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Like many domestic workers, Leydy is no stranger to wage theft. In a previous job, Leydy had been hired as a cleaner and then asked to take on more and more responsibilities, from cooking to childcare—with no additional pay. When she approached her employer and said she either needed a raise or additional help, she was fired, and she never got paid for her work that week. “In my rage, I went to the police,” she told Fast Company through a translator. (Leydy requested to only use her first name to avoid potential retaliation.) “They told me I had to get a lawyer and go to court in Newark. If I wasn’t getting paid, how could I pay for a lawyer?” A new AI chatbot built by and for domestic workers could help people like Leydy find some recourse when they are confronted with abusive employers. The National Domestic Workers Alliance—a nonprofit that advocates to improve labor rights and working conditions for nannies, cleaners, and home care workers—just launched a multilingual chatbot called Ask Aya, which aims to help educate domestic workers on their rights, negotiate pay with employers, and even draft employment contracts. Over the years, NDWA has experimented with different tech solutions to improve outreach and foster solidarity among domestic workers, who tend to work alone and are often siloed in their jobs. These workers are also overwhelmingly women of color—a significant share of whom are also undocumented—and they are excluded from federal labor protections, which leaves them vulnerable to being exploited in the workplace and at greater risk of retaliation if they push back. NDWA has invested in tools to help these workers create written contracts to formalize their employment and even secure benefits like paid time off; during the pandemic, NDWA’s Coronavirus Care Fund provided tens of millions of dollars in cash assistance to domestic workers who suddenly found themselves out of a job. When NDWA conceived of Ask Aya, the intent was to center workers in the development process, to ensure that the use of AI felt intentional and complementary to the critical work its organizers do on the ground. “We did not start with a goal to harness AI and immediately apply it to our problems,” says Alistair Stephenson, the chief strategy and impact officer of NDWA. “We started with this problem of isolation. If it is true that domestic workers are in these high stakes spaces and private homes and don’t have much community or support anywhere, should AI be a tool we explore to supercharge that connection and that sense of support?” But NDWA wanted to ensure there were guardrails around the use of AI, especially because the organization was designing Ask Aya for a population of workers who are already susceptible to mistreatment—and more likely to feel the negative effects of heightened automation and surveillance in the era of AI. “Trust is absolutely the currency of care and organizing, so we don’t take this question lightly,” Stephenson says. NDWA started with a policy charter that would guide the development process, and the organization brought domestic workers into the process from the very beginning, drawing on feedback from over a thousand workers to better understand what they would find most valuable. From there, NDWA partnered with workers to build a database of vetted information to feed into the platform. Stephenson knew privacy would be a major concern for some workers, who might not be comfortable feeding personal information into a chatbot. To help address those fears, Ask Aya has a seven-day data deletion window. “The majority are women and undocumented,” says Elza, a home care worker who was part of the AI council that NDWA consulted while developing Ask Aya. “So with that, there’s always fear. Maybe you want to ask [a question], but you’re afraid to ask. So one of the things that I spoke about was that [Ask Aya] had to be something that could be trusted.” (Elza is also using only her first name to protect her identity.) Beyond that, striking the right tone—and offering multilingual support—was also an important part of the development process. Ask Aya is currently available in English and Spanish, which means many workers can communicate in their native language. “We have put so much work into the design and personality of Ask Aya as another channel where people can feel dignified in a world where their work is constantly degraded,” Stephenson says. “I spoke to a worker who said Aya has the vocabulary and the understanding of what [their] work really means . . . It mirrors how organizers are trained to approach and connect with domestic workers. But [the fact] that we can train a model to have that kind of value system and personality and then scale that model is pretty remarkable.” Still, the platform is also engineered to direct workers to connect with a human organizer when they need more extensive counsel. When testing out Ask Aya, by posing as a worker facing wage theft, Elza was pleasantly surprised to see that the platform directed her to the Connecticut Worker Center, an affiliate of NDWA where she works. So far, Ask Aya seems to be having the intended effect: During beta testing, NDWA found that 93% of workers started to apply the chatbot’s advice in real situations, and 25% of them successfully negotiated pay increases. Over three-quarters of them said they trusted Ask Aya “completely” or “quite a bit.” It was a sample size of just 35 domestic workers, across different sectors and languages, but NDWA’s hope is that this effect will scale as the platform gets in front of workers across the country. “What we are trying to do is establish Ask Aya as an example of what a more responsible, ethical, worker-governed path for AI could look like,” Stephenson says. “We call it dignity-driven AI, as opposed to extractive AI.” With the help of Ask Aya, Leydy realized that she was being paid less than the minimum wage in her current cleaning job—and that she could earn even more because of her experience level. She was hesitant to broach the issue with her employer, but Ask Aya helped her practice and prepare for the conversation with different prompts. “I was scared I would get fired,” she says. “I was worried that the first thing I would hear is: ‘You don’t want to work? Then go home.’” When she finally talked to her employer, she managed to negotiate a raise of $2 an hour, boosting her hourly pay to $17. In the last few weeks, she even secured a week of paid vacation. “Many [people] can react and say, ‘Only $2?’” Leydy says. “But I was super emotional. I’m a single mom, and $2 an hour extra at this point is amazing. For me, this was an amazing accomplishment.” View the full article

A new survey of 900 CEOs around the world made one thing clear: company execs are feeling the heat when it comes to delivering on AI promises. According to new research from AI company Dataiku and The Harris Poll, most CEOs surveyed view the survival of a company as being tethered to the success of AI tools. The survey shows that nearly three-quarters (72%) of U.S. CEOs are feeling the pressure from their boards to prove AI-driven outcomes and ROI. That anxiety is fueling how executives think about their futures. A total of 80% of CEOs said their job is at risk if AI fails this year. The survey also shows that 81% of U.S. CEOs said they believe a fellow CEO would be removed from their role because of an unsuccessful AI strategy or crisis. In the last few years, executives were worried about falling behind on AI innovation. Now, 65% of CEOs feel more stressed about over-investing in AI than getting left behind. Still, 87% of global CEOs said their jobs are staked on the success of AI. That includes the success of autonomous AI agents. Even though companies have deployed agents to complete tasks like coding, the survey found that CEOs feel less confident about deploying agents and worry they can potentially create legal risks. Some of the most high-profile CEOs have opposing views about how, exactly, AI will change the future of work. Some CEOs, like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, said that most people will lose their jobs to someone who uses AI, not to AI itself. Block’s Jack Dorsey hopes that AI will completely get rid of middle management roles. The consensus, though, is that things will change. AI-related layoffs have also burned employees at major companies as of late. Meta announced that it will cut 10% of its workforce this month, while Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong attributed AI acceleration to the company cutting 14% of its workforce. More than a third (35%) of CEOs confessed that if the AI bubble were to burst, their jobs would be at significant risk. For 78% of U.S. CEOs, AI strategy is a top or high priority—and they’re taking a gamble on both performance and the market. It turns out, it’s not just workers at the whim of employers who are feeling stressed about how AI will impact their careers. View the full article

A reader writes: I teach in a business school and previously worked in my industry. I’ve been an AAM reader for a long time. I have seen you write about how group work in school projects is nothing like group work in the real world, and I’m not sure I totally agree. I have definitely worked with coworkers who slacked off or didn’t have the right skills, but there was no accountability, etc. I think getting some output from folks like this is actually a common challenge, which mirrors student work. Anyway, regardless of my personal opinion, every single industry speaker we have says they want students who work well as part of a team. Hiring managers who come here tell us our students are all very technically skilled, so teamwork and initiative are the things that will make them stand out. So the question is, do you have any suggestions on how instructors can a) help students develop these skills, and b) do so in a way that lets students demonstrate them to employers (via resume, interview, career fair chats, etc.)? One thing I’ve noticed in my years of teaching is that far fewer students have part-time jobs and such in high school (the emphasis on extracurriculars and obsession with college admissions seems to have taken its place) so where, 10 years ago, I would have told students they can highlight the part-time job where they went from server to shift lead to assistant manager, even if it has nothing to do with their professional field, now many have zero work experience at all. Some common tools among instructors: • Team contracts to set norms about communication, meetings, division of work, etc. • Dividing up the groupwork so each person turns in an individual portion and then combine them into a final product. • Regular formative peer evaluations so I can address conflicts early in the semester instead of hearing about them during finals week. • Regular meetings with each group so I can observe the group dynamic and attempt to surface issues. If you were teaching a class of undergrads, what would you do? It’s true that employers want people who can work well as part of a team, but group projects from school listed on a resume aren’t the primary way they’re assessing it. In practice, it’s much more commonly assessed through how the candidate comes across in an interview — are they a know-it-all or do they have a reasonable amount of humility? Do they talk about other people (teachers, fellow students, coworkers, whoever) respectfully? Are they forthcoming enough in conversation that you can picture collaborating with them or does it feel like pulling teeth to get any info from them? Do they seem engaged when they talk about work they’ve done? Do they have examples of conflicts (even minor ones) they’ve encountered, and how did they approach those? I can almost guarantee you that the person who was a drag to work with on group projects in school is painting themself on their resume as an active, helpful member of those teams, and interviewers generally know that. That doesn’t mean the tools you listed aren’t useful ones (although I would be interested in students’ feedback on them in practice — and whether it really does solve the problem of one or two people feeling like they end up carrying the rest of the team). I just don’t think they’re terribly useful to employers and are often incredibly frustrating to conscientious students, who end up feeling like they have to babysit their team members when they’re supposed to be learning. (And sure, that’s its own kind of lesson! But I don’t think it’s the one you’re setting out to teach to the class as a whole.) The post how are students supposed to show they work well as part of a team, if group projects in school are so awful? appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

Pay transparency is having a moment. Across Europe and beyond, new regulations are pushing organizations to disclose salary bands, justify pay differences, and confront longstanding inequities. It is a necessary shift and it’s long overdue. But there is a risk that, in focusing exclusively on base salary, companies miss a more elusive and equally consequential driver of inequality: the bonus gap. Bonuses, incentives, and variable pay are often treated as secondary components of compensation. They are not. In many roles, they represent a substantial share of total earnings. More importantly, they are where discretion thrives and bias follows. I learned this early. In my first internship, at a software company, I discovered almost by accident that the male intern who had preceded me—same role and duration—had received a higher bonus. The justification was vague. That was my introduction to how variable pay works in practice. If organizations are serious about closing gender pay gaps, they must go beyond salary grids and confront how bonuses are actually distributed. That requires rethinking not just compensation policies, but the everyday managerial decisions that shape outcomes. Here are four ways to get started. 1. Audit opportunity allocation, not just outcomes Most companies measure pay gaps at the end of the process: who earned what, and why. But when it comes to bonuses, inequality often originates much earlier. In performance-based roles, bonuses depend on access to opportunity—key accounts, high-potential clients, strategic territories. These assignments are rarely neutral. They are shaped by informal networks, managerial trust, and perceived “fit.” And they tend to favor those who already resemble incumbents. Two employees may have identical targets and commission rates, yet vastly different chances of achieving them. I experienced this firsthand in one of my very first jobs when I was selling IT services to businesses. My assigned list of prospects was, to put it charitably, the leftovers, small accounts, cold leads, companies that had already said no. At the end of the year, I did not hit my targets. I walked away with my base salary, a thin one, and a lesson about how inequality starts long before anyone picks up the phone. To address the bonus gap, organizations must start auditing how opportunities are distributed. Who gets the most lucrative accounts? Who is assigned to high-growth markets? Who inherits established client relationships? This requires making the invisible visible. Companies should track the revenue potential of assigned portfolios, not just individual performance. They should compare distributions across gender and other dimensions, and treat disparities as seriously as pay gaps themselves. Equal pay cannot exist without equal access to opportunity. 2. Formalize the criteria behind bonuses Unlike salaries, which are typically governed by structured pay bands, bonuses often rely on loosely defined criteria: “performance,” “impact,” “leadership,” or “potential.” These categories sound objective, but in practice they are highly subject to individual interpretation. When evaluation criteria are vague, decision-makers tend to default to mental shortcuts, stereotypes, affinity bias, or subjective impressions. In other words, the less formalized the system, the more room there is for inequality to creep in. Yet in many organizations, bonus decisions are still made with limited documentation and little traceability. Fixing this does not require eliminating managerial judgment, but it does require framing it. Companies need to define clear, measurable indicators for performance-related bonuses, and ensure that these indicators are consistently applied. Where qualitative assessments are necessary, they should be anchored in observable behaviors, not abstract traits. Decisions should also be documented to create accountability. 3. Make bonus decisions more transparent Transparency transforms salary conversations. It can do the same for bonuses, but only if organizations are willing to extend it. Many employees have little visibility into how bonuses are determined. They may know their own targets, but not how their performance is evaluated relative to peers. This opacity creates fertile ground for mistrust, and for inequality. Introducing transparency means clarifying the process. What percentage of bonuses is tied to individual versus team performance? How are targets set? How are exceptional contributions recognized? What checks are in place to ensure consistency across managers? Some organizations go further by making sure bonus decisions are reviewed collectively, which helps create a shared standard of fairness. Transparency also shifts the burden of explanation. Instead of employees having to question disparities, managers must be able to justify them. 4. Train managers to correct bias Many managers are not trained to make equitable compensation decisions. They are promoted for operational performance, not for their ability to assess others objectively. Too often they fall back on gut feeling, and on the assumption that their gut is a reliable instrument, which it rarely is. Identical behaviors are often interpreted differently depending on who exhibits them. Assertiveness may be rewarded in one employee and penalized in another. Availability and visibility—both key drivers of bonus outcomes—are themselves shaped by unequal constraints, particularly for caregivers. Think of the parent rushing out at 5pm to pick up a child from daycare, while her colleagues stay behind for that drink with clients that somehow always matters at year-end review. Training managers to recognize these dynamics is essential. But training alone is insufficient if it can remain abstract. It must be tied to concrete practices: how to evaluate performance against predefined criteria, how to document decisions, how to challenge one’s own assumptions. Bias may not be eliminated entirely. But it can be managed, acknowledged and measured better. From policy to practice Workplace inequality does not primarily reside in formal rules, but in their execution. Companies can have perfectly equitable salary grids and still produce unequal outcomes. Fighting the bonus gap therefore is not a marginal issue. Over time, differences in bonuses compound, affecting career progression, wealth accumulation, and perceived legitimacy within organizations. There is one more dimension that rarely makes it into these conversations: maternity leave. In France where I live, women on maternity leave are compensated at their normal salary level—which sounds great, until you realize that bonuses and variable pay are typically excluded. For American readers, even this may sound generous. But for me, watching a significant share of my income disappear felt like a clear signal that caregiving is penalized. The good news is that the levers for change are within reach. View the full article

