“What’s closing is the cheap part,” Shane Tepper told me. “The stretch where you can win position with work instead of budget.”
Tepper is co-founder of Resonate Labs, and I’d asked him a pointed question. Everyone in SEO talks about a closing window on earned AI visibility, but the surface area of AI search keeps expanding. More queries get answered by ChatGPT and Perplexity every month. More of those answers now carry clickable citations. So, what exactly is supposed to be closing?
We're excited to officially announce the next stop for
Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe 2026! Mark your calendars: based directly on
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Barcelona, Spain, from September 30 to October 2, 2026.
Apple's WebKit announced a new MCP server for Safari, enabling AI agents to debug websites for SEO and Core Web Vitals.
Safari announced they are introducing a new MCP server that will enable web developers and SEOs to debug websites with an AI agent. The AI agent connects to the Safari browser window and collects data like network requests and the DOM which are helpful for debugging bottlenecks related to Core Web Vitals or anything else that’s broken in the code or getting in the way with Safari browser compatibility.
Cloudflare is updating its method of identifying and blocking AI crawlers, which may result in Googlebot being blocked on sites that prevent AI training. The company announced the update as part of its second Content Independence Day.
AI Overviews are impacting more than informational search.
In our six-month analysis of over 600,000 keywords across 10 industries, AI Overviews grew an average of 71% across search engine results pages (SERPs) with commercial intent.
AI shopping agents have raised consumer expectations for personalization well beyond name tokens and basic segmentation.
Zero-party data (information customers share directly) and first-party behavioral data are the strongest inputs for personalized email programs.
Advanced segmentation, conditional logic in automations, and predictive churn modeling are the tactics separating high-performing email programs from average ones.
Personalization drives measurable gains in conversion rate, retention rate, and ROI across industries.
Every Email Service Provider (ESP) has different capabilities, but any increase in personalization tends to move performance metrics in the right direction.
A “Hi, [first name]” token in a subject line used to feel personal. Today it barely registers. Consumers have seen it so many times that it reads as the absence of personalization rather than the presence of it.
Last week, I argued that habitual publisher traffic – direct and branded – has been eroding for years, and that the under-35s are leading the charge. Not directly provable, but a theory.
Every content marketer seems to be asking the same question: Do semantic keywords still matter in SEO in 2026, especially now that AI engines influence traffic and buying decisions?
Google processes more than 5 trillion searches annually. But content marketers should pay closer attention to how Google interprets those queries. Its algorithm no longer evaluates pages by scanning for exact-match keyword strings. Like AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, it evaluates meaning.
Recent data shows that 88% of marketers now use AI every day to guide their biggest decisions, and for good reason. Marketing automation has been shown to generate 80% more leads and drive 77% higher conversion rates. With global ad spend now topping $1 trillion, there’s simply too much data for even the most experienced teams to manage by hand anymore.
As any marketer or SEO knows, there’s a special satisfaction in seeing your hard work pay off in the form of snagging a top result on the SERPs. But in the age of answer engine optimization (AEO), search results don’t tell the full story. To gauge success, you need to learn how to track your brand’s presence in AI search — which introduces a new set of metrics, including mentions, citations, and share of voice.
