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If you're like me, you're probably juggling multiple audio apps throughout the day. I listen to audiobooks on Audible, switch over to music on Spotify, check out podcasts on Pocketcasts, and there's always something on YouTube in the background. Usually, switching between audio sources means opening the app, finding the playback function (or the media itself), and pressing play, every time you want to listen to something new. With Android 17 (currently in beta), Google is giving us a more advanced version that lets you easily switch between playback sources right from the Notifications panel. The new Now Playing media switcher is rolling out to Android 17 QPR Beta 3 users across the globe, and should be a part of the stable release in a couple of months. Media switching on Android works better as tiles Credit: Khamosh Pathak Now, technically speaking, this isn't a whole new feature: It's an update to one that no one really used. In Android 16, you can swipe on the Now Playing panel in the Notifications shade to access previously used apps and media. But this gesture is often buggy, and you'll often end up swiping on the media scrubber itself. There's also no clear indication that you can switch between playback sources in the panel. The new design in Android 17 fixes all of this, and makes it a feature I can actually see myself using every day. When you've used multiple media apps recently, you'll now see two tiles next to the Now Playing bar in the Notification shade. Tap on a tile, and it shows the source, with the title, background image, and your last listening position. From here, you can tap the big Play button to switch to the source. Swiping between the tiles works as well. And this also works on the lock screen, so you can switch between audio sources without even unlocking your smartphone. You'll only see up to two other tiles at the same time, but the feature works with up to four recent audio sources. You'll just have to swipe across to see the fourth in the Now Playing bar. There is a downside, though. When you have two other sources, the playback tile itself shrinks down, and you lose out on the horizontal space. YouTube titles, especially, are brutally cut off. But in my time using the switcher, I didn't find that particularly annoying. The extra functionality outweighs the reduced readability. Plus, this feature is still in beta testing, so things could change before the official release. The redesigned Now Playing bar is one of the many new features coming to Android 17. For example, Google recently announced "Continue On", which brings Apple's Handoff feature to the Android universe. View the full article

US retail giant’s shares plunge after saying it absorbed higher fuel expenses to hold down prices for consumersView the full article

Curiosity is often hailed as the bedrock of innovation in the workplace, yet a recent report from SurveyMonkey reveals a stark disconnect between employees’ innate desire for discovery and the organizational structures that often stifle it. Based on a survey involving nearly 1,925 workers, the State of Curiosity report paints a compelling picture: while a significant majority of employees consider themselves curious, with six out of ten identifying as highly curious, only three in ten believe their workplace actively fosters this quality. For small business owners, these insights serve as a crucial call to action. In an age where innovation can define competitive advantage, understanding and nurturing curiosity within the workforce could prove transformative. The report highlights that curiosity is not just a personal trait but a driving force that fuels creativity and problem-solving. Employees who feel encouraged to explore, ask questions, and seek out new information often contribute more effectively to team dynamics and overall productivity. “Curiosity is a vital prerequisite to all innovation at work,” reflects a spokesperson from SurveyMonkey, emphasizing its role in the creative processes that keep businesses competitive. Implementing practices that promote curiosity within small businesses can take many forms. Simple actions like encouraging open dialogue during team meetings, implementing suggestion boxes, and providing resources for professional development can empower employees to ask questions and propose new ideas. Furthermore, creating an environment where mistakes are seen as opportunities for learning rather than failures can cultivate a culture of innovation. While the advantages are clear, small business owners should also be mindful of potential challenges. One significant barrier identified in the report is the existing workplace culture that inadvertently suppresses curiosity. Leaders may focus on results to the extent that they overlook the importance of exploration and experimentation. This might lead to a risk-averse environment where employees hesitate to share ideas for fear of being judged or dismissed. Addressing this challenge requires a deliberate shift in mindset. Business owners can model curiosity by demonstrating openness to feedback, facilitating brainstorming sessions, and recognizing those who take the initiative to pursue new ideas, no matter their outcome. Encouraging a culture of curiosity means reshaping how failure is perceived—framing it as an integral part of learning and growth. Another aspect to consider is the implementation of structured programs aimed at fostering curiosity. This could mean incorporating training sessions focused on critical thinking and problem-solving skills or teaming up employees from diverse backgrounds on projects to encourage different perspectives. The potential to generate innovative solutions increases dramatically when team members feel empowered to express their curiosity. Moreover, small business owners need to be aware of the resources required for these initiatives. Introducing changes will necessitate time, investment, and, in some cases, dedicated personnel. Small businesses often operate under tight budgets and may need to be strategic in how they deploy resources towards cultivating curiosity without compromising other essential operations. As small businesses seek to harness the power of their employees’ curiosity, they must remain vigilant to the barriers that may exist within their own organizational cultures. Adopting a curiosity-driven approach requires continuous evaluation of workplace practices, support for employee initiatives, and an unwavering commitment to creating an inclusive, innovative environment. With 39% of workers feeling that their curiosity is not adequately rewarded, there’s ample opportunity for small businesses to create an atmosphere that not only acknowledges but actively celebrates curiosity. By doing so, they can unlock untapped potential within their teams, ultimately leading to improved performance and growth. The insights gleaned from SurveyMonkey’s State of Curiosity report underscore that a curious workforce is a competitive asset. By intentionally fostering a culture of inquiry and exploration, small business owners can lay the groundwork for innovation and success in the evolving marketplace. For a closer look at the report, visit SurveyMonkey’s State of Curiosity Report. Image via Google Gemini This article, "SurveyMonkey’s Report Reveals Curiosity Stifled in Today’s Workplaces" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Curiosity is often hailed as the bedrock of innovation in the workplace, yet a recent report from SurveyMonkey reveals a stark disconnect between employees’ innate desire for discovery and the organizational structures that often stifle it. Based on a survey involving nearly 1,925 workers, the State of Curiosity report paints a compelling picture: while a significant majority of employees consider themselves curious, with six out of ten identifying as highly curious, only three in ten believe their workplace actively fosters this quality. For small business owners, these insights serve as a crucial call to action. In an age where innovation can define competitive advantage, understanding and nurturing curiosity within the workforce could prove transformative. The report highlights that curiosity is not just a personal trait but a driving force that fuels creativity and problem-solving. Employees who feel encouraged to explore, ask questions, and seek out new information often contribute more effectively to team dynamics and overall productivity. “Curiosity is a vital prerequisite to all innovation at work,” reflects a spokesperson from SurveyMonkey, emphasizing its role in the creative processes that keep businesses competitive. Implementing practices that promote curiosity within small businesses can take many forms. Simple actions like encouraging open dialogue during team meetings, implementing suggestion boxes, and providing resources for professional development can empower employees to ask questions and propose new ideas. Furthermore, creating an environment where mistakes are seen as opportunities for learning rather than failures can cultivate a culture of innovation. While the advantages are clear, small business owners should also be mindful of potential challenges. One significant barrier identified in the report is the existing workplace culture that inadvertently suppresses curiosity. Leaders may focus on results to the extent that they overlook the importance of exploration and experimentation. This might lead to a risk-averse environment where employees hesitate to share ideas for fear of being judged or dismissed. Addressing this challenge requires a deliberate shift in mindset. Business owners can model curiosity by demonstrating openness to feedback, facilitating brainstorming sessions, and recognizing those who take the initiative to pursue new ideas, no matter their outcome. Encouraging a culture of curiosity means reshaping how failure is perceived—framing it as an integral part of learning and growth. Another aspect to consider is the implementation of structured programs aimed at fostering curiosity. This could mean incorporating training sessions focused on critical thinking and problem-solving skills or teaming up employees from diverse backgrounds on projects to encourage different perspectives. The potential to generate innovative solutions increases dramatically when team members feel empowered to express their curiosity. Moreover, small business owners need to be aware of the resources required for these initiatives. Introducing changes will necessitate time, investment, and, in some cases, dedicated personnel. Small businesses often operate under tight budgets and may need to be strategic in how they deploy resources towards cultivating curiosity without compromising other essential operations. As small businesses seek to harness the power of their employees’ curiosity, they must remain vigilant to the barriers that may exist within their own organizational cultures. Adopting a curiosity-driven approach requires continuous evaluation of workplace practices, support for employee initiatives, and an unwavering commitment to creating an inclusive, innovative environment. With 39% of workers feeling that their curiosity is not adequately rewarded, there’s ample opportunity for small businesses to create an atmosphere that not only acknowledges but actively celebrates curiosity. By doing so, they can unlock untapped potential within their teams, ultimately leading to improved performance and growth. The insights gleaned from SurveyMonkey’s State of Curiosity report underscore that a curious workforce is a competitive asset. By intentionally fostering a culture of inquiry and exploration, small business owners can lay the groundwork for innovation and success in the evolving marketplace. For a closer look at the report, visit SurveyMonkey’s State of Curiosity Report. Image via Google Gemini This article, "SurveyMonkey’s Report Reveals Curiosity Stifled in Today’s Workplaces" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Healthcare workers and aid groups in eastern Congo said Thursday they are in dire need of more supplies and staff to respond to a growing Ebola outbreak linked to a rare virus, as armed groups continue to threaten a region already grappling with a displacement and humanitarian crisis. “The situation is worrying because this is gaining momentum,” Hama Amado, a field coordinator in the city of Bunia for the Alima aid group, told The Associated Press. “This is spreading in many areas. So everyone must mobilize.” He added: “We are still far from saying that the situation is under control.” There is no available vaccine or medicine for the Bundibugyo strain responsible for the outbreak, which spread undetected for weeks following the first known death while authorities tested for a more common Ebola virus. Healthcare workers and aid groups are struggling to respond as experts say the outbreak is much larger than what has been officially reported. Authorities have so far announced 139 suspected deaths and nearly 600 suspected cases. On Thursday, the M23 rebel group that controls parts of eastern Congo reported a confirmed case near the major city of Bukavu, some 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of the outbreak’s epicenter in Ituri Pronvince. The person died, M23 said in a statement. As well as Ituri, other cases have been confirmed in North Kivu province and two in Uganda. But the announcement by M23 was the first confirmation of a case in South Kivu. Health officials have not yet found “patient zero,” according to the World Health Organization, which has said that the threat of a global spread of the outbreak is low. The outbreak in Congo has had wider repercussions. India and the African Union said Thursday that the India-Africa Forum Summit, scheduled to be held next week in New Delhi, had been postponed due to the “evolving health situation in parts of Africa.” On Wednesday, Congo’s soccer team canceled a three-day World Cup preparation training camp and a planned farewell to fans in the capital Kinshasa because of the Ebola outbreak. Early detection is key While almost 20 tons of aid has been airlifted to Bunia, the site of the first known death last month, doctors using out-of-date facemasks were tending to suspected Ebola patients in general wards because of the lack of isolation space. Early detection of the virus is key in saving lives, but the region’s already weak health infrastructure and surveillance capacity has been further weakened by international aid cuts, experts say. There are over 920,000 internally displaced people in Ituri, according to the U.N. “Communities in eastern DRC are already facing immense pressure from conflict, displacement, and a collapsing health system,” said Dr. Lievin Bangali, Senior Health Coordinator for the International Rescue Committee in DRC. “Years of underfunding, compounded by recent cuts to front line health and outbreak preparedness programming, have weakened the ability to detect and respond to outbreaks quickly.” The group said it had to stop its surveillance activities in three out of five areas in Ituri over the last year because of funding cuts. A mother watches her son ‘bleeding and vomiting’ At a treatment center in Rwampara, near Bunia, healthcare workers in protective gear handled the bodies of suspected Ebola victims. Families who tend to wash loved ones’ bodies themselves watched on as workers disinfected the corpses and placed them into coffins to be taken to secure burial sites. Some relatives burst into tears. The disease struck suddenly, they said, describing a rapid deterioration after symptoms were mistaken for illnesses such as malaria. “He told me his heart was hurting,” said Botwine Swanze, who lost her son. “Then he started crying because of the pain. Then he started bleeding and vomiting a lot.” The Ebola virus is highly contagious and spreads in people through contact with bodily fluids such as vomit, blood, feces or semen. Symptoms include fever, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain and at times internal and external bleeding. ‘We have no protection’ Schools and churches remain open in Bunia. Some residents have started wearing facemasks, which have become harder to find. “It’s truly sad and painful because we’ve already been through a security crisis, and now Ebola is here too,” said Justin Ndasi, a resident. A Doctors Without Borders team identified suspected cases over the weekend at the city’s Salama hospital but found no available isolation ward in the area, Trish Newport, an emergency program manager, said on social media. “Every health facility they called said, ‘We’re full of suspect cases. We don’t have any space.’ This gives you a vision of how crazy it is right now,” she said. In Bambu General Hospital elsewhere in Ituri, suspected Ebola patients shared a ward with others. In Mongbwalu, where the body of the first known death was taken, the nearby border with Uganda remains open and gold mining continues, said Chérubin Kuku Ndilawa, a civil society leader, highlighting the difficulty of containing the virus. At Mongbwalu General Hospital, Dr. Didier Pay said they were treating around 30 Ebola patients. A student from the local medical technology institute died on Wednesday. “The patients are scattered here and there in rather unusual conditions,” Dr. Richard Lokudu, the hospital’s medical director, told the AP. He said if they didn’t get help setting up new facilities they could be “completely overwhelmed.” WHO chief says the ‘scale of the epidemic is much larger’ WHO has declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. The organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he was “deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic” and it’s likely much larger than the official case count. WHO’s chief in Congo said the outbreak could last at least two months. Investigations are continuing into the source of the outbreak, but “given the scale, we are thinking that it has started probably a couple of months ago,” said Anaïs Legand, a viral hemorrhagic fevers expert at the WHO. The London-based MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis estimates that cases have been substantially undercounted and that the actual number could already exceed 1,000. Insecurity continues Long the scene of attacks by an array of armed groups, the region’s volatility now further complicates efforts to handle the crisis. Local leaders said an attack by militants linked to the Islamic State group killed at least 17 people on Tuesday in Alima, a village in Ituri. Fighters with the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which has ties to IS, killed civilians with machetes and firearms, burned down houses and business and took several people hostage. Civil society groups warned of other villages in the region facing a threat of attack. The number of ADF fighters in Congo is unclear, but they are a significant presence in the region and regularly attack civilians. Another armed group that is active in the region is CODECO, a loose association of militia groups. Ladd Serwat, a security analyst, said he would be “especially worried about an opportunistic attack on healthcare workers” if the outbreak spreads into rebel areas. Pronczuk reported from Dakar, Senegal and Imray from Cape Town, South Africa. Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten in Geneva; Jean Yves Kamale in Kinshasa, Congo; and Wilson McMakin in Dakar, Senegal contributed to this report. For more on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. —Justin Kabumba, Monika Pronczuk and Gerald Imray, Associated Press View the full article

