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The offering marks a fresh attempt by Ackman to bring his long-term investment strategy to a broader base of investors, with a vision inspired by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. View the full article

Leaders sometimes realize that incremental improvement won’t move an organization far enough. That realization is where the idea of a BHAG—short for big hairy audacious goal—enters the conversation. The concept was introduced in the book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, where it was presented as a powerful way to push organizations toward extraordinary long-term achievements. What Is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal? A big hairy audacious goal is a bold, long-term objective designed to push an organization far beyond incremental progress and toward transformative achievement. Introduced in Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, a big hairy audacious goal provides a clear focal point that aligns teams, energizes employees and directs strategic decision-making toward a single ambitious outcome that may take decades to accomplish. Once goals are defined, teams need tools to plan the work and track progress. ProjectManager is an award-winning project management software that helps turn a big hairy audacious goal into an executable project plan by organizing tasks, building project timelines and monitoring progress in real time. Teams can track milestones, manage resources and visualize progress through dashboards and Gantt charts, ensuring their goals stay aligned with schedules, budgets and priorities. Get started for free today. /wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Light-mode-portfolio-dashboard-CTA-1600x851.pngLearn more Who Should Set a Big Hairy Audacious Goal? Fast-growing organizations, established corporations and mission-driven institutions benefit the most from a big hairy audacious goal. Companies operating in technology, manufacturing, aerospace, healthcare and other innovation-heavy industries often adopt a big hairy audacious goal to unite large teams around a long-term strategic direction that demands persistence, creativity and breakthrough performance. What Are the Benefits of a Big Hairy Audacious Goal? When organizations commit to a big hairy audacious goal, they gain more than an ambitious target. A big hairy audacious goal can reshape how leaders plan strategy, how teams collaborate and how employees understand the long-term mission of the organization. Creates a clear long-term strategic direction: A big hairy audacious goal gives teams a single, compelling destination that guides strategic planning, investment decisions and organizational priorities. Aligns teams around a shared mission: Because a big hairy audacious goal is easy to understand, it helps employees across departments see how their work contributes to the company’s long-term vision. Encourages breakthrough thinking: Pursuing a big hairy audacious goal forces organizations to abandon incremental thinking and explore bold ideas, new technologies and unconventional strategies. Strengthens organizational identity: Over time, a big hairy audacious goal becomes part of a company’s culture, reinforcing the values and ambitions that define the organization. Motivates employees with a compelling challenge: Many teams perform better when they feel they are contributing to something ambitious, and a big hairy audacious goal provides that sense of purpose. Supports long-term strategic planning: Leadership teams can use a big hairy audacious goal as a guiding reference when building strategic roadmaps, project portfolios and long-range growth strategies. Drives sustained performance improvement: Because a big hairy audacious goal often takes decades to accomplish, it encourages consistent progress and continuous improvement over time. Inspires innovation and competitive advantage: Organizations pursuing a big hairy audacious goal often develop new capabilities, products or services that strengthen their position in the market. /wp-content/uploads/2026/03/BHAG-Template.png Get your free Use this free to manage your projects better. How to Set a Big Hairy Audacious Goal Designing a big hairy audacious goal requires more than writing down an ambitious target. Leaders must translate long-term vision into a challenge that people across the organization understand, believe in and work toward consistently. The following steps reflect how visionary companies described in Built to Last structured a big hairy audacious goal so it inspires action for decades. 1. Set a Bold and Audacious Goal At its core, a big hairy audacious goal must stretch an organization far beyond normal expectations and push its vision. Collins and Porras describe it as a powerful long-term challenge that demands extraordinary commitment and pushes the organization toward breakthrough performance. A big hairy audacious goal should feel daunting but still believable, forcing teams to think beyond incremental growth and pursue transformative results. Imagine a renewable energy company that currently powers small regional communities. Leadership might establish a big hairy audacious goal to supply clean electricity to an entire national grid within twenty-five years. That challenge immediately changes how teams approach project planning, technology development, partnerships and infrastructure investments across the company. 2. Make the Goal Clear and Compelling Clarity is essential for a big hairy audacious goal to work. In Built to Last, the authors explain that visionary companies express their big hairy audacious goal in simple, memorable language so every employee understands it instantly. The goal must communicate a compelling destination that energizes teams and makes the organization’s strategic direction easy to rally around. Returning to the renewable energy example, leadership would avoid vague statements like “become a major clean energy provider.” Instead, they might frame the big hairy audacious goal as “power the entire country with 100% renewable energy by 2050.” That wording paints a clear picture employees, investors and partners can immediately grasp. 3. Establish a Clear Finish Line Another defining trait of a big hairy audacious goal is the presence of a recognizable finish line. Collins and Porras emphasize that a big hairy audacious goal should function like a long-term mission with a clear point of completion. Teams must know what success looks like so they can organize projects, milestones and strategic initiatives around reaching that endpoint. For the renewable energy company, the finish line becomes measurable and concrete: achieving enough renewable generation capacity to supply the entire country’s electricity demand. That milestone gives engineers, project managers and executives a shared reference point when planning large infrastructure projects, building partnerships and tracking long-term progress. 4. Think in Long-Term Horizons Unlike short-term performance targets, a big hairy audacious goal operates on a time horizon that can span decades. Collins and Porras observed that visionary companies use a big hairy audacious goal to guide progress over 10 to 30 years. The extended timeframe allows organizations to pursue transformational breakthroughs, build capabilities gradually and coordinate major strategic initiatives without being constrained by quarterly performance pressures. Continuing the renewable energy example, leadership recognizes that powering an entire national grid with renewable energy cannot happen within a few annual planning cycles. Instead, the big hairy audacious goal stretches across multiple decades, allowing teams to plan massive infrastructure projects, invest in research and development and gradually scale renewable capacity until the target becomes achievable. 5. Create a Unifying Focal Point One reason a big hairy audacious goal works so effectively is that it becomes a central point of focus for the entire organization. Collins and Porras describe a big hairy audacious goal as a powerful rallying objective that aligns decisions, motivates employees and channels collective effort toward a single long-term challenge that everyone understands and supports. Within the renewable energy company, the big hairy audacious goal of powering the country with renewable electricity becomes a constant reference point in meetings, strategy sessions and project planning discussions. Engineers, operations managers and executives all evaluate new initiatives by asking a simple question: does this move the organization closer to achieving that national energy milestone? BHAG Goal Template This example shows how a big hairy audacious goal can be created using clear criteria. Each row explains why the goal qualifies as a BHAG by demonstrating its ambitious scope, defined finish line, long-term horizon and ability to unite teams around a single transformative strategic objective. We’ve also created other goal-setting templates you can use to establish personal, project and organizational goals. /wp-content/uploads/2026/03/BHAG-Template-600x557.png BHAG Goal Examples Understanding a big hairy audacious goal becomes easier when looking at practical scenarios. The following BHAG goal examples illustrate how organizations translate a bold vision into a clear long-term challenge that aligns teams, guides strategic planning and drives transformational progress across the entire company. 1. BHAG Goal Example #1 A fast-growing electric vehicle manufacturer wants to accelerate the global transition to sustainable transportation. Leadership decides that incremental market expansion is not enough and establishes a big hairy audacious goal designed to redefine how vehicles are produced, sold and powered worldwide. Build the world’s largest electric vehicle ecosystem and replace gasoline-powered transportation in at least 20 major global markets by 2045. BHAG Criteria Explanation Audacious Goal Replacing gasoline transportation across major global markets requires massive innovation, infrastructure investment and industry disruption. Clear and Compelling The goal communicates a simple and powerful mission: transition global transportation to electric vehicles. Clear Finish Line Success occurs when at least 20 major global markets primarily rely on the company’s electric vehicle ecosystem. Long-Term Horizon The target year of 2045 allows decades for technology development, infrastructure expansion and global partnerships. Unifying Focal Point Every team—from engineering to supply chain—works toward enabling large-scale electric vehicle adoption. 2. BHAG Goal Example #2 An international healthcare organization aims to address global health disparities. Rather than focusing on individual programs, leadership defines a big hairy audacious goal that challenges the organization to dramatically expand medical access in underserved regions around the world. Provide reliable access to essential healthcare services for one billion people living in underserved regions by the year 2040. BHAG Criteria Explanation Audacious Goal Reaching one billion people requires unprecedented coordination across governments, nonprofits and healthcare systems. Clear and Compelling The mission of delivering healthcare access to underserved populations is easy to understand and highly motivating. Clear Finish Line The organization achieves the BHAG when one billion individuals consistently receive essential healthcare services. Long-Term Horizon The 2040 timeframe provides decades for infrastructure development, training programs and medical network expansion. Unifying Focal Point Doctors, logistics teams, program managers and partners coordinate around the shared mission of expanding global healthcare access. 3. BHAG Goal Example #3 A space technology company believes humanity’s future includes permanent settlements beyond Earth. Instead of focusing solely on satellite launches, leadership establishes a big hairy audacious goal centered on building the infrastructure necessary for sustained human presence on another planet. Develop the technology and infrastructure required to establish a permanent, self-sustaining human settlement on Mars by 2055. BHAG Criteria Explanation Audacious Goal Creating a permanent settlement on another planet represents one of the most ambitious technological challenges imaginable. Clear and Compelling The vision of establishing human life on Mars communicates a bold and inspiring mission. Clear Finish Line The BHAG is achieved when a functioning, self-sustaining human colony operates on Mars. Long-Term Horizon A 2055 target acknowledges the decades required for research, engineering breakthroughs and mission planning. Unifying Focal Point Scientists, engineers, investors and mission planners align their work around building the systems needed for interplanetary settlement. ProjectManager Is an Award-Winning Project Management Software ProjectManager offers robust project management features that are ideal for planning, scheduling and tracking the work required to achieve a big hairy audacious goal, such as Gantt charts, task lists, workload management charts, timesheets and real-time dashboards and reports. In addition to that, it’s also equipped with AI project insights, online team collaboration features and unlimited file storage that further help project managers ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Watch the video to learn more! Related Content 15 Goal-Setting Strategies for Individuals and Teams 15 Free Goal-Setting and Tracking Templates for Excel and Word How to Write SMART Goals: SMART Goal Examples SMART Goals Template If you need a tool to help you manage projects from start to finish, then signup for our software now at ProjectManager. Our online software can help project managers plan, track and oversee projects as they unfold. Sign up for a free 30-day trial today! The post How to Set a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) appeared first on ProjectManager. View the full article

Google Ads is rolling out auto end screens — a new feature that appends an interactive, auto-generated card to the end of eligible video ads to nudge viewers toward a conversion. How it works. An interactive screen appears for a few seconds immediately after the video finishes playing. Content is auto-populated from campaign data — app name, icon, price, and a direct install link for app campaigns End screens appear by default on eligible ads, requiring no setup from advertisers Why we care. Advertisers no longer need to manually build post-roll calls-to-action. This feature is on by default and changes the end of your video ads — and if you’ve already built custom YouTube end screens, they’ll be overridden without any warning. With end screens being the last thing a viewer sees before deciding to act, losing control of that moment matters. And with broader expansion planned, now is the time to understand how it works before it reaches more of your campaigns. The catch. Enabling auto end screens in Google Ads overrides any manually added YouTube end screens — meaning advertisers who’ve already customized their YouTube end cards will lose them. Current limitations. The feature is only available for in-stream ads running in mobile app install campaigns, with broader expansion planned but not yet dated. What stays the same. Auto end screens don’t affect billing or view counts — they’re purely an added engagement layer tacked on after a full video view. Next steps. Advertisers running mobile app install campaigns should audit their video ads now — check whether auto end screens are serving as expected and verify that any manually added YouTube end screens aren’t being silently overridden. As Google expands the feature beyond app installs, it’s worth establishing a review process early so campaigns are ready when eligibility broadens. Dig deeper. About auto end screens for video ads View the full article

Creditors allege in filings ahead of urgent court hearing that UK mortgage provider lent to connected partiesView the full article

