle says Search ignores the file, no major provider has committed to reading it, and a study of 38,000 domains carrying one found almost none were ever requestedFinding
- When a location page becomes doorway abuseGoogle's spam policy names city-targeted pages that funnel users to one destination, which describes the standard multi-location page set almost exactlyGuide
- Four Google controls that people keep mistaking for each otherGoogle-Extended, the Search generative AI control, nosnippet and noindex sound like versions of the same switch and each one does something differentGuide
- Internal-link relationship labelsA running test of whether labelling the relationship an internal link expresses changes how it is interpretedExperiment
- Read versus Inspect retrievalA running comparison of what a reader sees against what a machine extracts from the same pageExperiment
- Does anything fetch llms.txt?A running fetch log testing whether any user agent actually requests this site's llms.txtExperiment
- Answer-first page openingsA planned test of whether opening a page with the direct answer changes retrieval and citationExperiment
- What an agent can determine from a business websiteA running test of what a browser agent can reliably determine from a public business websiteExperiment
- Where an AI answer gets its picture of your practiceGoogle's own guidance points local businesses at Business Profile and Merchant Center rather than the website alone, which means the answer is assembled from sources most practices never checkPoint of view
- Local Services Ads are moving into Google AdsThe standalone LSA dashboard is being retired and campaigns migrate to a pay-per-lead Performance Max type, keeping the lead model but removing manual bidding, vertical-level targets and your historical reportsPlatform update
The same read, on your account
The diagnosis is the first step and it is not charged for. What is offered is an honest read and sensible, evidence-backed decisions, not a promise about lead volume.