New Data, New Models, New Problems. AI Search Is Getting Real.

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Find your customers on Roku this Black Friday

As with any digital ad campaign, the important thing is to reach streaming audiences who will convert. To that end, Roku’s self-service Ads Manager stands ready with powerful segmentation and targeting options. After all, you know your customers, and we know our streaming audience.

Worried it’s too late to spin up new Black Friday creative? With Roku Ads Manager, you can easily import and augment existing creative assets from your social channels. We also have AI-assisted upscaling, so every ad is primed for CTV.

Once you’ve done this, then you can easily set up A/B tests to flight different creative variants and Black Friday offers. If you’re a Shopify brand, you can even run shoppable ads directly on-screen so viewers can purchase with just a click of their Roku remote.

Bonus: we’re gifting you $5K in ad credits when you spend your first $5K on Roku Ads Manager. Just sign up and use code GET5K. Terms apply.

Use code GET5K now

SEO + GEO

Adobe to Acquire Semrush

In this Adobe announcement, the company lays out why its acquisition of Semrush is a strategic move for marketers navigating AI driven search. Why? “Semrush is a powerful partner for marketers looking to manage brand visibility and audience reach through its data-driven generative engine optimization (GEO) and search engine optimization (SEO) solutions.”

My Take: Wow…just Wow. With Adobe’s marketing and analytics products, including its Brand Concierge and LLM Optimizer, the acquisition makes sense. And if you’re into the whole SEO vs GEO debate…

Also interesting here is their use of “GEO” in first position in their announcement. It’s the largest company I’ve seen use “GEO” so far. Adobe’s made their position clear on their direction. Compare that to the number of media outlets/journalists reporting on the acquisition, but don’t use “GEO,” except in a direct quote. “SEO” or “search engine optimization” - not a problem though.

As for Ahrefs…

How AI Search Is Changing the Way Conversions Are Measured

Fabrice Canel and Krishna Madhavan at Microsoft Bing explain how AI search is shifting conversions upstream and why visibility now matters as much as clicks. Their core point is simple: users make decisions earlier inside AI answers, summaries, and comparisons, so your content needs to be structured, clear, and ready for citations. Tighten your schema, strengthen product and FAQ structure, and monitor where your content appears so you can double down on what AI already favor. Some stats:

• Amsive: AI driven sessions converted at 7.05% vs 5.81% for organic.

• Similarweb: AI referrals converted at 11.4% vs 5.3% for organic across global ecommerce.

• Adobe Digital Insights: AI referred retail conversions improving year over year.

• Microsoft Advertising: Copilot powered journeys are 33% shorter and 76% more likely to lead to lower funnel conversions.

• BrightEdge: AI search represents less than 1 percent of referral traffic but carries higher engagement.

• Microsoft Clarity: AI driven referrals grew 155 percent over eight months and converted at up to 3 times the rate of search and social.

• Microsoft internal data: Copilot sessions show a 22 percent increase in unique chat turns.

My Take: The recommendations on how to improve your site and content shouldn’t be surprising if you’ve been following along. But the stats here continue to show that AI search is converting at a better clip. Why else is AI Overviews taking over more of the Google SERPs?

I do believe that AI Mode will eventually be the default view. Not anytime soon, but it’s coming. If you look at what the ChatGPT Atlas browser does when putting in a query into the search bar, it gives you a response with web search enabled. Chrome gives you the AIO-led SERPs. The Atlas experience is where Chrome is going with AI Mode. Chrome is already suggesting AI Mode in the search bar. Here’s a look at what both do with Chrome’s AI Mode from search bar on the left and Atlas search bar on the right. Which do you prefer?

3 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Investing in AI Search

Aleyda Solis shows why AI search cannot run in a silo, urging marketers to align AI efforts with existing SEO so technical access, indexability, and brand signals compound instead of collide. She explains how goals must shift because AI search is both branding and performance, not just a traffic channel. She also warns against optimizing for static tool prompts and pushes teams to audit whether answers are grounded or model generated.