The DSCRI-ARGDW pipeline maps 10 gates between your content and an AI recommendation across two phases: infrastructure and competitive. Because confidence multiplies across the pipeline, the weakest gate is always your biggest opportunity. Here, we focus on the first five gates. The infrastructure phase (discovery through indexing) is a sequence of absolute tests: the system either has your content, or it doesn’t. Then, as you pass through the gates, there’s degradation. For example, a page that can’t be rendered doesn’t get “partially indexed,” but it may get indexed with degraded information, and every competitive gate downstream operates on whatever survived the infrastructure phase. If the raw material is degraded, the competition in the ARGDW phase starts with a handicap that no amount of content quality can overcome. The industry compressed these five distinct DSCRI gates into two words: “crawl and index.” That compression hides five separate failure modes behind a single checkbox. This piece breaks the simplistic “crawl and index” into five clear gates that will help you optimize significantly more effectively for the bots. If you’re a technical SEO, you might feel you can skip this. Don’t. You’re probably doing 80% of what follows and missing the other 20%. The gates below provide measurable proof that your content reached the index with maximum confidence, giving it the best possible chance in the competitive ARGDW phase that follows. Sequential dependency: Fix the earliest failure first The infrastructure gates are sequential dependencies: each gate’s output is the next gate’s input, and failure at any gate blocks everything downstream. If your content isn’t being discovered, fixing your rendering is wasted effort, and if your content is crawled but renders poorly, every annotation downstream inherits that degradation. Better to be a straight C student than three As and an F, because the F is the gate that kills your pipeline. The audit starts with discovery and moves forward. The temptation to jump to the gate you understand best (and for many technical SEOs, that’s crawling) is the temptation that wastes the most money. 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 Discovery, selection, crawling: The three gates the industry already knows Discovery and crawling are well-understood, while selection is often overlooked. Discovery is an active signal. Three mechanisms feed it: XML sitemaps (the census). IndexNow (the telegraph). Internal linking (the road network). The entity home website is the primary discovery anchor for pull discovery, and confidence is key. The system asks not just “does this URL exist?” but “does this URL belong to an entity I already trust?” Content without entity association arrives as an orphan, and orphans wait at the back of the queue. The push layer (IndexNow, MCP, structured feeds) changes the economics of this gate entirely, and I’ll explain what changes when you stop waiting to be found and start pushing. Selection is the system’s opinion of you, expressed as crawl budget. As Microsoft Bing’s Fabrice Canel says, “Less is more for SEO. Never forget that. Less URLs to crawl, better for SEO.” The industry spent two decades believing more pages equals more traffic. In the pipeline model, the opposite is true: fewer, higher-confidence pages get crawled faster, rendered more reliably, and indexed more completely. Every low-value URL you ask the system to crawl is a vote of no confidence in your own content, and the system notices. Not every page that’s discovered in the pull model is selected. Canel states that the bot assesses the expected value of the destination page and will not crawl the URL if the value falls below a threshold. Crawling is the most mature gate and the least differentiating. Server response time, robots.txt, redirect chains: solved problems with excellent tooling, and not where the wins are because you and most of your competition have been doing this for years. What most practitioners miss, and what’s worth thinking about: Canel confirmed that context from the referring page carries forward during crawling. Your internal linking architecture isn’t just a crawl pathway (getting the bot to the page) but a context pipeline (telling the bot what to expect when it arrives), and that context influences selection and then interpretation at rendering before the rendering engine even starts. Rendering fidelity: The gate that determines what the bot sees Rendering fidelity is where the infrastructure story diverges from what the industry has been measuring. After crawling, the bot attempts to build the full page. It sometimes executes JavaScript (don’t count on this because the bot doesn’t always invest the resources to do so), constructs the document object model (DOM), and produces the rendered DOM. I coined the term rendering fidelity to name this variable: how much of your published content the bot actually sees after building the page. Content behind client-side rendering that the bot never executes isn’t degraded, it’s gone, and information the bot never sees can’t be recovered at any downstream gate. Every annotation, every grounding decision, every display outcome depends on what survived rendering. If rendering is your weakest gate, it’s your F on the report card, and remember: everything downstream inherits that grade. The friction hierarchy: Why the bot renders some sites more carefully than others The bot’s willingness to invest in rendering your page isn’t uniform. Canel confirmed that the more common a pattern is, the less friction the bot encounters. I’ve reconstructed the following hierarchy from his observations. The ranking is my model. The underlying principle (pattern familiarity reduces selection, crawl, rendering, and indexing friction and processing cost) is confirmed: ApproachFriction levelWhyWordPress + Gutenberg + clean themeLowest30%+ of the web. Most common pattern. Bot has highest confidence in its own parsing.Established platforms (Wix, Duda, Squarespace)LowKnown patterns, predictable structure. Bot has learned these templates.WordPress + page builders (Elementor, Divi)MediumAdds markup noise. Downstream processing has to work harder to find core content.Bespoke code, perfect HTML5Medium-HighBot does not know your code is perfect. It has to infer structure without a pattern library to validate against.Bespoke code, imperfect HTML5HighGuessing with degraded signals. The critical implication, also from Canel, is that if the site isn’t important enough (low publisher entity authority), the bot may never reach rendering because the cost of parsing unfamiliar code exceeds the estimated benefit of obtaining the content. Publisher entity confidence has a huge influence on whether you get crawled and also how carefully you get rendered (and everything else downstream). JavaScript is the most common rendering obstacle, but it isn’t the only one: missing CSS, proprietary elements, and complex third-party dependencies can all produce the same result — a bot that sees a degraded version of what a human sees, or can’t render the page at all. JavaScript was a favor, not a standard Google and Bing render JavaScript. Most AI agent bots don’t. They fetch the initial HTML and work with that. The industry built on Google and Bing’s favor and assumed it was a standard. Perplexity’s grounding fetches work primarily with server-rendered content. Smaller AI agent bots have no rendering infrastructure. The practical consequence: a page that loads a product comparison table via JavaScript displays perfectly in a browser but renders as an empty container for a bot that doesn’t execute JS. The human sees a detailed comparison. The bot sees a div with a loading spinner. The annotation system classifies the page based on an empty space where the content should be. I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly in our database: different systems see different versions of the same page because rendering fidelity varies by bot. Three rendering pathways that bypass the JavaScript problem The traditional rendering model assumes one pathway: HTML to DOM construction. You now have two alternatives. WebMCP, built by Google and Microsoft, gives agents direct DOM access, bypassing the traditional rendering pipeline entirely. Instead of fetching your HTML and building the page, the agent accesses a structured representation of your DOM through a protocol connection. With WebMCP, you give yourself a huge advantage because the bot doesn’t need to execute JavaScript or guess at your layout, because the structured DOM is served directly. Markdown for Agents uses HTTP content negotiation to serve pre-simplified content. When the bot identifies itself, the server delivers a clean markdown version instead of the full HTML page. The semantic content arrives pre-stripped of everything the bot would have to remove anyway (navigation, sidebars, JavaScript widgets), which means the rendering gate is effectively skipped with zero information loss. If you’re using Cloudflare, you have an easy implementation that they launched in early 2026. Both alternatives change the economics of rendering fidelity in the same way that structured feeds change discovery: they replace a lossy process with a clean one. For non-Google bots, try this: disable JavaScript in your browser and look at your page, because what you see is what most AI agent bots see. You can fix the JavaScript issue with server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG), so the initial HTML contains the complete semantic content regardless of whether the bot executes JavaScript. But the real opportunity lies in new pathways: one architectural investment in WebMCP or Markdown for Agents, and every bot benefits regardless of its rendering capabilities. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Conversion fidelity: Where HTML stops being HTML Rendering produces a DOM. Indexing transforms that DOM into the system’s proprietary internal format and stores it. Two things happen here that the industry has collapsed into one word. Rendering fidelity (Gate 3) measures whether the bot saw your content. Conversion fidelity (Gate 4) measures whether the system preserved it accurately when filing it away. Both losses are irreversible, but they fail differently and require different fixes. The strip, chunk, convert, and store sequence What follows is a mechanical model I’ve reconstructed from confirmed statements by Canel and Gary Illyes. Strip: The system removes repeating elements: navigation, header, footer, and sidebar. Canel confirmed directly that these aren’t stored per page. The system’s primary goal is to find the core content. This is why semantic HTML5 matters at a mechanical level. <nav>, <header>, <footer>, <aside>, <main>, and <article> tags tell the system where to cut. Without semantic markup, it has to guess. Illyes confirmed at BrightonSEO in 2017 that finding core content at scale was one of the hardest problems they faced. Chunk: The core content is broken into segments: text blocks, images with associated text, video, and audio. Illyes described the result as something like a folder with subfolders, each containing a typed chunk (he probably used the term “passage” — potato, potarto, tomato, tomarto). The page becomes a hierarchical structure of typed content blocks. Convert: Each chunk is transformed into the system’s proprietary internal format. This is where semantic relationships between elements are most vulnerable to loss. The internal format preserves what the conversion process recognizes, and everything else is discarded. Store: The converted chunks are stored in a hierarchical structure. The individual steps are confirmed. The specific sequence and the wrapper hierarchy model are my reconstruction of how those confirmed pieces fit together. In this model, the repeating elements stripped in the first step are not discarded but stored at the appropriate wrapper level: navigation at site level, category elements at category level. The system avoids redundancy by storing shared elements once at the highest applicable level. Like my “Darwinism in search” piece from 2019, this is a well-informed, educated guess. And I’m confident it will prove to be substantively correct. The wrapper hierarchy changes three things you already do: URL structure and categorization: Because each page inherits context from its parent category wrapper, URL structure determines what topical context every child page receives during annotation (the first gate in the phase I’ll cover in the next article: ARGDW). A page at /seo/technical/rendering/ inherits three layers of topical context before the annotation system reads a single word. A page at /blog/post-47/ inherits one generic layer. Flat URL structures and miscategorized pages create annotation problems that might appear to be content problems. Breadcrumbs validate that the page’s position in the wrapper hierarchy matches the physical URL structure (i.e., match = confidence, mismatch = friction). Breadcrumbs matter even when users ignore them because they’re a structural integrity signal for the wrapper hierarchy. Meta descriptions: Google’s Martin Splitt suggested in a webinar with me that the meta description is compared to the system’s own LLM-generated summary of the page. If they match, a slight confidence boost. If they diverge, no penalty, but a missed validation opportunity. Where conversion fidelity fails Conversion fidelity fails when the system can’t figure out which parts of your page are core content, when your structure doesn’t chunk cleanly, or when semantic relationships fail to survive format conversion. The critical downstream consequence that I believe almost everyone is missing: indexing and annotation are separate processes. A page can be indexed but poorly annotated (stored but semantically misclassified). I’ve watched it happen in our database: a page is indexed, it’s recruited by the algorithmic trinity, and yet the entity still gets misrepresented in AI responses because the annotation was wrong. The page was there. The system read it. But it read a degraded version (rendering fidelity loss at Gate 3, conversion fidelity loss at Gate 4) and filed it in the wrong drawer (annotation failure at Gate 5). Processing investment: Crawl budget was only the beginning The industry built an entire sub-discipline around crawl budget. That’s important, but once you break the pipeline into its five DSCRI gates, you see that it’s just one piece of a larger set of parameters: every gate consumes computational resources, and the system allocates those resources based on expected return. This is my generalization of a principle Canel confirmed at the crawl level. GateBudget typeWhat the system asks1 (Selected)Crawl budget“Is this URL a candidate for fetching?”2 (Crawled)Fetch budget“Is this URL worth fetching?”3 (Rendered)Render budget“Is this page a candidate for rendering?”4 (Indexed)Chunking/conversion budget“Is this content worth carefully decomposing?”5 (Annotated)Annotation budget“Is this content worth classifying across all dimensions?” Each budget is governed by multiple factors: Publisher entity authority (overall trust). Topical authority (trust in the specific topic the content addresses). Technical complexity. The system’s own ROI calculation against everything else competing for the same resource. The system isn’t just deciding whether to process but how much to invest. The bot may crawl you but render cheaply, render fully but chunk lazily, or chunk carefully but annotate shallowly (fewer dimensions). Degradation can occur at any gate, and the crawl budget is just one example of a general principle. Structured data: The native language of the infrastructure gates The SEO industry’s misconceptions about structured data run the full spectrum: The magic bullet camp that treats schema as the only thing they need. The sticky plaster camp that applies markup to broken pages, hoping it compensates for what the content fails to communicate. The ignore-it-entirely camp that finds it too complicated or simply doesn’t believe it moves the needle. None of those positions is quite right. Structured data isn’t necessary. The system can — and does — classify content without it. But it’s helpful in the same way the meta description is: it confirms what the system already suspects, reduces ambiguity, and builds confidence. The catch, also like the meta description, is that it only works if it’s consistent with the page. Schema that contradicts the content doesn’t just fail to help: it introduces a conflict the system has to resolve, and the resolution rarely favors the markup. When the bot crawls your page, structured data requires no rendering, interpretation, or language model to extract meaning. It arrives in the format the system already speaks: explicit entity declarations, typed relationships, and canonical identifiers. In my model, this makes structured data the lowest-friction input the system processes, and I believe it’s processed before unstructured content because it’s machine-readable by design. Semantic HTML tells the system which parts carry the primary semantic load, and semantic structure is what survives the strip-and-chunk process best because it maps directly to the internal representation. Schema at indexing works the same way: instead of requiring the annotation system to infer entity associations and content types from unstructured text, schema declares them explicitly, like a meta description confirming what the page summary already suggested. The system compares, finds consistency, and confidence rises. The entire pipeline is a confidence preservation exercise: pass each gate and carry as much confidence forward as possible. Schema is one of the cleaner tools for protecting that confidence through the infrastructure phase. That said, Canel noted that Microsoft has reduced its reliance on schema. The reasons are worth understanding: Schema is often poorly written. It has attracted spam at a scale reminiscent of keyword stuffing 25 years ago. Small language models are increasingly reliable at inferring what schema used to need to declare explicitly. Schema’s value isn’t disappearing, but it’s shifting: the signal matters most where the system’s own inference is weakest, and least where the content is already clean, well-structured, and unambiguous. Schema and HTML5 have been part of my work since 2015, and I’ve written extensively about them over the years. But I’ve always seen structured data as one tool among many for educating the algorithms, not the answer in itself. That distinction matters enormously. Brand is the key, and for me, always has been. Without brand, all the structured data in the world won’t save you. The system needs to know who you are before it can make sense of what you’re telling it about yourself. Schema describes the entity and brand establishes that the entity is worth describing. Get that order wrong, and you’re decorating a house the system hasn’t decided to visit yet. The practical reframe: structured data implementation belongs in the infrastructure audit, and it’s the format that makes feeds and agent data possible in the first place. But it’s a confirmation layer, not a foundation, and the system will trust its own reading over yours if the two diverge. Why improve infrastructure when you can skip them entirely? The multiplicative nature of the pipeline means the same logic that makes your weakest gate your biggest problem also makes gate-skipping your biggest opportunity. If every gate attenuates confidence, removing a gate entirely doesn’t just save you from one failure mode: it removes that gate’s attenuation from the equation permanently. To make that concrete, here’s what the math looks like across seven approaches. The base case assumes 70% confidence at every gate, producing a 16.8% surviving signal across all five in DSCRI. Where an approach improves a gate, I’ve used 75% as the illustrative uplift. These are invented numbers, not measurements. The point is the relative improvement, not the figures themselves. ApproachWhat changesEntering ARGDW withPull (crawl)Nothing16.8%Schema markupI → 75%18.0%WebMCPR skipped24.0%IndexNowD skipped, S → 75%25.7%IndexNow + WebMCPD skipped, S → 75%, R skipped36.8%Feed (Merchant Center, Product Feed)D, S, C, R skipped70.0%MCP (direct agent data)D, S, C, R, I skipped100% The infrastructure phase is pre-competitive. The annotation, recruited, grounded, displayed, and won (ARGDW) gates are where your content competes against every alternative the system has indexed. Competition is multiplicative too, so what you carry into annotation is what gets multiplied. A brand that navigated all five DSCRI gates with 70% enters the competitive phase with 16.8% confidence intact. A brand on a feed enters with 70%. A brand on MCP enters with 100%. The competitive phase hasn’t started yet, and the gap is already that wide. There’s an asymmetry worth naming here. Getting through a DSCRI gate with a strong score is largely within your control: the thresholds are technical, the failure modes are known, and the fixes have playbooks. Getting through an ARGDW gate with a strong score depends on how you compare to all the alternatives in the system. The playbooks are less well developed, some don’t exist at all (annotation, for example), and you can’t control the comparison directly — you can only influence it. Which means the confidence you carry into annotation is the only part of the competitive phase you can fully engineer in advance. Optimizing your crawl path with schema, WebMCP, IndexNow, or combinations of all three will move the needle, and the table above shows by how much. But a feed or MCP connection changes what game you’re playing. Every content type benefits from skipping gates, but the benefit scales with the business stakes at the end of the pipeline, and nothing has more at stake than content where the end goal is a commercial transaction. The MCP figure represents the best case for the DSCRI phase: direct data availability bypasses all five infrastructure gates. In practice, the number of gates skipped depends on what the MCP connection provides and how the specific platform processes it. The principle holds: every gate skipped is an exclusion risk avoided and potential attenuation removed before competition starts. A product feed is only the first rung. Andrea Volpini walked me through the full capability ladder for agent readiness: A feed gives the system inventory presence (it knows what exists). A search tool gives the agent catalog operability (it can search and filter without visiting the website). An action endpoint tips the model from assistive to agentic — the agent doesn’t just recommend the transaction, it closes it. That distinction is what I built AI assistive agent optimization (AAO) around: engineering the conditions for an agent to act on your behalf, not just mention you. Volpini’s ladder makes the mechanic concrete: each rung skips more gates, removes more exclusion risk, and eliminates more potential attenuation before competition starts. A brand with all three is playing a different game from a brand that’s still waiting for a bot to crawl its product pages. Note: Always keep this in mind when optimizing your site and content — make your content friction-free for bots and tasty for algorithms. 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 DSCRI are absolute tests, ARGDW are competitive tests. The pivot is annotation. Five gates. Five absolute tests. Pass or fail (and a degrading signal even on pass). The solutions are well documented: Discovery failures fixed with sitemaps and IndexNow. Selection failures with pruning and entity signal clarity. Crawling failures with server configuration. Rendering failures with server-side rendering or the new pathways that bypass the problem entirely. Indexing failures with semantic HTML, canonical management, and structured data. The infrastructure phase is the only phase with a playbook, and opportunity cost is the cheapest failure pattern to fix. But DSCRI is only half the pipeline, and it’s the easiest to deal with. After indexing, the scoreboard turns on. The five competitive gates (ARGDW) are competitive tests: your content doesn’t just need to pass, it needs to beat the competition. What your content carries into the kickoff stage of those competitive gates is what survived DSCRI. And the entry gate to ARGDW is annotation. The next piece opens annotation: the gate the industry has barely begun to address. It’s where the system attaches sticky notes to your indexed content across 24+ dimensions, and every algorithm in the ARGDW phase uses those notes to decide what your content means, who it’s for, and whether it deserves to be recruited, grounded, displayed, and recommended. Those sticky notes are the be-all and end-all of your competitive position, and almost nobody knows they exist. In “How the Bing Q&A / Featured Snippet Algorithm Works,” in a section I titled “Annotations are key,” I explained what Ali Alvi told me on my podcast, “Fabrice and his team do some really amazing work that we actually absolutely rely on.” He went further: without Canel’s annotations, Bing couldn’t build the algos to generate Q&A at all. A senior Microsoft engineer, on the record, in plain language. The evidence trail has been there for six years. That, for me, makes annotation the biggest untapped opportunity in search, assistive, and agential optimization right now. This is the third piece in my AI authority series. The first, “Rand Fishkin proved AI recommendations are inconsistent – here’s why and how to fix it,” introduced cascading confidence. The second, “AAO: Why assistive agent optimization is the next evolution of SEO,” named the discipline. The third, “The AI engine pipeline: 10 gates that decide whether you win the recommendation,” mapped the full pipeline. Up next: “How AI decides what your content means (and why it gets you wrong).” View the full article

