Google turns AI Search into an ad machine while EU sends the bill

One company can post 24% growth and swallow a billion-dollar fine in the same breath. You know who.

The money’s still moving: Alphabet posted a big Q2, with growth across its core ad surfaces:

• Alphabet revenue: up 24% YoY
• Search ads: up 17%
• YouTube Ads: up 13%, with 1.7B unique viewers on World Cup content
• AI Mode: past 1 billion monthly users

And Google swears the AI surfaces are adding queries instead of eating them.

There are also new rooms to advertise in: AI Max left beta, unlocking “billions” of once-unmonetized searches for ads.

Over 500,000 advertisers are already in, chasing a claimed 15% conversion lift. Just don’t expect much clarity on how you got matched.

The control freaks get a treat, too: Those same AI tools were spotted inside Standard Shopping campaigns.

That means Performance Max smarts without surrendering your manual levers. It’s still unconfirmed, so treat it as an early look.

And the bill arrives: The EU fined Google roughly $1 billion under the DMA over self-preferencing in Search.

Google must now give third-party shopping, hotel, and travel results fairer prominence. European marketers could finally see SERP real estate shift their way.

Tale as old as time for Google. It builds the ad machine, the EU adjusts the settings.

AI is answering your local queries, your support tickets, and soon your ad reports

Somewhere between your reviews, your reports, and your support queue, AI has been busy.

First stop, your Yelp listing: OpenAI just struck a deal with Yelp to surface local reviews, ratings, and photos inside ChatGPT responses.

Which means your Yelp presence is now a GEO play, not just a local-search one. Time to treat those reviews like juice for LLM mentions.

Next, your reporting: The ChatGPT Ads Manager added a tooltip splitting conversions into View-Through and Click-Through attribution.

Small tweak, telling direction. OpenAI is building the reporting you’d need before trusting the real budget to the channel.

Then, your grunt work: Claude’s new “Record a skill” feature lets you screen-record yourself doing a task once, then have it repeat the whole thing on command.

No prompt engineering required. Handy for the recurring stuff eating your afternoons.

Finally, your support queue: Google says Gemini agents now autonomously resolve 75% of Google Ads support queries.

Big bet on offloading support to AI. Whether the quality holds for anything past routine questions is what we’re worried about.

The message is clear: Get comfortable, because AI’s now sitting in every seat around you.

Content decays in many ways. Here’s how to fix it

Traffic drops, so you update the date, bolt on a few hundred words, and hit republish.

Sometimes it works. But often, it does nothing.

As Ashish Jacob lays out, that’s because falling clicks are a symptom. And content decay usually comes in four flavors, each needing a different fix.

#1: Ranking decay. Clicks down, impressions down, position worse.

A competitor out-wrote you, links dried up, or your own pages are cannibalizing each other. This is the classic case and adding 300 words won’t cut it.

You need information gain: original data, first-hand testing, the follow-up question everyone else ignored.

#2: Zero-click capture. You’re ranking higher, but clicks don’t follow.

Translation? An AI Overview is answering the query right on the results page. Roughly 68% of Google searches now end without a click.

A refresh won’t help because you didn’t lose rankings. You just lost the click to the answer box.

The Crew’s take: This is the one catching everyone off guard. The play isn’t rewriting. It’s building something the summary can’t replace (a calculator, a tool, a real opinion) or reallocating effort to a page closer to conversion.

Easier said than done.

#3: Intent drift. Position’s holding, but the SERP reshaped around you. Google now wants a video, a comparison table, or a product page, and your narrative guide no longer fits.

Re-match the format or split the page, but keep the URL so you don’t torch its equity.

#4: Demand decay. Clicks and impressions down, position held or improved. You didn’t lose anything, but people just stopped searching. No rewrite resurrects a dead query.

Confirm demand’s actually gone, not just relocated to Reddit or YouTube, then consolidate, redirect, or prune without guilt.

The main step for each? Diagnose before you refresh.

Pull six months of clicks and a year-over-year comparison from Search Console, read the signature, and act only where the data says you’ll win.

Why most B2B content dies in the wild?

Most B2B content has a quiet, unremarkable death.

It gets published, gets a handful of views, and disappears into the archive without ever prompting a single meaningful action.

Here’s where the cracks are forming:

The biggest hurdle for 40% of B2B marketers is creating content that actually prompts a desired action. It’s one thing to get a click; it’s another to get a conversion.

Resource constraints (39%) and measuring effectiveness (33%) follow closely behind as major pain points.

Differentiating content from competitors remains a struggle for 24% of respondents, while 23% find it difficult to align content with the increasingly complex buyer’s journey.

We see here a growing need for more strategic, data-driven planning rather than just high-volume production.

Our opinion: Most content is “noise” that fails to drive action. This friction often stems from a lack of clear CTAs or content that doesn’t map to a specific stage of the funnel.

Actionable tip: Every piece of content should have a “Next Step.” Don’t leave your reader hanging; guide them to a related case study, a webinar, or a product demo immediately.