Package of incentives is designed to support struggling exporters and lure foreign companiesView the full article

Conversion signals are disappearing from your marketing data, and it’s probably costing your business money. Ad blockers, aggressive privacy laws, cookie deprecation, and a host of other converging factors have combined to mask significant conversion data, costing businesses up to $203 million in revenue annually, according to one Deloitte study. For most brands, the path from discovery to purchase is no longer clear. This signal decay is more than an annoying data quirk. Left unchecked, it can make it harder for new customers to discover your brand. Most marketers don’t realize they’re making decisions based on incomplete data. Instead, they see top-of-funnel campaigns that aren’t pulling their weight and reallocate those budgets elsewhere. The algorithm inevitably responds by pulling traffic back further, investment continues to shrink, new customer acquisition dries up, and suddenly, a brand is in a downward spiral that’s difficult to correct. The solution to avoiding the negative feedback loop isn’t better creative or larger budgets. Instead, data hygiene will be the competitive advantage in 2026. By feeding better information to Google’s hungry algorithm, you’ll transform your top-of-funnel activities and drive new customers through their purchase journey. Why signal loss hurts discovery channels first YouTube often sits near the top of the funnel, where attribution is weakest, and budget scrutiny is highest. That makes it one of the easiest channels to cut when performance data looks incomplete, even though it plays an important role in product discovery and brand research. According to Google research: “YouTube is the No. 1 platform viewers turn to when they want to research, vet, or make a decision about a brand or product.” Despite this popularity, conversion signal decay has an outsized impact on YouTube’s perceived performance as a marketing channel. It’s often the first touchpoint for product discovery, but users then leave the platform to make purchases, breaking the signal chain. Google’s own advertising tools underreport YouTube’s true marketing impact by 70% or more, a Haus Research study found. Fortunately, advertisers can recover some of those missing signals with a better measurement setup, making it easier to more fairly evaluate YouTube and other discovery channels. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with Closing the cross-device gap with enhanced conversions You’ve probably watched TV while holding your phone in your hand. You’ve also probably seen a commercial on TV, looked up the product on your phone, and then made the purchase on your desktop three days later. This new device-spanning purchase journey is a common way to buy, but it’s also impossible to track under the standard cookie-based tagging that most brands still rely on to measure conversions. Enhanced conversions help close that gap. They add a layer of hashed first-party data, like an email address or phone number, to every captured conversion. Google then securely matches that hashed data against its own user information to connect the conversion to an ad interaction. Including enhanced conversions in your analytics unlocks insights into purchase journeys that began on YouTube and continued off the platform to the final purchase. Without this information, you’d never really understand how effective YouTube is at driving conversions down the line. Training the algorithm with offline conversions Here’s another scenario you’ve probably experienced: You see a YouTube Ad for a high-ticket item you’ve thought about purchasing, like a car or a new piece of furniture. It costs more than you’re comfortable spending online, so you close the ad, pick up the phone, and call the seller directly. Cookie-based tagging has no way to track these valuable conversions back to their source. This tracking blind spot also applies to lead-generation campaigns because standard conversion tracking cannot provide insight into the full path from completed form to purchase. This is the gap offline conversions fill. Offline conversions connect customer relationship management software and call data back to Google. This data layer trains the algorithm on which leads actually close rather than just tracking who filled out a form and disappeared. With this information, smart bidding can then optimize for revenue outcomes rather than just top-of-funnel actions. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Defining new top-of-funnel signals with micro conversions Enhanced conversions and offline tracking recover existing signals you haven’t had the ability to see before. However, sometimes top-of-funnel activities like YouTube don’t generate enough conversion data for the algorithm to learn from. In those instances, micro conversions can feed the algorithm the data it needs to optimize your ads. Micro conversions send intermediate signals — such as watching half of a video, adding a product to cart, or lingering on a landing page — into campaigns that wouldn’t otherwise generate enough purchase-level data to effectively optimize. You can weight these signals as primary or secondary, depending on where the campaign sits in the funnel. Engagement signals like view times might feed prospecting data, while add-to-carts inform remarketing. Without these intermediate signals, it becomes much harder to separate productive upper-funnel activity from wasted spend. Micro conversions will enable you to treat your top-of-funnel activities like any other campaign and make data-backed decisions on what’s really working. Recovering lost signals with Google Tag Gateway The final piece of the data-hygiene puzzle is recovering conversion signals that get blocked before they ever reach Google. Browsers like Safari and Firefox aggressively restrict third-party tracking, which contributes to the massive signal decay found in online purchases. Google recently introduced a new tool, Google Tag Gateway (GTG), that can help you reclaim some of this lost data. GTG is a server-side technology that loads tracking tags from your website’s domain rather than Google’s. The gateway acts as a proxy, converting third-party requests into first-party requests, thereby bypassing some ad blockers. Google reports that GTG users “saw an 11% uplift in signals” over advertisers who did not use the technology. GTG also offers advertisers important secondary benefits, including faster page load speeds, which improve Google’s landing page experience score and can lower costs per click. While server-side tracking may sound like it’s difficult to implement, setting up GTG is actually a straightforward process if you’re on a content delivery network like Cloudflare. See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with Your data infrastructure is your competitive advantage Every brand selling online today is affected by conversion signal decay. Most won’t recognize the real problem: Cross-device browsing, offline conversions, ad blockers, and low top-of-funnel signal volume are combining to distort our view of actual purchase behavior. With inaccurate data in hand, most will respond by changing creative directions, reducing budget, or — even worse — cutting channels like YouTube that are secretly driving discovery. The downward spiral begins. The advertisers that will win in 2026 won’t work around the edges. Instead, they’ll implement sophisticated data-hygiene layers that feed all that lost data back into Google’s algorithm, effectively outsmarting their competitors. If you want to run more successful ads this year, focus on fixing your data first. Everything else will quickly follow. View the full article