A reader writes: I’m looking for some serious help navigating an issue. An employee at my company is likely to be transferred to my team. This person was arrested last year for soliciting a minor for sex. They are related to the CEO of the company and were bailed out. They will stand trial sometime in the near future. If anyone else were facing these charges, they would have been let go. This person has not and now I may have to deal with them on my team. I think the company’s stance is “innocent until proven guilty,” which I sort of get, but he was caught in a police sting where he was having explicit conversations with an officer posing as a teenager so public perception is pretty poor on this guy. Also, we have had former employees be charged with a crime and fired well before the trial. This is clearly a case of special treatment/nepotism. If we take this person on, how do we address it with our team? Do we get it all out there in the open and roll with the “innocent until proven guilty” line? Do I decline discussing outside personal matters? I don’t want to lose my job over this, so taking the stance that this guy is gross and the company is gross for keeping him on doesn’t really work. But my team will have legitimate questions and concerns. How are we supposed to have team events where families are invited? I’m not bringing my daughters somewhere this guy is invited and my team members won’t want to either. Do I just give a canned response and direct everyone to HR? I know readers will say that I should reconsider employment with this company, and maybe they are right and I need to hear it. But at the same time, I’ve worked here a long time and generally love it. There aren’t loads of jobs out there right now either. First and foremost, stop having team events that family members are invited to while this guy is on your team. You can’t safely encourage people to bring kids around him, full stop. If that means you have to change the sorts of team events you have, then that’s what you have to do. Beyond that, you absolutely 100% must ask HR for their guidance on how to manage this situation. You should do this for a few reasons: first, because your company has just dumped an enormous mess in your lap, and you shouldn’t be expected to figure out to navigate that alone. Second, there are potentially legal implications for how you talk about the situation, and you need to know how to navigate those correctly. (For example, in some states employers can’t take any adverse employment actions against an employee based on an arrest that hasn’t led to a conviction. I’m guessing you might not be in one of those states since your employer has done that in the past, but it also doesn’t sound like your employer is necessarily one we can assume would impartially follow the law, either.) Third, what are the company’s legal and ethical obligations around disclosure if, for example, you have team members whose minor children sometimes stop by the office? (Point out that legally, employers have an affirmative duty to protect employees, customers, and anyone else who comes in contact with the business from risks of harm that the employer knows about or should know about.) And fourth, how do they suggest you respond if team members come to you with concerns? For that last one, if they suggest you respond to team members with language you’re uncomfortable using or can’t personally stand behind, you should feel free to add your own addendum of “I spoke to HR about this and the company’s stance is…” in front of it. And you might go on to explain that while you personally don’t have the authority to respond to their concerns, you encourage them to talk with HR themselves. In other words, there are ways to keep your job while still not taking personal responsibility for a decision you’re not comfortable with — and while pushing your company to grapple with these ethical issues rather than just dumping them on you. The post a sex offender (related to the CEO) is moving on to my team appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

Everything from global turmoil to inflation has caused consumers to tighten their purse strings. While many businesses have subsequently reported lower sales, some companies are still seeing significant success. On Tuesday, March 10, The Lego Group announced impressive 2025 financial results that included a 12% increase in revenue year-over-year. The privately held Danish toy company reached 83.5 billion Danish kroner (DKK), about $13.2 billion, up from 2024’s 74.3 billion DKK, about $11.6 billion. Similarly, the company’s operating and net profit rose 18% and 21% YOY, respectively. Lego also reported a 16% increase in consumer sales, a figure it primarily attributes to its “innovative” product line. Product demand was high across different market groups and for both adults and children. What is causing Lego’s success? Clearly Lego is doing something right: The company claims that it grew over twice as fast as the overall toy market in 2025. Lego launched over 860 products last year, about half of which were new. Its Star Wars, cityscape, and botanicals products were all popular, while the company also released its first items through its Formula 1 partnership—over 20 Grand Prix event activations supported the partnership. Volume was part of Lego’s success last year, with the company saying it launched its “largest portfolio to date.” But the company also has a resilient global supply chain, with six factories and five distribution centers worldwide—plus one in Virginia set to open in 2027. Each factory typically supplies from its immediate region, allowing for lower costs and tailored product offerings. “Our innovative and extensive portfolio, combined with the strength of the Lego brand and an effective operating model, drove high demand,” Lego CEO Niels B. Christiansen said in a statement. “We delivered these results by being both creative in product innovation and efficient in operations, bringing Lego play experiences to more kids than ever before.” A little nostalgia doesn’t hurt Of course, Lego is also popular with adults—many of whom might be experiencing digital fatigue or appreciate the nostalgic aspect. Lego even has a selection of products specifically designed for consumers 18 or older. Lego is also adapting, leaning—a bit—into the digital world. The company announced its Smart Play system at CES in January. The interactive technology responds to players with things such as lights, sounds, and even behavior. The entire system avoids using any apps or screens, with Lego stating that it wanted to captivate digital natives without screens. The Smart Play system doesn’t factor into Lego’s 2025 success since it launched this year. View the full article