Why ‘It’s Just SEO’ Misses the Mark in the Era of AI SEO

Nick Eubanks shows why AI SEO is its own discipline, not a rebrand of legacy tactics. The big moves are clear: structure content so engines can lift passages cleanly, publish neutral evidence that models trust, seed definitions and facts in public sources, and tighten brand entity data so LLMs describe you accurately. He pushes brands to design content for retrieval, citation, and blending across surfaces, not just rankings.

LLMs.txt Shows No Clear Effect on AI Citations, Based on 300k Domains

Matt G. Southern digs into a 300,000 domain study and finds that llms.txt is not the magic switch some hoped it would be. Only about 10 percent of sites use it, and citation rates across major LLMs look identical whether the file exists or not. His advice is to add the file if you want a low effort future proofing step, but do not pitch it as a growth lever. For now, focus on signals that actually move AI visibility, because llms.txt is still more experiment than advantage.

My Take: I’m still in the camp that it’s such an easy thing to do that it won’t hurt to have it.

The Technical SEO Debt That Will Destroy Your AI Visibility

Reza Moaiandin discusses why traditional SEO wins are no longer enough. He shows how AI crawlers ignore the shortcuts Google has forgiven for years, which means slow pages, bloated code, and weak Core Web Vitals can quietly bury your brand in AI answers. He pushes you to check Cloudflare’s new default crawler blocking, tighten page speed at the source, and audit whether AI bots can even reach your site.

Adding Context to Your Search Console Data With Custom Annotations

Search Console now lets you drop custom annotations directly onto your performance charts, creating a simple timeline of everything you do that could sway traffic. Pin the day you launched a redesign, rolled out new content, fixed a technical issue or rode a seasonal wave. Those notes become a visual breadcrumb trail that helps you connect effort to outcome.

Looking at their documentation, one property can have up to 200 annotations. Annotations are stored up to 500 days.

Digital Equity Is Brand Equity: Don’t Lose Search Visibility in a Merger

Bill Hunt lays out a blunt truth that should make every SEO and exec sit up. Most mergers tank their search visibility because teams rush branding and legal work while ignoring the digital assets that actually drive revenue. He pushes leaders to audit visibility before a deal closes, map redirects early, align hreflang and structured data, and give a digital lead real authority. He stresses looping SEO into the deal room and treating the rebrand as a visibility booster, not a burial. He provides some interesting examples like a $200m deal where all of the top-performing content for the acquired firm was redirected to a single press release page (don’t do that).

SEO + GEO Ripples

• Matt G. Southern breaks down why Cloudflare’s outage sent 5xx errors surging and what SEOs should actually do about it. His core message is calming. Short bursts of 5xxs mostly slow Googlebot rather than tank rankings, so the smart move is to log the outage, annotate analytics, and let crawling stabilize before making any big calls. He urges you to watch Search Console’s crawl stats over the next few days and double check server logs to confirm recovery. If reports show missing traffic or conversions, treat them as data gaps instead of real performance drops.

AI

Introducing Nano Banana Pro

Nano Banana Pro turns image generation into a serious power tool for marketers, creators, and anyone building content driven products. The model produces accurate text in multiple languages, pulls real world data through Search grounding, and turns notes or references into polished infographics, mockups, and storyboards. You can blend up to fourteen inputs, keep people consistent across scenes, and control lighting, focus, and layout with precision. There’s also a note where you can put an image into Gemini and ask if it’s generated by AI. They focus on the SynthID watermark.

My Take: It’s BANANAS good. Best one out there. The first thing tried was this prompt: “Create an infographic for the Floyi SaaS platform.” No other info. But I was also logged in, so there might be some info about Floyi, although I primarily use ChatGPT. Gemini is really just for testing stuff like this when they have something new. I assume it had something in memory and went to search the web about Floyi.

Besides the AI-purple (might be the em dash of AI design), it did a great job for a first draft and hit on a number of key features and benefits.