It’s the Thursday “ask the readers” question. A reader writes: I’m in the position where I need to rethink my career path and have no idea where to begin. I enjoyed project management in the past, but the jobs I’m seeing are horribly underpaid relative to the workload. I’m currently an executive assistant and, while I can make it work, it’s a dead end and not fulfilling anymore. I can’t make ends meet with what I studied in undergrad, so I have to go back to the drawing board … but I also can’t afford start at an entry-level job. I’m fortunate in that I can go to grad school for the fall 2027 year … but for what? How does anyone figure this out? I’ve had a few people I trust suggest paths (therapist, for example) but I have no idea if I’d actually like that job and I worry I wouldn’t know for certain until I’d already sunk time and money into a degree. Does anyone have any advice for finding a career path that isn’t your One True Passion in life (I’ve found that, I can’t manage to get paid to do it) but isn’t so dull the apathy creeps in until you’re completely checked out? Readers? The post how do you figure out a career path that isn’t your One True Passion? appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

Artificial intelligence's ability to uncover and analyze granular data across large volumes of files may result in AI agents executing trades themselves, mortgage leaders said. View the full article

Bipartisan bill aims to restrict Scott Bessent’s use of $219bn Exchange Stabilization FundView the full article

Breakaway competition races to raise up to $350mn and resolve debts to players after Saudi backers pull outView the full article

AI adoption appears to be diverging between professional and consumer audiences, according to Rand Fishkin’s new analysis of Datos desktop-panel data and SparkToro audience comparisons. The data highlights a sharp divide in how people talk about AI use: broader consumer adoption may be slowing, while professional and B2B audiences appear far more likely to use tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Why we care. There’s no one-size-fits-all AI strategy. Your audience may behave very differently from broader AI trends, so you need to understand whether your audience is actually using these tools — and which ones. ChatGPT desktop growth slowed. Fishkin, SparkToro’s cofounder and CEO, said Datos’ U.S. desktop data showed ChatGPT and OpenAI usage had largely plateaued over the past six to seven months, even as Claude and Gemini continued to grow. At its peak, about 37% of U.S. desktop users visited OpenAI or ChatGPT in September 2025, according to the data Fishkin cited. That figure fell to 34% by March. Fishkin said the same general pattern appeared in the EU and U.K., though desktop usage there was roughly 10% higher than in the U.S. Claude gained with professionals. Claude showed the strongest recent momentum in the Datos data, with four straight months of growth from December through March. Fishkin said the trend supports his theory that consumer AI adoption may be plateauing while professional and business use continues to grow. To test that idea, Fishkin used SparkToro audience comparisons to analyze business professionals and, separately, a broad consumer audience centered on retail shopping behavior. The business-oriented audience showed substantially higher overall AI tool usage. Claude usage overindexed especially strongly among B2B professionals, with SparkToro showing a 373% lift versus the average U.S. population, according to Fishkin’s analysis. Consumer audiences look different. Fishkin said ChatGPT was 15% less likely to be used by the retail-shopping consumer audience than by the average American. Claude didn’t rank among the top four AI tools for that group. This may help explain why AI usage can feel far more dominant in professional online communities like LinkedIn than in broader consumer behavior, according to Fishkin. The research. Watch Fishkin’s LinkedIn video here. View embedded content View the full article

Airport lounges have spent decades promising travelers the same thing: a quieter place to sit and wait. But a new concept opening next week inside Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport is betting that modern travelers, especially millennials who grew up gaming, want something far more immersive for their layover. Portal Lounge, a new tech-forward independent lounge concept from Gameway founders Jordan and Emma Walbridge, officially opens at MSP on May 28. The lounge combines gaming, chef-driven food and drinks, immersive design, and interactive technology in an attempt to reimagine what travelers actually want from airport downtime. The opening represents a major expansion for the Walbridges, whose gaming-focused airport brand Gameway currently operates in nine U.S. airports, with plans to expand to 11 locations by the end of the year. While Gameway centered on dedicated gaming lounges for travelers during delays and layovers, Portal Lounge scales that idea into a full hospitality experience. From mall gaming center to airport lounges The roots of both concepts trace back nearly a decade. “We decided that airports really needed a form of entertainment and a source of fun,” Emma Walbridge tells Fast Company. “People talk about millennials needing experiences, and they do and they want it at airports now as well.” The couple first came up with the idea for Gameway after visiting a gaming center in a shopping mall in England. Jordan Walbridge initially explored whether the concept could work as a stand-alone business, but Emma, who previously worked in hospitality and hotel management in England, quickly recognized the limitations of a traditional location-based gaming model. “I said to Jordan, I’m actually hospitality born and bred,” Emma said. “I was like, this would do great if it was in airports.” That insight ultimately helped shape Gameway’s success. The company’s first location opened at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in 2018, where it quickly gained traction among travelers who had grown up gaming but were now adults traveling for work and leisure. “A lot of people think gaming is for kids, right? And it’s not anymore,” Emma says. “We were brought up on games, but now we’re actually in our 30s, 40s, and we are traveling for work as well as leisure.” Why gaming and airports suddenly make sense together That demographic overlap is central to Portal Lounge’s strategy. Adults ages 30-39 now represent the single largest gaming demographic in the U.S., accounting for 26% of gamers nationally. That same age group is also increasingly dominating premium travel programs and airport lounge memberships. Jordan Walbridge, a military veteran who grew up gaming and later played Halo with fellow soldiers while deployed overseas, said the company recognized early that gaming had become a mainstream social activity for adults. “These are the modern day gamers,” he said. “It’s something that we use as a social activity.” Portal Lounge reflects that evolution. Backed by more than $4 million in development investment, the 3,800-square-foot lounge was intentionally designed to feel immersive and social rather than quiet and transactional. Guests enter through a custom portal-inspired entrance before walking into a space filled with cinematic lighting, art deco-inspired interiors, curated music programming, social seating, and approximately 600 square feet dedicated to gaming. The gaming area includes 17 stations equipped with Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, and custom-built gaming PCs featuring more than 30 titles ranging from casual games to competitive multiplayer experiences. “We custom built our PCs,” Emma said. “When we talk about being genuine to the gamer community.” At the lounge, you can do everything from streaming the latest game to playing Mario Kart. “There is really something for everyone,” she says. An airport lounge designed to feel less corporate The design itself was also carefully calibrated to appeal to premium travelers rather than feeling like a traditional gaming venue. Jordan admitted the original design vision for Gameway leaned far too utilitarian before Emma pushed for something entirely different. “She said, ‘I really believe our space needs to blend Apple Store with eSports,’” he said. “It’s gonna be beautiful, and it’s gonna be nothing like you’ve ever seen in the gaming place, anywhere in the world.” That design philosophy now extends into Portal Lounge, which includes a robotic bartender. Developed in Italy, the robotic arm works alongside human bartenders rather than replacing them. “It is there to be part of the experience,” Emma said. “Some of the drinks get partially made with the robotic arm, and then they hand to the bartender to be finished up.” The broader goal, the founders say, was to rethink what airport lounges could actually become at a time when travelers increasingly expect experiences instead of just amenities. “Traditional lounges were designed around exclusivity and waiting,” Jordan said. “We need to revolutionize this marketplace of lounges now.” The culinary program similarly pushes beyond standard lounge fare. Signature drinks include the “Lag Free,” a Minnesota-inspired margarita with Honeycrisp apple, maple, and citrus notes, alongside “Prince’s Lemonade,” a zero-proof cocktail inspired by Prince. The menu also includes chef-driven small plates, local beers, regional wines, and an expanded mocktail selection aimed at younger travelers increasingly interested in premium non-alcoholic beverages. Jordan said traditional lounges often feel interchangeable, particularly in the common-use lounge space. Portal Lounge, he said, was built to feel more entertaining and memorable from the moment travelers approach the entrance. A new kind of premium lounge traveler Unlike airline or card-specific lounges, Portal Lounge operates as a common-use independent lounge accessible through Priority Pass and participating premium credit card programs from Chase, American Express, and Capital One. Walk-in access is also available for approximately $70. Jordan believes that flexibility, combined with a more visually engaging experience, is what modern travelers are increasingly looking for. “When you design something that’s very warm and welcoming for the adult traveler who also hobbies of playing video games, then they started to come in by the droves,” he said. Portal Lounge will operate daily from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. starting May 28. View the full article

Networking, timing, and intentional career planning help candidates stand out in competitive hiring processes. Accounting Conversations With Chayton Farlee Center for Accounting Transformation Go PRO for members-only access to more Center for Accounting Transformation. View the full article

Networking, timing, and intentional career planning help candidates stand out in competitive hiring processes. Accounting Conversations With Chayton Farlee Center for Accounting Transformation Go PRO for members-only access to more Center for Accounting Transformation. View the full article

Its decision in Louisiana vs Callais ignores the law and overturns precedentView the full article

