Here's What That Means for Mid-Market Brands. Google's May 2026 core update is still rolling out. And while the SEO community is busy refreshing their rank trackers and posting volatility screenshots, the more important story is the one that's been building across the last two updates. Google is changing who it trusts. Not how it ranks content. Who it trusts to produce it. That distinction matters more than most people are accounting for. Google is shifting from ranking well-

The tracking is live. The attribution is catching up. I've written before about zero-click search, about AI intercepting the buyer journey before anyone reaches a website, and about what that's doing to paid search performance. This is the next part of that conversation. Our engineering team started seeing a pattern across client accounts that didn't have a clean explanation. Organic rankings were solid. Nothing had shifted in terms of position. But traffic from specific quer

While Everyone Is Still Debating AI A few months ago I wrote about how AI was intercepting buyers before they ever clicked an ad, how CPCs were rising, CTRs were falling, and the real problem wasn't your campaigns. It was where the decision was already being made. That holds. But the story moved faster than most people expected. Three things happened between January and April of this year that changed the day-to-day reality for anyone running paid search. ChatGPT ads launched

Everyone's talking about AI. Not everyone's talking about the same thing. That distinction is becoming expensive for businesses that assume all AI is interchangeable. GenAI tools, AI agents, and agentic AI aren't three names for the same technology. They're three fundamentally different operating models with different capabilities, different limitations, and very different requirements to deploy well. Understanding where each one starts and stops is the difference between usi

The voluntary migration window is open but closes when automatic upgrades begin in September This isn't a Google product update. It's a structural shift in how paid search works, and both major platforms are executing it on roughly the same timeline. Google announced this week that starting in September, it will stop allowing advertisers to create new Dynamic Search Ad campaigns. Existing DSA, automatically created asset, and campaign-level broad match campaigns will be autom

Here's the Road From Here to There Sundar Pichai was asked last week whether search would exist in ten years. His answer: "Search would be an agent manager, in which you're doing a lot of things." That's not just a prediction, it's pretty much a product roadmap. If you're running marketing for a mid-market business, the question worth asking isn't whether that future arrives, it's what your business needs to look like at each stop along the way. Because there are stops. This

The marketing funnel didn't get longer. It got hijacked. Not by a competitor. Not by a platform update. By a fundamental change in how buyers build their shortlists, and it happened quietly, upstream of everything you've been optimizing. Before anyone types a query into Google, a growing share of your potential buyers have already had a conversation with an AI assistant. They've described their problem. Gotten a framework. Narrowed their options. In some cases, they've alread

AI access is no longer the issue Most organizations are already there. Tools are in place. Teams are experimenting. Research shows that 78% of organizations are using AI in at least one business function, and 75% of knowledge workers report using AI at work. That sounds like progress. But when you look at how the business actually operates, something doesn’t line up. Because despite that level of adoption, more than 80% of organizations are not seeing a meaningful financial i

Earned media was never just about awareness. Here's how to turn coverage into pipeline. Most mid-market businesses treat PR like a feel-good expense. You land a story, share it on LinkedIn, clip it for the quarterly report, and move on. Leadership nods. Nobody asks what it generated. Nobody asks because nobody knows how to find out. That's not a PR problem. That's a measurement problem. And it's costing you. 67% of CMOs say PR directly influences revenue growth over a three-y

I've written about broken attribution before. More than once. If you've been following along, you know my position: last-click measurement was always a simplification, AI amplifies whatever data infrastructure you feed it, and most mid-market businesses are optimizing against a distorted picture of reality before a single bid is placed. I'm not going to repeat all of that here. What I'm going to do is tell you what's actually changed recently, because Google just published a