Welcome back!

I know you missed us last week * tear 🥹*. In recompense, we’ve got extra digital marketing tea for you to sip on this week!

• ⚖️ The DOJ ruled that Google operated an “illegal monopoly in the advertising technology industry.” Google’s prices were ruled anticompetitive. This is the second case lost in addition to the search antitrust monopoly. Stay tuned as the DOJ prepares remedies for both rulings.

• Testing is in full swing for Google AI Mode experiment in Labs. 🔬 As with previous Search Lab experiments, early access is given only to premium Google One subscribers and previous Labs contributors like DBE. As one of our first prompts, we asked AI Mode to provide points of differentiation between it and the other two Google AI models we look at for SAIO — Gemini and AI Overviews. Gemini is actually the AI brains behind both AI Mode and AI Overviews though they generate responses differently. Here’s a chart AI Mode created for us to show the strengths, weaknesses, and use purposes for all three. We’ll continue our research to determine if and how AI Mode impacts our SAIO strategy and keep you in the loop of new developments.
  

• Google is now linking “keywords” in its AI Overviews responses that point to its own traditional search results. Come again?! They say this is “to help people more easily explore topics and discover relevant websites.” Trade coverage of this development includes the opinion that this is an effort to monetize AI Overviews by moving searchers to Google’s more traditional results pages that have more ads to click on. 

• Navigating search intent in a sea of AI platforms and search engines is tricky. Get tips on how to optimize for both topic clusters and keywords in a comprehensive strategy.

• Anthropic has a fascinating blog on the “faithfulness” of reasoning AI models (like their Claude) and their “Chain-of-Thought” as they are working on their response to your prompt. Anthropic’s research shows “you can’t always rely on what they (the AI models) tell us about their reasoning.” Anthropic’s solution is to “work out ways to increase faithfulness” between the chain-of-thought and the response. Note: Anthropic only tested its own Claude AI models and DeepSeek models. If we wanted to be a little cynical, we could posit that Anthropic is leveraging this research to distinguish itself from DeepSeek.

• Google Engaged Audiences… 
  • What are they? They are a segment of users that have interacted with your website across Google platforms. 
  • Limitations? You can only have one per Google ads account. 
  • Who are they good for? Small business owners or those just starting out in Google Ads who are looking to remarket.

• Everyone may try to act cool, but who is actually cool? 😎 NPR poses a form of this question for brands. If every brand acts like the cool best friend (snarky like Wendy’s or trendy like Duolingo), everyone blends in. My thoughts: brands should take a hint from 80’s high-school movies and be themselves to stand out in the best way.

Thoughts to Take With You… 💞

You know how people always encourage you to “find your joy?”

.

What if we flipped it…?

What if we allowed joy to find us?

.

What if we allowed joy to meet us

like the rays of morning sun stream through a curtain?

.

What if we let joy entwine itself in every aspect of our day

as an infant does with every new toy they discover?

What if joy was never lost, but always following behind,

waiting, patiently, to be discovered.

Happy Wednesday!

Natalie

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