All Activity

It’s the Friday open thread! The comment section on this post is open for discussion with other readers on any work-related questions that you want to talk about (that includes school). If you want an answer from me, emailing me is still your best bet*, but this is a chance to take your questions to other readers. * If you submitted a question to me recently, please do not repost it here, as it may be in my queue to answer. The post open thread – May 15, 2026 appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

As if college students didn’t have enough to worry about, now undergrads at Harvard University may see their A grades go up in smoke. With over 60% of Harvard students getting A’s in the mid-2025 academic year, faculty are currently weighing a proposal that would cap that to no more than 20% of the class, plus four students. (A more detailed breakdown: 66% of undergraduates earned A’s, and 84% earned an A or A-minus in the 2024–25 academic year.) “The Student Handbook recognizes an A grade as one reserved for work of ‘extraordinary distinction.’ We recommend returning to this definition,” the February 2026 proposal reads. “While any changes to grading policies may raise concerns about fostering a competitive culture, we believe that these recommendations take critical steps toward the College’s goal to re-center academics, restoring confidence in the College’s grading system, and better aligning incentives with pedagogical goals.” Just for context, less than half of the Ivy’s student body earned an A back in 2006. Also, as the administration clamped down on grade inflation during the fall 2025 semester, the number fell to 53%. “It’s kind of nutty,” Steven Levitsky, a Latin American studies professor at Harvard, told Inside Higher Ed. “We’ve completely erased the distinction between an A and A-minus,” he said, adding that the proposal is the “least bad solution.” Faculty are voting on the measure this week, with results due next Wednesday, May 20. It’s unclear whether it will pass, as students—already dealing with a weak job market and skyrocketing tuition costs (now surpassing $80,000)—are said to be furious, with some 85% opposing the cap, per the Harvard Crimson. Grade inflation isn’t anything new Of course, grade inflation at Harvard, and other U.S. colleges, isn’t anything new. It can be traced back to the Vietnam War, when professors used it to protect students from being drafted. More recently, from 1990–2020, grade point averages (GPAs) at four-year colleges increased more than 16%, according to a post by the U.S. Department of Education. It cited students’ “consumer demand” for higher grades, and the rating of professors, in driving the trend. “It’s true that grades always seem to be rising [at Harvard] . . . and has become extreme in recent years,” says a 2025 report about grading trends at Harvard from Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh. “A slow rise in the early 2010s, continuous with longstanding trends, followed by a more rapid rise in the late 2010s, then an additional spike during the year of remote instruction and a flattening out after that.” As students await a decision, one thing to note: Recent attempts at Princeton University and Wellesley College to rein in runaway grade inflation failed, Bloomberg reported. View the full article

Starbucks Corporation has announced that it will lay off 300 corporate employees in the United States. The layoffs represent the third round of job cuts that the coffee chain has initiated in the last 15 months. They come as the company is in the midst of efficiency and cost-cutting measures under the leadership of CEO Brian Niccol, who assumed the role in 2024. Here’s what you need to know about the latest Starbucks layoffs. Starbucks to cut 300 corporate jobs in the U.S. On Friday, Starbucks confirmed that it was cutting 300 corporate jobs in the United States. The news was first reported by CNBC. The job cuts will not impact the majority of the company’s workforce, which consists primarily of its retail workers who are employed in the chain’s thousands of coffee shops across the globe. Instead, the job cuts will impact the company’s roughly 19,000-strong U.S. corporate workforce. Starbucks employs an additional 5,000 non-retail employees across the globe. When reached for comment, a Starbucks spokesperson told Fast Company that the layoffs consisted of “300 U.S. support roles” and that the company was reviewing its international support organization and that it expects “additional role impacts outside the U.S.” Starbucks also said that it was streamlining its real estate footprint, which includes a consolidation of U.S. regional office space. Why is Starbucks cutting workers? The layoffs announced this morning are a direct result of the retail chain’s “Back to Starbucks” strategy, which involves streamlining operations, enhancing customer experiences, and redesigning its shops to feel less soulless and more like a comfortable place to hang out and enjoy a coffee. The job cuts announced today are being made to support the streamlining operations pillar of the company’s Back to Starbucks initiative. “We are taking further action under the Back to Starbucks strategy, building on our strong business momentum and working to return the company to durable, profitable growth,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. The third round of corporate layoffs to hit Starbucks Unfortunately, this is not the first time Starbucks has laid off workers since Niccol took the helm in 2024. In February 2025, Starbucks announced 1,100 layoffs while also eliminating hundreds of unfilled positions. At the time, Niccol said the cuts were designed “to create smaller, more nimble teams.” “We believe it’s a necessary change to position Starbucks for future success,” Niccol said in a memo at the time. “Our intent is to operate more efficiently, increase accountability, reduce complexity, and drive better integration.” Just seven months later, in September 2025, Starbucks announced more layoffs. These layoffs consisted of 900 non-retail job cuts. In addition, the company said it would close about 1% of its North American coffeehouses. “Our goal is for every coffeehouse to deliver a warm and welcoming space with a great atmosphere and a seat for every occasion,” the CEO wrote in a public letter at the time. “[We] identified coffeehouses where we’re unable to create the physical environment our customers and partners expect, or where we don’t see a path to financial performance, and these locations will be closed.” Starbucks sees sales and stock price growth While the layoffs under Niccol’s leadership are now doubt unpopular with the majority of Starbucks’s corporate workforce, they are part of his broader Back to Starbucks turnaround plan, and that plan does seem to be working. As CNBC reported at the time, Starbucks in April posted its second straight quarter of traffic growth at U.S. locations. That growth led to a 7.1% increase in same-store sales. Investors have also rewarded the company’s stock price recently. As of this writing, Starbucks shares (Nasdaq: SBUX) are hovering around $105. That’s a more than 26% increase since the year began. Over the past 12 months, Starbucks shares are up nearly 23%. View the full article

Chancellor wary about the ‘social climate developing there’ as relations with Donald The President hit new lowView the full article

A handful of technology companies now claim that they can track and identify users of Starlink, the satellite internet communications service operated by SpaceX, according to a spate of new documents. These services not only raise privacy questions for Starlink consumers, but also a growing number of government agencies that deploy SpaceX’s service for internet and communications networks. Sales documents, highlighted recently by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, detail how software might be used to monitor terminals used to access the SpaceX internet service. At least two companies named by Haaretz, TechTarget and Rayzone, appear to be marketing tools that use a variety of data sources to surmise where Starlink terminals might be operating. The tools seem to be designed for government clients, per Haaretz, and aren’t designed to access or exploit any SpaceX system directly. Fast Company was also able to identify a website for a third company, Shoghi, advertising Starlink user identification services for government clients. SpaceX and a series of resellers who sell Starlink to U.S. government agencies did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment. Rayzone, one of the companies listed in the Haaretz story, tells Fast Company that it operates out of the Israeli Ministry of Defense’s Defense Export Control Agency and that “export of our products or technologies is subject to the required governmental approvals, in addition to our own strict internal compliance procedures.” The company said it would not comment on any media reports or its capabilities, and added that its products “are designed to assist governmental agencies in addressing terrorism and criminal activity.” Of course, a range of actors use satellite internet services like Starlink, including activist groups, drug smugglers, and even military vessels, and there are plenty of reasons a government might want to purchase Starlink identification data from one of these firms. The fact that satellite terminals can potentially be identified isn’t new, but the story is a reminder that companies exist to find and catalog them at scale. But there’s a flip side, since the existence of the tools also raises questions about whether government agencies have adequately protected themselves, since they also use Starlink. “The U.S. Space Force takes the cybersecurity of our satellite communications and data networks extremely seriously,” says a spokesperson for U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command, which helps buy Starlink services for the military. “While we do not discuss specific operational security measures, threat assessments, or potential vulnerabilities due to OPSEC [operations security], we continuously monitor all integrated commercial systems to ensure they meet our rigorous security standards. We work closely with our commercial partners to identify, assess, and mitigate potential risks to our networks.” A State Department spokesperson said the agency “does not comment on alleged vulnerabilities, specific communications capabilities, or protective measures associated with systems used by our personnel.” Still, a growing number of U.S. government agencies, including the State Department, are now using Starlink, or Starshield, a military version of the service that runs on Starlink’s network. While these tools are sometimes marketed differently, they’re interconnected: A Starlink outage last year impacted Starshield, as FedScoop first reported, and also impacted Navy drone tests, Reuters later reported. Sometimes, the use of Starlink isn’t authorized: A few years ago, a Navy chief was demoted after sneaking Starlink onto a warship in order to access social media. For Sascha Meinrath, a Penn State professor who has studied Starlink’s network capacity, the existence of these firms is “unsurprising,” given that satellite imagery has been used to identify communications infrastructure in the past. “This begs the question of why Starlink is becoming the provider of choice for criminals around the globe, including everyone from Myanmar’s spam farms to paramilitary death squads in Sudan,” Meinrath tells Fast Company. “If both Starlink and, presumably, the U.S. government both know the precise locations of Starlink terminals, why are so many criminal elements able to continue using these systems with relative impunity?” View the full article

Pope Leo XIV on Thursday denounced how investments in artificial intelligence and high-tech weaponry were leading the world into a “spiral of annihilation,” as he called for peace in the Middle East and Ukraine during a visit to Europe’s largest university. Leo’s speech at Rome’s La Sapienza University marked the first time a pope has visited the campus since Pope Benedict XVI called off a planned speech there in 2008 in the face of protests from faculty and students. The American pope was warmly welcomed on Thursday, including by some of Sapienza’s newest students: Young Palestinians who arrived in Italy this week on a “humanitarian corridor” from Gaza to continue their studies at the university. The Italian government, working with Catholic organizations, has brought hundreds of Palestinians to study and receive medical care in Italy since the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza began in 2023. Leo met some of the Gaza students during a brief greeting at the campus chapel, and again after his speech in the main lecture hall of the university, which was founded by Pope Boniface VIII in 1303. In his speech, Leo denounced how military spending had increased dramatically this year, especially in Europe, at the expense of education and healthcare, while “enriching elites who care nothing for the common good.” He called for better monitoring of how AI was being developed and used in military and civilian contexts “so that it does not absolve humans of responsibility for their choices and does not exacerbate the tragedy of conflicts.” “What is happening in Ukraine, in Gaza and the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon, and in Iran illustrates the inhuman evolution of the relationship between war and new technologies in a spiral of annihilation,” he said. The pope said education and research must move instead in the opposite direction that values life “the lives of peoples who cry out for peace and justice!” Leo has identified AI as one of the most critical matters facing humanity, especially its application in warfare and everyday life. They are themes he’s expected to explore more fully in his first encyclical, due to be released in the coming weeks. Nada Rahim Jouda, 19, was one of the Gazans who met Leo, just two days after she arrived in Italy. She was still marveling at her new life studying business science in Rome, a city that she said was “like heaven for me.” “Everything here is green and it’s not gray and troubles everywhere and miserable people in the streets,” she said. But Jouda remains concerned for the family she left behind: her mother, recovering from leukemia, and younger sisters aged 17 and 13. Over the course of the war in Gaza, the family was forced to move four times, and her mother was unable to receive care or check-ups for her cancer. “They all rely on me. I’m the only hope that they have,” she said. Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. —Nicole Winfield and Paolo Santalucia, Associated Press View the full article