Fake accounts have been around as long as social media. So when it was recently revealed that a “hot girl” MAGA personality named Emily Hart was actually a 22-year-old male medical student in India, it might have seemed a little mundane. Just another catfisher, another sock puppet, another scammer—the internet is full of them. Except this one had photos. And videos. And thousands of followers across multiple networks with some posts getting millions of views. Emily Hart was a full-on influencer, not just some anonymous egg. The person who created Emily confessed to Wired that while the account was active, he was making thousands of dollars every month from posting softcore videos to an OnlyFans competitor and merchandising. Emily’s creator is not a developer. He’s just a cash-strapped student with a good sense of American political culture and a Google Gemini account. But the curious case of Emily Hart has exposed how AI has made it incredibly easy for almost anyone to create convincing content and game the system of engagement on social media. It also raises the question: Is anyone looking out for us out there? How can you tell what’s real and what’s not anymore? And who is responsible for alerting social media users that the images they’re looking at might have come from AI? The fake influencer template The major implication of the story isn’t about a single AI influencer. It’s that this is the tip of the iceberg. AI has made creating online personas like Emily so easy that it’s enabled deception at scale. The Wired story points to other pro-The President fake influencers like Jessica Foster, but you don’t have to look very far in your Instagram Explore page before you spot something AI-generated, and it’s rarely disclosed. The Emily Hart case proves that the template is cheap, fast, lucrative, and easy to copy. All the major social networks have policies governing AI content. While they vary in detail, the gist is generally the same: Synthetic images must be disclosed—especially if it could be construed as real and the subject matter involves sensitive subjects like politics, health, finance, and current news. If the account doesn’t identify AI content, it could be frozen, demonetized, or banned. But those penalties exist almost entirely on paper. In practice, enforcement is difficult, partly because detecting AI content is getting more difficult by the day. Most state-of-the-art image generators are light-years ahead of the models that created the first “Will Smith eating spaghetti” video, and telltale artifacts like extra fingers and disappearing background characters have largely become a thing of the past. Without watermarks, even automated systems have a difficult time parsing AI images from real ones just by looking at them. The ‘nutrition label’ that keeps getting lost A new standard was supposed to fix this. Content Credentials are a way to track how an image was created and modified throughout its life cycle. That information can be preserved in the image’s metadata, so the site displaying it can more easily tell whether it’s AI-generated, potentially passing on a label or warning to the user. The idea is that, as you scroll your social feed, any image would have a tiny icon next to it that would reveal its history when clicked. However, even though this technology has existed for years and ostensibly has the support of major tech companies such as Adobe, Google, and Nvidia, social platforms haven’t adopted it consistently. Seeing the label is rare, and a Washington Post report found that social networks often strip out the metadata that enables Content Credentials. This isn’t necessarily nefarious—it follows a best practice from the early days of the web when every byte was precious. But the fact that it’s still happening shows there is little enthusiasm to make the system work. Would a label make any difference? Emily’s creator says he believes many of his followers didn’t care whether the images he was posting were AI or not. That may be true for some, but data suggest labels can alter people’s propensity to engage with AI content. A 2024 study found that labels on AI-manipulated media reduced belief in the claims. The study also found that wording matters: “manipulated” or “false” were more impactful than process-based labels alone. In other words, labels help, but weak labels help weakly. A buried “AI info” tag is not the same as a clear warning that an image might depict a person who does not exist. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok already process and modify content at scale. They’ve spent two decades building the art of detecting copyright violations, nudity, spam, and engagement signals. It is hard to believe they are incapable of building a clearer label for AI-generated people. It’s the incentives, stupid So why don’t they? The uncomfortable answer is that the incentives point the other way. While platforms want to keep bad content out, they are more motivated to keep people posting, scrolling, sharing, and buying. AI-generated material fits neatly into that machine because it is cheap to make, easy to personalize and highly compatible with engagement-driven feeds. Mark Zuckerberg has been unusually direct about this, describing AI-generated material as “a whole new category of content” that he sees as important for Facebook, Instagram and Threads. That doesn’t mean Meta or any other platform wants deception (which, again, is a subcategory of AI content). But it does mean the companies have a business reason to welcome more synthetic content, and making the labels too strong or too visible could dampen the engagement they’re trying to encourage. The calculus could change, though. Europe’s AI Act includes transparency obligations for deepfakes and certain AI-generated public-interest content, with related rules taking effect this year. Should platforms start to rack up major fines for poor labeling, things could change in a hurry. Advertiser pressure would help, too, since appearing next to deceptive content is bad for business. Finally, and crucially, there’s audience behavior: if users begin to feel like they can’t trust what they’re seeing on a network, they might, over time, stop engaging with that network. The burden has shifted Right now, the responsibility for detecting AI content is falling largely on the user, with the social platforms not prioritizing the technical progress that might help, and regulators only beginning to act. And you might question what’s the point—many of Emily’s followers no doubt knew she was virtual but followed, engaged, and maybe even forked over some money anyway. However, that choice—to engage or not with a virtual influencer is robbed from you if you don’t know it’s virtual in the first place. The technology industry has spent years presenting provenance as a central answer to synthetic media. Adobe, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Google and others have backed standards, joined coalitions, made public commitments and embedded Content Credentials into their tools. Fine. Then show it to people. Make it visible before the share, before the follow, before the subscription, before the merchandise purchase. Because if the only way to learn that an influencer is fake is to wait for a magazine investigation, the disclosure system has already failed. View the full article

Negative keywords aren’t a checklist anymore. In 2026, they’re a series of strategic decisions — and how you make them shapes how the algorithm interprets your account. If you’re still treating negatives like maintenance, you’re missing the point. Every exclusion is a signal: who you want to reach, what you’re willing to pay for, and how your campaigns should perform. Here are six decisions that define modern negative keyword strategy — and why they matter more than ever. How negative keywords shape campaign performance Negative keywords are how you sculpt a campaign so the right ad shows up for the right person. The user’s query should match the ad. The ad should match the landing page. That alignment is what creates a good experience for the person on the other side of the screen (a.k.a., your ideal client). When that alignment breaks down, you waste budget. You also drag down click-through rate (CTR) and Quality Score, and push CPCs up. All of this is what ultimately makes the algorithm work against you in an ads account. But many of us were never really taught how negatives fit into an overall account strategy. We were taught how to add them. There’s a big difference. Now let’s get into the six strategic choices. 1. How aggressive should you be with negatives? This is the first decision an account manager needs to make, and most people skip it. Are you scraping the bottom of the barrel every week, pulling out every search term that didn’t convert? Are you letting things slide so you can keep mining new keyword opportunities? Or are you somewhere in the middle, adding negatives mostly to show that you’re doing something? There’s no universal right answer. But you do need to pick a level of aggression and back it up based on the account’s performance and goals. A growth-focused account probably shouldn’t be aggressive. An efficiency-focused account probably should. A small-budget account that can’t afford to learn slowly often needs to be more aggressive than an enterprise account that can. Pick the level. Defend the level when you’re working in the account and talking to your team. Then the rest of your choices become easier. 2. How to use match types for negative keywords Negatives don’t match the same way regular keywords do — broad, phrase, and exact — but most advertisers default to one match type without thinking about why. Here’s how I think about it: Negative exact match: Use this for strict removal. A specific long-tail variation that’s wasting budget, but you don’t want to nuke similar queries. Negative phrase match: Use this for groups of related queries you want gone. Competitor names, certain question phrases, and intent modifiers like “tutorial” or “review.” Negative broad match: Use this for words you want eliminated entirely — words like “cheap,” “dangerous,” or “free,” that signal a misaligned audience no matter how the rest of the query is constructed. This isn’t an either/or decision. A real negative keyword strategy uses all three match types intentionally, in different places, and for different reasons. 3. When should you add negative keywords? I’ve seen everything here. Some account managers add negatives on a strict weekly cadence, even when the data doesn’t call for it. Some only touch them when something stops converting. Some only review when a quarterly check-in forces them to. And some add them just to look busy on a status report. My recommendation: don’t add a negative just because a keyword didn’t convert, especially when you’re trying to scale. You never know if it would’ve converted with a little more volume. Be careful, and tie the trigger back to your account’s goals. For accounts in growth mode, the trigger might be: “This query has cost more than 3x my target CPA with zero conversions over 90 days.” For accounts focused on efficiency, the trigger might be: “This query cost more than $X without converting, period.” Both are valid. They just align to different goals in different accounts. 4. What time frame should guide your decisions? How far back are you looking when you make the call to add something as a negative? A 30-day window is aggressive. You’re cutting things off before they’ve had a real chance to convert. That’s appropriate for short-cycle ecommerce, fast-moving promotions, or tightly capped budgets. But this might not work for all accounts. A 90-day window is balanced. Long enough for sales cycles to play out, short enough to actually act on. This is the default I recommend for most paid search accounts. A 365-day window is conservative. You’re giving every query maximum runway. Appropriate for high-consideration B2B or anything with a long buying cycle. Longer time frames give individual queries more chances to succeed. Shorter time frames protect your budget faster. Pick the time frame that matches the aggressiveness level you set in your top choice, and don’t make these decisions in isolation from each other. 5. How much should you sculpt your campaigns? This is where the role of AI really starts to matter when it comes to negative keywords. How much control do you want over your account? And maybe more importantly: how much do you trust the machine? Some advertisers embed competitor keywords as negatives in non-brand campaigns just to keep the targeting clean. Some account managers let those queries through because they’re converting, even if they technically “shouldn’t.” Some refuse to add negatives at the campaign level at all, because they trust the algorithm to figure out what should match where. Consider that the machine and the algorithms have more information than we do. The platforms know what was searched before the query and more about user behavior. They know what was searched after. They know what session context the user is in. They can match queries to keywords in ways we can’t replicate manually. But sculpting accounts is still how we communicate intent to that machine. If you don’t sculpt, the bidding algorithm doesn’t know what you actually want, and it just optimizes against the goals you handed it, which isn’t always the same thing as the outcomes you actually care about. I lean toward more sculpting in 2026, not less. The algorithm has gotten better and will continue to improve, but so have the ways it can spend your budget on the wrong queries. 6. How should you manage negatives in practice? This is the choice that didn’t exist five years ago. In 2026, you have options that previous generations of account managers never had: A fully manual review with a spreadsheet and a search term report. Google Ads’ built-in negative keyword suggestions. A third-party tool that surfaces negatives semantically. Pasting your search term report into a chat and letting AI flag candidates for you. Delegating the entire task to a tool that adds negatives on autopilot, with no human in the loop. The question isn’t which one is best. The question is: how comfortable are you removing yourself from the loop? At what level do you want AI to handle this task? For some accounts that are highly templated, low-stakes, and high-volume, maybe fully delegated AI negative keyword management is fine. For most accounts, I’d recommend a hybrid: AI surfaces candidates, and you approve them. The middle ground gives you speed without sacrificing oversight. But the most important part is to make this decision intentionally, not by default, and to be able to defend the choice to key stakeholders. If you’re still doing all your negatives by hand in 2026, that should be a deliberate choice, not just “how I’ve always done it.” A few golden rules that hold up in any era No matter which choices you make above, a handful of things still hold true: Pull the search terms report regularly. The data won’t tell you what to decide, but it will tell you what to decide about. Make sure you look at the reports regularly, and remember no decision is still a decision. Keep your negatives updated as your campaigns evolve. The negatives that made sense for last quarter’s strategy may be the wrong ones now. Start with a few negatives and build from there. Being too negative too soon is genuinely harmful when an account is in a growth phase. Humans don’t search in straight lines. The query that looks irrelevant to your offer might be the final step before a conversion. Ad platforms try to teach us this in their documentation and training and reiterate that intent is messy, nonlinear, and often unpredictable. But as PPC practitioners, we still find ourselves resisting the idea that the system can make these judgment calls on our behalf. Paul DeMott, owner of Helium, sees this most clearly in high-spend accounts: “Most negative keyword lists are too exhaustive and haven’t been revisited in years… aggressive negative lists often hurt more than they help. You’re constraining the algorithm’s exploration on the exact accounts where it has the signal to make smart calls.” The risk today isn’t under-negating. It’s over-sculpting based on outdated assumptions. Jordan Brunelle, owner of Good Growth Marketing, points to a related issue: shutting down queries too quickly because they don’t match the product or service literally. “A lot of account managers are quick to negate keywords that don’t perfectly match their product/service… we must get into the head of the searcher and consider what their ultimate need is.” Intent isn’t always obvious at the query level. It often becomes clear only at the conversion level. Breanne Bartlett, a paid search consultant, frames it simply: “Most account managers still treat ‘vague’ queries as bad and overuse negatives to control them… the mistake isn’t allowing these queries, it’s blocking them before you’ve seen how they actually convert.” Top accounts aren’t restrictive. They’re responsive. They remove proven irrelevance, not theoretical inefficiency. That tension between control and trust is showing up everywhere. As platforms introduce features like previewing the impact of negative keywords before applying them — something Menachem Ani, founder of a Google Premier Partner agency JXT, recently highlighted — the direction is clear: more data-driven decisions, less reactive cleanup. At the same time, the core principle hasn’t changed. As Boris Beceric, a Google Ads consultant, reminded practitioners, efficiency starts with exclusion: “Most small budgets don’t fail because the offer is bad. They fail because the ads get shown for the wrong searches.” Beceric’s post on LinkedIn reframes negatives as a proactive efficiency tool, not just a cleanup task, and underscores that deciding what not to target is just as strategic as deciding what to include. Together, these perspectives capture the evolution of negative keyword strategy: from maintenance to signal-shaping, from exclusion to intent communication. The smartest account managers aren’t just adding negatives — they’re auditing, previewing, and sculpting them with purpose and a larger goal in mind. What your negative keyword decisions are really doing Negative keywords have always been part of paid search. What’s changed in 2026 is how much depends on how you guide — or defer to — the machine. The real risk is making decisions about negative keywords on autopilot. Stale lists, over-sculpting, and unexamined habits quietly shape how the algorithm interprets your intent. Every choice ties back to one question: what are the goals of this ad account? A growth-focused account makes different choices than an efficiency-focused one. A small-budget account behaves differently from an enterprise one. A B2B account isn’t the same as high-velocity ecommerce. Even the “right” level of control shifts as Smart Bidding gains more signal. Negative keywords aren’t a checklist in 2026. They’re a series of decisions that compound over time — and the account managers who make them intentionally, with fresh data, and clear goals, are the ones who deliver better results and can explain why. View the full article

