Get Your Business Found & Chosen In AI Search [Free SEJ Live Event]
AI search is changing how customers discover local businesses.
On August 26, from 12-3 p.m. ET, SEJ Live is bringing together local search experts and practitioners to show you how to earn visibility, track results, and build a website that AI engines can trust and cite.
YouTube Changes How It Counts Views On Long-Form & Live
- YouTube will count views from the first frame across all formats.
- The change applies to long-form video, Shorts, and live streams.
- Earnings will continue to use engaged Shorts views and engaged watch hours, not the new public count.
YouTube is changing how it counts views on long-form videos and live streams. This change will not affect earnings or eligibility.
Audience-First SEO: A Smarter Way to Rank Higher in 2026
Key Takeaways
- Audience-first SEO builds your keyword and content strategy around a specific, high-value audience instead of a broad topic or category.
- The tactics stay familiar (keyword research, content gap analysis, TAM (total addressable market) analysis), but the organizing principle behind all three changes.
- Programs using this approach see growth concentrated among the audiences that actually drive revenue, not just a bump in overall traffic.
- Applying it starts with defining your priority audience before you ever look at keyword volume.
- Integrated agencies have a built-in advantage here, since paid audience research already exists internally and can inform SEO strategy directly.
- Audience-first SEO also sets up your Digital PR targeting, since the same research tells you where that audience already spends its time.
Paid media has always started with the audience. Every campaign begins with who you’re trying to reach before it gets to what you’re going to say. Paid teams buy audiences, not channels.
AI search performance KPIs every marketer should track
As long as I’ve been in marketing, people have warned against focusing on “vanity metrics,” or those flashy, high numbers that don’t translate to real results or profit. Fast forward a decade, I never expected traffic and search rank to be part of that conversation.
Microsoft Clarity Now Separates Branded And Non-Branded AI Citations
Microsoft Clarity has added branded and non-branded query labels, filters, and Share of Authority breakdowns to its AI Citations dashboard.
The August 3 update helps marketers answer a basic question: Did an AI system look for your brand by name, or did it find your content while researching a broader topic?
Gen Z Now Treats Claude And OpenAI Like Consumer Brands, But Trust Is Still An Issue
Claude’s Consideration score among U.S. Gen Z adults nearly doubled in the second quarter of 2026, climbing from 14.2% to 28.1% and landing the highest score of any brand in YouGov’s newest ranking. OpenAI more than doubled its own score too, jumping from 10.1% to 22.1%. If you check referral traffic and citation share every Monday and consider the AI question handled, this number measures something referral logs never will. Gen Z isn’t just using these products. A growing share of them is starting to think of Claude and OpenAI the way they think of a sneaker brand or a streaming service.
What Claude Design Could Mean for UX | Neil Patel
Key Takeaways
- Claude Design is an experimental AI-powered design workspace from Anthropic, built on Claude Opus 4.7.
- The tool is built for rapid ideation and early-stage prototyping, not final production design.
- A standout capability lets the tool ingest a company’s codebase and design files to apply brand guidelines automatically.
- Users can iterate through conversation, direct edits, and comments, then export to PDF, PPTX, Canva, or Claude Code workflows.
- Claude Design is a complement to tools like Figma and Canva, not a replacement for them.
Most design tools are built for designers. That’s been the assumption for decades, and it’s created a bottleneck that marketers, product managers, and content teams know well: you have an idea, but getting it into a visual form means waiting on someone else’s schedule.
How AI Search Trends Are Changing PPC Campaign Structures – Ask A PPC
This month’s Ask a PPC tackles a strategy question masquerading as an execution one:
“What should search campaign structures look like when AI changes how people research before they buy?”
CRM deployment: A step-by-step process for growing teams
There’s an irony at the heart of most failed CRM rollouts: the technology almost never lets you down. The deployment does. More than 60% of CRM failures trace back to people and process challenges, not the software, and most of those failures are preventable with the right plan.
Reddit CEO Intends To Show More Reviews And Recommendations
Reddit’s Q2 earnings call revealed that Reddit intends to surface more evergreen content to users. The company also explained that it intends to make its search bar more visually engaging by integrating advertising modules. It’s clear that Reddit aspires to compete with online content publishers and become a stronger competitor to social networks.