US president returns from China after summit that yielded no big deals but brought hope of more stable ties View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. The Shortcuts app for iOS was introduced all the way back in 2018, and in the years since, more and more shortcuts have become available—both added by Apple and shared by Shortcuts users. Shortcuts, in case you've never used the app, essentially lets you put together mini apps that connect a trigger (like a time of day or a button push) with an action (like opening an app or turning off wifi). With a vast number of triggers and actions available, there are lots of potential possibilities here. The best way to explain how Shortcuts works is to give you a few examples of what it can do, and how these little connectivity tools can help you do more with your iPhone. Here are 10 picks that show off the power of Shortcuts. iPhone 17 Pro Max $1,199.00 at Apple Shop Now Shop Now $1,199.00 at Apple iPhone 17 Pro $1,099.00 at Apple Shop Now Shop Now $1,099.00 at Apple iPhone 17 $799.00 at Apple Shop Now Shop Now $799.00 at Apple iPhone Air $999.00 at Apple Shop Now Shop Now $999.00 at Apple SEE 1 MORE Extend your Action Button's capabilities If you've got an iPhone with an Action button, then you probably know you can customize what it does via the Action Button entry in iOS Settings. With the Shortcuts app, though, you can extend the Action Button's capabilities further, and set up multiple different combinations using other keys as well. Add Multi-shortcut Action Button to Shortcuts, then assign it to the Action Button. With that done, press and hold the Action Button, and tap the volume up key once, twice, or three times—each combination creates a new shortcut. Dive into the Multi-shortcut Action Button configuration page (via the three dots on its entry in the Shortcuts gallery), and you can match volume key presses to other shortcuts—playing podcasts, sending messages, or whatever you want to do. You've now got a lot more functionality from your iPhone's Action Button. Use News Report AI to get your news right in NotesWith News Report AI added to Apple Shortcuts, you've got yourself an easier and cleaner way of catching up on the day's news without having to venture on to the wilds of the web. Essentially, it turns the RSS feed(s) of your choice into separate entries in Apple Notes. You'll need to do some configuring here of the RSS feed addresses, via the three dots on the shortcut in the gallery (you can duplicate the shortcut if you need more), but then when you run it you get the latest news stories (and short AI summaries) right in Notes. Save X video clips with this shortcut There may be times when you're browsing the sprawling social media platform that is X, and you want to save a video you've come across. That's not especially easy in the X app or the X mobile site, but it's easy with the Download X Videos shortcut. Once you've added it to Shortcuts, the easiest way to use Download X Videos is to pin it to the iOS share sheet (just choose Edit Actions the next time it appears). You can then tap the share button in the X app to find Download X Videos and save clips. MusicBot offers numerous features, including easy access to mixes. Credit: Lifehacker Expand your song repertoire with MusicBotSome of the best shortcuts you can create are related to Apple Music, and MusicBot is a fine example. It offers multiple features every time you activate the shortcut, from surfacing recently added music in your library to controlling playback on AirPlay 2 devices. You can create smart mixes to rediscover tunes you've forgotten about or hear your top songs of the year so far, quickly add songs to playlists, clear your queue with a tap, and dig into your most favorite albums, for example. All of this requires some configuration, so that MusicBot knows the playlists you want to use, but it doesn't take long: You'll be asked a few questions when you first set up the shortcut, and can make edits later by tapping the three dots on the shortcut in the gallery. Save Current Location will log where you are There are all kinds of reasons why you might want to save your current location: You want to remember where you parked the car, or where the best fishing spot is, or how far you've walked on a certain day, and the Save Current Location shortcut has you covered here. Run the shortcut, and your current position on the planet is logged in an Apple Note or copied to the clipboard depending on how you set it up. It's easy and quick, and can be combined with automatic triggers (like a time of day) to make it even more useful. Low Battery Announcement will save you from a dead phone Out of the box, your iPhone has settings for warning you about a low battery and saving as much battery life as possible, but the Low Battery Announcement levels up what's possible, and gives you alerts that can be more precisely customized. Specifically, it calls on ChatGPT to let you customize both the battery warning message and the voice it's read in to tell you what's happening with your battery. Combine this with battery level triggers from the Automation tab in Shortcuts, and you're able to have your iPhone say anything you like when your battery level reaches any point you like—you can set up all the warnings you need about recharging. Shazam & Save listens for what's playing This isn't a shortcut you need to download from the web: You'll find it in the Gallery tab of the Shortcuts app. Once you've got it added, every time you launch it your iPhone will listen out for what's playing, and add the song to your Apple Music library. It's a good example of how shortcuts can expand on what iOS already offers—in this case, the Shazam-powered music identification capabilities. Having the song also added to your library means you're not to forget about it. Personalize your post-morning-alarm routine One of the automation options is stopping an alarm. Credit: Lifehacker As well as adding pre-built shortcuts, you can create your own. Tap the + (plus) button on the Library tab to build shortcuts (what you want to happen), and the + (plus) button on the Automation tab if you want the shortcut to run automatically based on a certain trigger. Shortcuts can always be run manually too. Here's one idea: Rather than just dismissing your morning alarm and that being the end of it, why not have your favorite morning playlist and directions to the office pop up automatically (so you can see how bad the traffic is)? When you create your shortcut, combine the Music > Play Music and Maps > Get Travel Time actions, filling in the specifics as prompted. You can then combine the shortcut with the Alarm > Is Stopped automation. Get a battery warning when leaving the houseYou can set up a shortcut to alert you that your iPhone battery level is low when you're leaving home—giving you the chance to take a charger with you and avoid having a dead phone on your hands in a few hours. There are a few ways to do this: For your main shortcut, combining the Get Battery Status and Show Alert actions is perhaps the simplest option (using the battery status variable as the content of the alert). That shortcut can then be connected to the Leave > Home option on the Automation tab, and customized further as needed: You can set it to only run between certain times of day, for example. Run specific actions in your car One of the other options you'll see on the Automation tab is CarPlay: It means you can have specific actions run whenever you're in your vehicle, and your iPhone has connected to a CarPlay dashboard. Again, there are lots of possibilities. One idea would be to use the Podcasts > Play Podcasts and Weather > Get Weather Forecast actions here, so that you've got your audio listening covered and know the weather conditions to expect on your drive. View the full article

U.S. President Donald The President and Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapped up critical talks on Friday, claiming important progress in stabilizing U.S.-China relations even as deep differences persist between the world’s two biggest powers on Iran, Taiwan and more. Following the trip, The President said he had not yet made a determination on whether a major U.S. sale of arms to Taiwan can move forward. Speaking to reporters as he flew back on Air Force One, The President said he’d not decided on the sale, but he added, “I will make a determination.” The President’s Republican administration has authorized the sale but it has yet to move forward. China opposes the deal and has suggested that Washington’s relationship with the self-governing island is the key factor in China-U.S. relations. The President said Xi told him that he was opposed to Taiwan’s independence. “I heard him out,” The President said. “I didn’t make a comment.” The President also said he raised a potential three-way nuclear deal among the U.S., Russia and China. He wants each of the three countries to sign a pact that would cap the number of nuclear warheads in its arsenal. China has previously been cool to entering such a pact. Beijing’s arsenal, according to Pentagon estimates, exceeds more than 600 operational nuclear warheads and is far from parity with the U.S. and Russia, which each are estimated to have more than 5,000 nuclear warheads. But The President suggested Xi was receptive to the idea. “I got a very a positive response,” The President said. “This is the beginning.” The last nuclear arms pact, known as the New START treaty, between Russia and the United States expired in February, removing any caps on the two largest atomic arsenals for the first time in more than a half-century. As the treaty was set to expire, The President rejected a call by Russia to extend the two-country deal for another year and called for “a new, improved, and modernized” deal that includes China. The Pentagon estimates China will have more than 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030. Xi welcomed The President at his official residence, Zhongnanhai, on Friday for their final engagement of the summit before the U.S. leader’s return to Washington. The leaders took a short walk through the grounds that feature ancient trees and Chinese roses, and they strolled through a covered passageway with green columns and archways painted with birds and traditional Chinese mountain scenes. Over tea and lunch, The President and Xi — with top aides and translators in tow — huddled for nearly three hours of talks before the U.S. leader completed his three-day visit to China. “It’s been really a great couple of days,” The President told reporters. Xi, for his part, called it a “milestone” visit. “We have established a new bilateral relationship, or rather a constructive, strategic, stable relationship,” he said. But the optimistic outlook collides with some difficult truths about the thorniest issues between the two superpowers. Beijing has shown little public interest in U.S. entreaties to get more involved in solving the conflict in Iran, even though The President said in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity that Xi had in their conversations offered to help. In recent weeks, the U.S. State Department has accused Chinese firms of providing satellite imagery to the Iranian government and the Treasury Department has moved to target Chinese oil refineries accused of buying oil from Tehran, as well as shippers of the oil. And the White House believes China can still do more to stem the flow of Chinese-made precursor chemicals into Mexico used to make illicit fentanyl that has wreaked havoc on many U.S. communities. Xi, meanwhile, warned The President during private talks that their differences on the self-ruled island of Taiwan, if handled poorly, could hurtle the world’s dominant powers toward “clashes and even conflicts,” according to Chinese government officials. The President appeared impressed by the bucolic grounds, remarking the roses were the most beautiful he had ever seen. Xi promised to send him some rose seeds. The compound is wrapped around two artificial lakes that had been built for the pleasure of emperors. Zhongnanhai is often compared to the White House, the Kremlin or South Korea’s Blue House. But unlike the other presidential residences, Zhongnanhai does not serve as the main venue for diplomatic visits. The invitation appeared to be an attempt by Xi to extend a personal touch to a U.S. leader who appreciates big gestures. “I think he’s a warm person, actually. But he’s all business,” The President said of Xi in the Fox News interview. “There’s no games.” The Chinese government also bid farewell to The President with great pomp. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi saw a smiling The President off at the airport. And schoolchildren dressed in Air Force One’s light blue and white colors waved American and Chinese flags in a coordinated movement as the U.S. president arrived to board the plane. Taiwan remains the most important issue for China Xi’s sharp language on Taiwan loomed large over the visit, with Chinese government officials amplifying that differences on the self-ruled island pose the biggest risk to U.S.-Chinese relations. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC News that U.S. policy toward Taiwan was “unchanged” and cautioned that it would be “a terrible mistake” for China to try to take Taiwan by force. He also framed Xi’s comments as standard practice. “They always raise it on their side. We always make clear our position, and we move on to the other topics,” said Rubio, who was among senior aides to join The President for the talks. China in recent weeks has sought to put more focus on its view that Taiwan sits at the “core” of its interests and is key to ensuring a stable relationship with the U.S. The President at moments has shown ambivalence toward Taiwan, raising speculation that he could be open to loosening ties with Taipei. The President has demanded Taiwan increase defense spending, and in December, the White House announced an $11 billion weapons package for Taiwan, the largest ever to the island democracy. But the U.S. has yet to begin fulfilling the arms sales, and The President had said he expected to discuss the matter with Xi in Beijing. He’s also groused that Taiwan “stole” America’s semiconductor business and called on Taiwan to pay the U.S. for protection. China wants the Strait of Hormuz opened The leaders agreed that the Strait of Hormuz — effectively closed since the start of the Iran conflict — needs to be reopened to support global energy demands About 20% of the world’s oil flowed through the strait before the war started on Feb. 28. “We feel very similar about (how) we want it to end,” the president said with Xi at this side. “We don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon.” White House officials say Xi was also opposed to any implementation of tolls on vessels crossing the strait and expressed interest in China potentially purchasing U.S. oil to reduce Chinese dependence on Gulf oil in the future. The President earlier this week had downplayed the importance of talks with Xi on the 11-week-old Iran war that has led to surging energy prices and threatens to plunge the global economy into recession if the conflict does not conclude soon. Will The President announce any major business deals? The White House, ahead of the visit, insisted that The President wouldn’t be making the trip without an eye toward securing results before he leaves, suggesting there could be announcements coming on trade. The President says some “fantastic trade deals” had been struck during the visit, but did not offer further details. The U.S. side had been hoping to nail down Chinese commitments to buy U.S. soybeans and beef. The President told Fox News that Xi had indicated a commitment for China to buy 200 Boeing jets from the U.S. Mistreanu reported from Bangkok. Associated Press writers Huizhong Wu in Bangkok, Darlene Superville and Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report. —Aamer Madhani, Will Weissert and Simina Mistreanu, Associated Press View the full article

