Author: Ryuzaki

With AI-driven search and hyper-fragmented media channels reshaping how people discover brands, the “set it and forget it” approach to marketing measurement is officially dead.  Measuring impact isn’t a static check of dashboard data. Used strategically, measurement is a virtuous cycle where data informs your ad platform settings and those settings, in turn, generate better data (and business outcomes). Here’s how to build a measurement flywheel that keeps your growth efficient. The 4-step measurement cycle Imagine a Bay Area SaaS company, PowerLoop, selling an AI-powered analytics platform. They’re investing heavily in Google Search, LinkedIn, and some emerging AI publication sponsorships.…

A growing share of search interactions now begins inside generative systems. Users open AI tools and ask questions the same way they’d ask a colleague: in full sentences, with context, and often across multiple follow-up prompts. Generative systems synthesize answers from sources they interpret as credible and relevant to the prompt. Visibility increasingly depends on whether a brand’s content aligns with the questions people ask AI systems, not just the keywords they type into search engines. Traditional search results haven’t disappeared. Today’s discovery environment blends ranked results, AI-generated summaries, and conversational assistants. This shift introduces a new research layer: prompt…

Imagine your ideal customer going to ChatGPT and asking, “Is [BRAND] worth it?” They’re not getting a vetted list of links in response. They’re getting a synthesized answer, most likely summarizing who you are, what you’re known for, and whether you’re credible. They’ll get a confident answer to the nebulous question of assigning worth. You don’t control that summary. But it will shape their decision before they convert, possibly before they ever visit your site. This is the new reality of search. SEO has traditionally been a discovery channel: higher rankings led to more traffic, which led to more conversions.…

We’ve tested Google AI Max over the past nine months, analyzing 23 individual tests across 16 already mature advertisers operating within a range of verticals. This article reveals what we did to maximize success with this campaign type. Your experiments and observations may vary. If so, we’d welcome the debate. This is intended to be just one voice among many in the conversation around AI Max. All the analyses we discuss are replicable within your own accounts, so you can ratify or dispute the findings based on your own data. The ground rules for AI Max Before launching an AI…

Eight in ten Performance Max advertisers are receiving connected TV (CTV) impressions via YouTube, as reported by Smarter Ecoommerce’s Mike Ryan. Google has expanded the channel’s reach over the past year — and the trajectory is only accelerating. The timeline of how we got here: Q2 2025: Google began serving CTV ads using standard product feed images, meaning advertisers with no video assets were suddenly generating TV impressions from their existing catalog photos January 2026: Google announced shoppable CTV ads — letting viewers browse products and scan QR codes to purchase directly from their TV screen, pulling directly from Google…

Google’s branded queries filter in Search Console is now available to all eligible sites. Google’s new branded queries filter, announced Nov. 20, lets you separate branded and non-branded search traffic in the Performance report. Why we care. Separating branded and non-branded queries has long required manual regex filters or keyword lists. This update gives you native segmentation in Search Console, making it easier to measure brand demand versus discovery traffic. Google’s announcement. Google confirmed the broader availability in a LinkedIn post today: “The branded queries filter in Search Console is now available to all eligible sites! This feature helps you…

We joke every time we hear Google’s John Mueller answer a question with “it depends.” But actually, it’s true. There are few definitive answers or universally established facts in SEO. Do meta titles matter? Yes. Is internal linking a good practice? Yes. Is duplicate content bad for SEO? Yes. But if I tried to make a list of SEO questions with a single, clear, absolute answer, it wouldn’t be long. That’s the real challenge: we operate in an industry where things almost always depend on context, intent, competition, your website’s situation, and the platform itself. Yet over and over, we…

The largest annual survey of PPC professionals finds the industry under growing pressure — more opaque platforms, weaker measurement, and AI tools that help but haven’t transformed the day-to-day. Why we care. More than half of practitioners (53%) say PPC is harder than it was two years ago, up from 49%. The dominant reason isn’t competition — it’s that platforms are making more decisions advertisers can’t see or override, and that gap is only widening. With 89% of digital spend flowing to just three companies, advertisers who don’t build measurement infrastructure independent of platform reporting are increasingly flying blind. By…

Google is making Merchant Center for Agencies generally available in the U.S. and Canada today — giving agency teams a single login to manage, monitor, and optimize merchant clients at scale. What’s included: A unified dashboard for managing all client accounts from a single login Proactive diagnostics that surface critical alerts across the portfolio Merchandising-based opportunity tools to identify performance improvements feeding directly into Google Ads. Why we care. Managing multiple merchant accounts across Google’s ecosystem has historically meant jumping between logins and dashboards. Having it all surfaced in one place means problems get caught faster, before they quietly drain…

Every few weeks, a new study drops declaring that Reddit (or YouTube, or Wikipedia) is the most important source for AI citations. Marketers share it. Clients ask about it. Someone starts drafting a Reddit strategy. Because it does. These analyses often flatten the nuance of prompt intent, model differences, and vertical context into a single headline number, and brands jump to start building strategies and teams around benchmarks that have nothing to do with their actual category or customer journey. The shiny object problem in AI search is real, and it’s getting more expensive. Tinuiti’s Q1 2026 AI Citation Trends…