AI search doesn’t just translate or localize results. It decides which sources, institutions, and versions of reality get surfaced in the first place. Catalonia offers a useful stress test for that system. Two languages share the same geography, which makes retrieval patterns easier to spot. When the same queries are run in Catalan and Spanish across Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT, the differences go far beyond wording — and reveal broader problems that extend well beyond multilingual regions. Catalonia as a stress test for AI search Did you know that if you search for Tradicions de Sant Jordi — Saint George’s Traditions, written in Catalan — Google Translate will identify the source language as Occitan? Probably not. Most Catalan speakers don’t know it either, partly because Translate’s language guess isn’t exactly wrong: Catalan and Occitan share a common Romance ancestry, and some classification systems group them together. The answer is technically defensible. It’s also, statistically, an odd call — and the kind of small anecdote that points at a much larger problem in the infrastructure underneath. Google Translate showing “Detectado: Occitano” with input “Tradicions de Sant Jordi” and output “Tradiciones de San Jorge” Occitan has roughly 200,000 speakers, mostly in southern France. Catalan has roughly 9 million speakers and is the co-official language of Catalonia, one of Europe’s wealthier regions and home to a city Google has operated in for over 20 years. Asked from a Barcelona IP, Google’s translation product decides that the more plausible source language is the one with more than an order of magnitude fewer speakers, in another country. Translate then renders Sant Jordi into Spanish as San Jorge — castilianizing the proper name of the patron saint of Catalonia, a name that doesn’t need translating in the first place. This single Translate quirk is anecdotal. What it points at isn’t. It’s a language-identification problem that has lived inside Google’s infrastructure for years — and Google itself has publicly acknowledged it. In January 2023, the company’s Search Liaison account responded to a wave of complaints from Catalan-speaking users about Catalan results being downgraded in favor of Spanish ones. Google called the issue “a priority” and committed to keep investigating. The acknowledgment was even posted in Catalan — a tacit admission that the affected audience was real and large enough to warrant a direct response. Google later pushed updates that year that measurably improved Catalan visibility in classical SERPs. But the underlying language-identification layer was never structurally repaired. When a Catalan speaker today watches Google’s AI Overview answer a Catalan-language query in Spanish, it isn’t a new bug. It’s an old bug now sitting underneath a synthesis layer that propagates it. AI search, when it arrives, inherits the assumption that the language of the query is unreliable in the first place. The retrieval pipeline that flattens Catalan into Spanish today is the same pipeline that will, in modified forms, flatten sub-national jurisdictional context in markets where the surface language never changes. I have spent the last several months documenting how AI search collapses Hispanic markets — treating 20+ Spanish-speaking countries as a single statistical default. That work is severe in its consequences, but at least the geography is clean: Spain is one country, Mexico is another, the model just fails to tell them apart. What happens inside Catalonia is more revealing because the geography doesn’t change. Two languages share one territory, and the system produces two parallel realities — when it can identify the languages at all. Multilingual regions are where the architectural defaults of retrieval become visible, because users in those regions can switch languages and watch the system reassign meaning, authority, and sometimes even the answer’s language. The same defaults will surface inside markets that look monolingual on the surface, in different forms and with different mitigations. Catalonia is a leading indicator. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with How I tested this The patterns I’m about to describe are familiar to any practitioner who has worked on Catalan-language SEO over the last decade — my own experience, and the experience of many colleagues working under similar conditions. Anyone who has tried to do keyword research in Catalan has watched Google Keyword Planner report essentially zero volume for terms catalan-speakers query daily, or return volumes that are clearly mixed with Spanish-language data and impossible to use cleanly. Anyone who has run multilingual sites has watched their Catalan variants underperform their Spanish ones for reasons standard tooling can’t explain. The small experiment I describe below is one specific, reproducible illustration of this broader, well-known systemic situation — not the foundation of the claim. The setup was deliberately simple. From a residential IP in the Barcelona metropolitan area, I ran a set of paired queries in Catalan and Spanish across two surfaces: ChatGPT (logged out, fresh session, no personalization). Google web search with its AI Overview enabled when the system chose to generate one. (Google doesn’t generate an Overview for every query — itself a signal worth noting.) Sessions ran in incognito mode. I ran the queries twice, roughly a week apart, to test whether what I was seeing was a stable pattern or a single-session artifact. Both dates are documented. Screenshots are available with location footers visible. I chose five intent pairs, each designed to test a different layer of the retrieval stack: A politically loaded factual query about Catalan independence, chosen because it has academic precedent in Walker and Timoneda’s 2025 study (Department of Political Science, Purdue University) of language-conditioned LLM output, published in Cambridge University Press’s Political Science Research and Methods. The replication of their method on a Barcelona IP gives the section editorial cover. A transactional commercial query about local accountants for freelancers, chosen because it sits squarely inside the everyday SEO economy and is identical in intent across languages. A cultural-tradition query about Sant Jordi, chosen because it has clear native authority (regional government, municipal authorities), low political temperature, and centuries of documented history independent of any particular brand. A regulatory query about Catalan rental subsidies, chosen because it requires hyper-local jurisdictional precision and is administered by the Generalitat de Catalunya directly. A language-identification stress test — a mix of casual and formal Catalan queries — to see whether the surface even recognized the input as Catalan. The findings below are reproducible existence proofs rather than statistical evidence. These specific failures occur on these specific platforms today — from this specific location — and any practitioner can replicate them in under 15 minutes. The broader claim — that these patterns generalize — rests on the community evidence the Google Search Liaison acknowledgment implicitly confirmed three years ago, and the lived experience of practitioners working in Catalan and other minority languages over the last decade. Four patterns emerged. The first three describe retrieval. The fourth describes identification, and it underpins the other three. Finding 1: Vocabulary and source plurality diverge I asked both ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview about the main arguments around Catalan independence. In Spanish, both surfaces produced a legalistic frame anchored in the 1978 Constitution and the 2017 referendum’s illegality. In Catalan, both surfaces foregrounded dret a decidir (right to decide) and autodeterminació as named conceptual blocks, with historical references to the loss of institutions after the Decrees of Nova Planta. The Catalan output wasn’t more ideological. It was more complete. It retained anti-independence arguments, including framings absent from the Spanish version. Side-by-side comparison of Google AI Overview for the independence query in Spanish and Catalan, citation panels visible The divergence sharpens in the citations. The Spanish AI Overview pulled from BBC, Wikipedia (ES), Fundación Espacio Público, and France 24. The Catalan AI Overview added El Punt Avui, VilaWeb, Reddit r/catalunya, and Wikipedia (CA), while still citing BBC and El País. Same engine, same geography, same question. Two non-overlapping retrieval pools, triggered by the language string. The language isn’t labeling the answer. It’s filtering the corpus. Finding 2: Commercial retrieval shifts, and the engine doubts the minority language The transactional pair was simple: Millors gestories per a autònoms a Barcelona / Mejores gestorías para autónomos en Barcelona. Best accountants for freelancers in Barcelona, in two languages, from the same city. ChatGPT recommended largely the same physical firms in both versions, but the online providers diverged: the Catalan response surfaced Openges and Gestasor; the Spanish response surfaced Gestoría Online and Gestorum. Same intent, same geography, two parallel commercial universes for the digital-first segment. Google’s organic SERP showed a more pronounced split. The Catalan version elevated locally bilingual sites (Gremicat, Calders Assessors, Gestumm, barcelona.cool). The Spanish version led with aggregators and generalist directories (Legify, Zaask, bcngest). Two secondary signals matter more than the rankings. First, Google autocorrected the Catalan query. Above the results, the engine offered: Quizás quisiste decir: Millors gelateries per a autònoms a Barcelona. Did you mean ice cream shops? The system, sitting on a Barcelona IP, declined to believe a commercial query in Catalan was genuine and proposed a homophone-adjacent alternative. Google SERP showing the autocorrection “Quizás quisiste decir: Millors gelateries per a autònoms a Barcelona” Second, the Spanish results carried paid ads — Talenom, Declarando, Horus Firm. The Catalan results carried zero. The SEM market treats Catalan as territory without bidders, and the absence of a commercial signal is itself a signal. Models trained on click and engagement data read that absence as evidence that the language isn’t commercially serious and weight retrieval accordingly. The mechanism teaches itself. Less commercial bidding produces less commercial visibility. Less commercial visibility produces less commercial signal. The language is steadily deprioritized for transactional intent — even though every user typing in Catalan from Barcelona shares the same geography as a user typing in Spanish. This will become relevant again when we look at language identification itself. Dig deeper: How AI search defines market relevance beyond hreflang Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Finding 3: Cultural authority gets reassigned The Sant Jordi pair shows it most clearly, and the specific reassignment changes between sessions in a way that is itself revealing. In the first session, the Spanish-language AI Overview for Tradiciones de Sant Jordi led with two hotel chains as primary citations — Casa Llimona Hotel Boutique and Sumus Hotels. The Catalan version cited the Ajuntament de Barcelona, the city council that has formally stewarded the tradition for centuries. In the second session, a week later, the same queries returned a different reassignment. The Spanish version now cited the Ajuntament alongside Spain.info, the state tourism portal aimed at foreign visitors. The Catalan version moved up the institutional hierarchy entirely — its primary citation became the Generalitat de Catalunya, the regional government, with a footer link to the Guia Oficial de la Diada de la Generalitat de Catalunya. The Ajuntament was absent. Composite — Google AI Overview citation panels for Sant Jordi traditions across both sessions, showing the language-conditioned shift in cited authorities What stays stable across both sessions is the structural pattern: the cultural custodian credited by the system changes with the language. Catalan-language queries surface regional and municipal government, the institutions native to the tradition. Spanish-language queries surface state tourism, commercial entities, or municipal government framed as a tourist destination. ChatGPT reinforces the same pattern in its prose. The Spanish version describes Sant Jordi externally: Día del amor “a la catalana,” oportunidad para conocer el patrimonio cultural catalán. The Catalan version uses native terminology without distance. The same 600-year-old tradition is described as exotic-from-outside in one language and as tradition-from-inside in the other. The model isn’t lying in either language. It’s producing the most statistically plausible synthesis given its retrieval pool. But the retrieval pool itself is constituted differently by language — and one constitution treats government as the cultural custodian, while the other treats tourism marketing as the cultural custodian. For brands, this isn’t a translation problem. It’s a question of who the model thinks owns the answer. Finding 4: Language identification was already broken before LLMs touched it This is the finding that reframes the rest. The reassignment patterns above all depend on the system correctly identifying the language of the query in the first place. Often, it doesn’t. The Google Translate finding — Catalan misclassified as Occitan from a Barcelona IP — is one face of it. Another is what happens when you type a query that is unambiguously Catalan into Google Search. The query receptes de calçots — recipes for calçots, a vegetable that exists only in Catalonia and retains its Catalan name in every other language — produces a banner above the results: Sugerencia: Mostrar resultados en español. También puedes consultar más información sobre cómo filtrar por idioma. The system suggests that the user filter Catalan results out. No AI Overview is generated for the query. The infrastructure has decided that a recipe search for a Catalan-only vegetable, in Catalan, is more usefully answered in Spanish. Google Search showing the suggestion “Sugerencia: Mostrar resultados en español” for the query “receptes de calçots” In Google’s AI Overview, the query Tradicions de Sant Jordi sometimes returns a Spanish-language answer despite being written entirely in Catalan, citing Spain.info. In other sessions, the same query is correctly identified and answered in Catalan. The behavior is inconsistent across sessions, which is worse than consistently wrong: it is undiagnosable. A site owner can’t fix something that breaks intermittently for reasons the system itself doesn’t surface. The failure isn’t universal. Queries like festivitats de Catalunya or poetes catalans contemporanis — slightly more formal or erudite phrasings — are correctly identified as Catalan and answered with Catalan-language synthesis, citing regional sources (Pimec, Gencat, El Temps, Lletra UOC). The system can identify Catalan. It just doesn’t do so reliably for