The war with Iran is doing collateral damage to the world economy. The conflict is driving up energy and fertilizer prices; threatening food shortages in poor countries; destabilizing fragile states such as Pakistan; and complicating options for the inflation fighters at central banks like the Federal Reserve. Causing much of the pain: the Strait of Hormuz — through which a fifth of world’s oil passes — was effectively shut down after the U.S. and Israel launched missile strikes Feb. 28 that killed Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “For a long time, the nightmare scenario that deterred the U.S. from even thinking about an attack on Iran and which got them to urge restraint on Israel was that the Iranians would close the Strait of Hormuz,” said Maurice Obstfeld, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. “Now we’re in the nightmare scenario.” With a key shipping route cut off, oil prices have surged — from less than $70 a barrel on Feb. 27 to a peak of nearly $120 early Monday before settling closer to $90. They’ve taken gasoline prices with them. According to AAA, the average price of U.S. gasoline has shot up to $3.48 a gallon from just under $3 a week ago. Prices could be felt even more significantly in Asia and Europe, which are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil and gas than the United States. 20 million barrels of oil a day go missing Every 10% increase in oil prices — provided they persist for most of the year — will push up global inflation by 0.4 percentage points and reduce worldwide economic output by as much as 0.2%, said Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund. “The Strait of Hormuz has to be reopened,” said economist Simon Johnson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and recipient of the 2024 Nobel memorial prize in economics. “It’s 20 million barrels of oil a day going through there. There’s no excess capacity anywhere in the world that can fill that gap.” The world economy has shown it can take a punch, absorbing blows from the Russian invasion of Ukraine four years ago and from President Donald The President’s massive and unpredictable tariffs in 2025. Many economists express hope that global commerce can stagger through the latest crisis. “The world economy has shown itself capable of shaking off significant shocks like broad U.S. tariffs, so there is room for optimism that it will prove resilient to the fallout of the war on Iran,” said Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University. Timing is everything Especially if oil prices can fall back to the $70-to-$80-a-barrel range, wrote economist Neil Shearing of Capital Economics, “the world economy may absorb the shock with less disruption than many fear.” But a lot of ifs remain. “The question is how long is it going to go on?” said Johnson, also former IMF chief economist. “It’s hard to see Iran backing down now that it’s announced this new leader” – Mojtaba Khamanei. The son of the slain ayatollah is believed to be even more of a hardliner than his father. Also muddying the outlook for an end to the crisis is uncertainty about what the United States is trying to achieve. “This is all about President The President,” Johnson said. “It’s not clear when he’s going to declare victory.” Economic winners and losers For now, the war is likely to create economic winners and losers. Energy importers — most of Europe, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India and China — will get clobbered by higher prices, Shearing wrote in a commentary for London’s Chatham House think tank. Pakistan finds itself in an especially bleak position. The South Asian country imports 40% of its energy and relies especially heavily on liquified natural gas from Qatar, supplies of which have been cut off by the conflict. Higher energy prices will squeeze Pakistani families and damage their economy. Far from cutting interest rates to provide some relief, though, the country’s central bank will probably have to raise them instead, say economists Gareth Leather and Mark Williams of Capital Economics. That is partly because inflation remains uncomfortably high in Pakistan — and higher energy prices threaten make it worse. But oil-producing countries outside the warzone — Norway, Russia, Canada — will benefit from high oil prices without the risk of missile and drone attacks. Energy isn’t the only issue. Up to 30% of world fertilizer exports – including urea, ammonia, phosphates, and sulfur – pass through the Strait of Hormuz, according to Joseph Glauber of the International Food Policy Research Institute. Disruption in the Strait has already cut off fertilizer shipments, raising costs for farmers – and is likely pushing food prices higher. “Any countries with significant agriculture sectors, including the United States, would be vulnerable,” Obstfeld said. “The effects are going to be most devastating in low-income countries where agricultural productivity may already be challenged. Add this extra cost component and you get the prospect of significant food shortages.” Where things stand in the US The United States, now a net exporter of energy, should gain slightly overall from higher oil and gas prices. But ordinary families will feel the pain at a time when Americans are already furious about high costs ahead of November’s midterm elections. U.S. households pay an $2,500 a year, or nearly $50 a week, to fill up their cars, said Mark Mathews, chief economist at the National Retail Federation. A 20% increase in gasoline prices means an extra $10 a week out their budgets, forcing them to cut back elsewhere. “If I have to pay more for an essential, then I would reduce a discretionary item,” Mathews said. If oil prices remain around $100 a barrel, analysts at Evercore ISI calculated, the resulting higher gasoline prices will wipe out for most Americans the benefits of higher tax refunds this year arising from The President’s 2025 tax cuts. Only the top 30% would still see a gain. A quandary for central banks The Iran crisis also puts the world’s central banks in a bind. Higher energy prices feed inflation. But they also hurt the economy. So should central bankers raise rates to curb inflation — or cut them to give the economy a lift? The Fed is already divided between policymakers who think a weak American job market needs help from lower rates and those still worried that inflation remains stuck above the central bank’s 2% target. “Their minds will easily go to the 1970s,” Johnson said, when conflict in the Middle East and an Arab oil embargo sent oil prices rocketing. Central bankers are haunted by the memory that their predecessors “didn’t get it right in the 1970s. They thought it was a temporary shock. They thought they could accommodate with lower interest rates, and they ended up regretting that because inflation became much higher.” Johnson predicted that higher energy prices ignited by the war with Iran are “going to massively intensify the debate inside the Fed” and make U.S. rate cuts less likely. AP Retail Writer Anne D’Innocenzio and AP Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report. —Paul Wiseman, AP Economics Writer View the full article

For over 40 years, “Mac vs. PC” has been technology’s most iconic rivalry. Yet in many ways, it’s been an indirect one. Apple, being Apple, has mostly stuck to computers with four-digit price tags—a rarefied territory where it can make the products it wants to make, not just the ones a given price point allows. Meanwhile, one of the best things about Windows PCs is that there’s something for everyone, including folks who don’t have a ton of money to spend. Every once in a while, though, Apple does ship something whose identity is defined by its attractive cost. I can’t think of any example more potentially impactful than its latest laptop, the MacBook Neo. It goes on sale tomorrow, in two versions whose prices—$599 and $699—are both unprecedented for a new Apple portable. I’ve been spending a few days with a review unit supplied by the company. Though the cheapest Windows laptops are still far cheaper, the Neo makes the Mac vs. PC debate relevant to a much wider swath of computer shoppers than before. According to third-party research, the Mac presently accounts for a little under 9% of computer shipments, a share that has grown but not exploded over the past decade. By putting a Mac within reach of more people, the arrival of the MacBook Neo could goose that figure in a way that few other developments could. Already, the Neo answers a question that people have been wondering about for eons: If Apple were to build a MacBook on a tighter budget, how would it turn out? It’s no shocker that it’s less lavishly equipped than its pricier stablemates, sometimes in totally obvious ways. On the Neo, MacBook features we thought were standard—like MagSafe and a backlit keyboard—aren’t available at all. But even if the MacBook Neo is a tad basic by Apple standards, it retains the overarching virtue that makes a MacBook a MacBook: niceness. In no way does it look or feel like a cheap laptop. The attributes that shape the experience most—screen quality, keyboard and trackpad comfort, audio fidelity—retain a premium feel. MacOS has sufficient processing power from the A18 Pro CPU (formerly an iPhone Pro chip) and 8 GB of RAM to perform everyday tasks well. There are certainly competent Windows laptops in the same price range as the MacBook Neo, many of which have more storage, larger screens, or features wholly unavailable on a Mac, such as touchscreens. Niceness, however, is harder to come by in Windowsland—especially since plastic, rather than the Neo’s aluminum, is the case material of choice. The Neo’s closest counterpart might be Microsoft’s 13″ Surface Laptop, but it’s a $900 computer, not a $600 or $700 one. Different yet familiar When Apple offers multiple variants of a product at different price points, the dividing lines can get murky. For example, the iPad Air—which I think of as the iPad Almost Pro—starts at $400 less than the iPad Pro. But it tops out at $1,099, which is $100 more than the base Pro. By contrast, the MacBook Neo is not a MacBook Almost Air. With a price differential of $400 between the most expensive Neo and cheapest Air, there’s no way it could be. I can’t imagine many people who can reasonably afford a MacBook Air opting for a Neo on the grounds that the differences between the two computers are insignificant. That’s probably good news for Apple, which would not benefit if MacBook Air buyers migrated en masse to the Neo. Then again, Apple smartly didn’t go out of its way to make the Neo feel like a lesser computer. It’s slightly chunkier than the smaller Air model, and its 13″ screen shaves off .6″ of display real estate, which is enough to notice without turning the Neo into a mini-laptop like the old 11.6″ MacBook Air or 12″ MacBook. But the 2.7-pound weight is identical to the 13.6″ Air, the industrial design is comfortably familiar, and the claimed battery life—up to 16 hours—is only a little less epic. The big differences are visual: The Neo comes in a slightly more playful selection of colors, with matching almost-white keyboards rather than the Air’s black one. My review unit is “Citrus,” which seemed to vamp between being a pale yellow and various subdued shades of green depending on lighting conditions. When it comes to features and tech specs, Apple appears to have worked its way through a list of the MacBook Air’s capabilities and asked itself: Which of these might a relatively casual, cost-conscious user be willing to live without, or maybe not even notice is missing? For example, the Neo’s display, though pleasing, lacks advanced features such as True Tone technology, which adjusts color temperature on the fly. The Neo uses an older version of Wi-Fi, and one of its two USB-C ports runs at only USB 2.0 speed, a 26-year-old standard. It lacks MagSafe charging and has a camera that doesn’t support the Center Stage subject-centering technology. These all strike me as eminently sensible compromises to grind down the Neo’s component costs. I was, however, bugged by the absence of Touch ID on the $599 unit I tried. Reacquainting myself with the need to type my password again and again wasn’t fun, and I kept absent-mindedly jabbing at the key where the Touch ID sensor would be if it were available. (The $699 model adds the feature and doubles the storage to 512 GB.) As someone who spends too much time computing when I should be sleeping, I also winced a little at Apple’s decision to omit keyboard backlighting. Of course, you may have an entirely different set of items you deem essential or utterly dispensable. Apple was never going to please everyone. But it’s struck a reasonable balance, and given itself a few logical ways to upgrade any future generations of the Neo that may come along. As for what it feels like to run macOS on a laptop with a smartphone-class chip and a modest amount of RAM, Apple seems to have provided the MacBook Neo with sufficient oomph to get by. I’ve been using a bunch of apps I depend on for real work, such as Microsoft Teams, Airtable, Microsoft Excel, and Hey email. I also performed some light image editing in Photoshop. The Neo was never overwhelmed. If I’d tried to push it to its limits, it might have been—but if you’re the kind of person who’s likely to push a computer to its limits, the Neo is not for you in the first place. The Neo may also not be ideal if you’re the type of person who thinks of a new computer as a long-term investment. Typically, I recommend that people buy machines they can grow into, with a bit more RAM and storage space than their present needs absolutely demand. The $699 Neo’s 512 GB of storage is worth the $100 premium, but neither version provides much headroom for tomorrow’s needs. If Apple comes up with some sensational Apple Intelligence feature a few years hence—one involving AI that runs on-device—will the Neo be able to handle it as well as an Air, or at all? I’m not sure, and Apple might not be, either. Overall, though, the MacBook Neo is one of Apple’s best recent products, even though its innovation is all about thoughtful cost control, not new features. Along with being a compelling option for anyone shopping for a laptop in its price range, it’s the perfect Mac for kids and other loved ones who might otherwise have inherited a dented, poky hand-me-down. I would not be startled to see it fly off shelves. If it’s a hit, makers of Windows PCs will surely take notice. Historically, they’ve done some of their best work when they’ve felt Apple’s competition most keenly, which is one reason why Windows laptops magically get slicker when they hit the MacBook Air’s price zone. Similarly, the Neo’s influence could lead to more polished Windows portables in the $600-$700 range. It would be a win for everyone concerned if the whole category got a little less plasticky and a little more, well, nice. View the full article