Markets price in greater chance of US interest rate rises after worse than expected data releases this weekView the full article

Enhancing customer service is vital for any business aiming to thrive in a competitive market. By focusing on five proven strategies, you can markedly improve how you connect with customers. These strategies include strengthening your service skills, analyzing every customer interaction, and personalizing experiences. You’ll additionally want to define your service standards and integrate technology effectively. Finally, providing feedback channels is fundamental. Implementing these strategies can transform your customer relationships, but there’s more to explore. Key Takeaways Strengthen customer service skills through empathy, clear communication, and active listening to enhance customer relationships and resolve issues effectively. Map customer touchpoints to identify improvement areas, ensuring consistent and personalized interactions that boost brand perception and customer loyalty. Regularly train staff to keep skills sharp, define clear service standards, and adapt strategies based on customer needs and feedback. Implement technology, such as CRM systems and AI chatbots, to streamline support processes and enhance the customer service experience. Establish accessible feedback channels, using surveys and NPS assessments, to gather insights and demonstrate responsiveness to customer concerns. Strengthen Your Customer Service Skills In today’s competitive market, strong customer service skills are fundamental for anyone looking to succeed in this field. One key skill is empathy. By truly recognizing your customers’ concerns, you can address their needs effectively, which amplifies satisfaction and builds loyalty. Clear communication plays a significant role here; when customers grasp the information you provide, it helps resolve issues swiftly. Continuous training is imperative to keep your skills sharp and up-to-date with best practices, enabling you to handle diverse customer situations more adeptly. Active listening is another critical component; it allows you to fully perceive customer concerns, nurturing trust and rapport. Furthermore, personalizing interactions makes customers feel valued and acknowledged, increasing the likelihood of repeat business. Focusing on these strategies will empower you to strengthen your customer service skills, ensuring you meet and exceed expectations in this demanding environment. Look at Every Touchpoint Every customer interaction counts, and overlooking any touchpoint can lead to missed opportunities for enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Each email, phone call, or social media message contributes to the overall perception of your brand, so it’s vital to maintain consistent service quality across all channels. By mapping out customer touchpoints, you can pinpoint areas needing improvement, addressing bottlenecks that might disrupt the customer experience. Anticipating potential friction points can greatly reduce negative experiences, as 88% of customers are less likely to return after a bad service encounter. Consistent and personalized interactions are important; 58% of consumers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Finally, monitoring customer touchpoints through feedback mechanisms provides valuable insights, enabling you to continuously refine your customer service strategies and cultivate stronger relationships that drive brand loyalty. Improve Your Customer Interactions Improving customer interactions is a fundamental aspect of improving overall customer experience and satisfaction. To effectively enhance your customer interactions, start by actively listening to customer concerns. This cultivates better relationships and allows you to provide customized solutions, which ultimately results in increased satisfaction and loyalty. Personalizing interactions, such as addressing customers by name and grasping their history, can greatly improve their experience, making them feel valued. Additionally, consistent follow-up after interactions shows your commitment to service and can increase the likelihood of repeat business. Keep in mind that clear communication is key; it guarantees customers fully grasp the information provided, reducing frustration. Finally, demonstrating empathy by acknowledging customer feelings is essential for resolving issues effectively. By implementing these strategies, you can improve customer service and create a more positive experience for your customers, leading to long-term success for your business. Enhance Your Customer Service Strategy A robust customer service strategy is essential for any business aiming to improve its interactions with clients. To boost your strategy, start by defining clear service standards that align your team’s efforts, ensuring consistency across all customer interactions. Integrating technology, like CRM systems and AI chatbots, can streamline support processes and personalize experiences, which greatly influences what makes a good customer experience. Regular training for your representatives promotes continuous learning, allowing them to effectively address diverse customer needs. Setting SMART goals for your customer service initiatives enables you to measure progress and adapt strategies based on performance metrics. This approach ultimately drives better customer experiences and cultivates loyalty. Give Your Customers a Way to Provide Feedback When you give your customers a way to provide feedback, you not only gather valuable insights but also cultivate a sense of involvement in your business. Accessible channels like surveys, email forms, or social media encourage about 85% of customers to share their thoughts when prompted. Utilizing Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT) helps you collect quantitative data on service effectiveness, allowing for targeted improvements. Implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) assessments measures customer loyalty, providing a clear picture of how your brand is perceived. Regular follow-ups with customers after interactions reinforce your commitment to service and demonstrate responsiveness, which can greatly improve loyalty and retention. Furthermore, anonymously collecting feedback through suggestion boxes or online platforms can uncover insights that lead to better service delivery. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the Strategies to Improve Customer Service? To improve customer service, you should implement omnichannel support, allowing customers to engage across various platforms. Proactively reach out to customers before issues arise, enhancing satisfaction. Regularly collect feedback through surveys and act on it to demonstrate responsiveness. Invest in ongoing training for your representatives to cultivate a customer-centric culture. Finally, utilize technology like AI chatbots for routine inquiries, freeing up agents to handle more complex issues and improving overall service quality. What Are the 7 R’s of Customer Service? The 7 R’s of customer service are crucial for effective interactions. First, Recognize customer needs, establishing trust. Next, Respond quickly to inquiries, enhancing the likelihood of repeat business. Then, Resolve issues efficiently, leading to greater satisfaction. Reassure customers about their choices, increasing their willingness to pay for better experiences. Finally, Retain customers through follow-ups and personalized interactions, as keeping existing customers is notably more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. What Are the 4 P’s That Improve Customer Service? To improve customer service, focus on the four P’s: People, Processes, Product, and Performance. Train your representatives continuously to elevate their skills, ensuring they’re engaged and effective. Streamline processes to reduce wait times, meeting customer expectations for quick responses. Equip your team with in-depth product knowledge, so they can exceed customer expectations. Finally, track key performance indicators like CSAT and NPS to identify improvement areas and align strategies with customer needs. What Are the 5 R’s of Customer Service? The 5 R’s of customer service are Recognition, Respect, Responsiveness, Resolution, and Relationship. You should recognize customers by name and understand their history, nurturing loyalty. Treat them with respect, valuing their time for positive experiences. Be responsive, as most customers expect quick answers to inquiries. Resolve issues effectively to boost loyalty, and build ongoing relationships to increase customer lifetime value. These elements together create an all-encompassing framework for improving customer interactions. Conclusion In summary, implementing these five strategies can greatly improve your customer service. By strengthening your skills, analyzing touchpoints, improving interactions, refining your strategy, and providing feedback channels, you create a more effective and responsive service environment. This approach not merely meets customer expectations but additionally nurtures loyalty and encourages ongoing improvement. By committing to these practices, you position your business for success in a competitive environment, ensuring that customer satisfaction remains a top priority. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "5 Proven Strategies to Enhance Customer Service" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

With AI infrastructure demands continuing to push up memory prices, it's tough to find good value for your tech purchases right now—though the Lifehacker team is always trying its best to help out—and buying used or refurbished can save you a substantial amount of money. That's the big advantage, but there are downsides: You're not getting a brand new device, which means it might not look pristine, and it could come with issues or technical faults attached. The SSD inside a two-year-old laptop won't be quite as speedy as one inside a new model, for example. It's something of a gamble, then, but you can make sure the odds are in your favor by knowing where to buy from and what to look for—and there are definitely used and refurbished items out there that are close to perfect in terms of looks and performance, so you're getting big savings without any real trade-offs. For the purposes of this article, "refurbished" means a device that's been returned to the manufacturer for some reason, and then checked and cleared for resale, typically with a limited warranty attached. If something is "used," it usually comes from a private seller, with fewer guarantees about future performance. Why go used or refurbished?Used or refurbished isn't the route everyone should go down, and if you've got the budget, then buying new is probably best: You get an untouched, factory-fresh device, and plenty of cover if something is wrong with it (which will depend on what type of gadget it is and where you bought it from). With refurbished items, though, sometimes an item will have been returned just because it was opened or the box was damaged, or it was on display in a store—you're essentially getting something that's almost as good as brand new, for a lot less. Opting for a used device means you can save even more, but the risks are greater—each deal is different, but you're looking at everything from 10-year-old phones that people are about to throw away to nearly new laptops that were unwanted gifts. The range in terms of quality and reliability is a lot greater here. The Apple refurbished store is one place to save money. Credit: Lifehacker The big reason to go used or refurbished is the amount of money you can save, especially if you're not particularly worried about getting something in perfect condition, and extra especially if you know a lot about the particular type of tech you're buying—which means you should be able to spot great deals better than most, and can do a few upgrades or repairs of your own once you've got your device. There's also the environmental angle: You're picking up a device that might otherwise get thrown away, extending its lifespan and reducing e-waste. A lot of energy and resources go into manufacturing new devices, so if you're buying used or refurbished on a regular basis, you're contributing less to that. Bear in mind that a lot of other people are saving money this way too, and the competition can be fierce when it comes to grabbing the best deals (there will also be those out there who are buying tech, repairing or polishing it, and selling it). Deciding to do this can be more stressful or more fun, depending on your perspective. What to watch out for when you're buying used techFirst and foremost, look who you're buying from, and adjust your skepticism accordingly. There are refurbished items from big name manufacturers sold through official stores at one end of the spectrum, and used gadgets from someone you've never heard of, with zero seller ratings, at the other. That's not to say you can't pick up a great bargain from a person with no selling history on a personal marketplace—but there's much more of a risk of being ripped off in these scenarios. If you are buying from an individual, look at feedback left from other buyers, if there are any, and factor this into your buying decision. When it comes to refurbished items, look carefully at the device's ratings in terms of performance and damage, any warranty that's being offered with the gadget, and what the returns policy is. Check what accessories (like a charger) are included, as otherwise you'll need to buy these separately. You can find a wide range of gadgets on eBay—but check the listings carefully. Credit: Lifehacker For used gadgets, try and get as much information as you can from the item listing. Ideally, you want to see a lot of pictures (from various angles) and a detailed specs list, but if there isn't enough, don't be afraid to ask: It's particularly important to check on battery health and capacity, as this is one of the areas where older tech can be problematic. Always check the age of a device, too. Software updates are only issued for so long (usually around seven years for phones for example), and you don't want to end up with something that's immediately outdated. The always-helpful End of Life website can tell you when a lot of popular gadgets are going to become obsolete. The more expensive the device you're shopping for, the more careful you need to be: Not only do you stand to lose more money, you'll come across more scammers. And speaking of price, check the current prices for the new version of whatever it is you're buying, too—on some devices, the savings might not be worth it. The best places to buy used and refurbished techeBay has its pros and its cons, but it remains one of the best places to pick up used tech, as long as you do it carefully. The platform runs the full gamut from official retailers to individuals, so there's a lot here to pick through, thd there are some great deals to be had. Look for items with the eBay Money Back Guarantee offered. Back Market lets you easily browse by category. Credit: Lifehacker Back Market has long been a trusted outlet for refurbishers, and it takes a lot of the stress and hassle out of buying refurbed tech. The site works a lot like a regular retail store, and you can quickly get information on the condition each item is in, and how it's been checked and restored. There are lots of user reviews to look through as well. Swappa is a bit of a mix of eBay and Back Market. It's mostly third-party resellers who do business here, though there are individual sellers too. All listings are reviewed by Swappa staff and are clearly categorized, and you can see at a glance a number of key details: the specs, the condition, and (sometimes) a limited warranty. Gazelle is exclusively for phones and tablets, and prides itself on its simplicity and ease of use. It offers its own in-house certification process for refurbished items, so you're buying gadgets that have been returned or traded in directly. There's a 30-day return window, plus plenty of information on each item, including cosmetic condition. Amazon Renewed is worth a look if you're prioritizing convenience and safety: The shopping experience is integrated right into the Amazon website, and everything comes with a 90-day guarantee window for returning items. The quality on offer can vary, so check listings carefully, in terms of item condition and bundled accessories. Then you've got the official refurbished outlets, including Apple, Samsung, and Dell. These score highly on reliability and trustworthiness, though the savings are likely to be less significant. You get less information on individual items as everything is done in bulk, but the guarantees and warranties are excellent—in the case of Apple, for example, you get a one-year limited warranty. View the full article