A large Applebee’s franchisee that filed for Chapter 11 protection in March is seeking to close additional restaurants as it works its way through the bankruptcy process and sale of its assets, a new court filing reveals. NRPF Group Two, which operates roughly 50 Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill + Bar locations in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, has asked a federal court for permission to reject the leases on five additional properties. Most of the Applebee’s restaurants associated with the properties appeared to be still open this week, though a few were marked as temporarily closed on Google as of Wednesday. Atlanta-based NRPF Group Two said in the court filing that the locations have “proved unprofitable,” and that it wants to close them. Four of the restaurants are in Florida and one is in Georgia. The planned closures are in addition to the 10 Applebee’s restaurants that NRPF previously closed, including locations near top tourist destinations such as Walt Disney World and SeaWorld, as Fast Company reported in March. As of December 2025, Applebee’s had roughly 1,520 franchised locations, but the casual dining chain has struggled with declining sales. The expected timeline for the newly revealed closures is not clear, nor is it clear how many jobs would be lost should the restaurants close permanently. Fast Company reached out to GGG Partners, the turnaround firm that is overseeing NRPF’s bankruptcy process, for comment. Which additional Applebee’s locations are expected to close? According to a May 5 court filing, NRPF (aka Neighborhood Restaurant Partners Florida) is seeking to close the following restaurants. Some of the leases on the properties date back more than 14 years, which is when NRPF first acquired the locations. 2823 South Orange Avenue, Orlando, Florida 808 West 7th Street, Tifton, Georgia 2615 SW 19th Ave. Rd., Ocala, Florida 10606 Sheldon Road, Tampa, Florida 298 Southhall Lane, Maitland, Florida These planned closures are in addition to 10 restaurants in Florida and Georgia that NRPF reported closed in March. Why is NRPF bankrupt? At the time of its bankruptcy petition in March, NRPF said its restaurants had initially been profitable but that business started to fall off at the end of 2015. The COVID pandemic, inflation, and higher operating costs made things worse in the years to come. The franchisee then struck a tentative deal with Dine Brands Global, owner of Applebee’s, which would see Applebee’s take over the locations. (Dine Brands also owns IHOP and has been opening co-branded IHOP-Applebee’s restaurants this year.) But as NRPF’s financial woes escalated, it said it had to file for bankruptcy before the deal was complete. Applebee’s is acting as a “stalking horse” bidder for NRPF’s restaurants, a deal that was supposed to be finalized by the middle of this month. It was not immediately clear if the company would potentially save these five restaurants from closure if and when the deal is finalized. Notably, some of the locations are included in the agreement between Applebee’s and NRPF that was filed in court last month, but other locations are not. In all, that agreement included 50 restaurants. Fast Company reached out to Dine Brands for comment. This story is developing . . . View the full article

Owners of some iPhones are in line to get cash payments of up to $95 from Apple after the company on Tuesday reached a $250 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit for false advertising of its artificial intelligence capabilities. Apple The Presidenteted new AI features for its virtual assistant Siri when it rolled out the iPhone 16 in 2024, part of new software updates that the company billed as “Apple Intelligence.” The company has been scrambling to keep up with tech rivals amid the AI boom but still hasn’t delivered on the Siri revamp two years later. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of U.S. consumers in the San Francisco federal court for the Northern District of California, alleged that Apple deceived consumers with a marketing campaign that promoted features that did not yet exist and misled them into buying the devices. Lawyers for the iPhone buyers asked a court for preliminary approval of the proposed $250 million settlement, according to a court filling. If approved by a judge, it would be one of the biggest ever for Apple. The settlement covers about 37 million devices bought in the United States between June 10, 2024 and March 29, 2025, including all iPhone 16 models and the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. Owners are eligible for a payment of at least $25 for each device, and that amount could go up to $95 depending on how many other claims are filed “and other factors,” the filing said. Customers will be notified by email or mail that they can file a claim on a settlement website, it said. Apple, based in Cupertino, California, was caught off-guard by the intense consumer interest in the Siri AI features. Buyers were angered after finding out that the new features would be released later than expected, the filing said. They “would not have purchased the Eligible Devices or would have paid significantly less, had they known Enhanced Siri features were not available,” the filling said. Apple’s AI features remain in development even as rivals Google and Samsung have been rolling out more of the technology on their own devices. The company is expected to unveil its Siri upgrade this year, most likely at its annual developer conference next month. —Kelvin Chan, AP Business Writer 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...View the full article

Watch this video on YouTube Generating high-quality leads from Google Ads often comes down to one unexpected factor: speed. If potential customers have to jump through hoops to reach you, you’ll lose business fast. That’s why Google Ads offers a trio of what I call “Contact Us assets.” Instead of sending users to a landing page, Call Assets, Lead Forms, and Message Assets let customers call you, fill out a form, or start a conversation directly from your search ads. Let’s dive into how to set up and optimize these three essential assets to simplify your funnel, capture valuable personally identifiable information (PII), and turn an expensive click into a lasting customer relationship. Call Assets: The must-have for phone leads If the action you want someone to take after clicking your ad is calling you, you need to use Call Assets. They display your phone number alongside your ads, allowing users to call you directly from the ad with a single click. If you’ve been relying on Call Ads to drive phone calls from Google Search, those are being deprecated. You’ll need to use Call Assets alongside Responsive Search Ads instead. 3 essential tips for Call Assets If you want Google’s bidding algorithms to prioritize phone calls, you need to set “Calls from ads” as a Primary conversion action. There’s nothing worse for a customer than calling a business and getting voicemail — or worse, no answer at all. Use asset scheduling to show your phone number only when someone is available to answer. If your business closes at 5 p.m., consider stopping your call asset at 4:55 p.m. Getting a phone call is important, but it’s just as important for Google to know that call happened so it can optimize for more of them. When you enable call tracking, Google uses a forwarding number. That means the number shown in the ad may not be your actual business number, but it lets Google (and you) track call duration and see which keywords triggered the calls. Lead form assets: Capturing data in the ad Lead Form Assets let users submit their email address or phone number directly within the ad. If you’ve run lead generation ads on Meta or TikTok, the experience will feel familiar. The main difference is that on social media, the lead form is the ad. In Google Search, it’s an optional asset attached to your Responsive Search Ad alongside your primary headlines. Because of that, you probably won’t see the same volume from Lead Form Assets as you would from a dedicated landing page. But if generating form fills is your primary goal, Lead Form Assets are absolutely worth enabling. Essential tips for lead form assets Because Lead Form Assets are so easy to complete directly from the SERP, they’re often more vulnerable to low-quality submissions. To improve lead quality, add a screening question. A simple question about budget or specific needs forces users to pause and qualify themselves before submitting. Don’t let these leads sit idle in the Google Ads interface. You need a system that pushes them directly into your CRM through a third-party integration. The longer it takes to respond, the colder the lead becomes. Make sure to set “Lead form submission” as a Primary conversion action if you want Smart Bidding to prioritize lead generation. You can run it alongside your standard website lead form conversion action, which should also remain set to Primary. Message assets: The beta that means business? Message Assets are the newest addition to Google’s “Contact Us” assets, and they’re currently in beta. I wrote about them last year. These assets let potential customers start a conversation with you through WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Zalo directly from your search ads. They don’t support SMS text messaging — only third-party messaging apps. Essential tips for Message assets You can’t use Message Assets until you complete Google’s full advertiser verification process. It’s part of Google’s effort to keep the advertising ecosystem safe. Message Assets only appear on mobile devices, which makes sense—most people aren’t trying to start a WhatsApp chat from a desktop browser. Message Assets are compatible with Search and Performance Max campaigns. What sets ‘Contact Us’ assets apart The biggest reason to use these three “Contact Us” assets is to capture personally identifiable information (PII) from potential customers. When someone calls you, fills out a form, or sends a message, they’re giving you a direct way to follow up. This data is incredibly valuable. Once you have an email address or phone number, you can follow up through email marketing or direct outreach without paying for another ad click. It turns a one-time ad interaction into a potential long-term customer relationship. How to get the best results from Call, lead form, and Message Assets Whichever asset you use, implement third-party lead tracking software to capture, filter, track, and respond to your leads. Once calls, forms, and messages start coming in, you need a system for responding quickly. You also need a way to tell Google which leads were high quality and which were spam or a poor fit. Lead tracking software lets you send that data back into Google Ads so the platform can learn what a qualified customer looks like for your business—and stop wasting budget on junk leads. If direct contact is central to how you win business, these contact assets aren’t just nice to have. They’re essential for effective lead generation. This article is part of our ongoing Search Engine Land series, Everything you need to know about Google Ads in less than 3 minutes. In each edition, Jyll highlights a different Google Ads feature, and what you need to know to get the best results from it – all in a quick 3-minute read. View the full article

A loyalty number is your key to revealing rewards in various customer loyalty programs. This unique identifier tracks your purchases, helping businesses tailor offers to your preferences as you earn points. It’s fundamental for grasping how these programs work and what benefits you can gain. From exclusive discounts to personalized promotions, a loyalty number plays a vital role. So, how do you get the most out of this system? Let’s explore the details further. Key Takeaways A loyalty number is a unique identifier for customers in loyalty programs that tracks points earned through purchases. It enhances customer experience by offering personalized rewards and insights into shopping habits. In airline programs, loyalty numbers help track miles and points for status tier progression and benefits. Points can be earned through eligible flights and partnerships, with specific promotions increasing accumulation. Common issues with loyalty numbers include inactivity, linking errors, and lost numbers, which can complicate point redemption. What Is a Loyalty Number? A loyalty number is a unique identifier that businesses assign to customers as part of their loyalty programs. It allows you to accumulate points or rewards based on your purchasing behavior. Comprehending what a frequent flyer loyalty number means is crucial for maximizing your travel benefits. When you present your loyalty number during transactions, it guarantees accurate point accumulation and reveals customized rewards that improve your experience. These numbers help you track your earned points and access exclusive benefits, such as bonus miles or upgrades. Many loyalty programs feature a tiered structure, where the perks associated with your loyalty number increase as you reach higher spending thresholds or complete specific actions. Additionally, loyalty numbers provide businesses with valuable insights into your preferences, enabling them to offer personalized marketing and experiences. By engaging in loyalty programs, you can considerably improve your purchasing experience and enjoy tangible benefits. The Role of Loyalty Numbers in Airline Programs Loyalty numbers play an essential role in airline programs by tracking the miles or points you earn through flights and eligible purchases. As you accumulate these loyalty points, you can ascend through various status tiers, like Silver or Gold, revealing improved benefits such as priority boarding and lounge access. Comprehending how to maximize your loyalty number can greatly improve your travel experience and savings. Earning Loyalty Points Explained Earning loyalty points is a fundamental aspect of airline frequent flyer programs, serving as a key incentive for travelers to choose specific airlines repeatedly. Each eligible flight you take earns you loyalty points, which can be increased through various means. Here are some important ways to accumulate these points: Fly with the airline and its partners to earn points. Benefit from bonus points for higher-tier members. Use partner services like hotels and car rentals for additional points. Participate in promotions that offer temporary point boosts. These loyalty points can be redeemed for advantages such as free checked bags, priority boarding, and access to airport lounges, consequently enhancing your overall travel experience and encouraging continued loyalty to a specific American Airlines. Status Tiers Overview Comprehending the various status tiers within airline loyalty programs is essential for maximizing your travel rewards. Each tier, such as Member, Gold, Platinum, Platinum Pro, and Executive Platinum, comes with unique benefits. Higher tiers often reveal perks like free checked bags, priority boarding, and access to exclusive airport lounges, greatly enhancing your travel experience. You can earn Loyalty Points through eligible flights and partnerships, including hotels and car rentals. Moreover, certain spending thresholds may offer bonuses, helping you reach your desired tier faster. Programs like AAdvantage allow you to estimate the Loyalty Points needed for status based on your spending and flight activity. Status Tier Benefits Member Basic rewards Gold Free checked bags Platinum Priority boarding Executive Platinum Lounge access, premium services Benefits of Loyalty Numbers A loyalty number serves as your personal identifier within an airline’s loyalty program, playing a vital role in tracking your accumulated miles or points. This unique identifier reveals several benefits that improve your travel experience, including: Free checked bags, saving you extra fees on your trip. Priority boarding, allowing you to get settled on the plane faster. Access to exclusive airport lounges, providing a relaxing environment before flights. Personalized offers and promotions customized to your spending habits. With your loyalty number, you can likewise monitor your progress toward achieving status tiers like Silver, Gold, or Platinum. Plus, it facilitates the redemption of miles for free flights, upgrades, and discounts, maximizing the value of your commitment to the airline. How Loyalty Numbers Accumulate Points When you participate in a loyalty program, your loyalty number serves as a unique identifier that tracks how many points you accumulate based on your purchasing behavior. Points usually accumulate with each purchase, often at a rate of 1 point for every $1 spent, which encourages repeat business. Furthermore, many programs offer bonuses for spending with specific partners or during promotional periods, enhancing your point totals. You can also earn points through non-purchase activities, such as referring friends or engaging on social media, providing more ways to boost your loyalty points. Transparency in tracking your points is essential; many programs offer apps or cards that allow you to monitor your progress easily. This visibility not only motivates you to participate more but likewise helps you keep track of how close you’re to achieving rewards. Comprehending how your loyalty number works can help you maximize the benefits of your spending. Benefits of Having a Loyalty Number Having a loyalty number comes with several advantages that improve your overall shopping experience. By participating in a loyalty program, you gain access to unique benefits that can elevate your purchases and customer relationship. Here are some key benefits of having a loyalty number: Exclusive Discounts: Enjoy special discounts that are only available to loyalty members. Free Products: Accumulate points that can be redeemed for complimentary items or services. Personalized Offers: Receive customized promotions based on your shopping habits and preferences. Priority Service: Experience quicker service, especially during busy times or events. How to Obtain Your Loyalty Number How do you get your loyalty number? To obtain your loyalty number, start by registering for the loyalty program of your chosen business or airline. This is usually done through their official website or mobile app. Once you complete the enrollment form, you’ll receive a unique loyalty number assigned to your account, which tracks your earned points and rewards. If you want to accumulate points more quickly, consider using a co-branded credit card linked to the loyalty program, as this can improve your earning potential. Always keep your loyalty number handy for every qualifying purchase or flight booking; this guarantees you receive the appropriate rewards and benefits. If you happen to lose your loyalty number, don’t worry—simply contact customer support for the loyalty program, and provide any necessary identification details to retrieve it. Tracking Your Loyalty Points Tracking your loyalty points is essential for maximizing your rewards. By comprehending how you earn points with each purchase, you can better estimate your rewards and plan for future redemptions. Furthermore, knowing the process for redeeming points guarantees you take full advantage of the benefits available to you through the loyalty program. Earning Points Explained When you engage with a loyalty program, earning points is typically straightforward, as most programs offer a standard rate of one point for every dollar spent. This system incentivizes repeat business and helps you accumulate points quickly. You can additionally earn more points through various methods, including: Using co-branded credit cards Participating in promotional events Spending at higher tiers for accelerated earning Monitoring your points via apps or online accounts Tracking your loyalty points is vital for comprehending how close you’re to redeeming rewards. Transparency in this process allows you to see your progress, and companies often use your data to create customized marketing strategies, enhancing your overall experience and satisfaction with the program. Redeeming Points Process The process of redeeming loyalty points can greatly augment your shopping experience, as it allows you to turn accumulated points into tangible rewards. You can track your points through a mobile app or a loyalty card system, which shows your balance and recent transactions. Most businesses outline the points needed for various rewards ensuring clarity in the process. Typically, redemption is seamless, often occurring automatically at checkout. Reward Type Points Required Description Discount Voucher 100 $10 off your next purchase Free Product 200 Choose any item up to $20 Exclusive Service 500 Access to a premium service Understanding this process can augment satisfaction and encourage continued loyalty. Utilizing Your Loyalty Number for Rewards Utilizing your loyalty number effectively can greatly improve your experience with a brand’s loyalty program. This unique identifier allows you to track and accumulate points through your purchases and engagement. By presenting your loyalty number during transactions, you’ll earn points on qualifying purchases, which can be redeemed for various rewards. To maximize your rewards potential, consider the following: Always have your loyalty number handy during purchases. Check your points balance and redemption options through mobile apps or online accounts. Take advantage of tier-based perks, like priority service or free checked bags. Keep track of special promotions that may require your loyalty number for bonus points. Common Issues With Loyalty Numbers Even though using a loyalty number can improve your shopping experience, several common issues can hinder your ability to earn and redeem rewards effectively. First, if there’s no activity on your account for an extended period, your loyalty number may become inactive, causing you to lose accumulated points. In addition, you might face difficulties earning or redeeming points if your loyalty number isn’t correctly linked to your account during a purchase. Errors in entering your loyalty number can also lead to missed points, requiring manual adjustments or customer support intervention. Furthermore, many loyalty programs have specific expiration dates for points, so if you don’t redeem them within a certain timeframe, they may vanish. Finally, forgetting or losing your loyalty number can complicate access to your account or benefits, often necessitating identification verification to regain access. Being aware of these issues can help you manage your loyalty program more effectively. Tips for Maximizing Your Loyalty Program Experience Maximizing your loyalty program experience requires proactive engagement and awareness of the benefits available to you. To make the most of your loyalty program, consider the following tips: Always provide your loyalty number when making reservations or purchases to guarantee you earn the maximum points. Regularly check your loyalty account for bonus opportunities and promotions, like double points days or partner offers, to aid in accumulating points faster. Keep track of your points and status tiers, as many programs offer bonuses for reaching specific milestones. Engage with the loyalty program via social media or newsletters for updates on exclusive offers, events, and new ways to earn points. Utilizing any mobile apps associated with the loyalty program can likewise simplify tracking points and redeeming rewards. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Meaning of Loyalty Number? A loyalty number is a unique identifier assigned to you by a business to track your participation in its loyalty program. When you make purchases, you present this number, accumulating points based on your spending. These points can lead to rewards, discounts, and exclusive benefits. As you earn more points, you may reach different status tiers, revealing additional perks. Fundamentally, your loyalty number helps personalize your shopping experience and improves your benefits with the brand. How Much Are 40,000 Loyalty Points Worth? Forty thousand loyalty points can typically be valued between $400 and $600, depending on your specific loyalty program. Many programs assign a value of about one cent per point, equating to $400 when redeemed for travel or merchandise. In airline programs, these points might cover a round-trip flight within the U.S., whereas hotel programs can offer several nights of accommodation, especially during off-peak seasons, highlighting the variability in point value. What Is a Loyalty ID Number? A Loyalty ID Number is a unique code assigned to you in a loyalty program, enabling businesses to track your purchases and engagement. When you present this number during transactions, it guarantees accurate crediting of loyalty points to your account. This ID likewise helps businesses gather data on your preferences, allowing for customized marketing and personalized offers. You can often register and manage your Loyalty ID online or through mobile apps for convenience. What Are the 3 R’s of Loyalty? The 3 R’s of loyalty are Recognition, Rewards, and Relationship. Recognition means acknowledging your loyal customers through personalized communication, which shows appreciation. Rewards offer tangible benefits like points or exclusive deals, encouraging repeat purchases. Finally, Relationships involve creating emotional connections that lead you to choose a brand consistently over competitors. When businesses implement these elements effectively, they improve customer engagement, nurture loyalty, and enhance long-term profitability. Comprehending these concepts is fundamental for success. Conclusion In conclusion, grasping your loyalty number and how it functions can greatly improve your shopping experience. By tracking points and utilizing rewards effectively, you can reap the benefits of exclusive discounts and customized offers. Obtaining your loyalty number is straightforward, and addressing common issues can help you avoid potential pitfalls. In the end, by maximizing your loyalty program participation, you not just save money but additionally enjoy a more personalized relationship with the brands you value. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "Understanding What a Loyalty Number Means" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