commercial or popular queries, which is where the cost of getting it wrong is highest for site owners. This is where Findings 2 and 4 close a loop. The same commercial categories that show zero SEM bidding in Catalan are the categories where language identification fails most often. A language with no commercial signal teaches the system that it doesn’t need to be treated as commercially serious — and so, for commercial queries, the system permits itself to identify it less reliably. The two failures reinforce each other. None of this is new. Google Search Liaison publicly acknowledged the Catalan demotion problem in January 2023 and later that year pushed visible improvements to classical SERPs. The synthesis layer that now sits on top has not inherited those fixes. AI search is built on these pipelines. It inherits their defaults, their training-data composition, and their decisions about when a language deserves to be treated as the language of the answer. The slop loop closing on minority languages A second, slower mechanism makes all of this worse over time, and it is worth flagging because it is starting to be visible elsewhere. LLMs trained on web-scale corpora are now generating significant quantities of low-quality content in minority languages — both directly (via translation features) and indirectly (via downstream tools that produce SEO content, social posts, and automated articles). That generated content gets indexed, gets crawled, gets fed back into the next generation of training data. The model that doesn’t understand Catalan well produces the Catalan content that trains the next model. This isn’t theoretical. A 2024 Princeton study by Brooks, Eggert, and Peskoff found that over 5% of newly created English Wikipedia articles showed signs of being AI-generated, with lower but still measurable rates in German, French, and Italian editions. By extension — though outside the Princeton team’s measurement scope — minority-language editions with thinner editorial oversight are likely to absorb a greater proportional impact. The minority-language damage is now well-documented. MIT Technology Review reported in September 2025 on a linguistic “doom loop” in vulnerable-language Wikipedias. Volunteers working on four African-language editions estimated that between 40% and 60% of their articles were uncorrected machine translations. The Inuktitut edition contained machine-translated portions in more than two-thirds of substantive pages. Some Hawaiian-language entries had 35% of their words flagged as incomprehensible by native speakers. The Greenlandic edition, where virtually no articles had been written by actual speakers, was ultimately recommended for closure in 2025, with the Wikipedia Language Committee citing AI tools that had “frequently produced nonsense that could misrepresent the language.” Wikipedia was estimated in 2022 to be the sole easily accessible source of online linguistic data for 27 under-resourced languages — meaning these errors don’t stay on Wikipedia. AI systems train on them next. This is the loop. Bad language identification produces bad retrieval. Bad retrieval surfaces bad content. Bad content gets generated at scale by LLMs that don’t fully understand the language. Bad content gets indexed. The next model trains on it. The mechanism doesn’t need malice to degrade quality — it needs only volume. And volume in minority languages has never been easier to manufacture. What Wikipedia decided to do about it The clearest institutional signal that this problem is real comes from one of the few platforms with both the experience and the incentive to take it seriously. On March 20, the English Wikipedia community formally voted to prohibit LLM-generated article content across its 7.1 million articles. Editors are still permitted to use LLMs for basic copyediting and for supervised translation of articles from other-language editions, but generating or rewriting article content with LLMs is prohibited outright. The decision was a response to years of mounting concern: ChatGPT-era articles were appearing with the “as a large language model” prompt left in the text, with entirely nonexistent citations, and with the kind of fluent-but-empty prose that reviewers were spending disproportionate volunteer time cleaning up. Wikipedia isn’t a typical SEO concern. It’s a curated knowledge platform with strong volunteer governance and explicit neutrality policies. If a platform with that level of structural defense against low-quality content has concluded that AI-generated text damages knowledge integrity, the SEO industry should not assume that retrieval pipelines downstream of Wikipedia will produce better answers than Wikipedia itself was willing to publish. The institutions building defenses against AI-generated content in minority languages — Wikipedia, the Aina Project in Catalonia, the Latxa models in the Basque Country — aren’t being defensive for ideological reasons. They are responding to a measured degradation in quality. That degradation is now part of the training data of the next generation of AI search. Dig deeper: How to use Google and LLM insights to improve international SEO Why this happens, mechanically Motoko Hunt has documented how AI systems collapse geographic boundaries by treating language as a proxy for markets, a phenomenon she calls geo-identification drift. The mechanism is the same here, with one extra constraint that exposes it more clearly. When two languages share one geography, the system can’t quietly default to “the country the language belongs to.” It’s forced to choose something else. The choice usually goes to whichever corpus is larger, more recent, or more commercially tagged. The Walker and Timoneda study above grounded this empirically. Their finding — that anti-independence framings appeared roughly twice as often in Spanish output as in Catalan — wasn’t a finding about politics. It was a finding about how training-data composition determines output. Catalan-language texts in the training corpus carry one distribution of perspectives; Spanish-language texts carry another. The model inherits both and surfaces whichever it is currently reaching for. This compounds with what researchers call semantic collapse: when retrieval embeddings can’t reliably separate sub-national signals, the system flattens them into the dominant variant. In monolingual countries, the dominant variant is the country itself. In a region like Catalonia, the dominant variant is the larger linguistic neighbor — Spain — pulling Catalan-specific meaning toward a generic Spanish default unless something explicit pulls back. Sub-national governments have noticed. The Aina Project and the Latxa models aren’t isolated efforts: they are direct attempts to build language-resource sovereignty because standard global LLMs perform measurably worse on Catalan and Basque than on Spanish. When governments start training their own LLMs, the SEO industry should treat that as evidence the underlying mechanism is real and structural. The pattern isn’t unique to Catalonia. Quebec users querying in French routinely receive Parisian-French defaults and answers anchored in French regulatory frameworks rather than Quebec’s distinct civil law and provincial tax regime. Belgian users get conflated French and Dutch jurisdictional defaults inside a country whose three regions operate under genuinely different legal and linguistic rules. Swiss users see retrieval flattened toward German or French national defaults rather than Switzerland’s own conventions. The Catalan case is the easiest to test from a single IP in a single session, but the structural finding generalizes to every region where two or more languages share one geography. The leading-indicator argument The interesting question isn’t what this means for Catalonia. It’s what Catalonia means for everyone else. Multilingual regions are the canary. The architectural flaw exposed when two languages share one geography — a vector space that can’t reliably separate jurisdiction from meaning, sitting on top of a language-identification layer that already gets things wrong — will show up in other forms as AI search matures and attempts genuinely sub-national answers. This is where I want to be careful with the parallel. In monolingual markets, AI search does have access to localization signals that the Catalan case partly removes: IP geolocation, GPS context, browser locale, and structured local pack data. A query from Austin about contractor licensing isn’t as ambiguous to the system as a query in Catalan from Barcelona, because the system has more non-linguistic context to lean on. The Catalonia–Texas parallel isn’t a direct equivalence. It’s a hypothesis worth testing, though. The same mechanisms that flatten Catalan into Spanish — corpus-weight defaults, semantic collapse, training-data composition — are present in synthesis pipelines regardless of the language pair. As AI Overviews and chat-style search increasingly answer queries by synthesis rather than by surfacing localized links, the protective effect of IP-based localization weakens. The system has to make a decision about which corpus represents “the answer,” and the corpus weight tends to win. The places this is most likely to surface inside monolingual English markets: State-level regulation with significant corpus asymmetry. California’s CCPA and Texas’s data privacy regime are written in the same language but represent different jurisdictional realities. The privacy literature is heavily California-weighted. When an AI Overview synthesizes a generic “what privacy rights do I have” answer, the defaults tilt toward whichever jurisdiction has more authority signals. Localization helps, but only when the query itself is jurisdictionally explicit. Sub-national regulatory granularity in any large country. Liquor licensing, contractor licensing, real estate disclosure rules, alimony calculations, school district policies, zoning codes — jurisdiction-specific, all in English, with wildly different corpus weights between jurisdictions. As more queries are answered by synthesis rather than links, jurisdictional defaults become consequential in ways traditional SEO never had to worry about. I don’t want to oversell this. The clean Catalan demonstration isn’t directly replicable in Texas. What is replicable is the underlying observation: when the retrieval system collapses signals, it collapses them in favor of the larger, better-represented corpus. That is true whether the signals being collapsed are linguistic, jurisdictional, or both. The brands that figured out how to operate across Spain and Mexico have already learned a version of this lesson. The brands operating across Texas and California will likely learn a related one, in a form that will not look identical and will require its own diagnostics. What to do about it The principles that work for multilingual fragmentation transfer, with adaptation, to multi-jurisdictional fragmentation. Same family of medicines, different patient. Treat sub-national jurisdictions as distinct entities. If your business operates in regulated verticals across multiple U.S. states, those state versions need their own authority signals — not just a folder structure. Each variant should canonicalize to itself, not to a national parent page that would invite collapse. Encode jurisdiction explicitly in structured data and copy. Schema.org’s areaServed operates at any geographic granularity; use it down to the state, county, or municipality where it matters. Pair it with explicit copy markers: regulator names, state-specific identifiers, region-specific currencies or formats. The model needs deterministic hooks. Without them, it improvises. Reinforce sub-national grounding through Wikidata. Most SEO programs stop at on-site schema, but knowledge graphs are reading what other graphs say about you. Wikidata’s jurisdiction property (P1001) and explicit language properties let you encode jurisdictional and linguistic boundaries at the knowledge-graph level — exactly the layer where AI systems pull entity context. If you operate in a sub-national jurisdiction that matters commercially, your entity should be modeled there with the granularity that matters. Audit for sub-national authority gaps the same way you’d audit for international ones. Run the diagnostic prompts you would run for Spain versus Mexico, but for Texas versus California, or Ontario versus Quebec inside Canada, or any pair of jurisdictions where your business operates. If the model conflates them, your content has a fragmentation problem inside what looked like a single market. Watch the secondary signals. In Catalan, the absence of SEM bids was a signal, and the system learned from it. The same applies to underserved monolingual jurisdictions: if no one bids on Texas-specific terminology, Texas-specific content gets deprioritized in synthesis. If your knowledge-graph presence, local citations, and authority signals all point to the dominant jurisdiction, the model has no reason to surface the underrepresented one. This isn’t a new playbook. It’s the cultural SEO framework applied below the country line: market segmentation, transcreation, retrieval constraints, and entity reinforcement, but at sub-national granularity. See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with What this means for your AI search strategy The Sant Jordi answer didn’t fail because of bad translation. It failed because the language-identification layer beneath the translation has never consistently distinguished Catalan from Occitan, Catalan from Spanish, or Catalan-the-language-of-the-query from Catalan-as-irrelevant-noise. Google said so itself, in Catalan, three years ago. The retrieval pipeline built on top of that layer inherits every one of those decisions, and now produces synthesized answers that quietly propagate them. Wikipedia, looking at the same generative-AI ecosystem from a different angle, decided in March 2026 that the risk of degradation was severe enough to prohibit LLM-generated content outright. The Aina Project and the Latxa team reached the same conclusion in advance by funding their own foundation models. The institutions closest to multilingual knowledge integrity are pulling away from generic AI. The SEO industry should at least notice the pattern. Multilingual regions reveal a structural assumption baked into AI search: that language and market are the same thing, and that language is reliably knowable from a query string. Neither is true. Hreflang made the geographic distinction operational for traditional search. Nothing has yet made it operational for generative retrieval. The brands that operate well across Spain and Mexico already know how to fix this for languages. The same techniques — explicit jurisdiction signals, market-specific authority, retrieval constraints, transcreation rather than translation, entity grounding in knowledge graphs — are now table stakes for operating well across any pair of jurisdictions, in any language combination. If you operate across multiple jurisdictions, the question to ask isn’t whether your content is localized. It’s whether the model can tell. View the full article