North America’s largest commuter rail system is facing a potential shutdown as a deadline nears to reach a deal with unionized workers to avert a strike. The Long Island Rail Road that serves New York City’s eastern suburbs has been negotiating for months on a new contract with labor officials representing locomotive engineers, machinists, signalmen and other train workers. A strike was temporarily averted in September when President Donald The President’s administration agreed to help. Those efforts ended without a deal, giving both sides 60 days — ending 12:01 a.m. Saturday — to again try to resolve their differences before the union was legally allowed to go on strike or the agency could lock out workers. Five labor unions representing about half the train system’s 7,000-person workforce warned this week that Saturday’s deadline was approaching. The LIRR is the busiest commuter railroad in North America, carrying about 250,000 customers each weekday. LIRR workers last went on strike in 1994, for about two days. Workers nearly walked out in 2014 before then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo reached a deal with unions. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the LIRR and other area transit systems, has said it will provide free but limited shuttle buses during the morning and afternoon rush hours. The agency says the shuttles will depart from designated LIRR train stations to subway stops in the New York City borough of Queens. Gov. Kathy Hochul has urged LIRR riders to work from home, if possible, as the free shuttles are meant for essential workers and those who cannot telecommute. The Democrat, months earlier, slammed the LIRR unions for “greedy asks” that threaten to “destabilize the local economy.” But there have been signs of progress in negotiations this week. Months ago, the MTA had proposed to the unions a 9.5% wage increase over three years, in line with what the system’s other unionized workers have already agreed to. The unions, however, held out for another yearly salary increase of 6.5%, for a total raise of 16% over four years. But following Wednesday’s closed door meetings, Gary Dellaverson, the MTA’s chief negotiator, said the agency offered the unions what it said would effectively amount to a 4.5% raise in the fourth year of the contract. That offer, he said, was in line with what federal officials had recommended and would come in the form of lump sum payments rather than wage increases, as the union sought. “The difference between those two positions is not unbridgeable,” Dellaverson said in a news conference. “It is describable simply in terms of money. There are no longer any complexities involved with the parties.” Kevin Sexton, a spokesperson for the unions, acknowledged Wednesday that there was “positive movement” toward a settlement but dismissed the notion that a deal was close as “far-fetched.” “We would like to reach an agreement that reflects the rising cost of living,” he said. “Anything short of that amounts to a cut in real wages.” Spokespersons for MTA didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment Thursday, but the union said the two sides were expected to continue talks later that night and reconvene Friday if there was still no deal. Susanne Alberto, a personal trainer from Long Island, said she’s already made plans with her Manhattan clients to hold virtual sessions in the event of a shutdown. She said the union likely has the upper hand, even if she believes raises should be based on job responsibilities and not made across the board. “The MTA is going to cave, and they know that,” Alberto said. “Why don’t they just do it now instead of waiting until virtually millions of people get inconvenienced?” Rob Udle, an electrician who takes the LIRR at least five days a week, said he’ll likely use his vacation days rather than navigate the “nightmare” of commuting into Manhattan if the rail service shuts down. A union member, he sympathized with the unions’ affordability concerns, but said he didn’t agree with their strongarm tactics. “I get it, the cost of living is going up and stuff like that,” Udle said while waiting at Penn Station for a train home. “But they shouldn’t hold everybody hostage to do it. There’s a better way. You’re affecting a lot of other people.” Follow Philip Marcelo at https://x.com/philmarcelo —Philip Marcelo, Associated Press View the full article

Bill Gross has a long history of betting on technological shifts and watching those bets pay off. But the latest proposition from one of Silicon Valley’s most storied founders and investors depends on forces far beyond the Bay Area. With ProRata, Gross is betting he can build a market in which publishers and creators can see how their work informs AI-generated outputs and get paid accordingly. He doesn’t expect AI companies to participate out of goodwill. In fact, Gross has already launched a spinoff, Gist, which allows ProRata partners to generate additional revenue from ProRata’s indexing of their work. Instead, he believes outside pressures will eventually leave AI operators with little choice. In a conversation with Fast Company, Gross discusses how he thinks that shift could happen, and why he believes some of the biggest names in AI are losing the plot. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Where did the inspiration come for ProRata? The inspiration came when The New York Times sued OpenAI a few years ago. I thought, wow, I really do think that the AI companies are stealing stuff from everybody. I think that lawsuits are one way to solve it, but I think a better way to solve it would be a business model that’s fair to everybody. And I thought, just like Spotify shares revenue with artists, just like YouTube shares revenue with artists, why don’t the AI companies share revenue with artists? If I can solve the problem of unscrambling the egg, figuring out where the answer came from, then I could use that as the attribution breakdown for sharing 50% of the revenues, just like Spotify shares revenues with the artists. So, I worked for a few months on coming up with a method to do that, and I was successful. So, then I patented that, and then I said, now, let me go see if I can get publishers to join. So we have now signed 1,500 publications in the last two years. Now I need to convince the big AI companies to share their revenues 50/50 and use my attribution method, and that is probably going to take two things to happen. One, they need to lose their lawsuits. Two, they need to get profitable, so they actually have revenues to share. To be clear: No AI operators are actually paying money through ProRata? Not yet. It’s a long game. There’s a few reasons why they’ll have to. One, I think they’re going to lose their lawsuits, but two, even if they don’t lose their lawsuits, it’s the right thing to do. But three, if they don’t have current information, their answer quality will go down. If one company does it—I think Microsoft is leaning in to be the first company to do something like this—that will put pressure on all of them to do it. So I think we need one domino to fall. The court cases have been interesting because so far there isn’t a whole lot of consistency. In the Anthropic case, the judge said it’s okay for an AI to get smarter by reading published work. The New York Times was able to show that there were large excerpts of their work literally in the answer. I think the right way to pay is based on output. That you can crawl stuff to train your model, but if you use the content in the output, that’s different. Some ProRata clients like the Atlantic already have deals with OpenAI. What do you add? Those deals were all input for crawling content to train the model. Our proposal is that you should also get paid on the output. I urge all of our publications to get money both ways. [Editor’s Note: The Atlantic’s arrangement with OpenAI does cover output.] The site says you serve publishers and creators; how small can the publisher and creator get? We’ll go to anybody. We have some people who are just vloggers. When this model is correctly affixed, I think smaller publishers are helped more in an AI era. Because you win in the AI answer based on the quality or uniqueness of your content, not by the size of your brand. It’s actually a fair method of giving the long tail proper compensation. About your attribution; have you gotten pushback from AI operators that you’re seeing something that isn’t there? We haven’t got any pushback on that. What we do have is the support from the publishers that the attribution is close enough to being correct that they would sign off on it. In other words, think about this like a Nielsen rating. Yes, it isn’t perfect. But all the advertisers accept it and they accept the fact that it’s a statistical sample. Let’s now pivot to your your spin-off out of ProRata, Gist. While the lawsuits are progressing, and while we’re waiting for the AI companies to get profitable, we want to help publishers be successful in any way we can. So, since we have already crawled their content for the purpose of attribution, we understand a lot about what readers are reading so we can make a number of systems for them to help them monetize their content better. People are trained to ask questions now, so if you show related questions on a website, click-through rate is very, very high. Like, between 3% and 5%, and therefore we can monetize those very well. Gist’s site-specific search is interesting to me because I keep finding that some of the worst performing search UXs around are on news sites where I’ve worked—where I have to switch to Google to find what I know I wrote. The site searches are notoriously bad. I think most publishers just haven’t invested in it to make it good. And, of course, Google invests billions of dollars to make it good. Our AI site search is better than Google because we haven’t just done keyword search. We’re actually understanding the context and the knowledge graph of each article. Basically, here’s the thing that large language models do so great: LLMs actually have a fake, but deeper understanding of the story. They don’t actually understand the story, but they have a fake understanding of it through statistics of words. Because they have such a fake deep understanding of the story, they can predict what questions you might have in your mind next. When you show that people click on it, that gives you another chance at another page view of that visitor way better than if they just left and went to Google and typed in that question. So, giving a website the power to hold on to the user a little bit longer is something we feel very proud of, and is really working. In what ways does ProRata use AI itself? We use it for everything, even the GEO [generative engine optimization] product which we just launched. It was about 13 people for four months; it would have been 30 people for four years if we were doing it the old-fashioned way. Everybody’s using Claude Code, everybody’s using agentic tools. Well, we had a patent come back recently, they rejected maybe 13 out of 15 of the claims. It’s very, very hard to decipher the patent’s office rebuttal, as well as which patents they’re referring to that they think have prior art. I took the patent officer’s rejection, gave it to ChatGPT and said help me come up with a better explanation of why I think these claims are really valid. I gave that back to the patent office a month ago. On Friday, I got the notice back from the patent office and all the claims were approved. They only got approved on their merit, but it would have been very, very hard for me to dig through every one of the other patents they refer to and explain why my thing was different in a convincing way. From the word “fake” you used, it sounds like you are not a believer in artificial general intelligence. Are we in an AI bubble? I definitely think that AGI is possible, probably in a longer time frame than people believe, but I still think we have something which is incredibly useful. It’s not AGI, but it’s wildly powerful, because, though it doesn’t have the depth of human thinking, it has a huge breadth. It has read so many things that it has what I keep calling it a fake understanding of things—but a useful fake understanding of things. I think that valuations are not that high relative to the revenues because the revenue growth is incredible, but I feel the valuations are very high relative to the current profits because they’re losing money. However, the cost per token is going down every day. The value per token is still going up every day. As soon as people start paying the fair price for the value they’re getting—for example, to do that patent, which was very valuable to me, I paid $20 a month. That’s too little. I would pay $100 a month. I don’t think we’re in a bubble in that sense, say, compared to I lived through the dot-com bubble at similarly high valuations, but almost no revenues and almost no path to profitability because they had no revenues. So I think that OpenAI does have a path to profitability. Do you see that as the case for AI companies in general? Anthropic is going after enterprise, who can afford to pay more, is not doing consumer things like Sora and others, which are expensive and don’t bring in much revenue. And Anthropic is smartly, much to some users’ dismay, throttling people back when they’re using it too much to make sure that they get closer to profitability. I think Anthropic is going to get profitable sooner than almost all the other companies. I think that OpenAI is finally getting religion about dropping some of the things that are way too expensive and religion in terms of, well, I have 900 million consumers, I better start charging them advertising. Then I think that Meta is on a fool’s errand right now. I don’t know if you read the recent thing this weekend about every single thing that Mark Zuckerberg has done since Facebook has failed or been bought. He bought Instagram; great success. He went all in on metaverse; I think he’s lost like $80 billion. I think he will lose a lot of money on AI too, because he’s not in first place, and he’s not even third place. The Chinese are doing way better than than he is. But it doesn’t matter. He’s got a money mint from Facebook and Instagram to cover it. Since we mentioned one very rich guy with a self-created public-image problem, we have to talk about xAI. Yeah, well, I think that the general direction of Elon’s bets are good. I just think Elon has a habit of exaggerating the timeline of things like data centers in space, reaching Mars, full self driving, all that. He exaggerates those by about 10 years so that he can raise the money to work on them, and that is a tactic. But he’s promising things that he can’t deliver in the time frame that makes sense. I have to close with this: What is your 10-year-out forecast for AI? Does it upend society? I do think that AI is going to upend society, and I would like to do anything I can to try and have the upending be more uniform and more lifting everybody. I’m worried that it will not be. I’m worried that the rich get richer, and it doesn’t flow down to other people. View the full article