A loyalty number is your key to revealing rewards in various customer loyalty programs. This unique identifier tracks your purchases, helping businesses tailor offers to your preferences as you earn points. It’s fundamental for grasping how these programs work and what benefits you can gain. From exclusive discounts to personalized promotions, a loyalty number plays a vital role. So, how do you get the most out of this system? Let’s explore the details further. Key Takeaways A loyalty number is a unique identifier for customers in loyalty programs that tracks points earned through purchases. It enhances customer experience by offering personalized rewards and insights into shopping habits. In airline programs, loyalty numbers help track miles and points for status tier progression and benefits. Points can be earned through eligible flights and partnerships, with specific promotions increasing accumulation. Common issues with loyalty numbers include inactivity, linking errors, and lost numbers, which can complicate point redemption. What Is a Loyalty Number? A loyalty number is a unique identifier that businesses assign to customers as part of their loyalty programs. It allows you to accumulate points or rewards based on your purchasing behavior. Comprehending what a frequent flyer loyalty number means is crucial for maximizing your travel benefits. When you present your loyalty number during transactions, it guarantees accurate point accumulation and reveals customized rewards that improve your experience. These numbers help you track your earned points and access exclusive benefits, such as bonus miles or upgrades. Many loyalty programs feature a tiered structure, where the perks associated with your loyalty number increase as you reach higher spending thresholds or complete specific actions. Additionally, loyalty numbers provide businesses with valuable insights into your preferences, enabling them to offer personalized marketing and experiences. By engaging in loyalty programs, you can considerably improve your purchasing experience and enjoy tangible benefits. The Role of Loyalty Numbers in Airline Programs Loyalty numbers play an essential role in airline programs by tracking the miles or points you earn through flights and eligible purchases. As you accumulate these loyalty points, you can ascend through various status tiers, like Silver or Gold, revealing improved benefits such as priority boarding and lounge access. Comprehending how to maximize your loyalty number can greatly improve your travel experience and savings. Earning Loyalty Points Explained Earning loyalty points is a fundamental aspect of airline frequent flyer programs, serving as a key incentive for travelers to choose specific airlines repeatedly. Each eligible flight you take earns you loyalty points, which can be increased through various means. Here are some important ways to accumulate these points: Fly with the airline and its partners to earn points. Benefit from bonus points for higher-tier members. Use partner services like hotels and car rentals for additional points. Participate in promotions that offer temporary point boosts. These loyalty points can be redeemed for advantages such as free checked bags, priority boarding, and access to airport lounges, consequently enhancing your overall travel experience and encouraging continued loyalty to a specific American Airlines. Status Tiers Overview Comprehending the various status tiers within airline loyalty programs is essential for maximizing your travel rewards. Each tier, such as Member, Gold, Platinum, Platinum Pro, and Executive Platinum, comes with unique benefits. Higher tiers often reveal perks like free checked bags, priority boarding, and access to exclusive airport lounges, greatly enhancing your travel experience. You can earn Loyalty Points through eligible flights and partnerships, including hotels and car rentals. Moreover, certain spending thresholds may offer bonuses, helping you reach your desired tier faster. Programs like AAdvantage allow you to estimate the Loyalty Points needed for status based on your spending and flight activity. Status Tier Benefits Member Basic rewards Gold Free checked bags Platinum Priority boarding Executive Platinum Lounge access, premium services Benefits of Loyalty Numbers A loyalty number serves as your personal identifier within an airline’s loyalty program, playing a vital role in tracking your accumulated miles or points. This unique identifier reveals several benefits that improve your travel experience, including: Free checked bags, saving you extra fees on your trip. Priority boarding, allowing you to get settled on the plane faster. Access to exclusive airport lounges, providing a relaxing environment before flights. Personalized offers and promotions customized to your spending habits. With your loyalty number, you can likewise monitor your progress toward achieving status tiers like Silver, Gold, or Platinum. Plus, it facilitates the redemption of miles for free flights, upgrades, and discounts, maximizing the value of your commitment to the airline. How Loyalty Numbers Accumulate Points When you participate in a loyalty program, your loyalty number serves as a unique identifier that tracks how many points you accumulate based on your purchasing behavior. Points usually accumulate with each purchase, often at a rate of 1 point for every $1 spent, which encourages repeat business. Furthermore, many programs offer bonuses for spending with specific partners or during promotional periods, enhancing your point totals. You can also earn points through non-purchase activities, such as referring friends or engaging on social media, providing more ways to boost your loyalty points. Transparency in tracking your points is essential; many programs offer apps or cards that allow you to monitor your progress easily. This visibility not only motivates you to participate more but likewise helps you keep track of how close you’re to achieving rewards. Comprehending how your loyalty number works can help you maximize the benefits of your spending. Benefits of Having a Loyalty Number Having a loyalty number comes with several advantages that improve your overall shopping experience. By participating in a loyalty program, you gain access to unique benefits that can elevate your purchases and customer relationship. Here are some key benefits of having a loyalty number: Exclusive Discounts: Enjoy special discounts that are only available to loyalty members. Free Products: Accumulate points that can be redeemed for complimentary items or services. Personalized Offers: Receive customized promotions based on your shopping habits and preferences. Priority Service: Experience quicker service, especially during busy times or events. How to Obtain Your Loyalty Number How do you get your loyalty number? To obtain your loyalty number, start by registering for the loyalty program of your chosen business or airline. This is usually done through their official website or mobile app. Once you complete the enrollment form, you’ll receive a unique loyalty number assigned to your account, which tracks your earned points and rewards. If you want to accumulate points more quickly, consider using a co-branded credit card linked to the loyalty program, as this can improve your earning potential. Always keep your loyalty number handy for every qualifying purchase or flight booking; this guarantees you receive the appropriate rewards and benefits. If you happen to lose your loyalty number, don’t worry—simply contact customer support for the loyalty program, and provide any necessary identification details to retrieve it. Tracking Your Loyalty Points Tracking your loyalty points is essential for maximizing your rewards. By comprehending how you earn points with each purchase, you can better estimate your rewards and plan for future redemptions. Furthermore, knowing the process for redeeming points guarantees you take full advantage of the benefits available to you through the loyalty program. Earning Points Explained When you engage with a loyalty program, earning points is typically straightforward, as most programs offer a standard rate of one point for every dollar spent. This system incentivizes repeat business and helps you accumulate points quickly. You can additionally earn more points through various methods, including: Using co-branded credit cards Participating in promotional events Spending at higher tiers for accelerated earning Monitoring your points via apps or online accounts Tracking your loyalty points is vital for comprehending how close you’re to redeeming rewards. Transparency in this process allows you to see your progress, and companies often use your data to create customized marketing strategies, enhancing your overall experience and satisfaction with the program. Redeeming Points Process The process of redeeming loyalty points can greatly augment your shopping experience, as it allows you to turn accumulated points into tangible rewards. You can track your points through a mobile app or a loyalty card system, which shows your balance and recent transactions. Most businesses outline the points needed for various rewards ensuring clarity in the process. Typically, redemption is seamless, often occurring automatically at checkout. Reward Type Points Required Description Discount Voucher 100 $10 off your next purchase Free Product 200 Choose any item up to $20 Exclusive Service 500 Access to a premium service Understanding this process can augment satisfaction and encourage continued loyalty. Utilizing Your Loyalty Number for Rewards Utilizing your loyalty number effectively can greatly improve your experience with a brand’s loyalty program. This unique identifier allows you to track and accumulate points through your purchases and engagement. By presenting your loyalty number during transactions, you’ll earn points on qualifying purchases, which can be redeemed for various rewards. To maximize your rewards potential, consider the following: Always have your loyalty number handy during purchases. Check your points balance and redemption options through mobile apps or online accounts. Take advantage of tier-based perks, like priority service or free checked bags. Keep track of special promotions that may require your loyalty number for bonus points. Common Issues With Loyalty Numbers Even though using a loyalty number can improve your shopping experience, several common issues can hinder your ability to earn and redeem rewards effectively. First, if there’s no activity on your account for an extended period, your loyalty number may become inactive, causing you to lose accumulated points. In addition, you might face difficulties earning or redeeming points if your loyalty number isn’t correctly linked to your account during a purchase. Errors in entering your loyalty number can also lead to missed points, requiring manual adjustments or customer support intervention. Furthermore, many loyalty programs have specific expiration dates for points, so if you don’t redeem them within a certain timeframe, they may vanish. Finally, forgetting or losing your loyalty number can complicate access to your account or benefits, often necessitating identification verification to regain access. Being aware of these issues can help you manage your loyalty program more effectively. Tips for Maximizing Your Loyalty Program Experience Maximizing your loyalty program experience requires proactive engagement and awareness of the benefits available to you. To make the most of your loyalty program, consider the following tips: Always provide your loyalty number when making reservations or purchases to guarantee you earn the maximum points. Regularly check your loyalty account for bonus opportunities and promotions, like double points days or partner offers, to aid in accumulating points faster. Keep track of your points and status tiers, as many programs offer bonuses for reaching specific milestones. Engage with the loyalty program via social media or newsletters for updates on exclusive offers, events, and new ways to earn points. Utilizing any mobile apps associated with the loyalty program can likewise simplify tracking points and redeeming rewards. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Meaning of Loyalty Number? A loyalty number is a unique identifier assigned to you by a business to track your participation in its loyalty program. When you make purchases, you present this number, accumulating points based on your spending. These points can lead to rewards, discounts, and exclusive benefits. As you earn more points, you may reach different status tiers, revealing additional perks. Fundamentally, your loyalty number helps personalize your shopping experience and improves your benefits with the brand. How Much Are 40,000 Loyalty Points Worth? Forty thousand loyalty points can typically be valued between $400 and $600, depending on your specific loyalty program. Many programs assign a value of about one cent per point, equating to $400 when redeemed for travel or merchandise. In airline programs, these points might cover a round-trip flight within the U.S., whereas hotel programs can offer several nights of accommodation, especially during off-peak seasons, highlighting the variability in point value. What Is a Loyalty ID Number? A Loyalty ID Number is a unique code assigned to you in a loyalty program, enabling businesses to track your purchases and engagement. When you present this number during transactions, it guarantees accurate crediting of loyalty points to your account. This ID likewise helps businesses gather data on your preferences, allowing for customized marketing and personalized offers. You can often register and manage your Loyalty ID online or through mobile apps for convenience. What Are the 3 R’s of Loyalty? The 3 R’s of loyalty are Recognition, Rewards, and Relationship. Recognition means acknowledging your loyal customers through personalized communication, which shows appreciation. Rewards offer tangible benefits like points or exclusive deals, encouraging repeat purchases. Finally, Relationships involve creating emotional connections that lead you to choose a brand consistently over competitors. When businesses implement these elements effectively, they improve customer engagement, nurture loyalty, and enhance long-term profitability. Comprehending these concepts is fundamental for success. Conclusion In conclusion, grasping your loyalty number and how it functions can greatly improve your shopping experience. By tracking points and utilizing rewards effectively, you can reap the benefits of exclusive discounts and customized offers. Obtaining your loyalty number is straightforward, and addressing common issues can help you avoid potential pitfalls. In the end, by maximizing your loyalty program participation, you not just save money but additionally enjoy a more personalized relationship with the brands you value. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "Understanding What a Loyalty Number Means" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Comprehension when you have to file taxes can be essential in managing your finances. Typically, if your gross income exceeds certain thresholds based on your filing status, you must file. For example, single filers under 65 need to file if they earn over $14,600. Different rules apply to married couples and dependents. Knowing these requirements can help you avoid penalties and guarantee compliance. So, what are the specific income thresholds you should be aware of? Key Takeaways You must file taxes if your gross income exceeds specific thresholds: $14,600 for single filers, $21,900 for head of household, and $29,200 for married couples filing jointly. Dependents must file if their earned income exceeds $14,600 or unearned income exceeds $1,250. The individual tax return deadline is April 15, with an option to file for an extension until October 15. Late filing or payment can incur penalties and interest, increasing your overall tax liability. Use the IRS e-filing system for faster processing, and consider free filing options if your income is $84,000 or less. Understanding Filing Requirements Based on Age When should you consider filing your taxes based on your age? If you’re under 65 at the end of 2024, you must file taxes if your gross income meets certain thresholds. For single filers, that threshold is $14,600, whereas head of household filers need to reach $21,900, and married couples filing jointly must hit $29,200. Gross income includes both earned income, like wages, and unearned income, such as interest. Dependents face different requirements; they need to file if their earned income exceeds $14,600 or if they’ve unearned income over $1,250. Even in the case that your income falls below these thresholds, filing could still be beneficial, as you may claim refunds on withheld taxes. It’s vital to understand your dependency status, as it directly influences when you have to file taxes and what potential tax benefits you can receive. Income Thresholds for Filing Taxes Comprehension of the income thresholds for filing taxes is key to guaranteeing compliance with tax regulations. Knowing the minimum taxable income helps you understand when you need to file. Here are the main thresholds for the 2024 tax year: Single filers: You must file if your income is $14,600 or more. Head of household: The threshold is set at $21,900, meaning you need to file if you earn this amount or more. Married couples filing jointly: If your combined gross income reaches $29,200 (or $30,750 if one spouse is under 65), you must file. Married individuals filing separately: You have to file if you earn $5 or more, a significantly lower threshold compared to other categories. Understanding these income thresholds can help you avoid penalties and guarantee you’re meeting your tax obligations. Types of Income Considered for Gross Income When you’re calculating your gross income, it’s important to understand the different types of income involved. Earned income includes your salaries, wages, and tips, whereas unearned income encompasses taxable interest, dividends, and other sources like unemployment compensation and pensions. Knowing these distinctions helps you accurately assess your total income for tax purposes and determine your filing requirements. Earned Income Sources Grasping the various sources of earned income is vital for accurately calculating your gross income and determining your tax obligations. If you’re wondering, do you have to file taxes every year, comprehending earned income is key. Here are the main types: Salaries and wages from employment. Tips received for services rendered. Professional fees earned from freelance work. Taxable scholarships and fellowship grants. These sources are subject to income tax and contribute to your gross income calculation. Keep in mind that unearned income, like interest or pensions, doesn’t fall under this category. Knowing the difference is crucial, especially when evaluating if you meet income thresholds, like the $14,600 requirement for single filers in 2024. Unearned Income Examples Unearned income encompasses various types of income that aren’t derived from direct employment or services. For instance, taxable interest earned from savings accounts, bonds, and other investments counts as unearned income. If you receive ordinary dividends from stocks, those must too be reported as part of your gross income. Moreover, unemployment compensation and pensions fall under unearned income, making them subject to income tax. Rental income from properties you own is classified as unearned income as well, regardless of how actively you manage those properties. In addition, Social Security benefits may qualify as unearned income, with the possibility that a portion can be taxable based on your total income level. Comprehending these categories is essential for accurate tax filing. Special Considerations for Dependents In the process of managing tax filing requirements, it’s vital to comprehend the unique considerations for dependents. As a dependent, you might need to file a tax return if your earned income exceeds $14,600 or unearned income surpasses $1,250 in 2024. Here are some key points to keep in mind: If you’re blind, special rules apply, allowing higher income thresholds for filing. Even though your income is below the filing threshold, you might benefit from filing to claim potential refunds or tax credits. The standard deduction for dependents is limited, typically to your earned income plus $400, not exceeding the standard deduction for your filing status. Grasping these rules is fundamental, as they can affect your parent’s ability to claim certain tax benefits. Important Tax Deadlines for Individuals and Businesses You need to stay on top of important tax deadlines to avoid penalties and guarantee a smooth filing process. For individuals, the due date for 2025 tax returns is April 15, 2026, whereas businesses, including Partnerships and S-Corps, must file by March 15, 2026. Don’t forget about estimated tax payments, with the fourth quarter payment due on January 15, 2026, to stay compliant. Individual Filing Deadlines Filing your taxes on time is crucial to avoid penalties and guarantee compliance with federal regulations. To help you stay on track, here are key individual filing deadlines: April 15, 2026: Deadline for filing individual income tax returns for the 2025 tax year, except you request an extension. October 15, 2026: Extended filing deadline if you file Form 4868 for a six-month extension. January 15, 2026: Due date for fourth-quarter estimated tax payments. February 2, 2026: Employers must provide W-2 forms to employees, ensuring you have the necessary documents for timely filing. Business Filing Deadlines Comprehending business filing deadlines is just as important as knowing individual tax deadlines. For 2025, businesses must file their partnership and S-Corporation tax returns by March 15, 2026. You can extend this deadline to September 15, 2026, using Form 7004. C Corporations share the same March 15, 2026 deadline for their tax returns (Form 1120), with an option to extend until October 15, 2026. If your business operates on a fiscal year, you need to file by the 15th day of the third or fourth month after your fiscal year ends. Estimated Tax Payment Dates Grasping the estimated tax payment deadlines is vital for both individuals and businesses, especially since these payments help avoid penalties and interest charges. If you’re self-employed or expect to owe $1,000 or more in taxes, you’ll need to make these payments quarterly. Here are the key dates for the 2025 tax year: First Payment: April 15, 2025 Second Payment: June 16, 2025 Third Payment: September 15, 2025 Final Payment: January 15, 2026 If you’re wondering, “Do you file taxes if you have no income?” the answer is often no, but if you expect to owe taxes, it’s vital to keep up with these estimated payments to avoid any penalties. Consequences of Missing Tax Deadlines Missing tax deadlines can lead to a range of financial repercussions that you might not fully anticipate. If you fail to file your return on time, you could face penalties and interest on any taxes owed, which accumulate until you file your return and pay your taxes. Even if you’re due a refund, you need to file within three years to claim it. Late filing can likewise delay your refund considerably, especially with paper returns taking six weeks or more. Furthermore, missing estimated tax payment deadlines incurs further penalties, calculated based on how much you owe and how long you delay. Not filing without an extension, particularly when you owe taxes, can lead to severe consequences, including potential legal actions from the IRS for non-compliance. Consequence Description Impact on Taxpayer Penalties Fees for late filing or payment Increased tax liability Interest Accumulated on owed taxes Higher total owed Legal Actions Potential enforcement measures from the IRS Serious financial risk Extensions and Special Circumstances for Filing When you’re maneuvering through tax season, knowing about extensions and special circumstances for filing can greatly ease your stress. Here are some key points you should remember: You can request an automatic six-month extension by submitting Form 4868 by the original due date, giving you until October 15 to file. An extension to file doesn’t extend the payment deadline; any taxes owed still need to be paid by the original due date to avoid penalties. If you’re affected by federally declared disasters, you may receive automatic filing and payment extensions, which can vary based on your circumstances. Military members serving in combat zones are granted at least 180 days after leaving the zone to file and pay taxes, with possible additional extensions for disaster impacts. Understanding these extensions and special circumstances for filing can help you navigate tax season more effectively. Options for Filing Taxes and Payment Methods As tax season approaches, you’ll want to contemplate the various options available for filing your taxes and the methods for making payments. You can file electronically through the IRS e-filing system, which opens in late January, ensuring faster processing and refunds. If your income is $84,000 or less, consider using the IRS Free File program for free self-preparation. Alternatively, local organizations often provide in-person assistance at no cost. When it comes to payment methods, you have several choices. You can opt for electronic funds withdrawal during e-filing, use a debit or credit card, or send a check or money order by mail. Each method has different processing times and fees. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Minimum Income to File Taxes? The minimum income threshold to file taxes varies based on your filing status. For single filers, it’s $14,600, whereas head of household filers must report if they earn $21,900. If you’re married and filing jointly, the threshold is $29,200, or $30,750 if one spouse is under 65. Those filing separately must file if they earn just $5. Although you’re below these thresholds, filing could lead to refunds for withheld taxes. Do You Need to File Taxes if You Made Less Than $5000? If you made less than $5,000, you mightn’t need to file taxes, but it depends on your situation. If you’d taxes withheld from your paycheck, filing could result in a refund. Moreover, if you have other income types, like self-employment earnings, you may still be required to file. Even though you’re below the threshold, consider filing to potentially claim refunds or credits that could benefit you financially. How Much Money Do I Have to Make to File Taxes? To determine how much money you need to make to file taxes, it varies based on your filing status. For instance, if you’re a single filer, you must file if your gross income hits $14,600. As a head of household, that threshold is $21,900. Married couples filing jointly need to report if their combined income reaches $29,200 or more. Each category has specific income limits, so it’s crucial to check your status. Do I Have to File Taxes if I Made $1300? If you made $1,300 in gross income, you typically don’t have to file a federal tax return, as it’s below the threshold for single filers. Nevertheless, consider filing if you’d taxes withheld or qualify for credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit. Remember, gross income includes both earned and unearned income, so if your total exceeds the threshold, you must file. Always check specific requirements if you’re claimed as a dependent. Conclusion In conclusion, comprehension when you need to file taxes is crucial for compliance and avoiding penalties. Your filing requirements hinge on your income level, age, and filing status. Keep in mind the specific thresholds for single filers, married couples, and dependents. Additionally, remember important deadlines and your options for filing. By staying informed about these aspects, you can navigate the tax process more easily and guarantee you meet all necessary obligations on time. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "When Do You Have to File Taxes?