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google Marketing Live is done and we covered the new conversational discovery ads and highlighted answer ads...View the full article

It’s a good day to be an American quantum computing company—well, as long as you’re willing to give up some equity. Nine major firms are splitting $2 billion in grants from the The President administration, the Wall Street Journal reports. In return, the government will take varying equity stakes in each of the companies. IBM will receive half the award, putting it toward a new IBM company called Anderon. IBM will match the grant with another $1 billion in cash for the Albany, New York-based standalone company. It’s an investment that IBM predicts will pay off in spades. “Anderon will operate as a state-of-the-art 300-millimeter quantum wafer foundry,” IBM stated in an announcement. “It will help the nation solidify its leadership at the center of a thriving new quantum industry that is estimated to generate up to $850 billion in economic value by 2040 and spur American economic growth while also bolstering national security.” Alongside IBM, GlobalFoundries is set to receive $375 million from the grant, while companies such as D-Wave Quantum, Inc., Infleqtion Inc., and Rigetti Computing Inc. should get $100 million each. Diraq, a private startup, is expected to receive $38 million. The final deals are still being confirmed and multiple announcements state the funds are contingent on meeting certain milestones. Fast Company has reached out to the Commerce Department for comment. We will update this post if we hear back. Shares of publicly traded companies involved were up in Thursday’s premarket. As of publication, IBM (NYSE: IBM) is up about 6.6%, D-Wave (NYSE: QBTS) is up about 17.5%, and Rigetti (Nasdaq: RGTI) is up about 15.5%. Meanwhile, Global Foundries (Nasdaq: GFS) rose about 14.5% and Infleqtion (NYSE: INFQ) jumped about 24%. The government wants a stake in quantum computing companies It’s critical to highlight that these grants are being supplied by the Biden-era 2022 Chips and Science Act. It provided $280 billion in funding for semiconductors—a critical part of quantum computing—over the next decade, and votes against it came from 187 House Republicans and 32 Senate Republicans. Last year, The President used his joint address to Congress as a platform to rally against the legislation. “Your CHIPS Act is a horrible, horrible thing,” The President told Congress, according to Politico. Directing his remarks at Speaker Mike Johnson, he continued: “You should get rid of the CHIP[S] Act and whatever’s left over Mr. Speaker, you should use it to reduce debt or any other reason you want to.” Now, despite the Chips and Science Act devoting money toward advancement, the The President administration is making these grants contingent on receiving stakes in the quantum computing companies. Yes, as part of the award, the The President administration is continuing its unusual practice of taking equity in major companies. Notably, the government took a 10% stake in Intel last year. D-Wave and Infleqtion plan to offer $100 million worth of common stock to the Commerce Department—with Infleqtion proposing a 15% discount on market pricing. View the full article

When considering the best customer service approach for your business, it’s essential to focus on creating a customer-centric culture. This involves comprehending the customer experience, leveraging technology effectively, and nurturing a proactive service environment. Key elements include accessibility, personalization, and empowering your team to resolve issues independently. By implementing these strategies, you can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. But what specific steps can you take to guarantee your approach is effective and sustainable? Key Takeaways Prioritize accessibility by ensuring prompt responses across all channels to retain customers and build trust. Implement personalized service strategies to meet customer expectations and enhance overall satisfaction. Leverage technology such as CRM systems and AI chatbots to streamline service and reduce response times. Foster a customer-centric culture where feedback drives decision-making and employees feel empowered to resolve issues. Continuously gather customer feedback and set SMART goals for ongoing improvement in service delivery. Understanding Customer Experience Comprehending customer experience (CX) is vital for any business that wants to thrive in today’s competitive market. CX encompasses every interaction and emotion a customer has with your brand, which can greatly influence their loyalty and spending behavior. To provide exceptional guest service, you need to understand that positive experiences can lead to a 90% likelihood of repeat purchases. Conversely, negative experiences can drive 32% of customers away entirely. Investing in excellent customer service is important, as 80% of customers value experiences as much as the products and services you offer. Key Elements of Excellent Customer Service Excellent customer service is essential for nurturing loyalty and ensuring a positive brand reputation. To achieve this, focus on accessibility; 73% of social media users will switch brands if responses are delayed, highlighting the need for prompt communication across all channels. Personalization is also fundamental; 70% of customers expect representatives to understand their history, which boosts satisfaction. Furthermore, proactive engagement is a good practice in customer care. Anticipating customer needs before they reach out cultivates healthier relationships. Empowering your customer service teams through training and granting autonomy enables quicker issue resolution, greatly impacting customer retention. Finally, keep in mind that how to give outstanding customer service includes leveraging technology—CRM systems and AI tools can streamline service delivery and improve the overall experience by increasing efficiency and personalizing interactions. Leveraging Technology for Enhanced Interactions As businesses endeavor to provide outstanding customer service, leveraging technology becomes a key strategy in improving interactions. By integrating advanced tools, you can raise your service technique and deliver amazing customer service. Consider these effective methods: AI-driven chatbots: These provide 24/7 support, responding instantly to common inquiries and cutting down wait times. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems: These give you a thorough view of customer interactions, allowing for personalized service based on insights. Automation technologies: They help manage inquiries and follow-ups efficiently, reducing human error and improving overall service efficiency. Data analytics: By leveraging this technology, you can identify customer preferences and tailor services to improve the customer experience effectively. Building a Customer-Centric Culture To build a customer-centric culture, every employee must understand that customer satisfaction is a shared responsibility across the organization. This culture prioritizes excellent customer service, promoting employee engagement by making each team member feel empowered in their roles. Research shows that organizations with a strong customer service vision enjoy higher employee retention and improved customer experiences. In a customer-centric environment, decisions are driven by customer feedback, leading to necessary adjustments that improve overall satisfaction and loyalty. Empowering employees to resolve customer issues independently not just reduces micromanagement but also allows for quicker problem resolution. Furthermore, regular training and development are critical in this culture, ensuring employees possess the skills and knowledge to meet evolving customer expectations. Strategies for Continuous Improvement in Customer Service A customer-centric culture lays the groundwork for strategies that cultivate continuous improvement in customer service. By embracing these methods, you can guarantee excellent customer service during keeping your team engaged and motivated: Collect and Act on Customer Feedback: Since 85% of customers are willing to share insights, regularly seek their feedback to identify areas for improvement and boost satisfaction. Implement SMART Goals: Establish Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound objectives, allowing for regular progress assessments and necessary adjustments. Leverage Data-Driven Decision-Making: Track key performance indicators like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to refine your service approaches. Invest in Ongoing Training: Provide continuous training for your customer service team, equipping them with the skills and tools to improve service quality effectively. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the 4 P’s of Service Strategy? The 4 P’s of service strategy are crucial for effective customer service. First, Product focuses on the services you provide, ensuring they meet customer needs and expectations. Next, Price involves setting competitive prices that reflect the value offered. Place emphasizes accessibility, allowing customers to easily access your services through various channels. Finally, Promotion includes marketing efforts that inform customers about your services, creating awareness and encouraging engagement with your brand. What Is My Approach to Excellent Customer Service? Your approach to excellent customer service should focus on clarity, responsiveness, and empowerment. Start by establishing a clear vision aligned with your organizational goals, ensuring consistency. Empower your team to make decisions for quicker resolutions. Implement a robust CRM system to personalize interactions based on customer history and preferences. Regularly measure KPIs like Customer Satisfaction Score to identify improvement areas, during proactive engagement with customers through timely follow-ups to improve satisfaction and loyalty. What Are the 5 R’s of Customer Service? The 5 R’s of customer service are crucial for enhancing customer experiences. First, you need to Recognize customer issues quickly, which boosts loyalty. Next, Respond swiftly to inquiries, as 70% of customers expect a reply within 24 hours. Then, Resolve problems effectively to increase satisfaction and retention. Afterward, Retain customers by nurturing loyalty through consistent engagement. Finally, Repeat this process to promote long-term relationships and guarantee continuous improvement in your service approach. What Are the Top 3 of Customer Service? The top three customer service approaches are accessibility, personalization, and proactive engagement. First, being accessible and responsive is key, as customers expect quick replies. Second, implementing a strong CRM system helps you track interaction history, enabling customized service. Finally, anticipating customer needs before they reach out can greatly improve satisfaction, as it addresses issues proactively rather than reactively. Together, these strategies create a more effective and satisfying customer experience. Conclusion In summary, adopting a customer-centric approach is crucial for your business’s success. By focusing on accessibility, personalization, and proactive engagement, you can improve customer experiences. Utilizing technology like AI-driven tools and empowering your service team further elevates interactions and resolutions. Regular feedback collection allows for ongoing adjustments and refinements. In the end, these strategies not just boost customer satisfaction but likewise cultivate loyalty, leading to repeat purchases and long-term success for your business. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "What Is the Best Customer Service Approach for Your Business?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