Tribunal kicks off hearing of hedge fund founder’s appeal against UK financial watchdogView the full article

Today Adobe is launching the public beta of its new AI assistant for Photoshop Web and Photoshop Mobile. The company’s impressive new assistant technology enables anyone to do seemingly flawless photo editing—Nano Banana style—by prompting the apps. Then it ups its power by giving you easy and precise ways to interact with that software—whether it’s via voice or using your finger to navigate the interface. Photoshop Mobile and Web have included AI features for a while. The web version already had Adobe Firefly generative AI features like generative fill and generative expand. The previous mobile version of Photoshop became truly usable because it smartly integrated AI to allow for making accurate object selections with your fat finger. This new AI assistant integration removes any lingering difficulty from image editing, putting it in competition with popular AI image generators like Google’s Nano Banana, OpenAI GPT-Image, or ByteDance’s Seedream. Unlike those models, however, combining the new Adobe AI assistant with Photoshop Mobile and Web gives users a lot more image editing precision through its new tools. Plus, it adds the possibility of “upstreaming” results beyond posting an edited image on social media. Users will be able to move the AI-edited files into the full Adobe creative app workflows, to go full Photoshop, integrate into a Premiere project, or publish a book in Acrobat. How the new Photoshop web and mobile workWhen you click on the assistant icon, the model first analyzes the raw pixels on your screen. The assistant essentially scans the image to identify both the overall context and the specific objects within the frame—recognizing the difference between a human subject in the foreground, all the different objects present, and a chaotic crowd in the background. Once it maps out the “reality” in the image, the app provides you with proactive recommendations. The assistant suggests edits, which can be any number of things, depending on the nature of the image, from removing “scattered objects to tighten the composition” to refining the lighting to adjust the color palette or anything in between. If you prefer to be hands-off, you can tell the machine to do it for you, or you can choose to bypass the automation and do your own thing. Taking the manual route means you can use your voice or text prompts to manipulate the image while retaining granular control over the assistant’s actions. In the mobile app, for instance, you can issue a vocal command to alter a specific object—like removing the cropped head of a dude in the background—and the assistant will automatically isolate that element and place the changes on a dedicated layer. Think of layers as transparent sheets of acetate stacked on top of each other; you can shuffle them around, duplicate them, or delete the background from the top sheet without permanently destroying the original photograph at the bottom of the pile. You can even sandwich generated typography securely behind a subject but in front of a newly created background. You just have to talk to the assistant to add the text wherever you want, even specifying the typography, color, size, and then move it or manipulate it using your fingers. All very cool and Minority Report-ish. Over on the web version, the new assistant introduces a feature called AI Markup to give users absolute precision over image alterations. Located within a contextual task bar, this tool lets you use your finger, mouse, or stylus to draw directly on the image, effectively outlining a digital quarantine zone for the artificial intelligence. By physically marking up the canvas and adding text prompts, you establish strict borders that control exactly where the computational changes happen. It allows you to draw rough shapes to integrate entirely new objects into the scene, or to generate specific adjustment layers that fine-tune the contrast, shadows, and highlights of an isolated element in the image. Adobe’s demonstration of the web platform illustrates how this localized editing works in practice. Using the AI Markup tool, a user highlighted specific fruits on a table to execute hyper-targeted commands. By drawing over the objects, the user was able to completely erase a pineapple from the composition, transmute a pomegranate into an apple, and shift an item’s color to blue. Because the artificial intelligence is confined to the marked boundaries, the rest of the image’s lighting, shadows, and surrounding elements remain untouched. This is a big difference from the latest AI image editing models, which will change the image, even slightly, no matter how many times you tell them not to touch one single pixel of the image and just remove the damn banana from the fruit bowl. This happens because image editors have to “re-imagine” the entire image again, without the element, and generative AI always makes mistakes and hallucinates a bit, no matter how hard you try to avoid it. Photoshop’s assistant, however, only changes the marked area in a new transparent layer, avoiding touching the rest of the image. The mobile application’s voice- and text-activated capabilities are equally utilitarian. In one demo, a user commanded, “Remove the person in the foreground.” The app instantly identified the human shape, excised it, and—understanding the context of the remaining image—suggested a logical follow-up at the bottom of the screen: “remove background people.” Other voice commands ranged from “Turn this into a night scene with polar lights” to asking the app to “Make the Bridge darker.” When the latter command was issued, the software automatically generated a digital mask around the architectural structure and applied a targeted brightness and contrast adjustment layer. Users can also dictate text generation—saying “Add text that says Kyoto in white” or “Add text, Golden Gate”—and then manually tweak the font, size, position, and color. Access to the beta depends on your subscription tier. Through April 9, users paying for Photoshop on the web and mobile, along with current Firefly customers, get unlimited AI generations. Free users on web and mobile, meanwhile, are capped at 20 free generations to get started. View the full article

Donald The President has said the conflict will be over ‘very soon’. How can he stop it?View the full article

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When people speak naturally, their language flows. It’s often messy, incomplete, and not especially coherent. The Google search bar, however, required something different. Users had to compress their needs into short phrases or slightly longer queries — what’s traditionally classified as short-tail or long-tail. To make that work, users stacked queries across a journey, moving through a funnel from A to B and refining as they went. In the process, users often stripped out personalized nuance to match what they believed the search engine could understand. In response, SEO professionals built systems around that constraint, grouping queries by search volume, categorizing them by a limited set of intents, and measuring competitiveness. That dynamic is changing. SEOs need to understand the behavioral change that’s emerging. Google is promoting Gemini, and phone manufacturers like Samsung are marketing AI-enabled features as product USPs. Alongside this product marketing, there’s also a level of education happening. Users are being encouraged to be more expressive with their queries, personalize their searches, and describe what they’re looking for in greater depth. Moving from keyword research to prompt research This is where we need to move away from the notion of keyword research to prompt research. Keyword research traditionally assumes that demand can be quantified, that variations can be listed and grouped, and that optimization happens at a phrase level or a cluster level. In the new hybrid AI and organic search world, demand is much more of a generative concept. Prompts can be written in countless ways while preserving the same underlying need. This doesn’t make keyword research obsolete, but it does change its focus. Instead of extracting keywords from tools as we’ve done, we also need to start understanding and modeling journeys. Instead of grouping by volume alone, we need to group by decision stage and the type and level of uncertainty the user has. The output of this process isn’t simply a keyword map, but a task map that accurately reflects the real pressures and constraints experienced by the audience. This is an evolution from short-tail and long-tail keyword research to an infinite tail of prompt research. Dig deeper: Why AI optimization is just long-tail SEO done right 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 infinite tail as a behavioral shift You can describe the infinite tail as an expansion of the long tail. But that underestimates what’s actually changing. It’s not just about more niche phrases or longer query strings. It’s about the level of personalization that’s been layered into each request. As users add context, constraints, and preferences, prompts become unique combinations of a multitude of factors. The number of possible combinations effectively becomes infinite, even if the underlying tasks remain finite. AI systems respond by evaluating the given prompts and probabilistically predicting the next tokens rather than using exact-match strings. It’s less about how you rank for a specific keyword or whether you’re visible in AI for a specific phrase. It becomes whether your content has the highest probability of satisfying the situation being described. That’s a different optimization problem altogether. You’re not competing on phrasing. You’re competing on task completion. This part of the journey is where “fuzzy searches” happen, meaning the path isn’t a straight line. Success isn’t just about finishing a task. It’s about making sure the user actually found what they were looking for. Since every user moves differently, the process is flexible rather than a set of rigid steps. Dig deeper: From search to answer engines: How to optimize for the next era of discovery Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Fan-out and grounding queries One of the most important mechanics in AI search is query fan-out. When a complex prompt is submitted, the system doesn’t treat it as a single string. Instead, it decomposes a request into a network of subquestions, classifications, and checks that together form a broader evaluation framework. From an SEO perspective, this means your content moves beyond evaluation against a single phrase or specific document matches. Instead, it’s assessed across a network of related questions, with a collective determination of whether it can satisfy a broader task. In a fan-out world, you win by supporting the entire decision cluster that surrounds that term. If your content addresses only one narrow dimension of the task, it becomes fragile. If it supports multiple layers of the decision, it becomes resilient. Fan-out rewards structural coverage and contextual relevance rather than repetition of specific phrases. Grounding queries help provide the LLM with a level of confidence through its fan-created queries. AI systems generate answers and attempt to validate them. They’re used to check whether a proposed answer is supported elsewhere, whether claims are consistent across sources, and whether the entity behind the information is reputable. If an AI system includes your brand in a summarized response, it needs a level of confidence to defend it virtually if challenged by alternative information. This changes the meaning of authority. In traditional SEO, ranking could be achieved through technical content, links, and other forms of manipulation. In AI search, selection also depends on how easily your content can be corroborated against a broader consensus within the cohort. This can involve factors tied to entity clarity, including structure, data consistency, consistent messaging, and external validation. These signals reduce uncertainty for the system. You’re not just trying to appear. You’re trying to be selected and defended. Dig deeper: The authority era: How AI is reshaping what ranks in search Designing for hybrid search Organic search isn’t disappearing. Ranking still influences discovery, technical SEO still shapes crawlability, and architecture still determines how well a site and its content are understood. But now, AI layers sit on top, synthesizing information and influencing which brands are surfaced within conversational responses. In this hybrid environment, organic visibility feeds AI selection. They aren’t exclusive, and yet they aren’t codependent. AI selection can reinforce brand perception, and fan-out rewards depth of current coverage. Grounding then rewards trust and consistency. This is where the infinite tail rewards genuine audience understanding and the creation of websites and content systems that support it. This is a shift from keyword research to prompt research, and not just a cosmetic renaming of the process. Success will depend on understanding why people search, the decisions they’re making, the uncertainties they face, and the evidence they need before committing. Search increasingly revolves around satisfying situations rather than matching strings. Designing for the infinite tail means designing for people and the tasks they’re trying to complete. Dig deeper: How to use AI response patterns to build better content View the full article