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Comprehension when you have to file taxes can be essential in managing your finances. Typically, if your gross income exceeds certain thresholds based on your filing status, you must file. For example, single filers under 65 need to file if they earn over $14,600. Different rules apply to married couples and dependents. Knowing these requirements can help you avoid penalties and guarantee compliance. So, what are the specific income thresholds you should be aware of? Key Takeaways You must file taxes if your gross income exceeds specific thresholds: $14,600 for single filers, $21,900 for head of household, and $29,200 for married couples filing jointly. Dependents must file if their earned income exceeds $14,600 or unearned income exceeds $1,250. The individual tax return deadline is April 15, with an option to file for an extension until October 15. Late filing or payment can incur penalties and interest, increasing your overall tax liability. Use the IRS e-filing system for faster processing, and consider free filing options if your income is $84,000 or less. Understanding Filing Requirements Based on Age When should you consider filing your taxes based on your age? If you’re under 65 at the end of 2024, you must file taxes if your gross income meets certain thresholds. For single filers, that threshold is $14,600, whereas head of household filers need to reach $21,900, and married couples filing jointly must hit $29,200. Gross income includes both earned income, like wages, and unearned income, such as interest. Dependents face different requirements; they need to file if their earned income exceeds $14,600 or if they’ve unearned income over $1,250. Even in the case that your income falls below these thresholds, filing could still be beneficial, as you may claim refunds on withheld taxes. It’s vital to understand your dependency status, as it directly influences when you have to file taxes and what potential tax benefits you can receive. Income Thresholds for Filing Taxes Comprehension of the income thresholds for filing taxes is key to guaranteeing compliance with tax regulations. Knowing the minimum taxable income helps you understand when you need to file. Here are the main thresholds for the 2024 tax year: Single filers: You must file if your income is $14,600 or more. Head of household: The threshold is set at $21,900, meaning you need to file if you earn this amount or more. Married couples filing jointly: If your combined gross income reaches $29,200 (or $30,750 if one spouse is under 65), you must file. Married individuals filing separately: You have to file if you earn $5 or more, a significantly lower threshold compared to other categories. Understanding these income thresholds can help you avoid penalties and guarantee you’re meeting your tax obligations. Types of Income Considered for Gross Income When you’re calculating your gross income, it’s important to understand the different types of income involved. Earned income includes your salaries, wages, and tips, whereas unearned income encompasses taxable interest, dividends, and other sources like unemployment compensation and pensions. Knowing these distinctions helps you accurately assess your total income for tax purposes and determine your filing requirements. Earned Income Sources Grasping the various sources of earned income is vital for accurately calculating your gross income and determining your tax obligations. If you’re wondering, do you have to file taxes every year, comprehending earned income is key. Here are the main types: Salaries and wages from employment. Tips received for services rendered. Professional fees earned from freelance work. Taxable scholarships and fellowship grants. These sources are subject to income tax and contribute to your gross income calculation. Keep in mind that unearned income, like interest or pensions, doesn’t fall under this category. Knowing the difference is crucial, especially when evaluating if you meet income thresholds, like the $14,600 requirement for single filers in 2024. Unearned Income Examples Unearned income encompasses various types of income that aren’t derived from direct employment or services. For instance, taxable interest earned from savings accounts, bonds, and other investments counts as unearned income. If you receive ordinary dividends from stocks, those must too be reported as part of your gross income. Moreover, unemployment compensation and pensions fall under unearned income, making them subject to income tax. Rental income from properties you own is classified as unearned income as well, regardless of how actively you manage those properties. In addition, Social Security benefits may qualify as unearned income, with the possibility that a portion can be taxable based on your total income level. Comprehending these categories is essential for accurate tax filing. Special Considerations for Dependents In the process of managing tax filing requirements, it’s vital to comprehend the unique considerations for dependents. As a dependent, you might need to file a tax return if your earned income exceeds $14,600 or unearned income surpasses $1,250 in 2024. Here are some key points to keep in mind: If you’re blind, special rules apply, allowing higher income thresholds for filing. Even though your income is below the filing threshold, you might benefit from filing to claim potential refunds or tax credits. The standard deduction for dependents is limited, typically to your earned income plus $400, not exceeding the standard deduction for your filing status. Grasping these rules is fundamental, as they can affect your parent’s ability to claim certain tax benefits. Important Tax Deadlines for Individuals and Businesses You need to stay on top of important tax deadlines to avoid penalties and guarantee a smooth filing process. For individuals, the due date for 2025 tax returns is April 15, 2026, whereas businesses, including Partnerships and S-Corps, must file by March 15, 2026. Don’t forget about estimated tax payments, with the fourth quarter payment due on January 15, 2026, to stay compliant. Individual Filing Deadlines Filing your taxes on time is crucial to avoid penalties and guarantee compliance with federal regulations. To help you stay on track, here are key individual filing deadlines: April 15, 2026: Deadline for filing individual income tax returns for the 2025 tax year, except you request an extension. October 15, 2026: Extended filing deadline if you file Form 4868 for a six-month extension. January 15, 2026: Due date for fourth-quarter estimated tax payments. February 2, 2026: Employers must provide W-2 forms to employees, ensuring you have the necessary documents for timely filing. Business Filing Deadlines Comprehending business filing deadlines is just as important as knowing individual tax deadlines. For 2025, businesses must file their partnership and S-Corporation tax returns by March 15, 2026. You can extend this deadline to September 15, 2026, using Form 7004. C Corporations share the same March 15, 2026 deadline for their tax returns (Form 1120), with an option to extend until October 15, 2026. If your business operates on a fiscal year, you need to file by the 15th day of the third or fourth month after your fiscal year ends. Estimated Tax Payment Dates Grasping the estimated tax payment deadlines is vital for both individuals and businesses, especially since these payments help avoid penalties and interest charges. If you’re self-employed or expect to owe $1,000 or more in taxes, you’ll need to make these payments quarterly. Here are the key dates for the 2025 tax year: First Payment: April 15, 2025 Second Payment: June 16, 2025 Third Payment: September 15, 2025 Final Payment: January 15, 2026 If you’re wondering, “Do you file taxes if you have no income?” the answer is often no, but if you expect to owe taxes, it’s vital to keep up with these estimated payments to avoid any penalties. Consequences of Missing Tax Deadlines Missing tax deadlines can lead to a range of financial repercussions that you might not fully anticipate. If you fail to file your return on time, you could face penalties and interest on any taxes owed, which accumulate until you file your return and pay your taxes. Even if you’re due a refund, you need to file within three years to claim it. Late filing can likewise delay your refund considerably, especially with paper returns taking six weeks or more. Furthermore, missing estimated tax payment deadlines incurs further penalties, calculated based on how much you owe and how long you delay. Not filing without an extension, particularly when you owe taxes, can lead to severe consequences, including potential legal actions from the IRS for non-compliance. Consequence Description Impact on Taxpayer Penalties Fees for late filing or payment Increased tax liability Interest Accumulated on owed taxes Higher total owed Legal Actions Potential enforcement measures from the IRS Serious financial risk Extensions and Special Circumstances for Filing When you’re maneuvering through tax season, knowing about extensions and special circumstances for filing can greatly ease your stress. Here are some key points you should remember: You can request an automatic six-month extension by submitting Form 4868 by the original due date, giving you until October 15 to file. An extension to file doesn’t extend the payment deadline; any taxes owed still need to be paid by the original due date to avoid penalties. If you’re affected by federally declared disasters, you may receive automatic filing and payment extensions, which can vary based on your circumstances. Military members serving in combat zones are granted at least 180 days after leaving the zone to file and pay taxes, with possible additional extensions for disaster impacts. Understanding these extensions and special circumstances for filing can help you navigate tax season more effectively. Options for Filing Taxes and Payment Methods As tax season approaches, you’ll want to contemplate the various options available for filing your taxes and the methods for making payments. You can file electronically through the IRS e-filing system, which opens in late January, ensuring faster processing and refunds. If your income is $84,000 or less, consider using the IRS Free File program for free self-preparation. Alternatively, local organizations often provide in-person assistance at no cost. When it comes to payment methods, you have several choices. You can opt for electronic funds withdrawal during e-filing, use a debit or credit card, or send a check or money order by mail. Each method has different processing times and fees. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Minimum Income to File Taxes? The minimum income threshold to file taxes varies based on your filing status. For single filers, it’s $14,600, whereas head of household filers must report if they earn $21,900. If you’re married and filing jointly, the threshold is $29,200, or $30,750 if one spouse is under 65. Those filing separately must file if they earn just $5. Although you’re below these thresholds, filing could lead to refunds for withheld taxes. Do You Need to File Taxes if You Made Less Than $5000? If you made less than $5,000, you mightn’t need to file taxes, but it depends on your situation. If you’d taxes withheld from your paycheck, filing could result in a refund. Moreover, if you have other income types, like self-employment earnings, you may still be required to file. Even though you’re below the threshold, consider filing to potentially claim refunds or credits that could benefit you financially. How Much Money Do I Have to Make to File Taxes? To determine how much money you need to make to file taxes, it varies based on your filing status. For instance, if you’re a single filer, you must file if your gross income hits $14,600. As a head of household, that threshold is $21,900. Married couples filing jointly need to report if their combined income reaches $29,200 or more. Each category has specific income limits, so it’s crucial to check your status. Do I Have to File Taxes if I Made $1300? If you made $1,300 in gross income, you typically don’t have to file a federal tax return, as it’s below the threshold for single filers. Nevertheless, consider filing if you’d taxes withheld or qualify for credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit. Remember, gross income includes both earned and unearned income, so if your total exceeds the threshold, you must file. Always check specific requirements if you’re claimed as a dependent. Conclusion In conclusion, comprehension when you need to file taxes is crucial for compliance and avoiding penalties. Your filing requirements hinge on your income level, age, and filing status. Keep in mind the specific thresholds for single filers, married couples, and dependents. Additionally, remember important deadlines and your options for filing. By staying informed about these aspects, you can navigate the tax process more easily and guarantee you meet all necessary obligations on time. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "When Do You Have to File Taxes?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Everything looked normal in the SEO data. Google Search Console, traffic, and indexing — no red flags. Then I opened Scrunch, our AI citation monitoring tool, and looked at platform-by-platform presence for searchinfluence.com over the prior 30 days: Google AI Mode: 37.8% Copilot: 22.2% Google Gemini: 16.3% ChatGPT: 9.6% Perplexity: 7.8% Claude: 0.0% Meta AI: 0.0% Two platforms at zero. Every crawler reads the same site, so content quality and topical authority can’t account for that gap. They’re identical for every platform on the list. What varies is access — whether each platform’s crawler is allowed in. Nothing else explains how Google AI Mode hits 37.8% while Claude lands at 0%. So I opened the logs. What 7 days of Cloudflare logs showed Seven days of Cloudflare data (April 4-10) for searchinfluence.com revealed 29,099 bot requests, 65.8% of them AI bots. Here’s a per-bot share of those requests rate-limited (HTTP 429, “too many requests”), broken out by bot user-agent (UA, the identifier each request sends): Amazonbot: 51% rate-limited ClaudeBot: 29% GPTBot: 29% Bytespider: 61% blocked (different mechanism: 403/5xx, not 429) ChatGPT-User: 0% PerplexityBot: 0% The split isn’t random. Training crawlers, the ones that pull whole sites in big bursts, get throttled. User-facing crawlers, the ones that fire human-paced requests during a live user query, don’t. For context: Cloudflare’s Q1 2026 crawl-to-referral analysis shows ClaudeBot makes 20,583 crawl requests for every referral it sends back. GPTBot: 1,255 to 1. Perplexity: 111 to 1. Google: 5 to 1. AI training crawlers take far more than they give back, so it makes sense that hosting infrastructure has started fighting back. Whether that’s the right fight for your site is a separate question. The 429s in our logs were being passed through Cloudflare with a cache status of dynamic or bypass. So I wrote them off as downstream of Cloudflare, must be a web application firewall (WAF) or security plugin. That assumption sent me down a multi-hour rabbit hole through the wrong layers. 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 Where we looked first, and why we were wrong Suspect 1: Solid Security’s HackRepair default ban list A WordPress security plugin we use for hardening, with a built-in bot UA blocklist. Toggled it off, ran a 24-hour before/after on per-bot 429 counts. No change. Two bots even spiked higher in the post-toggle window. Coincidental crawl bursts, not a regression. Ruled out. Suspect 2: Solid Security’s other firewall subsystems 24,538 firewall log entries over 30 days. Every single one was a /wp-login.php brute-force lockout. Zero entries for ClaudeBot, GPTBot, or Amazonbot. Rules empty. IP Management clean. Ruled out. Suspect 3: Sucuri Cloud WAF SI has a Sucuri subscription. Logged into the portal and saw warnings across every service column (Monitoring, Firewall/CDN, SSL, Backups). A dig and curl confirmed why: DNS resolved to Cloudflare ranges, and response headers showed no x-sucuri-id. Sucuri was never in the request path. The subscription existed; the activation never happened. Ruled out. Suspect 4: Cloudflare itself Originally written off because cache-status was dynamic/bypass. That inference was sloppy: Cloudflare can return 429 from rate-limit rules with the same cache-status. Going back to the right view (Security → Analytics → Events tab, filtered by ClaudeBot UA, last 24 hours): zero events. Cloudflare took no security action on ClaudeBot in 24 hours while passing through 608 ClaudeBot 429s. Ruled out. At that point, we were out of suspects on layers we could see. The reproduction test that changed everything We ran 60 fast curl requests with a ClaudeBot UA against three different paths. 60 x 429 every time. Control runs: same paths, browser UA → 60 x 200 (HTTP “OK”). Same paths, Googlebot UA → 60 x 200. The block was unambiguously UA-based — not path-based, not rate-based. The headers gave it away. A single curl -I showed x-powered-by: WP Engine. We were on a managed host, and the block was firing from a layer that hadn’t been on the suspect list: the host’s own platform infrastructure, sitting between Cloudflare and WordPress. The hosting platform itself. The bot-by-bot fingerprint Once we knew which question to ask, we ran the rest of the AI bot UA list through the same curl harness. Bot UAResultStatusClaudeBot60/60 x 429BlockedGPTBot8/10 x 429, 2/10 cached (200)BlockedAmazonbot10/10 x 429BlockedBytespider10/10 x 520Blocked (520 is a Cloudflare-specific error: origin returned an invalid response, possibly IP-blackholed)anthropic-ai (older Anthropic UA)10/10 x 200Not blockedCCBot (Common Crawl)10/10 x 200Not blocked Two findings: The blocklist is dated: It targets the AI training crawler set as of mid-2024. The older anthropic-ai UA is allowed. CCBot, the Common Crawl bot that feeds many LLM training pipelines, is allowed. If the intent is “no LLM training data,” this gap defeats it. Scrapers can use CCBot’s UA, or Common Crawl can pull the site directly, and the data ends up in training sets anyway. The named-bot list is a fence with a gate left open. Cached responses serve through the block: WP Engine’s edge cache returns cached pages to ClaudeBot just fine (x-cache: HIT in the headers). Cache-miss requests hit the origin handler and get 429. This explains the Cloudflare data exactly: in 24 hours, 1,054 ClaudeBot requests returned 200 (cache hits) and 608 returned 429 (cache misses). Same UA, same site, two outcomes. It’s worth flagging that ~100% of our 24-hour “ClaudeBot” traffic came from a single Microsoft/Azure IP (AS8075, Microsoft’s network), not Anthropic’s published AWS ranges. Almost certainly, it’s a spoofed UA: a scraper on Azure pretending to be ClaudeBot. A meaningful slice of “AI crawler 429s” in WAF reports may be appropriate for blocking imposter traffic, not legitimate Anthropic crawl. Why this is hard to find Start with what WP Engine itself says about its firewall. From their support page on the security environment: “Further information cannot be provided around our firewall, as this can compromise its secure integrity.” That’s the company’s own statement, verbatim. Whatever the rules are, customers don’t get to see them. Their 2025 Year in Review reports 75 billion bot requests mitigated via Cloudflare-powered bot management. No documented user portal control opts you out per-site or per-bot. I checked every customer-facing setting that could plausibly fire AI bot 429s: Utilities → Redirect bots: Off (default). Web rules: Empty. Robots.txt setting: Not customized. Live /robots.txt only disallows a few specific PDFs. All clean. The block is somewhere customers can’t reach. A few more reasons it’s invisible: It returns 429, not 403: Returning “forbidden” can get a site flagged by search engines as a site-wide failure, so 429 is the safer choice. But 429 reads as “rate limit” in every WAF analytics tool, which sends investigators chasing rate-limit configurations at the wrong layer. It fires below the WAF plugins: Wordfence, Sucuri, and Solid Security all log at the WordPress application layer. WP Engine’s block fires at the platform edge, before the request reaches WordPress. Plugin logs show nothing. It fires below customer Cloudflare, too: WP Engine runs its own Cloudflare-backed bot management at the hosting edge. That’s a separate Cloudflare layer behind your own Cloudflare zone. Events fired there don’t appear in your Cloudflare dashboard. WP Engine’s billing already accounts for the block: They exclude “suspected bots” from billable metrics. From a hosting-cost perspective, the customer benefits. From a GEO/AEO perspective, the customer pays in citation absence, without ever knowing they signed up. What WP Engine confirmed when I asked After several rounds of canned auto-replies, I reached a live agent. The relevant exchanges: On the policy itself: “WP Engine does enforce platform‑wide rate limiting on certain high‑impact bots to protect overall server performance, and that part can’t be selectively disabled per bot.” On whether the customer-facing Web Rules Engine could route around it: “Allowing AI bot IPs via Web Rules Engine does not override WP Engine’s platform-wide rate limiting rules, which operate at the infrastructure level.” On whether the SEO downside was acknowledged anywhere internally: “The documentation acknowledges that blocking or rate limiting bots like Amazonbot and similar user agents can impact their crawling and indexing… It emphasizes balancing bot management with SEO considerations and suggests customers be empathetic as many did not configure these bots themselves.” Read that last bit twice. The internal framing assumes the customer is being protected from bots they didn’t ask for. For agencies, content sites, B2B SaaS, and anyone whose growth depends on AI search citations, the assumption inverts. Those bots are the audience the customer is trying to reach. There’s an escalation path: “If you have an exceptional use case or need a bot to behave differently than the platform defaults allow, we can escalate it to ProdEng (product engineering) for review.” So the policy isn’t immutable. It’s just not a self-service setting. WP Engine appears to be the outlier here We assumed every managed host did this. Public record on the other three top-managed WordPress hosts contradicts that: Kinsta’s CTO said in March 2026 that they will not block at the platform level and will not bill for bot bandwidth. Their Bot Protection feature is opt-in, with four customer-controllable levels. Pressable explicitly states in its knowledge base: “Pressable does not currently disallow these bots by default.” Customer manages it via robots.txt. Pantheon explicitly states: “We do not block identified bot traffic from entering the platform.” They detect and exclude bots from billing only. Outside managed WP, the closest analog is SiteGround, which blocks training crawlers by default but is more transparent about the policy and distinguishes training bots from user-action bots. One wrinkle: Flywheel, a managed WP host owned by WP Engine since 2019, has no documented AI bot block. Same parent company, two products, two different stated policies. Not a corporate-wide stance. A product-level decision specific to WP Engine. Caveat on the comparison: we confirmed WP Engine’s block empirically with curl. We didn’t run the same diagnostic against Kinsta, Pressable, or Pantheon. What we have for them is their public documentation, which is reliable but not the same as a live test. The precise claim: based on what each host publicly discloses, WP Engine appears to be the only top-tier managed WP host with a default-on, non-disableable platform-level AI bot block. The question shifts. It’s not “Are other hosts doing this?” It’s “Why is WP Engine, and apparently only WP Engine, doing it this way?” How to check whether it’s happening to you The standard audit advice for your WAF logs doesn’t catch this. Below are three steps that don’t require root access. Step 1: Reproduce with curl (a command-line tool that fetches URLs) for i in $(seq 1 30); do curl -sI -A "ClaudeBot/1.0 (+https://www.anthropic.com/claudebot)" \ "https://yourdomain.com/" \ -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" sleep 0.05 done | sort | uniq -c Then run the same loop with a Mozilla/5.0 … browser UA. If the browser run returns 200s and the ClaudeBot run returns 429s, the block is UA-based and someone in your stack is doing it. If both return the same code, you don’t have this problem. Step 2: Identify your host Run curl -I https://yourdomain.com/ and look at the response headers for x-powered-by or server. They often name the host (WP Engine, Pressable, Kinsta, etc.). If your host is unmanaged or self-hosted, this article likely doesn’t apply. Investigate your WAF instead. Step 3: Check what the host actually controls For WP Engine specifically, confirm Utilities > Redirect Bots is off and that Web Rules has no AI UA blocks, then open a support ticket. Here’s recommended wording: “We’ve reproduced via curl that requests with ClaudeBot/GPTBot/Amazonbot user-agent strings receive HTTP 429 responses for cache-miss requests on our environment. Cloudflare and our security plugins are not the source. Is this WP Engine’s platform-level AI crawler mitigation? Can it be disabled or scoped per-bot for our environment?” For other hosts, the equivalent path is their portal’s security section first, then a support ticket with the same evidence. What to do once you know Four real options, in order of effort. Escalate to your host’s product engineering WP Engine’s support agent named an “exceptional use case” escalation path. The policy isn’t immutable; it’s just not a self-service toggle. SEO and AI search visibility is exactly the kind of case that the escalation path is built for. Allowlist via the customer-controllable Web Rules Engine WREn lets you allowlist UAs at the site level, but the support agent confirmed it doesn’t override the platform rules. It’s useful for the bots not on the platform list (CCBot, anthropic-ai), but not a fix for the ones that are. Move to a host that doesn’t impose this A nuclear option, but worth costing out if AI search visibility is a strategic priority and ProdEng escalation goes nowhere. Kinsta’s and Pressable’s documented stances both leave AI crawler access to the customer. And to be clear: AI search visibility absolutely should be a strategic priority right now. ChatGPT alone handles billions of queries a week, and the answers cite a small set of sources. If your category is being decided in those answers and your site can’t be crawled, you don’t get cited. There is no “I’ll just rank later” backup plan, because the citation set hardens fast. Treating AI access as optional in 2026 is the same call as treating organic search as optional in 2008. It worked for a while. Then it didn’t. Accept the block as a deliberate policy Some companies will conclude that staying out of AI training data is the right call. The honest version: tell the team that’s what’s happening, factor it into AI-search expectations, stop running GEO/AEO audits that score you on missing citations you weren’t going to get anyway. The wrong move is to keep running the WAF audit playbook and concluding that nothing’s wrong. The block fires invisibly, and the citation’s absence shows up months later in dashboards that no one connects back to it. The citation correlation Googlebot ~100% access → Google AI Mode 37.8% citation presence GPTBot 54% access → ChatGPT 9.6% PerplexityBot 100% access → Perplexity 7.8% ClaudeBot 57% access → Claude 0.0% The platform-by-platform split in citations matches the platform-by-platform split in crawl access. Where the bot can read the site, the AI cites it at meaningful rates. Where the bot is blocked, citation presence collapses. Suggestive, not proof: 7-day correlation on a single site, no controlled before/after. Part 2 publishes the post-fix numbers if we get the block lifted (or move hosts). The intuition: crawl access is the floor; content quality, topical authority, and freshness are the ceiling. If the bot can’t read you, the ceiling doesn’t matter. Perplexity is the wrinkle: 100% access, 7.8% citation. Full access alone doesn’t guarantee citation. But the absence of access (Claude at 0%) is decisive. Caveats Single-site case study: The diagnostic generalizes; the specific numbers don’t. AI citation is multi-factor: Content quality, topical authority, entity coverage, freshness, schema, brand recognition: all of those matter. Crawl access is the floor, not the whole game. Bot UAs can be spoofed: Roughly 100% of our “ClaudeBot” traffic was from a non-Anthropic IP. The host-level block is doing the right thing for those impostors. AI bots don’t fully respect crawl-delay: InMotion’s coverage is a good reference: GPTBot and ClaudeBot only partially honor crawl-delay in robots.txt, so the 429 is one of the few signals they actually act on. That’s a feature, until they improve crawl-delay compliance. WP Engine’s defaults aren’t malicious: They’re protecting customers who didn’t ask for AI bot traffic. The opacity is the issue, not the intent. Customers who do want the traffic should have a way to say so without escalating to product engineering. 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 you should do next If you’re on WP Engine, run the diagnostic above. If the curl reproduction shows the same pattern, you’ve got the same issue. Open a ticket and see where that goes, or switch providers. If you’re on a different managed host, run it anyway. The diagnostic takes three minutes. If you’re spending months on content updates, schema markup, and llms.txt files while a default-on platform setting is silently blocking the crawlers you’re trying to reach, you’re optimizing the ceiling of a building with no floor. Full disclosure on method: An AI assistant (Claude) ran the curl tests, parsed headers, and walked the architecture with me. Where this piece says “we” tested or reproduced something, that’s me plus the AI. Where it says “I,” it was me directly: portal logins, the WP Engine support chat. View the full article