When considering the best customer service approach for your business, it’s essential to focus on creating a customer-centric culture. This involves comprehending the customer experience, leveraging technology effectively, and nurturing a proactive service environment. Key elements include accessibility, personalization, and empowering your team to resolve issues independently. By implementing these strategies, you can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. But what specific steps can you take to guarantee your approach is effective and sustainable? Key Takeaways Prioritize accessibility by ensuring prompt responses across all channels to retain customers and build trust. Implement personalized service strategies to meet customer expectations and enhance overall satisfaction. Leverage technology such as CRM systems and AI chatbots to streamline service and reduce response times. Foster a customer-centric culture where feedback drives decision-making and employees feel empowered to resolve issues. Continuously gather customer feedback and set SMART goals for ongoing improvement in service delivery. Understanding Customer Experience Comprehending customer experience (CX) is vital for any business that wants to thrive in today’s competitive market. CX encompasses every interaction and emotion a customer has with your brand, which can greatly influence their loyalty and spending behavior. To provide exceptional guest service, you need to understand that positive experiences can lead to a 90% likelihood of repeat purchases. Conversely, negative experiences can drive 32% of customers away entirely. Investing in excellent customer service is important, as 80% of customers value experiences as much as the products and services you offer. Key Elements of Excellent Customer Service Excellent customer service is essential for nurturing loyalty and ensuring a positive brand reputation. To achieve this, focus on accessibility; 73% of social media users will switch brands if responses are delayed, highlighting the need for prompt communication across all channels. Personalization is also fundamental; 70% of customers expect representatives to understand their history, which boosts satisfaction. Furthermore, proactive engagement is a good practice in customer care. Anticipating customer needs before they reach out cultivates healthier relationships. Empowering your customer service teams through training and granting autonomy enables quicker issue resolution, greatly impacting customer retention. Finally, keep in mind that how to give outstanding customer service includes leveraging technology—CRM systems and AI tools can streamline service delivery and improve the overall experience by increasing efficiency and personalizing interactions. Leveraging Technology for Enhanced Interactions As businesses endeavor to provide outstanding customer service, leveraging technology becomes a key strategy in improving interactions. By integrating advanced tools, you can raise your service technique and deliver amazing customer service. Consider these effective methods: AI-driven chatbots: These provide 24/7 support, responding instantly to common inquiries and cutting down wait times. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems: These give you a thorough view of customer interactions, allowing for personalized service based on insights. Automation technologies: They help manage inquiries and follow-ups efficiently, reducing human error and improving overall service efficiency. Data analytics: By leveraging this technology, you can identify customer preferences and tailor services to improve the customer experience effectively. Building a Customer-Centric Culture To build a customer-centric culture, every employee must understand that customer satisfaction is a shared responsibility across the organization. This culture prioritizes excellent customer service, promoting employee engagement by making each team member feel empowered in their roles. Research shows that organizations with a strong customer service vision enjoy higher employee retention and improved customer experiences. In a customer-centric environment, decisions are driven by customer feedback, leading to necessary adjustments that improve overall satisfaction and loyalty. Empowering employees to resolve customer issues independently not just reduces micromanagement but also allows for quicker problem resolution. Furthermore, regular training and development are critical in this culture, ensuring employees possess the skills and knowledge to meet evolving customer expectations. Strategies for Continuous Improvement in Customer Service A customer-centric culture lays the groundwork for strategies that cultivate continuous improvement in customer service. By embracing these methods, you can guarantee excellent customer service during keeping your team engaged and motivated: Collect and Act on Customer Feedback: Since 85% of customers are willing to share insights, regularly seek their feedback to identify areas for improvement and boost satisfaction. Implement SMART Goals: Establish Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound objectives, allowing for regular progress assessments and necessary adjustments. Leverage Data-Driven Decision-Making: Track key performance indicators like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to refine your service approaches. Invest in Ongoing Training: Provide continuous training for your customer service team, equipping them with the skills and tools to improve service quality effectively. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the 4 P’s of Service Strategy? The 4 P’s of service strategy are crucial for effective customer service. First, Product focuses on the services you provide, ensuring they meet customer needs and expectations. Next, Price involves setting competitive prices that reflect the value offered. Place emphasizes accessibility, allowing customers to easily access your services through various channels. Finally, Promotion includes marketing efforts that inform customers about your services, creating awareness and encouraging engagement with your brand. What Is My Approach to Excellent Customer Service? Your approach to excellent customer service should focus on clarity, responsiveness, and empowerment. Start by establishing a clear vision aligned with your organizational goals, ensuring consistency. Empower your team to make decisions for quicker resolutions. Implement a robust CRM system to personalize interactions based on customer history and preferences. Regularly measure KPIs like Customer Satisfaction Score to identify improvement areas, during proactive engagement with customers through timely follow-ups to improve satisfaction and loyalty. What Are the 5 R’s of Customer Service? The 5 R’s of customer service are crucial for enhancing customer experiences. First, you need to Recognize customer issues quickly, which boosts loyalty. Next, Respond swiftly to inquiries, as 70% of customers expect a reply within 24 hours. Then, Resolve problems effectively to increase satisfaction and retention. Afterward, Retain customers by nurturing loyalty through consistent engagement. Finally, Repeat this process to promote long-term relationships and guarantee continuous improvement in your service approach. What Are the Top 3 of Customer Service? The top three customer service approaches are accessibility, personalization, and proactive engagement. First, being accessible and responsive is key, as customers expect quick replies. Second, implementing a strong CRM system helps you track interaction history, enabling customized service. Finally, anticipating customer needs before they reach out can greatly improve satisfaction, as it addresses issues proactively rather than reactively. Together, these strategies create a more effective and satisfying customer experience. Conclusion In summary, adopting a customer-centric approach is crucial for your business’s success. By focusing on accessibility, personalization, and proactive engagement, you can improve customer experiences. Utilizing technology like AI-driven tools and empowering your service team further elevates interactions and resolutions. Regular feedback collection allows for ongoing adjustments and refinements. In the end, these strategies not just boost customer satisfaction but likewise cultivate loyalty, leading to repeat purchases and long-term success for your business. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "What Is the Best Customer Service Approach for Your Business?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

The shared standards that once made one engine's guidance apply to all of them never got built between LLM providers. Optimization is no longer portable. The post LLM Guidance Doesn’t Transfer The Way SEO Guidance Did appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The first-generation Sonos Beam has dropped to $260.93 at Woot for an open-box unit, and according to price trackers, that’s the lowest price this soundbar has hit so far. For comparison, the same model is still sitting around $488 on Amazon, where it has never dropped below $299. The “open box” label here is also less risky than it sounds. Woot says the packaging may have been opened for testing or display purposes, but the soundbar itself is new and still covered by a standard 12-month manufacturer’s warranty. Shipping is free for Prime members, while everyone else pays an extra $6. This deal runs for the next four days or until stock runs out. Sonos Beam (Gen 1) $260.93 at Woot $486.13 Save $225.20 Shop Now Shop Now $260.93 at Woot $486.13 Save $225.20 Even though this is the older Beam from 2018, it still holds up surprisingly well if your main goal is improving TV audio without stuffing a giant soundbar under your screen. It is compact enough to fit comfortably in front of most TVs without blocking the display, and it looks clean in a way many bulkier soundbars don’t. More importantly, it works with Alexa, AirPlay 2, Siri, and Google Assistant, and it slides easily into a multi-room Sonos setup if you already own other speakers from the company. Sonos packed four full-range drivers, a tweeter, and three passive radiators inside its small frame, and the result is a fuller, more detailed sound than most built-in TV speakers can manage. Dialogue comes through clearly, and movies have noticeably better depth and bass without immediately forcing you to buy a separate subwoofer. That said, it doesn’t support newer formats like Dolby Atmos, so you’re not getting the same overhead surround effects you’d find on newer premium models—but for apartments, bedrooms, or smaller living rooms, the Sonos Beam feels appropriately sized. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds — $148.99 (List Price $179.00) Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS, 42mm, S/M Black Sport Band) — $329.00 (List Price $399.00) Apple iPad 11" A16 128GB Wi-Fi Tablet (Silver, 2025) — $299.00 (List Price $349.00) Fire TV Stick 4K Plus Streaming Player With Remote (2025 Model) — $29.99 (List Price $49.99) Sonos Move 2 — $399.00 (List Price $499.00) Sony WH1000XM6- Best Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones — $398.00 (List Price $459.99) Ring 2nd Gen 2K Wired Video Doorbell (2026 Release) — $49.99 (List Price $79.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

