How to Future-Proof Your Marketing for an AI-Centric Search World? | 5-Minute Whiteboard

Today, Google’s search results still look (mostly) like lists of snippets and links, e.g. But, plenty of search marketers and industry observers suspect we’re in the closing days of this format, and the future holds something closer to how AI-tools like ChatGPT and Bard answer user-inputted prompts, e.g. If that’s the case, what can/should marketers do to give themselves a…

5-Minute Whiteboard: Is Generative AI in Search Results the SEO Apocalypse?

In the not-too-distant future, we’ll look back at the days when a full 1/3rd of Google searches resulted in a free click to the open web and marvel at how good we had it. For the last few months, Google’s been telegraphing that generative AI answers will soon appear in search results. These pieces of content will be drawn from…

AI-Generated Content is the New Floor

Anyone can make it. Most of it is at least OK. Some of it’s pretty good. A few folks are already sharpening their skills at prompting AIs to generate increasingly high-quality material. But, the core problem with content created by large language model (LLM) outputs is that it’s so cheap, so accessible, so ubiquitous—it’s not merely table stakes; AI content…

Why Marketers Should Follow Their Audiences, Not Predict the Future

It’s 2017, and you convince your executives to be early adopters of the #Web3 trend. Blockchain-based product investments, marketing with NFTs, perhaps your own crypto coin. It’s fun, interesting, and it feels like you’re ahead of your competition on a rising tide that will lift all ships. Only trouble is, your target audience—the people you hope will become customers—aren’t adopting…

Why Marketers, Creators, and Brands Should Start Using Mastodon ASAP

I joined Twitter in June, 2007. It turned out to be a very smart move; over the next decade, that network had a massive impact on my professional success. Some of that is because I did interesting or valuable things, but a lot of it was a combination of timing and serendipity. There are plenty of articles about why you…

Google, Apple, and Amazon Stifle Innovation When They Favor Their Own Products

The SparkToro team got an exciting surprise on Sunday evening: a mention of our research on Last Week Tonight by John Oliver. The full episode, Big Tech Monopolies, is available on YouTube. It covers an issue I’ve railed against before, but with a heightened sense of urgency: there is actually a bipartisan bill in Congress that might fix this. Thankfully,…
Marketing Predictions

Inferred Links Will Replace the Link Graph

For 25 years, links have been core to how Google ranks web pages. But, today, I think most marketers dramatically overestimate their importance. There’s good evidence that over the long run, links won’t be all that crucial to Google’s rankings, and will be replaced by lexical references that connect topics and keywords to a brand, website, or page—what I’ll call…