The Treasury anticipates keeping nominal note and bond sale sizes unchanged "for at least the next several quarters," the department said in a quarterly statement on debt policy Wednesday. View the full article

China’s foreign minister on Wednesday called for a comprehensive ceasefire in the Iran war, in comments that could inject new energy into stalled efforts to end the two-month conflict between the United States and Iran. Wang Yi said his country was “deeply distressed” by the conflict. He spoke after meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who was visiting Beijing for the first time since the war with the U.S. and Israel started Feb. 28. China’s close economic and political ties to Tehran give it a unique position of influence. The The President administration is pressing China to use that relationship to urge the Islamic Republic to open the Strait of Hormuz. The Chinese minister’s comments followed an earlier statement by U.S. President Donald The President that he was pausing his short-lived U.S. effort to guide stranded commercial vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz in hopes that a deal could be finalized. A shaky ceasefire has been largely holding, despite exchanges of fire during the U.S. push to reopen the strait on Monday. Iran’s effective closure of the strait, a vital waterway through which major oil and gas supplies, fertilizer and other petroleum products passed before the war, has sent fuel prices skyrocketing, rattled the global economy and put enormous economic pressure on countries, including major powers like China. The spot price of Brent crude oil, the international standard, fell to around $100 per barrel Wednesday, easing significantly from big price jumps earlier in the week. The prices are still well above the roughly $70 a barrel that crude was selling for before the war began. The President also due to visit China Araghchi’s visit to China comes ahead of a planned visit by The President to Beijing for a high-profile summit May 14-15 with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The trip would be The President’s first to China during his second term and the first by a U.S. president since The President visited in 2017. “We believe that a comprehensive ceasefire is urgently needed, that a resumption of hostilities is not acceptable, and that it is particularly important to remain committed to dialogue and negotiations,” Wang said, according to a video of the meeting. The Chinese foreign minister said the conflict “has already lasted for more than two months. It has not only caused serious losses to the Iranian people, but also had a severe impact on regional and global peace. China is deeply distressed by this.” In a televised interview with Iran’s state media from Beijing, Araghchi said his visit included discussions of the Strait of Hormuz as well as Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions imposed on Tehran. Iran has attained “an elevated international standing” after the war, having proven its capabilities and strength, Araghchi said. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed hope that Beijing would reiterate the need for Iran to release its chokehold on the strait, which would deny its main leverage as The President demands a major rollback of Tehran’s disputed nuclear program. “I hope the Chinese tell him what he needs to be told,” Rubio said during a White House briefing Tuesday. “And that is that what you are doing in the strait is causing you to be globally isolated. You’re the bad guy in this.” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said Beijing has made clear that the relevant sides must act “with prudence” and resolve the conflict through dialogue in order to restore peace. He added that China has been actively promoting peace talks and will continue to do so. In a statement published on the ministry’s website about Wang’s meeting with Araghchi, the foreign ministry said China values Iran’s pledge not to pursue nuclear weapons while affirming its “legitimate right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy.” The President pauses effort to guide ships out of strait Hundreds of merchant ships remain bottled up in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. said it had opened a safe shipping lane Monday and sunk six small Iranian boats that had threatened commercial ships in the strait. Only two merchant ships are known to have passed through the U.S.-guarded route. But The President announced he was pausing the effort, dubbed Project Freedom, to see whether an agreement with Tehran on ending the war could be reached. In a social media post Tuesday, The President said the move was based “on the request of Pakistan and other Countries, the tremendous Military Success that we have had during the Campaign against the Country of Iran and, additionally, the fact that Great Progress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement with Representatives of Iran.” Pakistan has been mediating between the U.S. and Iran, and had hosted peace talks between the two sides. On Wednesday, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif thanked The President for what he described as a timely announcement of a pause in the effort to guide ships out of the strait. In a post on X, Sharif said The President’s response to requests from Pakistan and other countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, would help advance regional peace, stability and reconciliation. “Pakistan remains firmly committed to supporting all efforts that promote restraint and a peaceful resolution of conflicts through dialogue and diplomacy,” Sharif said. “We are very hopeful that the current momentum will lead to a lasting agreement that secures durable peace and stability for the region and beyond.” Becatoros reported from Athens, Greece. Munir Ahmed in Islamabad, Pakistan, Toqa Ezzidin in Cairo and Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, contributed. —E. Eduardo Castillo and Elena Becatoros, Associated Press View the full article