A company tax deadline is the date by which your business must file tax returns or make payments to the IRS. These deadlines differ depending on your business structure, whether it’s a C corporation, S corporation, partnership, or sole proprietorship. Comprehending these deadlines is crucial to avoid penalties and guarantee compliance with tax laws. As you navigate these important dates, you’ll want to know how to prepare effectively and stay on track. Key Takeaways Company tax deadlines vary by business structure, including C corporations, S corporations, partnerships, and sole proprietorships. C corporations must file Form 1120 by April 15, while S corporations need to file by March 15. Estimated tax payments are due quarterly on April 15, June 15, September 15, and January 15. Non-compliance with tax deadlines incurs penalties, including a 5% monthly penalty for late corporate returns. Preparing for tax deadlines involves organizing documentation and consulting a tax professional for tailored advice and compliance strategies. Understanding Company Tax Deadlines Grasping company tax deadlines is crucial for guaranteeing compliance and avoiding penalties. Each business structure has its specific deadlines. For C corporations, the Form 1120 due date is April 15, whereas S corporations must file by March 15 each year. Furthermore, estimated tax payments for corporations are due quarterly on April 15, June 15, September 15, and January 15 of the following year for calendar year filers. Sole proprietors need to file their taxes using Schedule C (Form 1040) by April 15, aligning with individual tax return deadlines. LLCs and partnerships are required to submit Form 1065 by March 15, and partners will receive Schedule K-1 by March 16 to report income on their personal returns. Finally, businesses must ascertain they send W-2 forms to employees by January 31 each year, adhering to reporting requirements for wages paid in the previous year. Key Business Tax Deadlines for 2025 As you prepare for the upcoming tax season in 2025, it’s essential to note several key business tax deadlines that could impact your operations. For S corporations and partnerships, returns are due by March 17, whereas sole proprietorships and single-member LLCs must file by April 15. This date is likewise significant for C corporations, which face the 1120 due date on April 15, 2025, with extensions possible via Form 7004. Estimated tax payments for the first quarter are due on April 15, followed by Q2 payments on June 16. Moreover, you must file 1099 forms and W-2s by January 31 to report payments made to contractors and employee wages. If your FUTA tax liability exceeds $500, quarterly payments are due on April 30, July 31, and October 31. Staying aware of these deadlines will help you avoid penalties and streamline your tax filing process. Employment and Payroll Tax Payment Timelines Grasping employment and payroll tax payment timelines is vital for maintaining compliance and avoiding costly penalties. FICA taxes are due by the 15th of the month after each payroll period, ensuring timely contributions to Social Security and Medicare. If you’re dealing with FUTA tax liabilities, remember these are due quarterly, with payments required by the last day of the month following the quarter’s end. If your FUTA liability is $500 or less, you can carry it over to the next quarter. Furthermore, employers must file W-2 forms for employees by January 31 each year, reporting wages and tax withholdings from the previous calendar year. If your business has a FUTA liability of $500 or more, you must pay that quarter’s tax using Form 940 by January 31 of the following year. Staying on top of these deadlines is vital, especially when considering when corporate tax returns are due. Importance of Staying Compliant With Tax Deadlines Grasping the importance of staying compliant with tax deadlines is vital for any business owner. When are corporate taxes due? Different business structures, like S Corporations, have specific deadlines, so comprehending your requirements is fundamental for timely submissions. Non-compliance can lead to severe consequences, including financial penalties and interest on unpaid amounts. For example, corporations face a 5% penalty for each month their return is late, capping at 25%. If your business has tax liabilities exceeding $500, you’re required to make estimated tax payments quarterly to avoid underpayment penalties. Late submissions not only incur automatic penalties but can additionally complicate your financial standing. Consulting a certified tax professional can improve your compliance strategy, helping you navigate complex deadlines and maximize deductions. Staying informed and organized is key to avoiding unnecessary fines and ensuring your business remains in good standing. How to Prepare for Upcoming Tax Deadlines Preparing for upcoming tax deadlines requires a proactive approach to secure your business stays compliant and avoids penalties. Start by familiarizing yourself with specific tax deadlines based on your business structure; for example, S corporations need to file by March 17, whereas sole proprietorships and C corporations have an April 15 deadline in 2025. Furthermore, guarantee compliance with estimated tax payment schedules, with key dates being January 15, April 15, June 16, and September 15 for 2025. Gather and organize all necessary documentation, such as receipts and financial statements, well in advance of the Internal Revenue Service tax deadline to maximize deductions. Consulting with a certified tax professional can provide customized advice and strategies, helping you navigate tax intricacies. Finally, consider utilizing services like Block Advisors for year-end tax filing readiness to prepare and avoid missed deductions before the suggested December 1 date for end-of-year tax planning. Frequently Asked Questions What Happens if I Miss My Tax Deadline? If you miss your tax deadline, you could face penalties, which typically include late fees and interest on any unpaid taxes. The IRS may likewise assess additional charges if you fail to file your return altogether. It’s vital to file as soon as possible, even in the event that you can’t pay the full amount owed. Consider applying for an extension or a payment plan to mitigate consequences and avoid further complications with your tax obligations. Can I Request an Extension for My Tax Filing? Yes, you can request an extension for your tax filing. Typically, you’ll need to submit Form 4868 to the IRS, which grants you an automatic six-month extension. It’s essential to recognize that this extension only applies to filing your return, not to paying any taxes owed. You should estimate your tax liability and pay any amount required to avoid penalties and interest. Always check specific guidelines for your situation to guarantee compliance. Are There Different Deadlines for State Taxes? Yes, there are different deadlines for state taxes, and they can vary considerably from one state to another. Typically, each state sets its own tax filing deadline, which may align with the federal deadline or differ by weeks or months. You should check your specific state’s tax authority website for precise dates, as some states may likewise offer extensions. Staying informed about these deadlines is essential to avoid penalties and guarantee compliance. How Can I Find My Specific Tax Deadline? To find your specific tax deadline, check the official IRS website or your state’s tax authority site, as they provide accurate and updated information. You can additionally refer to tax software, which often includes deadlines, or consult a tax professional for personalized guidance. What Documents Do I Need to File My Taxes? To file your taxes, you’ll need several key documents. Gather your W-2 forms from employers, 1099 forms for any freelance work, and receipts for deductible expenses. Don’t forget your Social Security number and bank details for direct deposits. If you’re claiming dependents, have their information ready as well. Finally, previous tax returns can help you spot any changes or carryovers. Keeping these documents organized will streamline your filing process. Conclusion In conclusion, comprehension and adhering to company tax deadlines is crucial for your business’s financial health. By recognizing key filing dates for various business entities and maintaining compliance with employment and payroll tax timelines, you can avoid penalties and interest. Preparing in advance guarantees you’re ready for upcoming deadlines, allowing you to focus on growing your business. Staying informed and organized will help you navigate the intricacies of tax requirements effectively. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "Company Tax Deadline: What Is It?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

A company tax deadline is the date by which your business must file tax returns or make payments to the IRS. These deadlines differ depending on your business structure, whether it’s a C corporation, S corporation, partnership, or sole proprietorship. Comprehending these deadlines is crucial to avoid penalties and guarantee compliance with tax laws. As you navigate these important dates, you’ll want to know how to prepare effectively and stay on track. Key Takeaways Company tax deadlines vary by business structure, including C corporations, S corporations, partnerships, and sole proprietorships. C corporations must file Form 1120 by April 15, while S corporations need to file by March 15. Estimated tax payments are due quarterly on April 15, June 15, September 15, and January 15. Non-compliance with tax deadlines incurs penalties, including a 5% monthly penalty for late corporate returns. Preparing for tax deadlines involves organizing documentation and consulting a tax professional for tailored advice and compliance strategies. Understanding Company Tax Deadlines Grasping company tax deadlines is crucial for guaranteeing compliance and avoiding penalties. Each business structure has its specific deadlines. For C corporations, the Form 1120 due date is April 15, whereas S corporations must file by March 15 each year. Furthermore, estimated tax payments for corporations are due quarterly on April 15, June 15, September 15, and January 15 of the following year for calendar year filers. Sole proprietors need to file their taxes using Schedule C (Form 1040) by April 15, aligning with individual tax return deadlines. LLCs and partnerships are required to submit Form 1065 by March 15, and partners will receive Schedule K-1 by March 16 to report income on their personal returns. Finally, businesses must ascertain they send W-2 forms to employees by January 31 each year, adhering to reporting requirements for wages paid in the previous year. Key Business Tax Deadlines for 2025 As you prepare for the upcoming tax season in 2025, it’s essential to note several key business tax deadlines that could impact your operations. For S corporations and partnerships, returns are due by March 17, whereas sole proprietorships and single-member LLCs must file by April 15. This date is likewise significant for C corporations, which face the 1120 due date on April 15, 2025, with extensions possible via Form 7004. Estimated tax payments for the first quarter are due on April 15, followed by Q2 payments on June 16. Moreover, you must file 1099 forms and W-2s by January 31 to report payments made to contractors and employee wages. If your FUTA tax liability exceeds $500, quarterly payments are due on April 30, July 31, and October 31. Staying aware of these deadlines will help you avoid penalties and streamline your tax filing process. Employment and Payroll Tax Payment Timelines Grasping employment and payroll tax payment timelines is vital for maintaining compliance and avoiding costly penalties. FICA taxes are due by the 15th of the month after each payroll period, ensuring timely contributions to Social Security and Medicare. If you’re dealing with FUTA tax liabilities, remember these are due quarterly, with payments required by the last day of the month following the quarter’s end. If your FUTA liability is $500 or less, you can carry it over to the next quarter. Furthermore, employers must file W-2 forms for employees by January 31 each year, reporting wages and tax withholdings from the previous calendar year. If your business has a FUTA liability of $500 or more, you must pay that quarter’s tax using Form 940 by January 31 of the following year. Staying on top of these deadlines is vital, especially when considering when corporate tax returns are due. Importance of Staying Compliant With Tax Deadlines Grasping the importance of staying compliant with tax deadlines is vital for any business owner. When are corporate taxes due? Different business structures, like S Corporations, have specific deadlines, so comprehending your requirements is fundamental for timely submissions. Non-compliance can lead to severe consequences, including financial penalties and interest on unpaid amounts. For example, corporations face a 5% penalty for each month their return is late, capping at 25%. If your business has tax liabilities exceeding $500, you’re required to make estimated tax payments quarterly to avoid underpayment penalties. Late submissions not only incur automatic penalties but can additionally complicate your financial standing. Consulting a certified tax professional can improve your compliance strategy, helping you navigate complex deadlines and maximize deductions. Staying informed and organized is key to avoiding unnecessary fines and ensuring your business remains in good standing. How to Prepare for Upcoming Tax Deadlines Preparing for upcoming tax deadlines requires a proactive approach to secure your business stays compliant and avoids penalties. Start by familiarizing yourself with specific tax deadlines based on your business structure; for example, S corporations need to file by March 17, whereas sole proprietorships and C corporations have an April 15 deadline in 2025. Furthermore, guarantee compliance with estimated tax payment schedules, with key dates being January 15, April 15, June 16, and September 15 for 2025. Gather and organize all necessary documentation, such as receipts and financial statements, well in advance of the Internal Revenue Service tax deadline to maximize deductions. Consulting with a certified tax professional can provide customized advice and strategies, helping you navigate tax intricacies. Finally, consider utilizing services like Block Advisors for year-end tax filing readiness to prepare and avoid missed deductions before the suggested December 1 date for end-of-year tax planning. Frequently Asked Questions What Happens if I Miss My Tax Deadline? If you miss your tax deadline, you could face penalties, which typically include late fees and interest on any unpaid taxes. The IRS may likewise assess additional charges if you fail to file your return altogether. It’s vital to file as soon as possible, even in the event that you can’t pay the full amount owed. Consider applying for an extension or a payment plan to mitigate consequences and avoid further complications with your tax obligations. Can I Request an Extension for My Tax Filing? Yes, you can request an extension for your tax filing. Typically, you’ll need to submit Form 4868 to the IRS, which grants you an automatic six-month extension. It’s essential to recognize that this extension only applies to filing your return, not to paying any taxes owed. You should estimate your tax liability and pay any amount required to avoid penalties and interest. Always check specific guidelines for your situation to guarantee compliance. Are There Different Deadlines for State Taxes? Yes, there are different deadlines for state taxes, and they can vary considerably from one state to another. Typically, each state sets its own tax filing deadline, which may align with the federal deadline or differ by weeks or months. You should check your specific state’s tax authority website for precise dates, as some states may likewise offer extensions. Staying informed about these deadlines is essential to avoid penalties and guarantee compliance. How Can I Find My Specific Tax Deadline? To find your specific tax deadline, check the official IRS website or your state’s tax authority site, as they provide accurate and updated information. You can additionally refer to tax software, which often includes deadlines, or consult a tax professional for personalized guidance. What Documents Do I Need to File My Taxes? To file your taxes, you’ll need several key documents. Gather your W-2 forms from employers, 1099 forms for any freelance work, and receipts for deductible expenses. Don’t forget your Social Security number and bank details for direct deposits. If you’re claiming dependents, have their information ready as well. Finally, previous tax returns can help you spot any changes or carryovers. Keeping these documents organized will streamline your filing process. Conclusion In conclusion, comprehension and adhering to company tax deadlines is crucial for your business’s financial health. By recognizing key filing dates for various business entities and maintaining compliance with employment and payroll tax timelines, you can avoid penalties and interest. Preparing in advance guarantees you’re ready for upcoming deadlines, allowing you to focus on growing your business. Staying informed and organized will help you navigate the intricacies of tax requirements effectively. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "Company Tax Deadline: What Is It?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article