Then I asked Nano Banana: “Create Pixar-styled, 3D-animated Floyi mascot options.” And it gave me these characters:

Grok 4.1 Fast’s Compelling Dev Access and Agent Tools API Overshadowed by Musk Glazing

Carl Franzen explains how xAI’s biggest developer release yet was drowned out by Grok’s bizarre streak of overpraising Elon Musk. While Grok 4.1 Fast finally arrived with full API access, long context windows, strong benchmark wins, and a new Agent Tools API for search, code execution, and document retrieval, conversation online fixated on Grok calling Musk stronger than pro athletes and smarter than Einstein. The tech looks fast, cheap, and capable, but the glazing controversy signals alignment gaps that developers must test for before trusting Grok in production.

Gemini 3 Brings Upgraded Smarts and New Capabilities to the Gemini App

The new Gemini 3 update gives the model sharper reasoning to help

you get cleaner, more usable outputs with less prompt wrangling. The new generative interfaces let you turn prompts into interactive layouts or dynamic UIs, which is perfect for planning content, pitching ideas, or mock testing user flows. Gemini Agent now handles multi step tasks like inbox cleanup, research, and travel planning, giving you more space to focus on the work that matters.

AI Ripples

• OpenAI releases the new GPT 5.1 Codex Max for anyone building software, automations, or technical products. The model handles long running coding tasks, refactors entire repos, and works across millions of tokens without losing the plot. It cuts token costs by thinking more efficiently, generates cleaner implementations, and collaborates through the CLI and IDE with far fewer retries. It also ships with safer defaults, sandboxing, and clearer logs so developers can trust the output.

• OpenAI is sunsetting GPT 4o from its API on February 16, so teams still relying on it need to shift to GPT 5.1, which delivers larger context windows, faster throughput, and cheaper input costs. Emotional user loyalty slowed earlier transitions, but this time developers get a clear runway. If you use GPT 4o for multimodal tasks or latency sensitive workflows, benchmark replacements now, tune pipelines early, and rewrite any logic built around its conversational quirks.

LINK BUILDING

Why Hyper-Relevance Wins in Digital PR

Vince Nero breaks down why digital PR teams keep getting ignored and what actually moves the needle now. His data from 31 million emails shows that small, hyper-targeted outreach earns dramatically more links, replies, and opens. He urges PR pros to match journalists by topic, geography, timing, and format instead of blasting giant lists. He also shows how digging into recent articles, beats, and publication patterns helps you build lists that stay under 50 contacts yet drive triple the ROI.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Facebook Marketplace Gets a Glow Up

The Facebook Marketplace is leveling up with social shopping, smarter discovery, and new AI features. They now have collections you can build with friends, collaborative buying that lets multiple people join a seller chat, and reactions plus comments that sharpen recommendations. Meta AI now suggests smart questions to ask sellers and pulls detailed insights for cars, furniture, and fashion. Add the expanded inventory from eBay and Poshmark and a clearer shipping flow, and Marketplace suddenly looks like a much more useful channel for digital marketers watching social commerce trends.

TikTok Will Let You Choose How Much AI Generated Content You Want to See

Geoff Desreumaux breaks down TikTok’s newest control that lets users dial AI generated content up or down in their For You feed. The update sits inside Manage Topics, where AI generated content now has its own slider, giving users real control instead of forcing an AI heavy feed. He notes that TikTok also introduced invisible watermarking so the platform can identify AI made videos even when metadata is stripped..

X Handle Marketplace

X breaks down how its Handle Marketplace works and what creators need to know before trying to claim an inactive username. You need a Premium+ level subscription, a clean account history, and steady posting to keep any handle you acquire. X prioritizes active creators, and inactivity or low quality engagement can get a handle reclaimed. High value handles may cost five to seven figures, and approvals can take a week or more.

What handle do you want?

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

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TopicalMap.com Service - Let us do the heavy lifting. We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map designed to boost authority and dominate your niche and industry.

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AD

CTV ads made easy: Black Friday edition

As with any digital ad campaign, the important thing is to reach streaming audiences who will convert. Roku’s self-service Ads Manager stands ready with powerful segmentation and targeting — plus creative upscaling tools that transform existing assets into CTV-ready video ads. Bonus: we’re gifting you $5K in ad credits when you spend your first $5K on Roku Ads Manager. Just sign up and use code GET5K. Terms apply.

Use code GET5K now