New technologies come and go. Early in my career, I often chased shiny new things in an attempt to be on the cutting edge, but it didn’t take more than a few years to realize I was spending countless hours of my time, and my clients’ time, implementing technologies and techniques that went by the wayside. Google Authorship, anyone? It turns out that if you simply wait for wider — but still early — adoption, learn from the first movers’ mistakes, and catch up quickly, you can avoid wasting time and create greater value for yourself and those you serve. That lesson has served me well. And then there are those key moments where the early movers stand to not just win in the current landscape, but to shape and lead the next one. Think of the first people reading the PageRank paper and thinking, “I should build some links.” WebMCP feels like one of those moments, only bigger. It’s not just a revolution in how search works or even in generative engine visibility. We’re at a moment where the very place discoverability occurs is changing, and who (or rather, what) is doing the discovering is changing with it. Coming soon: Non-human engagement While SEOs have long debated whether we should be optimizing for search engines or humans (shockingly, it’s both), that paradigm is about to be turned on its head. What happens when discovery shifts from a human to an LLM or agentic system? This change is already underway. Whenever you visit ChatGPT with a request, it makes decisions, runs supplemental searches, asks follow-up questions, and returns conclusions. The agent is planning and deciding on your behalf, and your resulting output is shaped entirely by what it retrieves and how it interprets it. We can even see the supplemental (fanout) queries in DevTools: I think of this as the latest chapter in a longer story: Discovery v1: People interacted with the world and discovered things firsthand. Experience and word of mouth were the discovery points. Discovery v2: People started writing things down. Libraries and educational institutions became the discovery points, followed by newspapers and books. Discovery v3: The web proliferates information and media at a scale previously unimaginable. Directories, then search engines, rose to aid discovery. Discovery v4 (current): After about 25 years of search engines, LLMs rose and discovery moved to a blended, LLM-forward format. Light agentic capabilities are baked in to assist retrieval. People are still in the loop, but the assistant is doing more of the legwork. Discovery v5 (on the horizon): Agentic systems move beyond being assistants in the retrieval and presentation layer and are given autonomy to act on users’ behalf. Many users will have their own agents. Companies will offer them. Google almost certainly will. I would argue that the stage we’re entering, Discovery v5, will be the most dramatic since the shift to v2. Can’t you just imagine a world where basic decisions are offloaded from your brain and body, leaving you room to pursue more important things? I know I’ve seen this utopia before. I honestly don’t see it resulting in this future, but the world we’re creating right now is fundamentally different from the one we’re in presently as marketers, and WebMCP is one of the first concrete steps in this journey. Dig deeper: WebMCP explained: Inside Chrome 146’s agent-ready web preview 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 The trust ratchet only turns one way Do you accept what you read in an AI Overview and stop your journey there more often than you did on the day it launched? Not 100% of the time, but more often than you did? You do. So do I. For quick, low-risk queries, we’re happy to trust it. If you’re like me, as these systems have evolved and improved, you’ve started trusting them with higher-stakes information. Would I trust an AI Overview with tax questions or major health decisions? No. Would I trust it to remind me of the benefits of vitamin D or pull together a dinner recipe? Absolutely. That boundary keeps moving. As it moves, so does what we’re willing to let an agent do on our behalf, not just what we’ll let it tell us. The cost of being wrong when automating the reorder of groceries you’re running low on is small. The benefit of an agent monitoring flight and hotel combinations for an amazing refundable deal, on your days off, within your budget, is very high. The benefit of hopping in an autonomous vehicle with your family after work on a Friday, dinner in hand, playing a game and sleeping, and arriving at Disney World rested just in time for opening — that’s pretty compelling. You may say you’ll never hand your autonomy to an agentic system. People said the same about search engines, smartphones, and GPS. The path usually goes: Skepticism (“Who would ever enter their credit card number on a website?!”) Reluctant adoption (“Ugh, it’s an online service, and I trust the company and don’t have a choice. Alright, I’ll give them my card. But just this once.”) Dependency (“I can’t believe I used to actually go into stores!”) What does this have to do with WebMCP? Here’s where it gets concrete and actionable. MCP servers and skills files are early versions of the infrastructure that makes Discovery v5 possible, but the barrier to entry is high, and they apply only in specific contexts. WebMCP is different. It’s a browser-native web standard, currently published as a W3C Community Group Draft and in early preview in Chrome 146 beta as of this writing, that gives websites a structured way to expose actions directly to AI agents without scraping, guessing, or brittle automation. This isn’t a Google-only initiative. The specification is co-authored by engineers from both Google and Microsoft, which matters. When two of the largest browser and AI platform vendors are writing the spec together, it has a different trajectory than a unilateral bet. Right now, when an AI agent tries to take an action on your website, like filling out a form, booking an assessment, or searching your inventory, it has to figure everything out by reading your page and inferring intent. It looks at your DOM, guesses what your fields mean, hopes the date format it picks is the one your form expects, and submits. It’s intelligent, but it’s also fragile. One UI change and the whole flow breaks. WebMCP changes this by letting you tell the agent exactly what your site can do and how to do it. The spec defines two distinct ways to do that: one that closely maps to what you already know, and one that handles more complex, dynamic interactions. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Declarative vs. imperative: You already know this distinction WebMCP proposes two APIs, and the difference between them will feel familiar to anyone who’s spent time in technical SEO. The Declarative API is the one that should make you sit up and get to work right away. The idea is straightforward. You annotate your existing HTML forms with attributes that describe what the form does and what each field means. The browser automatically translates that into a structured tool any agent can call. The form continues working exactly as before for human visitors. The agent gets a clean, unambiguous interface. To be clear, the declarative API is still being formally specified, and the exact attribute names aren’t locked down yet. But the concept is settled, and demos are already running. Think of it the way you’d think about schema markup in its early days: the syntax evolved, but the underlying idea, annotating what already exists so machines can understand it, was clear and worth acting on. The analogy to schema markup is almost exact. You’re not building a new system. You’re making what you already have legible to a new class of visitor. That’s a pattern SEOs understand intuitively. The Imperative API is more mature in the spec and already available for testing. You register tools directly in JavaScript. Here’s an example for a site taking bookings for an assessment: navigator.modelContext.registerTool({ name: "book-assessment", description: "Book a free IT assessment for your business.", inputSchema: { type: "object", properties: { name: { type: "string", description: "Customer's full name" }, city: { type: "string", description: "City for the assessment" }, slot: { type: "string", description: "Preferred time in ISO 8601 format" } }, required: ["name", "city", "slot"] }, execute: async (input) => { // your booking logic here return { confirmed: true, appointmentId: "APT-001" }; } }); This is more powerful and flexible, the right approach for dynamic interactions, multi-step flows, or anything that can’t map cleanly to a single form. Here’s something that makes it genuinely interesting: the tools available on a page can change based on state. A hotel booking demo from Google Chrome Labs illustrates this well. After an agent runs a search_location tool, a new filter_search_results tool appears. After selecting a hotel, start_booking becomes available. The agent’s toolset evolves as the user’s journey progresses, just as a well-designed interface guides a human through a flow. Think of declarative as the equivalent of adding schema markup to existing content: low lift, high legibility, great starting point. An imperative is like building a fully structured data feed, It takes more effort, offers more power, and is better suited to complex or dynamic needs. Most sites should start with declarative and extend into imperative as their needs grow. A quick note on scope: The example below uses the declarative side of WebMCP because, as we’ve discussed, that’s the easiest place for most site owners and SEOs to start. It maps naturally to existing HTML forms. Add clear machine-readable descriptions to the form and its fields, and the page becomes easier for agents to understand. The imperative API is more case-specific. It’s better suited to dynamic flows, multi-step interactions, custom JavaScript logic, or cases where an action does not map cleanly to a single form. What the agent sees: Before and after The contrast is easiest to see with something every service business already has: a booking or contact form. This form: <form action="/contact" method="POST"> <label for="name">Name</label> <input id="name" name="name" type="text" required> <label for="email">Email</label> <input id="email" name="email" type="email" required> <label for="city">City</label> <input id="city" name="city" type="text"> <label for="message">Message</label> <textarea id="message" name="message" required></textarea> <button type="submit">Send</button> </form> Now here is the same form prepared for WebMCP using declarative-style annotations: <form action="/contact" method="POST" toolname="submitContactInquiry" tooldescription="Submit a contact inquiry for a service business."> <label for="name">Name</label> <input id="name" name="name" type="text" required toolparamdescription="The requester's full name." > <label for="email">Email</label> <input id="email" name="email" type="email" required toolparamdescription="A valid email address where the requester can be contacted." > <label for="city">City</label> <input id="city" name="city" type="text" toolparamdescription="The city where the requester is located." > <label for="message">Message</label> <textarea id="message" name="message" required toolparamdescription="The requester's question, project details, or service need." ></textarea> <button type="submit">Send</button> </form> The form still works the same way for a human visitor. Nothing about the normal user experience had to change. The difference is that an agent no longer has to guess what the form does or what each field means. The form declares its action with toolname and tooldescription, and each important input explains itself with toolparamdescription. That’s the core idea. You’re not rebuilding the site for agents. You’re making the existing interface easier for them to understand. And critically, this doesn’t have to mean fully automatic submission. For a contact form, you may want an agent to prepare the form and let the user review it before sending. For a low-risk action, you may eventually allow more automation. The point is that the action becomes explicit, structured, and less fragile. The attributes proposed for forms are: toolname: The name of the tool (in this case, a form tool). tooldescription: The description of the tool (in this case, the description of a form). toolautosubmit: A boolean attribute that lets the agent submit the form on the user’s behalf without requiring consent. This may not seem like it’d make sense if you’re thinking about just chatting with ChatGPT, but it suddenly makes sense if you have agents engaged in complex tasks, hooked up to your email, and tasked with completing something complex like making reservations or compiling information that requires details beyond a login or form fill. toolparamdescription: A description of a specific parameter, so the agent is aware of the field it’s engaging with. You can keep up with the specifics of the declarative API as it evolves in the Declarative API Explainer. Why this matters for your sites specifically Think about the types of queries agentic systems will handle on behalf of users in a Discovery v5 world: “Find me an SEO consultant who understands technical SEO, doesn’t talk like a LinkedIn carousel, and has time for a call next week.” “Compare three AI agent observability tools and tell me which one seems most likely to solve my actual problem instead of selling me a chatbot.” “Find a contra dance near me this Friday, check whether beginners are welcome, and add it to my calendar if the band looks fun.” Which site gets the engagement? The one the agent can interact with cleanly, confidently, and without friction. If your competitor has WebMCP-registered tools and you don’t, the agent completes the action on their site and moves on. The user may never know they had a choice. There’s a secondary implication worth naming. Tool descriptions are the new meta descriptions. The quality of your tool name, description, and parameter definitions will directly shape whether an agent selects your tool over a competitor’s, understands what it does, and calls it correctly. The best practices guidance in the WebMCP documentation reads like conversion copywriting. Use clear verbs, explain the why behind options, and be specific about what each parameter means. If that sounds familiar, it should. You’ve been writing for machine readers for years. This is the next layer. 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 The window is open, but not forever I’ve been skeptical of early adoption my whole career. I still am, as a default. But I’ve also learned to recognize the moments that are different in kind, not just degree. Schema markup was one. SSL was one. Mobile optimization was one. Each time, the window in which early movers earned disproportionate returns was real and finite. In each case, the people who understood the underlying shift, not just the tactic, were the ones who compounded that advantage. WebMCP is a W3C Community Group Draft today, co-authored by Google and Microsoft, already running in Chrome 146 beta, and already integrated into Cloudflare’s infrastructure. It’s not table stakes yet. But the trajectory is clear: The spec matures. Browsers ship it. Agents learn to prefer sites that expose structured tools. The sites that haven’t caught up become invisible to that class of visitor. The declarative approach, once finalized, means the barrier to starting will be genuinely low: annotations on your most important forms, not a new backend system. The imperative API is available for testing right now. That’s the argument. It’s the reason I’m making it now, not in six to 12 months when everyone else is trying to catch up. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The LG UltraGear 39GX90SA-W has dropped to $749.99 on Amazon from its original $1,599.99 price, and according to price trackers, this is the lowest it has been so far. It’s a 39-inch ultrawide panel that feels huge in person, especially with its 800R curve wrap that pulls you into games in a way smaller ultrawides usually don’t. Racing games, open-world titles, and anything cinematic look especially good here because the OLED panel gives dark scenes real depth and color without the washed-out look many LCD gaming monitors still struggle with. The 240Hz refresh rate also helps games feel smooth with minimal motion blur, whether you are playing competitive shooters or something slower-paced. LG UltraGear 39GX90SA-W Smart Gaming Monitor $749.99 at Amazon $1,599.99 Save $850.00 Get Deal Get Deal $749.99 at Amazon $1,599.99 Save $850.00 The UltraGear 39GX90SA-W comes with LG’s full webOS smart TV software built directly into the monitor, basically turning this into a smart TV disguised as a gaming monitor. You can open Netflix, YouTube, Crunchyroll, Xbox Cloud Gaming, or GeForce Now without connecting a PC or console—and while that sounds gimmicky at first, it actually makes a lot of sense for people who spend long hours at their desk and want one screen for work, gaming, and streaming. The USB-C connection also helps with that setup because it supports 65W charging, meaning laptop users can connect and charge with a single cable. There are plenty of ports, including HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort, Ethernet, USB-A, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi 6; you are not going to run out of ways to connect devices to it. That said, its 3440 x 1440 resolution spread across 39 inches is not as crisp as a 4K panel, so text can look softer if you spend all day reading documents or editing spreadsheets. The built-in speakers also feel weak for a monitor this large. They work for casual YouTube videos or background streaming, but they lack volume and depth for gaming or movies. Even so, if you want a giant OLED display that can handle gaming, movies, work, and streaming apps all in one place, this deal makes the 39GX90SA-W far more tempting than it was at launch. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $229.00 (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) Apple iPad 11" A16 128GB Wi-Fi Tablet (Silver, 2025) — $319.99 (List Price $349.00) Shark AV2501AE AI XL Hepa- Safe Self-Emptying Base Robot Vacuum — $299.99 (List Price $649.99) Dell 15 DC15250 (Intel Core i7 13th Gen, 512GB SSD, 8GB RAM, Touch Display) — $599.99 (List Price $839.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has updated the public on ongoing Salmonella outbreaks linked to backyard poultry. Unfortunately, the outbreaks have continued to spread and have now infected nearly 200 individuals in 31 states, with children making up an alarming number of cases. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? As Fast Company previously reported, the CDC in April warned the public about a concerning Salmonella outbreak that had then spread to 13 states. The outbreak was alarming because those infected with Salmonella were found to have strains of the bacterium resistant to fosfomycin, a drug commonly used to treat the infection. Additionally, strains of the bacterium linked to the outbreak were found to be resistant to other commonly used antibiotics, too. At the time, the CDC said the outbreak—believed to be caused by contact with outdoor poultry, such as ducks and chickens—had sickened 34 people, with 13 requiring hospitalization. The agency also cautioned that the number of people infected was likely higher than the official figures suggested. This was because not everyone who becomes infected with Salmonella seeks care. The CDC has now published a new update on its investigation, which it now says includes three Salmonella outbreaks. The results show cases have spread significantly. How many people have been infected? According to a May 14 update from the CDC, cases linked to the drug-resistant Salmonella outbreaks have climbed significantly since the agency’s last update just weeks earlier. “The largest outbreak has an unusually high number of people reporting contact with ducks,” the CDC said in its update. In its previous update, the CDC said 34 people had been sickened, and 13 had required hospitalization. Now those figures have soared. As of yesterday’s update, the CDC has now confirmed that 184 individuals have been infected with Salmonella linked to the outbreaks. The number of hospitalizations has also climbed too. Previously, 13 people had required hospitalization. Now the total number is 53—an increase of 40 people. And unfortunately, the outbreaks have now claimed a fatality. The CDC says that one person from Washington state is confirmed to have died. Just as alarming is the report that 25% of those infected in the outbreaks are children under 5 years old. Children under the age of 5 are particularly vulnerable to Salmonella infections because of their still-developing immune systems. Where are the outbreaks happening? According to the CDC’s update, cases linked to the drug-resistant Salmonella outbreaks have now been confirmed in 31 states. That’s a jump of 18 states since the CDC’s last update. Previously, the outbreaks were mainly limited to the Midwest and the Northwest, but now cases have spread to Texas and states along the Pacific coast. Kentucky currently has the highest number of confirmed cases, at 22. Michigan is not far behind, at 21 confirmed cases. Washington, which has confirmed 9 cases so far, is the only state with a fatality. Here are the states where cases have been confirmed, along with their number of cases as of the CDC’s May 14 update: California: 1 Colorado: 3 Florida: 3 Georgia: 4 Idaho: 10 Illinois: 7 Indiana: 10 Iowa: 1 Kentucky: 22 Maine: 10 Maryland: 6 Massachusetts: 2 Michigan: 21 Minnesota: 3 Mississippi: 2 Missouri: 1 Montana: 2 Nevada: 1 New Hampshire: 1 New York: 1 North Carolina: 1 Ohio: 15 Oregon: 3 Pennsylvania: 2 Tennessee: 4 Texas: 3 Utah: 5 Vermont: 5 Washington: 9 West Virginia: 9 Wisconsin: 17 The CDC has also included a map of the cases. What are the symptoms of Salmonella? The CDC says those infected with Salmonella can show the following common symptoms: Watery diarrhea that might have blood or mucus Stomach cramps that can be severe The agency says that Salmonella infections may also cause additional symptoms, including: Headache Loss of appetite Nausea Vomiting Symptoms can last anywhere from 4-7 days, and generally appear within 6 hours to 6 days after infection. What can I do to stay safe? In its May 14 update, the CDC says that those who come into contact with backyard poultry or are around their grounds or supplies should be careful to: Wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds Don’t wear the shoes you wear in the birds’ environment inside your own house Don’t let the birds or the supplies you use in their care inside your house Don’t let children younger than 5 touch the birds or interact with the area the birds are in While Salmonella infections can be contracted by anyone, children younger than 5, people with weakened immune systems, and people aged 65 or older are more likely to experience severe illness. View the full article