U.S. President Donald The President said Monday that the war against Iran could be short-lived, but he left open the possibility of an escalation in fighting if global oil supplies are disrupted by the Islamic Republic, which chose a new hard-line supreme leader. Oil prices briefly shot to their highest level since 2022 a day after Iran selected Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his late father as Iran’s supreme leader. Investors saw it as a signal that Iran was digging in 10 days into the war launched by the United States and Israel. But prices later fell and U.S. stocks rose on hopes that the war with Iran may not last much longer. “We took a little excursion” to the Middle East “to get rid of some evil. And, I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion,” The President told Republican lawmakers at his golf club near Miami. Hours later, The President posted on social media: “If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far.” In an apparent response to The President’s remarks published in Iranian state media, a spokesperson for the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, Ali Mohammad Naini, said “Iran will determine when the war ends.” The war has choked off major supplies of oil and gas to world markets and sent fuel prices rising across the U.S. The fighting has also led foreigners to flee from business hubs and prompted millions to seek shelter as bombs hit military bases, government buildings, oil and water installations, hotels and at least one school. The President also had a call Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the war and other issues. Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said Putin “voiced a few ideas regarding a quick political and diplomatic settlement” of the conflict following his conversations with Gulf leaders and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Khamenei, a secretive 56-year-old cleric, is only the third supreme leader in the history of the Islamic Republic. He has close ties to the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which has been firing missiles and drones at Israel and Gulf Arab states since his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had ruled since 1989, was killed during the war’s opening salvo. Multiple strikes shake Tehran Dozens of explosions were heard in Tehran in what was considered the heaviest air raid on the capital since the war started Feb. 28. Iranian media did not report on damages and casualties. Israel said Monday that it was carrying out “a wide-scale wave of strikes” on the Iranian city of Isfahan, as well as Tehran and in southern Iran. The Israeli military said it hit dozens of infrastructure sites, including the drone headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard. Meanwhile, Israel’s military alerted the population throughout the day about incoming missiles from Iran. From Lebanon, Iran-backed Hezbollah also fired rockets into Israel on Monday. The President said the United States was nearing its goal to eliminate Iran’s ballistic missile stockpile and its ability to produce and launch them. The administration has offered shifting rationales and timelines since the start of the conflict. He also talked about “building a new country,” a comment that seemed to suggest the U.S. might be engaged in the building of a new Iran. The President likes idea of another ‘internal’ candidate to lead Iran Thousands poured into a central square in the capital, Tehran, and other locations in a show of allegiance to the new supreme leader, waving flags and shouting phrases like “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” The younger Khamenei, who has not been seen in public since the war started, was long considered a potential successor — even before the killing of his 86-year-old father. The President told reporters that he was “disappointed” that Mojtaba Khamenei was picked and that he liked “the idea” of a leader drawn from an “internal” group of candidates, saying that worked well with Venezuela. The younger Khamenei is seen as even less compromising than his late father. As supreme leader, he has the final say on all major policies, including Tehran’s disputed nuclear program. Though Iran’s key nuclear sites are in tatters after the U.S. bombed them during the 12-day Israel-Iran war in June, it still has highly enriched uranium that’s a technical step away from weapons-grade levels. Khamenei could choose to do what his father never did — build a nuclear bomb. The President told reporters the war with Iran started because that country was working on a new site for developing material for nuclear weapons to replace one bombed last year by the U.S. Israel has already described Khamenei as a potential target. The President said Monday it “would be inappropriate” to say whether he would be targeted. US market seesaws over uncertainty of war The U.S. stock market careened through a manic Monday, going from a steep early loss to a solid gain as worries turned into hope that the war with Iran may not last that long. Oil prices whipped from nearly $120 per barrel, the highest since 2022, back toward $90. Iran’s attacks in the Strait of Hormuz have all but stopped tankers from using the shipping lane through which a fifth of the world’s oil is carried, and Iranian drones and missiles have targeted oil and gas infrastructure in major producers. Attacks on merchant ships near the strait have killed at least seven mariners, according to the International Maritime Organization. Kamal Kharazi, foreign policy adviser to the office of the supreme leader, told CNN on Monday that Iran is prepared for a long war. He said he sees no “room for diplomacy anymore” unless economic pressure prompts other countries to intervene and stop the “aggression of Americans and Israelis against Iran.” Turkey, meanwhile, said NATO defenses had intercepted a ballistic missile that entered the country’s airspace for the second time since the war started. Arab states decry Iran’s drone strikes Saudi Arabia lashed out at Iran following a drone attack on its massive Shaybah oil field, saying Tehran would be the “biggest loser” if it continues to attack Arab states. The attacks continued Monday night with a dozen drones downed by Saudi Arabia. In the United Arab Emirates, home to the futuristic city of Dubai, authorities said two people were wounded by shrapnel from the interception of Iranian missiles over the capital, Abu Dhabi. The Emirati Defense Ministry said 15 ballistic missiles and 18 drones were fired at the country on Monday. Early Tuesday, the UAE said a drone attack targeted its consulate in the Kurdish region of Iraq, causing damage but no injuries. The statement from the foreign affairs ministry did not blame the attack on anyone but decried it as “a dangerous escalation and a threat to regional security and stability.” Iran also attacked Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, where the government said that a person was killed and others injured in an Iranian attack targeting a residential building in the capital, Manama. Several U.S. diplomatic missions have ordered all but key staff to leave. The war has killed at least 1,230 people in Iran, at least 397 in Lebanon and 11 in Israel, according to officials. A total of seven U.S. service members have been killed. The President said Monday that family members of the soldiers told him during the transfer of their remains over the weekend in Dover, Delaware: “Make sure you win, sir.” Magdy reported from Cairo, and Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press journalists around the world also contributed to this report. —Jon Gambrell, Will Weissert and Samy Magdy, Associated Press View the full article

An effective customer retention plan is vital for any business aiming to improve loyalty and reduce churn. It hinges on five fundamental elements: a strong onboarding process, proactive engagement, personalized interactions, incorporation of feedback, and continuous monitoring of metrics. Each element plays a significant role in creating a seamless experience that keeps customers satisfied. Comprehending how to implement these strategies can make a notable difference in your retention efforts and overall success. What strategies have you considered for your plan? Key Takeaways Implement a strong onboarding process to reduce buyer regret and enhance customer satisfaction from the start. Engage proactively with customers to anticipate their needs and provide timely solutions, boosting retention rates. Personalize customer interactions through tailored communications to increase repurchase likelihood and satisfaction. Regularly gather and analyze customer feedback to identify areas for improvement and reinforce customer loyalty. Continuously monitor retention metrics to identify trends and make data-driven adjustments to retention strategies. Strong Onboarding Process To guarantee your customers feel confident in their purchasing decisions, a strong onboarding process is essential. It greatly reduces buyer regret by providing clear guidance and support, ensuring customers comprehend their investment from day one. This structured onboarding experience is one of the most effective client retention strategies available, as it prevents early contract cancellations and sets a positive tone for long-term relationships. Companies that prioritize onboarding report 50% higher customer satisfaction, which directly impacts their customer retention plan. Addressing potential issues like hidden costs and slow implementation can prevent negative perceptions, as personalizing the onboarding experience improves engagement. By tailoring content to meet individual customer needs, you nurture loyalty right from the start. In the end, grasping how to retain customer loyalty hinges on creating a seamless onboarding process that makes your customers feel valued and supported throughout their experience. Proactive Customer Engagement After establishing a strong onboarding process, the next step in enhancing customer retention is proactive customer engagement. This approach involves anticipating your clients’ needs and providing solutions or relevant content before issues arise. By implementing proactive engagement strategies, you could see up to a 20% increase in client retention rates, as your customers will feel more valued and understood. Utilizing automated tools can help identify common queries, allowing you to create targeted help articles that minimize the need for support interactions. Furthermore, regularly reaching out with personalized messages, like reminders for renewals or relevant updates, can markedly boost customer engagement and reinforce brand loyalty. Investing in these proactive support measures can lead to a 30% reduction in customer inquiries, enabling your teams to focus on more complex issues and improving overall efficiency. Personalization of Customer Interactions Personalization of customer interactions is vital for enhancing retention, as studies show it can lead to a 78% increase in the likelihood of repurchases. By customizing communications based on individual preferences, you can greatly boost customer satisfaction. In fact, 89% of support leaders emphasize that personalization is important for growth. Utilizing customer data, such as names and interests, allows you to create more engaging interactions that promote loyalty. Automation and AI technologies facilitate real-time personalized experiences, ensuring customer needs are met swiftly and effectively. Consistent personalization across various touchpoints builds stronger connections, finally driving loyalty and long-term retention. Aspect Benefit Customized Communication Increases customer satisfaction Real-Time Interaction Meets customer needs swiftly Consistency Builds stronger connections Incorporation of Customer Feedback Incorporating customer feedback into your retention strategy can greatly improve your comprehension of customer experiences and preferences. Regularly gathering feedback through surveys and polls is essential, as it provides direct insights that can improve your retention efforts. By implementing a feedback loop, you can collect, analyze, and act on these insights, nurturing a sense of involvement and loyalty among your customers. Analyzing feedback can reveal trends and highlight areas for improvement, allowing you to address concerns proactively and boost satisfaction. Engaging customers in dialogue through feedback mechanisms reinforces their value, making them feel heard and appreciated. Furthermore, sharing changes made based on their feedback showcases your commitment to continuous improvement, reinforcing the relationship between your business and its customers. This proactive approach not only improves customer loyalty but creates a more responsive and customer-centric organization. Continuous Monitoring of Retention Metrics To effectively improve your customer retention strategies, continuous monitoring of retention metrics is essential. By regularly evaluating key indicators like Customer Retention Rate (CRR) and Customer Churn Rate (CCR), you can gauge the success of your retention efforts. This ongoing analysis helps you identify trends, allowing for timely adjustments to your strategies. Data-driven insights from these metrics enable you to gain a deeper comprehension of customer behavior and preferences. This comprehension makes it easier to tailor your engagement efforts to meet customer needs. High retention rates often lead to increased Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), highlighting the importance of consistent metric evaluation to maintain revenue growth. Moreover, continuous monitoring uncovers potential issues early, allowing you to take corrective actions before customers decide to leave. By preserving these valuable relationships, you can guarantee long-term success for your business. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the 4 Pillars of Retention? The four pillars of retention are Customer Experience, Customer Engagement, Customer Loyalty, and Customer Feedback. Customer Experience emphasizes delivering exceptional interactions at every touchpoint, whereas Customer Engagement focuses on regular communication and personalized outreach. Customer Loyalty involves creating programs that reward repeat purchases, nurturing a sense of belonging among customers. Finally, Customer Feedback helps you understand client needs and preferences, allowing you to adapt and improve your offerings based on direct insights. What Are the 8 C’s of Customer Retention? The 8 C’s of customer retention are Clarity, Consistency, Communication, Convenience, Connection, Commitment, Customer Experience, and Community. Clarity helps you understand product benefits, whereas Consistency guarantees a reliable experience. Effective Communication keeps you informed, reducing churn. Convenience simplifies interactions, enhancing satisfaction. Building Connection nurtures emotional engagement, and Commitment secures loyalty. A focus on Customer Experience improves overall satisfaction, and cultivating Community encourages advocacy among customers, driving repeat business. What Are the 4 C’s of Customer Loyalty? The 4 C’s of customer loyalty are Commitment, Care, Consistency, and Communication. Commitment reflects the emotional connection you have with a brand, enhancing repurchase likelihood. Care involves comprehension and addressing your needs, which builds trust. Consistency guarantees you receive reliable and high-quality experiences every time you interact with the brand, reinforcing your loyalty. Finally, Communication keeps you informed and engaged, strengthening your connection to the brand and increasing overall loyalty. What Are the Three R’s of Customer Retention? The three R’s of customer retention are Retention, Related sales, and Referrals. Retention focuses on keeping your existing customers satisfied to minimize churn. Related sales capitalize on established relationships by upselling and cross-selling, increasing revenue per customer. Referrals leverage the satisfaction of your current customers to attract new clients, as happy customers are more likely to recommend your brand. Together, these elements improve customer loyalty and drive overall profitability for your business. Conclusion In summary, implementing these five crucial elements in your customer retention plan can greatly improve your business’s success. A strong onboarding process sets the foundation, whereas proactive engagement and personalization strengthen relationships with clients. Incorporating customer feedback guarantees they feel valued, and continuous monitoring of retention metrics allows for timely strategy adjustments. By focusing on these areas, you can create a seamless experience that not just cultivates loyalty but likewise maximizes customer lifetime value, ultimately benefiting your bottom line. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "5 Essential Elements for an Effective Customer Retention Plan" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

