AI Thoughts

Why platforms, governments, companies, and consumers must share the burden of trust This article was sparked by a Washington Post story last Friday about a traveler who was scammed after calling a fake number surfaced by Google’s AI Overview. Reading it, I realized the frustrations I first wrote about two years ago—when I questioned whether […]

Search Makes the Earnings Call Highlights Reel Historically, companies avoided directly naming Google in investor communications, even when traffic dropped or algorithms changed. But with the rise of zero-click searches decimating organic traffic, AI Overviews and generative search, the gloves are off. Thanks to a comprehensive roundup by Glen Allsopp at Detailed.com, we now have

In a world of multimodal results and AI-powered curation, shelf space isn’t just about showing up—it’s about being the brand that gets picked, cited, and trusted. From Floor Plan to Recommendation Engine In The New Shelf War, I explored how modern search results resemble a retail floor, with brands battling for placement across shopping blocks,

The era of indiscriminate web crawling is coming to an end. As infrastructure costs mount and legal frameworks become more stringent, both search engines and AI companies are shifting from “crawl everything” to “crawl selectively.” This transformation, catalyzed by initiatives like Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl and growing resource constraints, demands that content creators optimize for

While preparing for a webinar last week with my good friend at Milestone Internet on the “Future-Proofing your SEO Strategy” and how businesses must shift from traditional SEO to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) I started with the same assumption many others have: “We need a new framework becase Everything’s changed.” But as I sifted through

Everyone’s talking about the outcomes, the traffic drops, AI answers, disappearing links, and the end to SEO as we know it, but not enough people are asking: What actually changed? The rise of AI-powered search has triggered widespread anxiety across the digital world. Organic visibility is collapsing. Zero-click results are taking over. SEO is dead,

Cloudflare has introduced a new solution called Pay Per Crawl, billed as a “third option” for content owners to leverage in the new AI world. The blog post highlights that publishers had only two options: “all open” or “walled garden.” CloudFlare’s new Pay‑Per‑Crawl feature allows it to charge AI crawlers per request. Using HTTP 402 and secure authentication,

Early last week, Meta was granted partial summary judgment in a copyright lawsuit, with the court concluding that the plaintiffs failed to present evidence of a functioning licensing market disrupted by Meta’s use of their books for AI training. But the ruling wasn’t just about what evidence was missing—it highlighted a more profound issue: the

Across the broader search community and specifically at SMX Advanced last week, the phrase “Delphic costs ” was mentioned multiple times. But while many are referencing it, few outside of those speakers seem to grasp the strategic implications of this emerging concept fully. Delphic costs refer to the hidden costs incurred when users are shielded from suboptimal options

AI-powered search engines don’t just find answers—they shape them. Google SGE, Bing Copilot, ChatGPT, and Perplexity summarize and synthesize what they determine to be the best answer, often by collapsing multiple viewpoints into a single “consensus.” The more frequently an idea appears across authoritative sources, the more likely it is to be cited. But what