I had a client meeting today. Good client, long relationship, smart operator. We covered a lot of ground, but one thread kept surfacing: shrinking conversion rates, why they're happening industry-wide, and what actually needs to change. The answer connects what's happening inside Google's auction to what Google is building outside of it. And it's worth putting on paper. Google Says Search Traffic Is Declining. Are You Paying Attention to What That Signals? Google search refer

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