Rare Earths Americas is expected to make its New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) debut today. The company, which focuses on “heavy rare earths” projects in the United States and Brazil, will make its initial public offering at $19 per share. Here’s what you need to know about Rare Earths Americas’s IPO. What is Rare Earths Americas? Calling itself an “exploration stage company,” Rare Earths Americas is a critical minerals company that is positioning itself as key to creating a rare earth supply independent of China. It plans to use the money raised in its IPO to fund land acquisition, drilling, and metallurgy, among other developments. The company is based in Manchester, Georgia, and also has a field office in Brazil. Rare earth elements are the backbone of everything from cell phones to wind turbines. At the same time, their extraction is also devastating poor communities around the globe. When is the IPO for Rare Earths Americas? The company priced its shares on Tuesday. It expects to start trading today, Wednesday, May 6, and close the offer on Thursday, May 7. What is the stock ticker for Rare Earths Americas? It will trade on the NYSE under the ticker REA. What is the IPO share price of Rare Earths Americas? The company’s share price is $19, the higher end of its marketed range. Rare Earths Americas initially estimated each share would be priced between $17 and $19 in its April 28 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). According to Reuters, the company has a valuation of roughly $368.4 million at that price. How many Rare Earths Americas shares are available in its IPO? Rare Earths Americas is offering 3.3 million common stock shares to the public. The company is also offering its underwriters 30 days to purchase another 499,999 shares. How much will Rare Earths Americas raise in its IPO? The company expects to raise $63.3 million in its IPO. What else is there to know about Rare Earths Americas? In its prospectus filed with the SEC, Rare Earths Americas listed a range of risk factors for potential investors. They include notable—and almost humorous—factors given that the company’s entire aim is wanting to work on rare earth projects. The risks include: We have no history of producing rare earth materials Mineral exploration is highly speculative and subject to an exceptionally high probability of failure All of our business activities are now in the exploration stage and there can be no assurance that we will build successful business operations or ever produce minerals from any of our properties Estimates that guide our development plans and anticipated financing needs with respect to our mineral projects may prove inaccurate or incomplete View the full article

