What we are thinking about.
Notes from running 8 publications and building tools for them. Restaurant SEO, local marketing, the boring parts that move the needle.
Retailers’ AI App Gold Rush Is a Feature Fetish, Not a Shopper Magnet
Retailers are rushing to build AI apps, but with little evidence shoppers actually want them, these features risk becoming expensive digital window dressing.
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Generative AI in the Creator Economy: More Hype Than Help, But The Hustle Isn’t Dead
Generative AI in the creator economy is mostly a productivity tool, not the creative revolution it’s hyped up to be. The real winners know where to draw the line.
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OpenAI’s Consent-First Ad Gambit in the EU: A Privacy Theater or a Real Shift?
OpenAI’s new consent-first pixel signals upcoming ChatGPT ads in Europe, but don’t mistake compliance theater for true privacy respect.
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The AI Visibility Tool Circus: Why Marketers Are Waking Up to Overpriced Snake Oil
Marketers are dumping cash into AI visibility tools that promise clarity in a zero-click world, but inconsistent data and lack of standards expose them as costly gimmicks.
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The Yoast AI Feature Fiasco: How Lazy SEO Plugins Are Selling You Snake Oil in 2026
Yoast’s so-called “AI feature” is a perfect snapshot of lazy SEO plugin grift—repackaging shallow language models as magic, while actual SEO fundamentals rot on the vine.
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X’s New Ads Manager Is AI Hype Wrapped in a Pretty Interface — Here’s Why It Still Won’t Fix Your Campaigns
X’s revamped Ads Manager touts AI-powered ad optimization, but it’s mostly a cosmetic upgrade that won’t solve marketers’ real problems.
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Meta and Google’s AI Spending Spree: Betting Big on Ads, Betting Big on Smoke and Mirrors
Meta and Google are betting billions on AI to boost ad performance, but this AI hype is mostly a repackaged version of old ad tech promises that rarely pan out.
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Google’s AI Max Expansion: Another Layer of Automation Theater While Alphabet Prints Billions
Google’s latest AI Max update is less about innovation and more about locking advertisers tighter into its ecosystem as Alphabet rakes in $110B in Q1. Here’s why you should care.
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Meta Throws Open Its Ad Platform to Third-Party AI — Brace for the Next Wave of Marketing Automation Bullshit
Meta’s new AI connectors for ads are just another layer of automation hype in a space already drowning in vendor grift and lazy marketing tactics.
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Amazon’s $70 Billion Ad Revenue Is the Real Reason AWS Keeps Roaring and AI Gets Fed
Amazon’s ad revenue just hit $70 billion, fueling AWS’s AI-driven growth and rewriting the rules of ecommerce and advertising. The SEO grift can’t keep up.
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Omnicom’s AI Gambit: Finally Ditching the Ad Tech Parasites That Bleed the Industry Dry
Omnicom is testing AI-driven media buying to cut out the ad tech middlemen that have long bled the programmatic ecosystem dry. This is a rare sign the industry’s finally serious about change.
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Publishers Are Fumbling Deepfake Verification While AI Fakery Runs Wild
Deepfakes have shattered the trust publishers once took for granted, exposing lazy fact-checking and hollow AI defenses as the industry’s fatal weaknesses.
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Stagwell’s Agent Cloud: Another Overhyped Marketing Toolkit Pretending to Solve SMB AI Woes
Stagwell’s new “Agent Cloud” toolkit for SMBs is just another overhyped SaaS play promising AI magic but delivering generic, fragmented solutions. SMBs deserve better.
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Hershey’s $2B Marketing Blind Spot Meets Its Match — Or So They Hope — With AI Agents
Hershey is tackling a $2 billion marketing blind spot with AI agents from Mutinex and Tracer, aiming to overhaul slow, outdated media budget models. The move could shake up an industry stuck in the past.
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Goodway Group and Optable’s Data Clean-Up Is What AI Agents Actually Needed—Not Another Overhyped ‘Revolution’
Goodway Group and Optable are cutting through the AI hype by fixing the real problem in ad tech: garbage data. Their partnership proves AI agents only work when fed clean, compliant data.
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Mastercard’s AI Bet: Building for a Future Where Machines Make the Calls, Not Humans
Mastercard is engineering a future where AI doesn't just assist but fully drives decision-making, signaling the end for outdated human-led financial models and traditional advertising.
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Marketers Aren’t Just Embracing AI — They’re Freaking Out, And It Shows
Marketers are caught in a panic cycle over AI, driven by fear and hype rather than real, honest adoption. The future belongs to those who treat AI as infrastructure, not magic.
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Yoast and Rank Math AI Features: Overpromised, Underdelivered, and Totally Useless
The AI “features” in Yoast and Rank Math aren’t revolutionary tools—they’re half-baked gimmicks designed to distract you from their real problem: lazy SEO.
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