Thanks for sharing Ryan, some notes that might be useful to others: - Google is constantly changing. We're always adapting. That is part of what's happening here. Google has made a bunch of recent changes. We're confident about how to navigate them and are in the process of working through them. - We've been adapting our SEO strategy for what we believe Google is going to focus on in the future; as an example, we categorize content in different fit buckets (fit = content for ICP) and are mapping different strategies to those buckets. Our primary goal is to continue growing good fit traffic. - We're seeing traffic from AI engines increase M/M and have been leaning toward driving more of and optimizing this traffic. (And we've launched AI Search Grader to help other companies do the same. We do see the impact of AIO (AI features) in early-adopter markets - Blog is one part of our organic strategy, we do see organic traffic growing in other parts One of the challenges of operating a distribution engine at this kind of scale is platform changes will impact you, but it's not something we haven't worked through before.

This is cute.

This is it. Giant Freakin Robot is done. This is our last day in operation as a website. Going forward you'll only find us on YouTube. Here's why... giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/in…

So with the major affiliate sections of major publishers dropping in SEO visibility, who will take their place? Other review sites doing their own legitimate reviews? You know, the kind that Google recommends in its Review guidelines? Or, more e-commerce and forum websites? I have a hunch.

ok #engagepdx i'm up next in the main room at 2:10 talking about how to survive in an aI search world (and how I can dominate AI overviews) Just sad that @jesseseogeek and Rachel in the downstairs room and @IanLurie in the other room are going to miss it.

Soon we’ll be launching a change to how the block function works. If your posts are set to public, accounts you have blocked will be able to view them, but they will not be able to engage (like, reply, repost, etc.).

I posted something similar a while ago, I think there’s a lot of demand for this. Google could also throw small publishers a bone after all the devastation they’ve caused, by creating something like a SERP feature or a filter for small publishers. But yeah, I know, they won’t.

CEO: I hate how our ads are starting to look. I feel like we're starting to come across like used car salesmen. VP Growth: I feel the same way, but they work. CEO: What does “they work” actually mean? VP Growth: They drive revenue. Isn’t that what we want? CEO: Yes, but there might be a cost to our brand we’re not accounting for. VP Growth: That sounds hand-wavy. I thought we prided ourselves on being data-driven. CEO: We do. I’m realizing we haven’t been looking at the right data. VP Growth: I thought we had all the performance marketing data we could get our hands on. CEO: Have you been tracking our organic traffic from branded searches? VP Growth: Sure, quarterly for board meeting prep. CEO: Great. Is our branded search volume up or down vs last year? By how much? Is traffic from branded search up or down? Is the share of total traffic and total revenue from branded search up or down? VP Growth: Umm... CEO: And how often are you looking at ROAS from our ads? VP Growth: Every 15 minutes during a 9-hour day and a few times after... so roughly 38 times a day. CEO: So we look at paid media stats 3,420 times more frequently than our organic business driven by branded search? VP Growth: When you put it that way... but there’s so much noise in that organic number. It goes up with more spend, discounts, new products, and in core season. CEO: That’s why we strip out the noise and seasonally adjust to get to a resilient baseline representing our brand strength. VP Growth: How do we get to that baseline? We can’t turn off ads, discounts, and new product launches for a while to see the base. CEO: Unfortunately, you’re right. Let's use our best judgment and get to a rough, imperfect, directional calculation of the true base. VP Growth: Nice. Then what? CEO: Once we have the rough base of branded search volume and revenue, we’ll take 30, 60, 90, and 180-day rolling averages and compare each year over year. Again, it’s imperfect, but we’ll start to get a feel for which look-back period is most useful when evaluating if we're raising the base. VP Growth: Seems reasonable. CEO: We’ll pick one KPI to keep things simple. For now, let’s go with branded search volume and allocate 10% of our budgets and 25% of our time to driving that base, and we'll increase as we see signal VP Growth: Love that. Here’s my realization: All marketing is growth marketing. It’s about generating the biggest totality of high-margin dollars over the mid and long term. We'll have to make the cost cuts now to support the evolution. The spike-stripped-seasonally-adjusted base of branded search volume is a reasonable leading indicator KPI. All our inputs (channels, tactics, creative, targeting, etc.) will be accountable to that output, and it's my job to find those inputs. CEO: That was epic. You’ll have my job someday. VP Growth: Thanks, but I’m thinking of getting into used car sales...