Images of debris from attack on Kyiv apartment block that killed at least 24 suggest Kh-101 missile was usedView the full article

Google adds AI assistant traffic to GA4, FAQ rich results are gone, Ahrefs tests schema, and Condé Nast plans around near-zero search forecasts. The post GA4 Tracks AI Assistant Traffic, FAQ Results Gone – SEO Pulse appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Most law firms follow the same trajectory with SEO. They invest in content, build out service pages, refine their technical foundation, and align their site to targeted keywords. Early on, the results are there. But firms often don’t realize they’ve hit the ceiling on their SEO strategy. They just feel it. Rankings stall, growth slows, and the default response is almost always to do more: Publish more content, target more keywords, make more incremental optimizations. However, for firms already investing in SEO, the problem likely isn’t effort or execution. It’s that their strategy is missing the layer that actually drives sustained visibility. SEO still is (and always will be) the foundation, but without authority — real, verifiable credibility across the web — it stops building on itself. And in a search environment that’s consistently changing and being shaped by AI, that gap becomes more and more expensive. 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 What ‘real authority’ actually looks like Authority is about how the broader web perceives your credibility. It’s often reduced to metrics such as domain authority scores, backlink counts, or content volume. While those stats are useful for tracking, reporting, and strategy, they don’t fully reflect how search engines and AI systems evaluate trustworthiness and expertise. Real authority is whether your firm shows up as a recognized, trusted entity across the web. It’s about how often you’re referenced, cited, and connected to your areas of expertise beyond your own website. Recognition beyond your own website The strongest firms don’t just publish content. They’re referenced in places that actually matter to the audience they want to reach. This shows up in a few key ways: Mentions in legal publications, industry outlets, and news organizations. Quoted expertise in third-party articles, not just bylined posts on your own site. Awards, rankings, and association memberships that create verifiable connections. For example, a labor and employment firm that’s regularly cited in HR trade publications builds a fundamentally different authority profile than one publishing weekly blogs that never get referenced outside of their own website. That difference is visible to both search engines and AI systems. Dig deeper: SEO’s new goal in 2026: Recognition, not rankings E-E-A-T as an authority framework Google’s E-E-A-T framework (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) isn’t a checklist. It’s a lens for evaluating whether a source deserves to rank in search results. For law firms, this means: Attorney bios with verified credentials and external publication links Content authored or reviewed by practicing attorneys Consistent digital footprint that connects the firm to its practice areas across multiple platforms E-E-A-T isn’t a separate strategy from SEO. It’s the credibility layer that allows your SEO efforts to perform at a higher level and sustain momentum over time. Why authority matters more in an AI search landscape This shift becomes more important as search itself evolves. AI-generated results are changing how visibility is earned and where users engage with your firm. AI systems don’t simply pull from the most optimized pages. They prioritize sources they recognize as credible, introducing a new layer of competition that isn’t tied strictly to rank. Some trends that are already shaping this reality: In July 2025, an Ahrefs study found that only 76% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also appeared in the top 10 organic search results. However, in March 2026, a secondary study found that only roughly 38% of AI citations were pulled from the top 10, with the majority 62% split almost evenly from positions 11-100 and beyond the top 100 spots. AI Overviews now appear in 50%+ of searches, and organic CTR has declined by 61% when they appear. This is where good SEO and GEO converge: The same authority signals that improve your organic rankings are what make AI engines trust and cite your content. Dig deeper: The authority era: How AI is reshaping what ranks in search How to build authority that impacts both rankings and AI visibility Authority isn’t built overnight; it compounds over time, and for most firms, it requires a shift from purely on-site optimization to a more complete view of digital visibility. Audit your off-site footprint The first step is understanding where you are today. When you search for your firm or your attorneys, what appears beyond your own website? Look specifically for: Mentions, links, or citations on third-party websites. Presence in relevant legal or industry directories. Visibility in publications tied to your practice areas. If those signals are limited, that’s often the primary gap, not anything happening on your site. Comparing your footprint to competitors can make this even clearer — are they showing up in places you’re not? Create citable, not just indexable, content Often, law firm content is written specifically to rank, and very little is written to be referenced. To close this gap, shift the approach to: Develop original insights, frameworks, or perspectives that others can cite. Make expertise explicit through attribution and clear positioning. Structure content so both search engines and AI systems can extract key points. When content is built this way, it extends beyond your website and becomes part of a broader authority “network.” This is also where digital PR plays a crucial role in amplifying and reinforcing that visibility. Build entity connections systematically It’s very important to note that authority is reinforced through consistency. Your firm, your attorneys, and your areas of expertise need to be clearly connected across platforms: legal directories, LinkedIn, publication bylines, conference speaking engagements, etc. Digital PR that earns editorial attention, not just backlinks, from publications your target clients and AI engines trust is also paramount to building a cohesive digital identity and authoritative foundation across the web. Dig deeper: From links to brand signals: The new SEO authority model 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 Spark growth through authority SEO is still the foundation of any effective law firm SEO strategy. It ensures your site is structurally sound, accessible, and aligned with how potential clients search. But if your strategy stops at optimization, it will eventually plateau. Authority is what turns that foundation into something that truly compounds. It’s what separates firms that level off from those that keep growing. And increasingly, it’s what determines who gets cited, who gets surfaced, and who earns trust (in both traditional and AI search). The firms investing in authority now aren’t just improving performance today. They’re positioning themselves to be the sources that search engines, AI platforms, and potential clients rely on moving forward. Dig deeper: Why your law firm’s best leads don’t convert after research 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. At $199.96 for the four-camera kit, down from $349.99, the Eufy Security EufyCam C35 bundle is currently at its lowest price yet, according to price trackers. Eufy’s biggest advantage remains local storage—the included HomeBase Mini stores footage locally with 8GB of built-in storage, and both the hub and cameras support microSD cards if you need more room. You can still pay for cloud storage if you want (starting at $3.99/mo for a single camera or $13.99/mo for 10 devices), but unlike many competing systems, you are not forced into it just to access recordings. That alone makes this setup appealing for anyone tired of stacking subscriptions on top of hardware purchases. Eufy Security EufyCam C35 4-Cam Kit Wireless security indoor/outdoor camera $199.96 at Amazon $349.99 Save $150.03 Get Deal Get Deal $199.96 at Amazon $349.99 Save $150.03 Setup is largely painless. You install the Eufy app, scan a few QR codes, and the HomeBase Mini handles the rest of the pairing process for all four cameras—you don’t have to re-enter wifi credentials for every device, which saves time when mounting multiple cameras around the house. The cameras themselves cover most of the features people expect from a modern wireless security system—they run on batteries, support two-way audio, and have IP67 weather resistance for outdoor use, notes this CNET review. Eufy also includes color night vision, motion alerts, activity zones, and built-in deterrents like lights and sirens. You can tweak motion sensitivity, limit recording lengths to preserve battery life, and filter alerts using AI detection via the companion app. That said, the EufyCam C35 records at 1080p, which now feels modest compared to the growing number of 2K and 4K security cameras available on the market. While the footage is usable and clear enough to identify activity around a yard, garage, or living room, finer details can look soft or grainy, especially at night, and faces and objects become less defined at longer distances. None of this makes the system unusable, but buyers expecting razor-sharp footage may want to spend more on a higher-resolution system like the EufyCam S4. Still, for under $200, this kit gives you four weatherproof cameras, local storage, solid battery life, and a polished app experience without locking core features behind a subscription. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $229.00 (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) Apple iPad 11" A16 128GB Wi-Fi Tablet (Silver, 2025) — $319.99 (List Price $349.00) Shark AV2501AE AI XL Hepa- Safe Self-Emptying Base Robot Vacuum — $299.99 (List Price $649.99) Dell 15 DC15250 (Intel Core i7 13th Gen, 512GB SSD, 8GB RAM, Touch Display) — $599.99 (List Price $839.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

This week in search I covered, yep, heated Google search ranking volatility kicking in the middle of this week. Google updated its spam policies to say it also applies to Google's AI responses in Search. Google Discover...View the full article