When you’re building sets for a musical that’s populated by flying vampires, you have to challenge yourself to think three-dimensionally. But Dane Laffrey is used to challenging himself. Over the course of his decades-long career in theater, the Tony-winning scenic designer has been tasked with bringing to life some of the most memorable sets in recent Broadway history—from a sandy, 360-degree Caribbean archipelago for the 2017 revival of Once on This Island to the futuristic South Korea setting of 2024’s Maybe Happy Ending. Now Laffrey’s set designs are literally soaring to new heights—while also sinking to new depths—in The Lost Boys, a dynamic and at times acrobatic musical that opened last month at Broadway’s Palace Theatre. Dane Laffrey Based on the 1980s movie about undead teenagers running amok in a California beach town, the musical demanded a head-spinning array of disparate locations: for starters, a seedy arcade, a washed-up boardwalk, a sunken-in mosh pit, a towering railroad trestle, and a postindustrial underground lair where the vampires claim their victims—complete with its own working elevator. In the vast expanse of the Palace, one of the biggest houses on Broadway, Laffrey’s work astounds as it morphs into all these locations in service of the fast-paced story, sometimes offering the actors multiple levels on which to perform their action-packed sequences, and other times moving out of the way completely so they can take flight. You may find yourself anxiously holding your breath as you wait to see if everyone lands on cue, and fortunately, Laffrey’s Rubik’s Cube-like set pieces always slide into their proper place at just the right time. Taken in as a whole, the experience is at once intense and hard to describe, which is the point. “Hopefully, it feels boundless in a good way,” Laffrey tells Fast Company in an interview from his office in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. “One of the things we’ve tried to do is make the audience unaware of the boundaries of the space. You can’t quite tell where the theater begins and the set ends, or where anything goes, or quite how big anything is.” Laffrey approached The Lost Boys set design by viewing the story’s central location not just as a backdrop, but as an “important character” in its own right: the rustic old house where the Emerson family, fleeing an abusive patriarch, first arrive in the opening scene. “It’s a metaphor for the thing that everybody in the story is yearning for,” he says. “They’re yearning to belong. They’re yearning for a home.” As the musical faithfully follows the main beats of the movie, the house had to be ready to accommodate key scenes, including quieter moments between the family and a major showdown that involves some effects-laden vampire hunting. That meant a house with multiple levels, rooms, and complex moving parts, Laffrey recalls thinking early on. That same house then also had to disappear—quickly. “We needed to be able to explode out onto the Santa Carla boardwalk, and have that feeling of scope and mystery and luridness, and find ourselves in the vampires’ lair, and do a lot of magic tricks, and the list goes on,” Laffrey says. “So the challenge of this show was figuring out how to hold all of those quite divergent visual ideas into one container.” The Lost Boys was nominated for 12 Tony Awards this week, including best musical, with Laffrey picking up a nomination for his scenic design. Blood, sweat, and fangs Adapting a movie into a musical always brings with it a delicate balance: how to honor the source material while also pushing it into a direction that justifies the singing and dancing. Pleasing the fans can be its own thing entirely, perhaps especially so with The Lost Boys. The movie is, if not quite a cult classic, certainly a Gen X touchstone with its share of pop-culture references. Kiefer Sutherland’s bleached mullet aside, there is also the famous scene of the gang hanging from a bridge—which is restaged brilliantly here. Laffrey hadn’t seen the movie when he first joined the project, and he confesses that he waited as late in the process as possible to do so, in the interest of developing his own “visual point of view” about the story. “Being tabula rasa is an incredibly valuable place to find yourself artistically as a designer or visual artist,” he says. “I was able to confront The Lost Boys for the longest time just as a piece of theater, as it was being written.” The production comes about a year after Laffrey, along with George Reeve, took home the Tony Award for best musical scenic design for Maybe Happy Ending, the sleeper hit about two obsolete robots who fall in love. Side by side, the two shows are a study in contrasts, with Laffrey remarking how he tries not to repeat himself. Indeed, the set pieces for Maybe Happy Ending are unabashedly sleek and modern, with bright colors and size-shifting rooms that underscore the intimacy of the storyline and complement its romantic undertones. The Lost Boys, meanwhile, is awash in brown and rust, a dreary cast-iron portrait of a town that’s long past its prime. “There is a lot of detail in there that hopefully flags that this is something that has some history to it, and some weight and some time on it,” Laffrey says. “And we’re sort of layering 1987 on top of that.” In contrast to the immersive projections that won such acclaim in Maybe Happy Ending, the only screen we ever see in The Lost Boys is a tube TV set featuring a speech by Ronald Reagan. “The needs of those shows couldn’t be more different,” Laffrey says. One thing they share in common is director Michael Arden, Laffrey’s longtime collaborator. The two met in high school in Michigan and have been close friends for 25 years, he says—vital in a business that thrives on relationships. “The building blocks of a shared vocabulary are so valuable in making really dynamic art,” Laffrey says. The Lost Boys marks Laffrey’s and Arden’s seventh Broadway show together. The pair also have a producing interest in the show through their production company, At Rise Creative. Laffrey says the company raised “several million dollars” for the project, though he declined to share a specific figure. While creatives often serve as producers on movies, this arrangement is less common in theater, Laffrey points out. He says it’s a testament to what he and his producing partners see as the creative and commercial potential of the show. “As people who intend to make ambitious theater—which also becomes expensive theater—we want to be conscious of making expensive theater that is also sustainable theater,” he says. They’ll have their work cut out for them. Profits can be ruthlessly elusive on Broadway, where most shows don’t recoup their full investments and many close under the weight of crushing operating costs and light attendance. For now, the buzz is on their side. In addition to this week’s Tony nominations, The Lost Boys earned a wave of positive reviews when it opened last month, with Laffrey’s work in particular being praised in The New York Times, Deadline, The New Yorker, Variety, and elsewhere. The show is being cited as the one that finally broke Broadway’s notorious “vampire curse,” a reference to early-2000s musical flops such as Dance of the Vampires and Lestat. But then maybe that’s because, in Laffrey’s mind at least, The Lost Boys is not really about vampires at all. “The vampires are a textural element in this world, but this is a story about lost people and a family that’s breaking apart,” he says. “There’s something universal and emotionally resonant about that. Those are the things you need for a musical to really work.” View the full article

The conversation is changing. For the first time ever, the person or thing on the other side of an interaction isn’t always human. Every time I talk with other executives, the “agentic future” comes up. It’s a compelling idea: agents replacing old systems to actually solve problems for us without oversight. With more than a billion AI agents poised to handle everything from customer complaints to complex trades by 2029, the hurdle isn’t the tech itself. It’s whether we can actually trust it. The reality is that most businesses are stuck in the pilot stage. Not for failure of imagination, but because we don’t have the right tools to move from a cool demo to a smart system that works safely at scale. The old plumbing, or legacy infrastructure, wasn’t built for an agentic future. Workflows break easily. Data is trapped in silos. Trust is bolted on versus being built in. The result: As we deploy more agents, complexity will turn into chaos. What’s missing is a trusted, neutral middle ground, a Switzerland for the modern tech stack. As billions of these interactions happen, we need a layer that acts like a nervous system, connecting and coordinating every app and agent. Think of it as a conversational command center that fixes the trust gap by focusing on three things: identity, governance, and visibility. IDENTITY: VERIFY WHO IS DOING WHAT Let’s say you task an agent with purchasing an expensive driver that’ll add 20 yards off the tee, or in my case, one with AI to help me find the fairway more often. The retailer needs to know in real time that it was actually you who authorized the purchase, not some bad actor or rogue agent trying to improve their own handicap. And as agents get more autonomy, the stakes get higher. A several hundred-dollar golf club purchased without approval is a nuisance. An unsanctioned bank transfer or a leaked confidential email is a disaster. This goes far beyond the traditional machine-to-machine logins and identity tools we’ve used for years. Unlike traditional machines that follow a fixed script, agents use “reasoning” that is fluid and responds to each situation differently. They are built to work around problems and develop new skills. Expecting old school authentication, which is built for systems that react the same every time, to do the job against autonomous agents sets us up for disaster. Forget one-time logins. Identity in the agentic era has to be alive, dynamic, and real-time, constantly checking user intent and behavior against specific rules. That’s how you make interactions secure, whether you’re talking about a person or a bot. GOVERNANCE: DEFINE WHAT IS HAPPENING Agents are autonomous by design. They’re meant to go off and do things on their own. To do this accurately, they need clear, defined guardrails and policies that say what systems, applications, or data they have permission to access, and for how long. Let’s revisit the agent buying your driver. Instead of sticking to your budget, it orders a custom TaylorMade for four times as much. Again, this sounds silly when it’s golf, but there’s absolutely no margin for error when agents are making calls on patient care or power grids. Without strict access controls, scope creep can happen faster than you can say, “I didn’t authorize that.”Since agents from different companies have to work together across thousands of enterprise workflows, governance rules have to apply to everyone, regardless of the AI model they’re using. OBSERVABILITY: UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED AND WHY As agents start making decisions at the enterprise level, they create more liability. They’ll be roaming through sensitive networks and talking to your customers. We can’t let that be a black box. We have to be able to explain exactly what happened, why it happened, and who gave the green light. Did that agent skirt its guardrails to spend $1,000 on your driver, or was a precise spend ceiling never initially established? Did it share private data on its own, or did someone on your team tell it to? Without a clear audit trail, businesses will be stuck in a loop with no way to improve. It’s simple: You can’t manage what you can’t see. Without real observability, we lose accountability over agent behavior, which leads to waste, frustrated customers, and very real legal headaches. Nobody needs more of that. ORCHESTRATE EVERY INTERACTION We’re not just hosting conversations anymore; we’re managing a world of humans and AI. The way we run our businesses has to reflect that, starting now. Without continuous identity, governance, and observability, we’re heading for smarter, faster dysfunction. No one vendor will own the entire AI ecosystem. To close the trust gap, we need a neutral broker that doesn’t care what cloud, data warehouse, or model you use; a layer that acts as the agentic nervous system, regulating signals, making sure things are secure, and keeping us in control of every single interaction. Khozema Shipchandler is the CEO of Twilio. View the full article

Google is adding subscription labels, inline links, discussion previews, and desktop link previews to its AI Search experiences. The post Google Adds More Links & Link Context To AI Search 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. Samsung’s flagship soundbars have reached the point where the yearly upgrades are more about refinement than reinvention, and that is pretty much the story with the Samsung HW-Q990H. Right now, this 2026 model is down to $1,299.99 on Woot, which is its lowest price yet, according to price trackers. The same system is listed for nearly $2,000 on Amazon, so the discount itself is substantial. Samsung HW-Q990H Soundbar System Q-Series 11.1.4-channel setup $1,299.99 at Woot $1,999.99 Save $700.00 Get Deal Get Deal $1,299.99 at Woot $1,999.99 Save $700.00 Samsung kept the same 11.1.4-channel setup from the older HW-Q990F, including the soundbar, wireless subwoofer, and two rear speakers, but leaned harder into software this time around—features like the SpaceFit Sound Pro automatically adjust the sound depending on your room layout, and unlike some auto-calibration features that barely change anything, this one reportedly shifts the audio balance in noticeable ways. Sometimes it improves dialogue clarity and bass response. Other times, you may prefer tweaking things yourself with the built-in seven-band EQ. The system also handles basically every major audio format, supports wireless Dolby Atmos with compatible Samsung TVs, and includes 4K 120Hz HDMI passthrough for people gaming on a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X. That said, while the bass is strong for a compact subwoofer, it compresses when you push the volume near maximum, so it's not perfect for huge spaces or people who want nightclub-level output. More importantly, if you already own the HW-Q990F or even the older HW-Q990D, upgrading probably will not feel dramatic enough to justify the cost. But for someone starting from TV speakers or an entry-level soundbar, this system can completely change how movies, games, and even sports feel at home. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $199.99 (List Price $249.00) Apple Watch Series 11 [GPS 46mm] Smartwatch with Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band - M/L. Sleep Score, Fitness Tracker, Health Monitoring, Always-On Display, Water Resistant — $329.00 (List Price $429.00) Fitbit Versa 4 Fitness Smartwatch (Black) — $149.95 (List Price $199.95) Apple iPad 11" A16 128GB Wi-Fi Tablet (Silver, 2025) — $299.00 (List Price $349.00) Anker 20,000mAh Portable Power Bank With Built-in USB-C Cable — $49.99 (List Price $69.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

Google announced five changes to how the search engine will show links and citations within its AI Search features – AI Mode and AI Overviews. These changes aim to make it “easy for you to connect with authentic voices and explore useful information across the web,” Google’s Hema Budaraju, VP, Product Management, wrote. Here are the five changes that are rolling out in AI Mode and AI Overviews: (1) Suggested angles at the end of the AI responses. Google may show suggestions for where to go next at the end of many AI responses within AI Mode or AI Overviews. This “section links to unique articles or in-depth analyses on different facets of your topic, making it easy to satisfy your curiosity,” Google explained. Here is what it looks like: (2) Easier access to your news subscriptions. Google will highlight links from your news subscriptions in AI Mode and AI Overviews. Google said this makes it easier for “you can quickly access the content you trust and get more value from your subscriptions.” Google added in its early testing that searchers were “significantly more likely to click links that were labeled as their subscriptions.” Publishers can enable subscription linking using this documentation. Here is what it looks like: (3) Social media and online discussions include creator’s name, handle and community name. When Google’s AI features cite social media or online discussions, Google will not just include the name of the website, but also the creator’s name and handle – along with the community name. This is to make it easier to understand these responses are from firsthand sources. We saw Google testing this earlier. Here is what it looks like: (4) More links, next to relevant text. Google also said it will show more links directly within the AI responses, right next to the relevant text it was citing. This should encourage searchers to dig deeper into those websites because those citations and links are right next to the related text. Here is what it looks like: (5) Hover over inline links. Google’s AI features will give you a quick preview of a website when you hover your cursor over an inline link in the AI feature, AI Mode or AI Overviews, on desktop. We saw Google testing this in February and I feel this is a better method to encourage searchers to click over. The information in the overlay includes name of the website or title of the web page and maybe more useful information. Here is what it looks like: Why we care. Google wrote, “We’ll keep testing, learning and improving these features based on what works best for you.” These changes, in my opinion, should increase the chances of searchers clicking from the AI experiences to the cited page. And it also shows Google is making changes to try to improve the overall ecosystem. The big question is, will these changes be enough? View the full article

GEO vendors are selling the same SEO playbook with a new acronym. The academic paper they cite actually points the other way. The post The Whole Point Was The Mess appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Learn how to track ChatGPT traffic, benchmark against competitors, and connect AI visits to visibility signals. View the full article