An effective customer retention plan is vital for any business aiming to improve loyalty and reduce churn. It hinges on five fundamental elements: a strong onboarding process, proactive engagement, personalized interactions, incorporation of feedback, and continuous monitoring of metrics. Each element plays a significant role in creating a seamless experience that keeps customers satisfied. Comprehending how to implement these strategies can make a notable difference in your retention efforts and overall success. What strategies have you considered for your plan? Key Takeaways Implement a strong onboarding process to reduce buyer regret and enhance customer satisfaction from the start. Engage proactively with customers to anticipate their needs and provide timely solutions, boosting retention rates. Personalize customer interactions through tailored communications to increase repurchase likelihood and satisfaction. Regularly gather and analyze customer feedback to identify areas for improvement and reinforce customer loyalty. Continuously monitor retention metrics to identify trends and make data-driven adjustments to retention strategies. Strong Onboarding Process To guarantee your customers feel confident in their purchasing decisions, a strong onboarding process is essential. It greatly reduces buyer regret by providing clear guidance and support, ensuring customers comprehend their investment from day one. This structured onboarding experience is one of the most effective client retention strategies available, as it prevents early contract cancellations and sets a positive tone for long-term relationships. Companies that prioritize onboarding report 50% higher customer satisfaction, which directly impacts their customer retention plan. Addressing potential issues like hidden costs and slow implementation can prevent negative perceptions, as personalizing the onboarding experience improves engagement. By tailoring content to meet individual customer needs, you nurture loyalty right from the start. In the end, grasping how to retain customer loyalty hinges on creating a seamless onboarding process that makes your customers feel valued and supported throughout their experience. Proactive Customer Engagement After establishing a strong onboarding process, the next step in enhancing customer retention is proactive customer engagement. This approach involves anticipating your clients’ needs and providing solutions or relevant content before issues arise. By implementing proactive engagement strategies, you could see up to a 20% increase in client retention rates, as your customers will feel more valued and understood. Utilizing automated tools can help identify common queries, allowing you to create targeted help articles that minimize the need for support interactions. Furthermore, regularly reaching out with personalized messages, like reminders for renewals or relevant updates, can markedly boost customer engagement and reinforce brand loyalty. Investing in these proactive support measures can lead to a 30% reduction in customer inquiries, enabling your teams to focus on more complex issues and improving overall efficiency. Personalization of Customer Interactions Personalization of customer interactions is vital for enhancing retention, as studies show it can lead to a 78% increase in the likelihood of repurchases. By customizing communications based on individual preferences, you can greatly boost customer satisfaction. In fact, 89% of support leaders emphasize that personalization is important for growth. Utilizing customer data, such as names and interests, allows you to create more engaging interactions that promote loyalty. Automation and AI technologies facilitate real-time personalized experiences, ensuring customer needs are met swiftly and effectively. Consistent personalization across various touchpoints builds stronger connections, finally driving loyalty and long-term retention. Aspect Benefit Customized Communication Increases customer satisfaction Real-Time Interaction Meets customer needs swiftly Consistency Builds stronger connections Incorporation of Customer Feedback Incorporating customer feedback into your retention strategy can greatly improve your comprehension of customer experiences and preferences. Regularly gathering feedback through surveys and polls is essential, as it provides direct insights that can improve your retention efforts. By implementing a feedback loop, you can collect, analyze, and act on these insights, nurturing a sense of involvement and loyalty among your customers. Analyzing feedback can reveal trends and highlight areas for improvement, allowing you to address concerns proactively and boost satisfaction. Engaging customers in dialogue through feedback mechanisms reinforces their value, making them feel heard and appreciated. Furthermore, sharing changes made based on their feedback showcases your commitment to continuous improvement, reinforcing the relationship between your business and its customers. This proactive approach not only improves customer loyalty but creates a more responsive and customer-centric organization. Continuous Monitoring of Retention Metrics To effectively improve your customer retention strategies, continuous monitoring of retention metrics is essential. By regularly evaluating key indicators like Customer Retention Rate (CRR) and Customer Churn Rate (CCR), you can gauge the success of your retention efforts. This ongoing analysis helps you identify trends, allowing for timely adjustments to your strategies. Data-driven insights from these metrics enable you to gain a deeper comprehension of customer behavior and preferences. This comprehension makes it easier to tailor your engagement efforts to meet customer needs. High retention rates often lead to increased Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), highlighting the importance of consistent metric evaluation to maintain revenue growth. Moreover, continuous monitoring uncovers potential issues early, allowing you to take corrective actions before customers decide to leave. By preserving these valuable relationships, you can guarantee long-term success for your business. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the 4 Pillars of Retention? The four pillars of retention are Customer Experience, Customer Engagement, Customer Loyalty, and Customer Feedback. Customer Experience emphasizes delivering exceptional interactions at every touchpoint, whereas Customer Engagement focuses on regular communication and personalized outreach. Customer Loyalty involves creating programs that reward repeat purchases, nurturing a sense of belonging among customers. Finally, Customer Feedback helps you understand client needs and preferences, allowing you to adapt and improve your offerings based on direct insights. What Are the 8 C’s of Customer Retention? The 8 C’s of customer retention are Clarity, Consistency, Communication, Convenience, Connection, Commitment, Customer Experience, and Community. Clarity helps you understand product benefits, whereas Consistency guarantees a reliable experience. Effective Communication keeps you informed, reducing churn. Convenience simplifies interactions, enhancing satisfaction. Building Connection nurtures emotional engagement, and Commitment secures loyalty. A focus on Customer Experience improves overall satisfaction, and cultivating Community encourages advocacy among customers, driving repeat business. What Are the 4 C’s of Customer Loyalty? The 4 C’s of customer loyalty are Commitment, Care, Consistency, and Communication. Commitment reflects the emotional connection you have with a brand, enhancing repurchase likelihood. Care involves comprehension and addressing your needs, which builds trust. Consistency guarantees you receive reliable and high-quality experiences every time you interact with the brand, reinforcing your loyalty. Finally, Communication keeps you informed and engaged, strengthening your connection to the brand and increasing overall loyalty. What Are the Three R’s of Customer Retention? The three R’s of customer retention are Retention, Related sales, and Referrals. Retention focuses on keeping your existing customers satisfied to minimize churn. Related sales capitalize on established relationships by upselling and cross-selling, increasing revenue per customer. Referrals leverage the satisfaction of your current customers to attract new clients, as happy customers are more likely to recommend your brand. Together, these elements improve customer loyalty and drive overall profitability for your business. Conclusion In summary, implementing these five crucial elements in your customer retention plan can greatly improve your business’s success. A strong onboarding process sets the foundation, whereas proactive engagement and personalization strengthen relationships with clients. Incorporating customer feedback guarantees they feel valued, and continuous monitoring of retention metrics allows for timely strategy adjustments. By focusing on these areas, you can create a seamless experience that not just cultivates loyalty but likewise maximizes customer lifetime value, ultimately benefiting your bottom line. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "5 Essential Elements for an Effective Customer Retention Plan" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Ranking No. 1 in Google means less when product grids dominate the SERP. Here’s how ecommerce visibility actually works now. The post Organic Rankings Vs. Product Grids: The New Ecommerce Divide appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Multiyear partnership includes a further ‘significant’ investment from Nvidia into one-year-old AI start-upView the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Portable Bluetooth speakers usually force a trade-off. The smallest ones are easy to carry but sound thin; the bigger ones sound better but take up more space in a bag. The JBL Grip Bluetooth Speaker, currently $77.36 on Amazon (down from $99.95), sits right in the middle. Price trackers show this is just a dollar above its lowest recorded price so far, and Amazon is also bundling 90 days of Amazon Music with the purchase, which gives you something to actually play on it right away. It is small enough to slide into a backpack pocket where a water bottle would normally sit, and a nylon loop on the back lets you clip it to a carabiner or hang it from a hook. Plus, it carries an IP68 rating, so it can deal with dust and even survive being submerged in nearly five feet of water for about 30 minutes. JBL also says it can take a three-foot drop onto concrete, so tossing it into a backpack or beach bag isn’t likely to hurt it. JBL Grip Compact Bluetooth Speaker $77.36 at Amazon $99.95 Save $22.59 Get Deal Get Deal $77.36 at Amazon $99.95 Save $22.59 In everyday use, the Grip focuses more on portability and durability than on huge sound. Inside is a 43mm by 80mm full-range driver that covers frequencies from 70Hz to 20kHz, connected through Bluetooth 5.4. It’s a mono speaker, so it doesn’t produce stereo sound on its own, but you can pair it with another JBL speaker if you want that wider effect. In practice, it handles podcasts, playlists, and casual listening well. Voices come through clearly and the midrange stays balanced, though the bass lacks the deeper rumble you would get from a larger speaker like the JBL Flip series, and the high-end detail can sound slightly subdued, notes this PCMag review. Still, the sound has enough body for a speaker this size. JBL includes a few ways to adjust the audio through the JBL Portable app, including four EQ presets and a simple seven-band equalizer. The controls on the speaker itself are straightforward, with power, Bluetooth, and Auracast buttons on top and volume and playback controls on the front. There’s also a small LED light strip on the back that cycles through lighting effects and can act as a soft light source in a dark room or tent. As for its battery life, it is rated for up to 14 hours at moderate volume, which should get through a full day outdoors without needing a recharge. When it does run out, the speaker charges through a USB-C port and takes about three hours to reach full power. Just keep in mind that JBL doesn’t include the USB-C cable, so you’ll need to use one you already have. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds — $153.99 (List Price $179.00) Samsung Galaxy S26 512GB + $100 Amazon Gift Card (Black) — $899.99 (List Price $1,099.99) Samsung Galaxy Buds 4 AI Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds + $20 Amazon Gift Card — $179.99 (List Price $199.99) Google Pixel 10a 128GB 6.3" Unlocked Smartphone + $100 Gift Card — $499.00 (List Price $599.00) Apple iPad 11" 128GB A16 WiFi Tablet (Blue, 2025) — $329.99 (List Price $349.00) Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS, 42mm, S/M Black Sport Band) — $299.00 (List Price $399.00) Amazon Fire TV Soundbar — $99.99 (List Price $119.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

“Content is king” remains one of the most widely accepted ideas in SEO. Not everyone has agreed. Different schools of thought have always existed, with some practitioners prioritizing backlinks and others focusing on technical SEO. Content is often treated as the primary driver of search visibility. I’m not arguing that. My point is simpler: if you’ve relied on content to drive results — and earn a living — you should start doubling down on distribution. With AI search changing the game, creating great content (and, yes, building some backlinks) is no longer enough to get it seen. The more important question may no longer be “What should I write next?” but “Where should I push this next?” AI tools are further fragmenting search Content distribution has become far more important in recent years, especially as audiences spread across more online spaces. In many teams, this job was usually outsourced to someone other than SEOs: Social media managers. Community managers. PR specialists. Various assistants and interns. Sure, distribution held some value to SEO, but it was generally considered more beneficial to other functions. Thanks to AI search, it’s finally landed squarely on our plate. Since AI models have fragmented search to an unprecedented level, distribution is now key to meaningful SEO outcomes. There are three key drivers behind this change: Different tools have different sourcing logic. AI tools source differently from traditional search. Their logic is changeable. If this all sounds a bit abstract, let’s briefly dig into the evidence and explain what’s really going on. Different tools have different sourcing logic Search is fragmenting as people use a wider range of tools. Ideally, one strategy would work everywhere, but research shows that’s not the case. AI search tools cite different sources, a 2025 Search Atlas study found. Some show significantly more overlap with the SERPs than others. This indicates that different tools follow different sourcing logic. And as long as that’s true, optimizing for one won’t necessarily boost visibility on another. The whole thing is even trickier because users seem more open to switching tools than before. Gemini may soon surpass formerly unrivaled ChatGPT in traffic share, according to Similarweb. That could change again quickly. Thinking there’s a single clear winner, like Google used to be, would be wrong. Focusing on the most popular tool at the moment isn’t a guaranteed strategy. To maximize visibility, we need to consider how multiple AI tools source their information, which implies our distribution strategy needs to be broad. Dig deeper: Tracking AI search citations: Who’s winning across 11 industries 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 AI search uses different logic from traditional search The Search Atlas study showed that some AI search tools overlap with Google more than others — but in all cases, the overlap is pretty low. Perplexity ranked the highest at 43%, while ChatGPT barely hit 21%. Characterizing Web Search in The Age of Generative AI (PDF) explicitly finds that AI search tools draw from a much wider pool of sources and are more likely to cite sites with fewer visits than traditional search engines. This shows us that fragmentation is compounding. The pool of potential sources is wider, with little overlap among AI tools or between AI and traditional search. The sourcing logic is changeable The most problematic factor out of all, though, is that the sourcing logic of one tool can and often does change, too. This leads to different domains getting cited for the same prompts at different points in time — a phenomenon called citation drift. Citation drift is more frequent than we might assume. Over the course of just a month, for instance, AI tools change approximately 40-60% of the domains they cite for the same prompt, according to Profound. In other words, one domain could appear several times in a single response, then disappear completely the following month. This flip-flopping gets even worse over longer periods. For example, Profound’s study also showed that, from January to July, as many as 70% to 90% of the domains cited for the same prompt had changed. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Focus on broad, multi-channel distribution Search is fragmented across tools and time. As cited domains change more frequently, users see more sources, making it even harder for you to push your brand to the front. So, what can we do about it? How should we approach this increasing fragmentation of search? While this might change as new tools and strategies emerge, the best answer we have so far is this: focus on broad, multi-channel distribution. When you can’t reliably predict which sources will be used, the best strategy is to widen your footprint. This creates more potential entry points into AI systems’ training and retrieval layers. Distribution also matters for another reason. AI tools often prefer third-party sources over branded domains, according to an AirOps study. This will require some serious shifts in how many SEOs approach their work. Here are a few you can implement right away. 1. Get good at collaborating You’re unlikely to win fragmented AI search on your own. Optimizing for it now takes a much broader approach than before, pulling in digital PR, social media, community management, and other functions. Those areas require skills many SEOs don’t have. Those who do still have only 24 hours in a day, so spreading that work across multiple disciplines isn’t realistic. This only works with a team. You might hate that idea, especially because it means giving up full control of your projects and results. I get it, but that’s the reality right now. You’ll have to let some things go, trust others to handle them, and divide responsibilities. In other words, you’ll need to collaborate efficiently. Dig deeper: Why 2026 is the year the SEO silo breaks and cross-channel execution starts 2. Broaden your skillset Even if you let experts handle certain tasks, you’ll still need at least a surface-level understanding of other disciplines becoming central to search. SEOs will still own at least parts of distribution, whether that means handling the high-level strategy or downright executing it on specific channels. In either case, doing this well requires skills you may not have used much before. So now’s the time to develop them. That could mean learning more about digital PR, partnerships, thought leadership, syndication, community presence, or something else. With so many possibilities, it helps to start with the area you feel most comfortable with or most drawn to at the moment. 3. Shift your mindset from ranking to presence You also need to change how you think about SEO, and then translate that shift into actual workflows. Google is still a major traffic driver, and rankings still matter. But for a fragmented, AI-driven search, obsessing over rank won’t cut it. Instead of asking, “How do I get this content to rank?” You now need to ask, “How do I get this content into as many places as possible?” Again, the goal is to create multiple entry points across AI systems, platforms, and audiences, increasing the chances of your content getting discovered, cited, and surfaced. That’s why it’s important to start thinking more about overall presence across ecosystems rather than just positions in specific search engines. 4. Redesign your workflow If you’ve successfully shifted your mindset from ranking to presence, it’s time to build a workflow that reflects that change. I know firsthand how easy it is to forget about distribution, especially if it wasn’t part of your process before. To make it stick, you need to redesign your workflow to position distribution at the core. A good place to start is by adding a launch phase, where content is distributed immediately upon publishing. After that, you could include a recurring phase every few months to ensure you regularly refresh and redistribute content. Define reusable details upfront, like which channels you’ll consistently target and who owns each one. That way, you’ll minimize planning from scratch and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Dig deeper: Content marketing in an AI era: From SEO volume to brand fame 5. Start with these easy-to-implement best practices Finally, if you want some easy tactics to immediately add to your to-do list, consider these: Pilot content partnerships, starting where it’s easiest. Usually, that implies reaching out to existing business partners first. Proactively distribute your content on third-party sites, whether that means syndicating it or repurposing it for Quora and LinkedIn. Pay attention to where AI tools already pull from. While sourcing logic changes constantly, you may still notice recurring patterns worth leveraging. Give a special push to your existing, older content to counteract the pitfalls of citation drift. Reintroduce it on new channels, or work to get it referenced in new places. 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 Rethinking SEO processes for fragmented AI search The shifts are large enough that you’ll need to rethink how you do SEO. As search fragments, the work itself will have to evolve. The approaches and workflows you relied on in the past won’t translate cleanly into a landscape shaped by multiple AI tools, changing sourcing logic, and constantly shifting citations. These processes will also become more complex because they require closer collaboration with other teams. Distribution now intersects with digital PR, social media, partnerships, and community management, making cross-team coordination more important than before. There’s a long road ahead. The best way to keep your sanity is to start small: focus on manageable steps, take them one at a time, and build from there. View the full article