Forecasting SEO performance means estimating future outcomes from historical data. But search behavior rarely follows stable or linear patterns. Seasonal demand, anomalies, SERP changes, and measurement issues can all distort your data and lead to unreliable forecasts. That makes forecasting more complex than running linear regression, exponential smoothing, or asking an LLM to project trends from historical performance. Here’s how to account for seasonality, detect anomalies, and build more reliable SEO forecasts in Python using models designed for non-linear search data. SEO forecasting pays the bills, but doesn’t add much value Decision-makers rely on forecasts to justify investments and align expectations across digital teams. Stakeholders want forward-looking estimates, finance needs revenue projections, and roadmaps require a clear view of expected returns. However, the value of forecasting has diminished today. AI Mode and AI Overviews created a major disconnect between clicks and impressions as LLM-driven scrapers increased bot activity and inflated impression data in reporting tools. Additionally, Google reported a logging issue affecting Search Console impression data since May 2025. As a result, many forecasts end up serving as reassurance rather than guidance. They shield decision-makers from scrutiny while failing to reflect the business’s actual operating context. From a data analytics perspective, if search performance followed a normal distribution, you could rely on linear regression, exponential smoothing, or even a simple moving average (SMA) with confidence. However, the average SEO forecast still relies on assumptions that don’t hold in organic search: Stable trends. Normal distributions. Consistent relationships between inputs and outputs. TechniqueDescriptionWhen to useWhen not to useLinear regressionFits a straight line through historical data to model long-term trends and project future performance.When traffic or rankings show a consistent upward or downward trend with relatively low volatility. Useful for baseline forecasting and directional planning.When data is highly volatile, seasonal, or affected by frequent algorithm updates, migrations, or campaign spikes.Exponential smoothingApplies weighted averages where recent data points have more influence than older ones. Can adapt to short-term changes.When recent performance is more indicative of future outcomes, such as after site changes, migrations, or content updates. Useful for short-term forecasting.When long-term trends matter more than recency, or when sharp anomalies may distort recent weighting.Simple moving average (SMA)Averages values over a fixed window to smooth noise and highlight underlying trends.When you need to understand data direction, such as smoothing daily traffic for reporting.When forecasting future performance because predictions rely on aggregated historical averages and may miss turning points. Today’s AI landscape forces a rethink of forecasting as search shifts toward highly volatile and probabilistic outcomes. In other words, today, a 10% increase in effort doesn’t translate into a proportional 10% increase in traffic. Several structural factors are at play: Long-tail traffic distribution: A small number of pages typically generate most traffic, while most pages contribute very little. Binary user behavior: Many core SEO metrics, such as CTR, are driven by yes/no interactions (click versus no click) that diverge from normally distributed patterns. Zero-click search impact: High rankings don’t guarantee traffic — more queries are resolved directly in the SERP, inflating visibility without corresponding clicks. If you have to forecast, do it properly. Baseline models still have a role: Linear regression for directional trends. Exponential smoothing for short-term adjustments. Moving averages for noise reduction. There are ways to apply these techniques in Google Sheets. However, they should be treated as descriptive tools, not decision-making systems. To make forecasting useful, you need to move beyond them. 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 Why LLMs aren’t the answer to SEO forecasting LLMs and MCP connections only compound the inefficiencies listed above. There are two structural problems with this approach. They assume data behaves linearly Pre-configured prompts or skills implicitly assume the data follows a linear distribution. This is misleading because SEO data is dominated by seasonality, cyclical demand, and structural breaks. Any system that treats it as smooth or continuous will systematically misrepresent future performance. They optimize for plausibility, not statistical accuracy LLMs aren’t forecasting models. They’re probabilistic text generation systems. They assign probability scores to predict token sequences based on patterns observed during training. They’re trained to reward your thinking, not challenge it. As a result, they can produce confident but ungrounded outputs that lack the business and domain context required to interpret anomalies. No matter how well engineered the prompt is, the system can still hallucinate – not because it’s “wrong,” but because it’s optimizing for linguistic plausibility, not statistical validity. Forecasting requires explicit handling of seasonality, non-linearity, and critical interpretation of outputs. These analytical responsibilities can’t be abstracted away through prompting alone. LLMs can assist with workflows, accelerate analysis, and even help operationalize models. But they can’t replace the role of an analyst in framing the problem, selecting the methodology, and validating the results. How to do an SEO forecast that accounts for seasonal effects Asking the right questions is often the hardest part of any analysis. SEO forecasts are often requested by enterprise stakeholders or pushed by agencies during new business pitches. This typically makes forecasting more straightforward because the research question is already defined upfront. Either way, the subject of the analysis is usually one of the following search indicators: Clicks (search demand). Impressions (search visibility). Rankings (position distribution). CTR (SERP behavior). For this article, we’ll use Python to forecast synthetic clicks for a fictitious website influenced by seasonal demand. Retrieving and preprocessing seasonal fluctuations Based on the scope of analysis, gather historical data from Google Search Console through either the API or Google BigQuery. While a larger dataset with broader historical coverage is technically better, it may not justify the query costs in BigQuery for an SEO forecast. Carefully assess the tradeoff between cost, resources, time, and data sampling. You might find that using an API to retrieve as much historical data as possible (e.g., via Search Analytics for Sheets) does the job. Set up a Google Colab notebook, install the required dependencies, load your dataset with date and clicks as columns, and convert the date column into a datetime index. Enforce daily frequency to ensure consistency across dates, and quickly fill any missing data gaps using interpolation. #data viz !pip install plotly import plotly.graph_objects as go import plotly.express as px import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import matplotlib.pyplot as pyplot import seaborn as sns from scipy.stats import boxcox #anomaly detection from statsmodels.tsa.stattools import adfuller from statsmodels.tsa.seasonal import STL #timeseries decomposition from statsmodels.tsa.seasonal import seasonal_decompose from statsmodels.graphics.tsaplots import plot_acf, plot_pacf #data manipulation import pandas as pd import numpy as np #time series plotting from prophet import Prophet from statsmodels.tsa.statespace.sarimax import SARIMAX from sklearn.metrics import mean_absolute_error, mean_squared_error df = pd.read_excel('/content/input.xlsx') df.columns = map(str.lower, df.columns) df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date']) df = df.sort_values('date') # Set index df.set_index('date', inplace=True) # Ensure daily frequency (important for decomposition) df = df.asfreq('D') # Handle missing values df['clicks'] = df['clicks'].interpolate() df.head() Raw clicks line for all available date Does it look like a linear distribution, or can you already spot anomalies? Data preprocessing involves standardizing and cleaning your dataset to reduce the impact of outliers on your next forecast. This step is often overlooked, yet it’s critical for improving model reliability. To prove this, we need to assess stationarity, i.e., whether the relevant measures of central tendency, namely the mean and variance, remain stable over time. result = adfuller(df['clicks'].dropna()) print(f"ADF Statistic: {result[0]}") print(f"p-value: {result[1]}") For context, the smaller the p-value (<0.05), the more confident you can be that patterns in the time series aren’t random. ADF Statistic: -3.014113904399305 p-value: 0.06246422059834887 The p-value isn’t convincing here, meaning the series isn’t stationary (linear), and seasonality likely plays a role. As discussed, assuming SEO data is stationary (i.e., follows a linear distribution) is a flawed heuristic. SEO data often follows non-linear trends, so relying on simple methods that assume stable data can lead to poor forecasts. Instead, you should decompose the time series and model seasonality. Seasonality decomposition helps separate true performance trends from recurring patterns such as weekly or monthly cycles. To do this, we need to zoom in on granular weekly search patterns. #If data recorded daily, and you want to analyse weekly seasonality (period=7) result_weekly = seasonal_decompose(df['clicks'], model='additive', period=7) #If data recorded monthly, and you want to analyse yearly seasonality (period=12) #result_monthly = seasonal_decompose(df['clicks'], model='additive', period=12) # Plot the decomposition for monthly data result_weekly.plot() plt.title('Weekly Seasonal Decomposition') plt.show() STL decomposition framework The trend plot itself is already suggestive: Search interest (clicks) is trending downward. Search interest is likely affected by weekly sales cycles – look at the numerous small peaks. Search interest likely follows seasonal demand – it ebbs and flows at certain times of year. However, the residuals plot contains clusters of large spikes, both positive and negative, reaching up to 500,000. These represent anomalies, or outliers, that appear connected to the trend’s inflection points. This means the model made a “mistake” when decomposing the trend line because it didn’t fully capture sudden spikes. