The Insights

A plain-English rundown of the AI agents Google launched at I/O 2026, from agentic checkout to Gemini Spark, and what they change for any business with a website.

The vendor industry has spent eighteen months selling AEO, GEO, AIO, and a dozen lesser acronyms as new disciplines that need new tools, new budgets, and new specialists. Google’s own Search Advocate, John Mueller, called that pattern out on Bluesky in August 2025. The quote is the cleanest summary I have seen of where the […]

Google’s I/O 2026 letter dropped one announcement that nobody is sequencing properly. Most of the recap coverage led with AI Mode hitting 1 billion monthly active users or AI Overviews reaching 2.5 billion. The bigger story was a paragraph buried under those numbers: Information Agents. Personalized AI agents running 24/7, monitoring the web for users, […]

You probably cannot guess the words your customers search. Real volume data shows why, and how to find the exact phrases that win in Google and AI search.

Chrome added an “Agentic Browsing” score to Lighthouse. You went to check yours, opened PageSpeed Insights or Chrome DevTools, and it was not there. You are not missing a setting. The score genuinely does not appear in the two tools most people use. Every guide currently telling you to “open PageSpeed Insights and check the […]

On May 27, 2026, Google extended its Preferred Sources feature into AI Overviews and AI Mode. It is one of the few levers in AI search that a publisher can actually pull. It is also one of the most misunderstood, because the vendor content that appeared within days framed it as something you can optimize […]

Every earnings call, every LinkedIn thread, every tech-media headline tells the same story: AI is eating Google’s lunch. The actual numbers say something different. Berkshire Hathaway’s Q1 2026 13F filing showed the firm tripled its Alphabet stake to roughly $16.6 billion, making Google the firm’s fifth-largest holding (IBTimes, 2026). It was the first quarterly disclosure […]

Key Takeaways How to Check if AI Search Is Citing Your Content AI citation visibility is something most businesses have never measured. They track Google rankings, monitor organic traffic, and watch Search Console data. But they have no idea whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews are referencing their content when users ask questions about […]

Google’s new AI optimization guide spends most of its word count saying the quiet part out loud: keep doing SEO, just be smarter about it. Buried in the “create valuable, non-commodity content” section is one line that does a lot of work without explaining itself: If you’re using generative AI tools to assist in content […]

LLMs.txt is the most-promoted, least-effective piece of “AI SEO” the industry produced between mid-2024 and mid-2026. Google made the position official in its May 2026 AI Optimization Guide. The hard data behind that position has been in server logs for over a year. I’ve been writing about it since October 2025. None of this is […]