Google is rolling out new AI features designed to quickly flesh out Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides using data from the web and your existing Google files. The overall aim is to eliminate much of the busywork involved in filling out templated documents, transferring data from saved files or internet sources into spreadsheets, and tweaking slide presentations to add new facts and figures—all while reflecting the personal and professional preferences expressed in people’s previous work. “It’s not enough to simply generate a generic email or brief,” says Yulie Kwon Kim, VP of product for Google Workspace. “People want AI to understand your specific context, delivering results that are deeply personalized to them and their organization.” In Google Docs, that means being able to instruct Google’s Gemini AI to generate a document mimicking the layout or writing style of another document, fleshed out with content from additional sources stored on Google Drive. Already, says Google Docs product lead Frank Tisellano, more than a third of Docs are created as copies of another document, and the AI features are intended to let users create at least a first draft of their new files close to instantaneously. When it comes to Google Sheets, the AI is able to translate plain language requests into detailed execution plans to filter, transform, and analyze data. In a streamed demonstration, Eric Birnbaum, who leads the product team for Google Sheets, showed how the new AI could quickly filter through a complex spreadsheet of property data, finding real estate matching certain parameters in a certain neighborhood and generating relevant bar and pie charts. “The Gemini agent, just like a human would, goes back and checks its work and fixes anything it might have gotten wrong,” Birnbaum says. Birnbaum also used a new AI drag-and-drop feature to automatically fill out a spreadsheet of data about a set of major corporations, populating fields for headquarters city, revenue, and market capitalization based on information from the web. “Just by looking at the column headers, Gemini can figure out how to go find what you need,” he says. And by generating a plan users can examine and ask the AI to tweak, Google may be able to assuage concerns about AI inaccuracy. Gemini can similarly populate Google Sheets presentations based on existing data, even tweaking existing slides to add new information without users needing to tediously resize existing text and graphics. And Gemini can also help search through and pull information from Google Drive files, like compiling a table of purchased items from a folder of PDF receipts, without actually crafting a new document. The new AI features will be available first to subscribers of Google’s AI Pro and Ultra plans, along with businesses in the Gemini Alpha program. In general, makers of business software from Microsoft and Google to Adobe and Canva have added increasingly far-reaching artificial intelligence features to their product suites in recent years, hoping to reach AI-curious customers where they’re already working. At the same time, AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have rolled out a growing assortment of ways to do work from within their AI platforms. Google, which says it serves more than 3 billion users and 11 million paying customers through its Workspace tools, hopes many of those people will prefer to use AI features in the software they’re already familiar with rather than turning to external AI tools. “You don’t need to go and learn a new app,” says Kim. “You can go and get the assistance from Gemini right where you are in your familiar place where you’re doing your everyday work.” View the full article

Few brands can point to a specific date for their downfall. For Sonos—once the darling of home audio—that date is May 7, 2024, when it rolled out a disastrous app update that left many of its 15 million customers confused by hardware and software features that were suddenly unusable. When all was said and done, more than a decade of brand trust was flipped like an off switch. Now Sonos is taking its first major steps to earn back trust and audiophile stature with a new brand strategy and the launch of two new speakers: the Sonos Play and Era 100 SL. The Sonos Play is framed as a “callback” to the original Play:1 speaker that invented the smart wireless speaker category 13 years ago. The portable speaker, which retails for $299, features 24 hours of battery life in a durable, waterproof design, and a built-in power bank to charge your phone. The second speaker—the Era 100 SL—is a new, cost-efficient entry point into the Sonos system. At $189 retail, it features wide stereo separation and balanced, natural bass while removing built-in microphones to focus on essential listening. Tom Conrad, who took over as CEO in 2025 after the app debacle, says the company is no longer in the audio hardware arms race with companies like Bose, JBL, and Apple. Instead, he’s steering Sonos back to founder John McFarland’s original vision: creating a system for sound at home. “I think we really just make one product and that product is called Sonos,” Conrad says. “Sonos is a sound system for the home, and any individual device that we make is just a way into the system or a way to deepen your engagement with the system. But the system is the product.” Eras Tour The Sonos comeback path hasn’t been smooth. After its app disaster, revenue dropped 16% in fiscal Q4 2024. Former CEO Patrick Spence stepped down in January 2025, and Conrad was named interim CEO (becoming permanent in July). In August 2024, the company laid off about 100 employees, then another 200 in February 2025, totaling about 18% of its workforce. Revenue began to stabilize by early 2026, but the company still showed a consecutive three-year decline in performance. Conrad says the company was in “triage mode,” having cut R&D spending by 26%, and sales and marketing by 25%. Part of the turnaround plan hinges on resetting the brand’s narrative, so in November 2025 Sonos named Colleen DeCourcy—former Snapchat chief creative officer and Wieden+Kennedy exec—CMO. Conrad sees the story of Sonos as having three distinct eras. The first being its decade under founder McFarland, and what he describes as being “relentlessly focused on this idea of filling every home with music, with a system for sound.” He says the second era under Spence was defined by “developing the muscle of building great new hardware” every year. He believes this era had an “unintended consequence” in that the company began to view itself as a seller of stand-alone devices like soundbars and headphones that competed directly with rivals like Sony and Bose. Now, in the third era of Sonos, Conrad’s goal is to merge the best parts of the first two. “I’m bringing the focus of the company back to this idea that everything we do is grounded in enhancing the Sonos system, and that our new product introductions are kind of like grace notes on that symphony,” he says. Brand over time The brand challenges for Sonos are crystal clear, but newly minted CMO DeCourcy sees a silver lining. One of the lessons she learned while working with ad agency legend Dan Wieden was knowing how to answer the question, “If your product disappeared overnight, what would people be missing?” The app breakdown in 2024 provided the answer. It quickly became apparent that millions of people were pissed off at the brand—but the upside is that they cared at all. “It was clear that there was a super deep connection to, fundamentally, not that speaker, but that system,” DeCourcy says. A primary pillar of DeCourcy’s strategy involves activating the roughly 17 million existing households with Sonos through word-of-mouth and grassroots engagement rather than traditional ad campaigns. She plans to leverage the “Sonos Soundboard”—a group of influential music and film creators—to remind users of the brand’s creative roots through social and other content. Details on executing the brand strategy are pretty thin, because this is all still very much in its infancy. Before any major brand work launches to the public, the priority is to sell the vision to the company’s 1,300 employees at its Santa Barbara, California, headquarters. “The first thing that’s on my bucket list to get done is to internally rearticulate . . . and pull people along on this vision of why we are getting up and doing this every day,” DeCourcy says. “And then letting that spill out into the community.” Now they just have to hope people are ready to turn up the volume and listen. View the full article

A streamlined application makes it easier than ever to apply to Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators. Here are six reasons why you should apply to our eighth annual BWFI program. 1. Brand exposure. Every ranked company and all those earning honoree status in a category will appear in the fall (September) issue of the magazine and on fastcompany.com. 2. Talent retention. Public recognition as a Best Workplace for Innovators honoree provides powerful third-party validation that enhances your ability to recruit and retain top talent. 3. Editorial access. Fast Company editors will review all applications; the application represents an opportunity to highlight individuals and projects that showcase your company’s innovation prowess. The insight Fast Company editors glean from judging applications informs our ongoing coverage, often leading to stories. 4. Credibility. Fast Company‘s reputation for writing about innovation is unparalleled in business media. Inclusion on the list is a powerful stamp of approval of your company’s efforts. 5. Employee recognition. The program honors an Innovative Team of the Year as well as an Innovative Leader of the Year, along with finalists in each category. 6. A level playing field. Every company is unique, so the Best Workplaces for Innovators application is structured to allow your company to focus on whatever particular initiatives and programs you’ve established to cultivate innovative work across your organization. There are different categories for different size companies, as well as companies from different regions and sectors. For more than 15 years, Fast Company has been recognizing outstanding achievement in business innovation with its annual awards programs. In addition to Best Workplaces for Innovators, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, Innovation by Design, World Changing Ideas, Brands That Matter, and the Next Big Thing in Tech lists have celebrated thousands of organizations transforming industries and shaping society through paradigm-shifting products, insights, or services. What differentiates Best Workplaces for Innovators from existing best-places-to-work lists is that it goes beyond benefits, competitive compensation, and collegiality (mere table stakes in today’s competitive talent marketplace) to identify which companies are actively creating and sustaining the kinds of innovative cultures that many top employees value even more than money. These are the places where people can do the best work of their careers and improve the lives of hundreds, thousands, even millions of people around the world. Best Workplaces for Innovators is the most authoritative list of companies cultivating an organization-wide commitment to innovation. We hope you’ll submit your company today. For more information on applying, see the FAQs. But don’t delay too long—the final deadline is March 27. View the full article

How one London trading floor coped with a record swing in pricesView the full article