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Handling seasonality with SEO forecast To decompose and isolate seasonality, you can use several models depending on the level of complexity and flexibility you need: ModelDescriptionSTL decompositionA robust technique for separating a time series into trend, seasonality, and residuals. Ideal for revealing the underlying structure in data where patterns vary over time, making it useful for anomaly detection.SARIMAXARIMA extended to seasonal data. A statistical model that handles non-stationary data, seasonal patterns, and external independent variables such as algorithm updates.ProphetBuilt by Meta for real-world data, it handles multiple seasonalities, missing data, and abrupt shifts. Leveraging additive models, it’s particularly suited for time series with strong seasonal patterns.BSTSA Bayesian model that captures trend and seasonality while incorporating uncertainty. BSTS is commonly used for counterfactual estimation in causal impact analysis (“what would have happened if X never occurred?”), making it suitable for testing applications such as pre- versus post-analysis. Useful if you want to learn R. For this article, we’re going to use STL decomposition for anomaly detection in a “wobbling” (non-stationary) time series. # Fit STL decomposition (period=7 for weekly cycle) stl = STL(df['clicks'], period=7, robust=True) result = stl.fit() # Extract residuals and flag anomalies via IQR resid = result.resid Q1, Q3 = resid.quantile(0.25), resid.quantile(0.75) IQR = Q3 - Q1 anomalies = df[(resid < Q1 - 1.5 * IQR) | (resid > Q3 + 1.5 * IQR)] # Plot fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(14, 5)) ax.plot(df.index, df['clicks'], label='Clicks', color='steelblue') ax.scatter(anomalies.index, anomalies['clicks'], color='red', label='Anomalies', zorder=5) ax.set_title('Click Anomalies (STL + IQR)') ax.legend() plt.tight_layout() plt.show() Weekly anomaly detection using STL decomposition The red points are extreme values that aren’t explained by either trend or seasonality. However, detecting anomalies isn’t the same as removing them. In non-stationary time series, variability changes over time (e.g., seasonality, trends, algorithm updates). Removing outliers outright breaks the time index and introduces artificial gaps that bias the actual seasonal impact. A more robust approach is to replace anomalies with expected values. df['trend'] = result.trend df['seasonal'] = result.seasonal df['resid'] = result.resid # --- Define anomaly flag (based on residuals) --- Q1, Q3 = df['resid'].quantile(0.25), df['resid'].quantile(0.75) IQR = Q3 - Q1 df['anomaly'] = ( (df['resid'] < Q1 - 1.5 * IQR) | (df['resid'] > Q3 + 1.5 * IQR) ) # --- Replace anomalies with expected value (trend + seasonal) --- df['clean_clicks'] = df['clicks'].copy() df.loc[df['anomaly'], 'clean_clicks'] = ( df['trend'] + df['seasonal'] ) Because this approach preserves the time series rows, the forecasting baseline is now protected from bias and artificial gaps. You can validate this by applying STL decomposition to the cleaned time series. result_clean = seasonal_decompose(df['clean_clicks'], model='additive', period=7) result_clean.plot() plt.title('Weekly Seasonal Decomposition (Cleaned Data)') plt.show() STL decomposition framework without anomalies What finally stands out is that once a week (every seven observations), there’s a spike. This suggests peak search demand on Saturday or Sunday, indicating stable and consistent interest patterns. A few scattered residuals, or anomalies, remain, but they’re rare and random, showing no clustering or drift. This confirms that outlier handling has been effective and the model fit is robust. At this stage, the time series decomposition is clean enough and ready for forecasting. Plotting a non-stationary SEO forecast While you could experiment with SARIMAX or BSTS, this synthetic SEO forecast uses Prophet because it’s well-suited for handling time series with strong seasonality. Using our anomaly-free dataset with a preserved time index, Prophet can forecast click performance over the next 90 days. To add more context, you can introduce a regressor to flag external factors such as Google core updates or measurement issues. In this example, you can apply a flag to account for the Google Search Console logging issue that artificially inflated impressions between May 2025 and April 2026. The code below generates a 90-day forecast and outputs a line chart, with the option to export the forecast as an .xlsx table. Tabular output of Prophet’s 90-day click forecast from anomaly-free non-stationary timeseries. Note that the lower and upper bounds represent the confidence interval, indicating the range within which clicks are expected to fall over the forecast horizon. prophet_df = df[['clean_clicks']].reset_index() prophet_df.columns = ['date', 'clicks'] prophet_df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(prophet_df['date']) prophet_df = prophet_df.rename(columns={'date': 'ds', 'clicks': 'y'}) # ── GSC INFLATION FLAG ─────────────────── start = pd.to_datetime('2025-05-13') end = pd.to_datetime('2026-04-13') prophet_df['gsc_inflation_flag'] = 0 prophet_df.loc[ (prophet_df['ds'] >= start) & (prophet_df['ds'] <= end), 'gsc_inflation_flag' ] = 1 model = Prophet( yearly_seasonality=True, weekly_seasonality=True, daily_seasonality=False ) model.add_regressor('gsc_inflation_flag') model.fit(prophet_df) # ── FORECAST──────────────────────────────────────────── future = model.make_future_dataframe(periods=90) future['gsc_inflation_flag'] = 0 future.loc[ (future['ds'] >= start) & (future['ds'] <= end), 'gsc_inflation_flag' ] = 1 forecast = model.predict(future) forecast_clean = forecast[['ds', 'yhat', 'yhat_lower', 'yhat_upper']].copy() forecast_clean.columns = [ 'date', 'clicks_forecast', 'lower bound', 'upper bound' ] # Extract next 90 days only forecast_90 = forecast_clean.tail(90) # ── EXPORT OPTION ───────────────────────────────────── EXPORT = True if EXPORT: forecast_90.to_excel('seo_forecast_90_days.xlsx', index=False) # ── PLOTLY VISUALISATION ────────────────────────────── fig = go.Figure() # Actuals fig.add_trace(go.Scatter( x=prophet_df['ds'], y=prophet_df['y'], mode='lines', name='Actual (Cleaned)', opacity=0.6 )) # Forecast fig.add_trace(go.Scatter( x=forecast_clean['date'], y=forecast_clean['clicks_forecast'], mode='lines', name='Forecast', line=dict(dash='dash') )) # Confidence band fig.add_trace(go.Scatter( x=forecast_clean['date'], y=forecast_clean['upper bound'], mode='lines', line=dict(width=0), showlegend=False )) fig.add_trace(go.Scatter( x=forecast_clean['date'], y=forecast_clean['lower bound'], mode='lines', fill='tonexty', name='Confidence Interval', line=dict(width=0) )) # Highlight inflation period fig.add_vrect( x0=start, x1=end, annotation_text="GSC Inflation Period", annotation_position="top left", opacity=0.2 ) fig.update_layout( title='SEO Forecast Adjusted for GSC Impression Inflation Bias', xaxis_title='Date', yaxis_title='Clicks' ) fig.show() Prophet’s 90-day clicks forecast from anomaly-free non-stationary timeseries 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 SEO forecasting isn’t usually linear SEO forecasting isn’t about projecting neat, linear trends – it’s about understanding messy, non-stationary data shaped by seasonality, anomalies, and external shocks. By cleaning data properly, modeling seasonality, and accounting for real-world distortions such as SERP changes and tracking issues, forecasts become less about false certainty and more about informed direction. While the goal isn’t perfect accuracy, a robust approach to forecasting non-stationary time series is essential for framing stakeholder expectations within a realistic range and making better decisions. View the full article

Over the past few decades, “functional” fitness has been seen as everything from a niche practice, to a trend, to a joke. The styles of training that call themselves “functional” vary as well, from bodyweight exercises to Hyrox training. So what is functional fitness really? Functional fitness is more a buzzword than a style of trainingIf you ask somebody who coaches functional fitness, they’ll probably tell you that it’s about doing exercises that will help you in everyday life. Maybe that means doing farmer’s walks with heavy dumbbells so that you’ll be strong enough to carry all the groceries in one trip. Maybe it’s doing hundreds of air squats so you can bend down to pick up your kids. Maybe it’s balancing on a Bosu so you’ll be less likely to slip and fall on an icy sidewalk. Historian Conor Heffernan traces the roots of functional fitness to exercises that were prescribed for general health rather than specifically for strength or sports. Sometimes these would use unusual apparatus like pulleys and weighted balls or, today, battle ropes or suspension trainers. Today’s trainers often define functional fitness in opposition to what they think “regular” fitness is. For some, regular training means a lot of single-joint exercises like bicep curls, so they’ll program compound movements that involve the whole body. For others, regular training means you’re using heavy weights, so they consider functional training to be workouts that use light weights or only bodyweight. And for still others, regular training means doing sets and resting in between them, while functional training keeps you moving the whole time. In other words, “functional” can mean any type of exercise that your trainer prefers. Sometimes "functional fitness" is like a code wordJust when it looked like the functional fitness craze was dying down, it seems more and more gyms and trainers are picking the term back up. But this time, I think something specific is going on: “Functional” is code for “CrossFit-type exercise, but not the CrossFit brand.” CrossFit is a mix of barbell training, gymnastics and calisthenics moves, and cardio. Workouts may involve skill practice, strength training, and most famously timed “WODs” (workouts of the day) that require cardio fitness to power through. But the name CrossFit is trademarked, and it’s tied to a specific company, and that company has some unpleasant things in its history. What do you do if you like the style of workout but you don’t want to do CrossFit CrossFit? You call it something else. So when people do similar exercises as what you'd see in a CrossFit class, sometimes that gets called functional, whether it's being done for a real-life purpose or not. For example, Hyrox classes prepare you for a race, which isn't really functional; but you'll be doing wall balls and lunges and pushing a sled, which you could argue are functional exercises No exercise is non-functionalThe idea of training to be better at everyday life is not a bad one. We all need strength and mobility to exist as a human being without complaining about our knees and our backs all the time, and that goes double as we age. But do you need a specific type of exercise to do that? Not really. Plain old boring barbell squats might not be “functional” in some people’s eyes, but they still build a ton of leg strength to help you pick up your kids. Anything that improves some aspect of your fitness is going to be helpful to you in everyday life. If you want to take a lesson from the world of functional fitness, let it be that you’re not limited to any stereotype of fitness. Balance training can be fun and helpful; so can grip training, and core training, and interval cardio training, and all kinds of things you might not normally think to do in the gym. Learning new skills is an exercise for your brain, as well as your body, and it’s a worthwhile one, too—even if you’ll never find a “functional” use for something like handstand pushups. View the full article

Google's John Mueller said, "The indexing API is inundated by bloggers trying to act like legitimate sites." This means that Google needs to be more careful about who and what they accept through the Google indexing API.View the full article