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Long security lines snaked into baggage claim areas and parking garages at some U.S. airports this weekend, a possible indicator of more widespread travel problems as the latest government shutdown drags on. That kind of disruption, while not yet widespread, is not a concern that typically surfaces at San Francisco International Airport, the largest of nearly two dozen U.S. airports where screening checkpoints are staffed by private contractors under a little-used federal program that allows airports to outsource security screenings while maintaining TSA oversight. Because contractors’ pay comes from a federal contract, it often continues even when the government shuts down. “The money’s already been allocated, the payments have already been made, and that continues without interruption,” SFO spokesperson Doug Yakel told The Associated Press. “That is a very nice place to be.” The contrast draws attention to a long-running debate in the aviation industry: Can private contractors operating under TSA oversight provide a stopgap — and shield airport security operations from the political impasses that can disrupt U.S. air travel? Some aviation experts see the TSA screening program as a potential model for keeping security lines moving with fewer disruptions during shutdowns. At SFO, that system helped maintain screening operations during last year’s record 43-day shutdown, Yakel said. But critics caution that privatization is not a silver bullet — and could introduce new risks. The union representing federal screeners argues that moving operations to private companies could erode job protections and reduce pay and benefits for workers already facing high turnover amid demanding conditions. How the program works TSA’s screening partnership program allows airports to use private security companies chosen by the federal government to run checkpoints while TSA retains authority over procedures and oversight. The agency says private security screeners receive the same security background check and must meet the same medical requirements as prospective federal security screeners. In addition to SFO, other participating airports include Kansas City International Airport, Atlantic City International Airport and Orlando Sanford International Airport. The vast majority of the nation’s roughly 400 commercial airports, meanwhile, rely on federal screening officers employed directly by TSA. During shutdowns, those workers must continue reporting for duty even though they stop getting paid — a dynamic that has historically led to higher absenteeism and slower-moving checkpoints the longer a shutdown lasts. The current partial shutdown affects only the Department of Homeland Security, which includes TSA. Democrats in Congress refused to fund the department over objections to its immigration enforcement tactics. The lapse marks the third shutdown in less than a year to leave TSA workers temporarily without pay — and once the government reopens, to have to wait for backpay. Those disruptions can ripple through the travel system, cascading problems across already crowded flight schedules. The strain is especially acute this time of year as airlines and airports brace for what they expect will be one of the busiest spring break travel seasons on record. San Francisco’s airport is a ‘litmus test’ Aviation security expert Sheldon Jacobson, whose research contributed to the design of TSA PreCheck, said the program’s success at SFO, a large international airport, shows that privatization “is something that needs to be explored.” SFO is among the top 15 busiest airports in the U.S. when measured by passenger traffic. A major hub for international travel, it is the second-busiest airport in California behind Los Angeles International Airport. “It’s operated just as well as any other airport,” Jacobson said, adding that SFO’s multiple concourses and status as a hub for United Airlines demonstrate that even large-scale operations can be managed effectively under this model. “If SFO is the litmus test for delivering this privatized product, then many other airports can do it, too.” Jacobson noted that most airports currently using the program are smaller, but “the scale issue should not be a limiting factor,” and he called for a broader conversation on how such options could deliver government services efficiently and benefit travelers. “Of course TSA would have oversight. It’s not like they’re freewheeling on their own,” he said of privately contracted screeners. “We might as well use a government shutdown that affects air travel as an opportunity to begin that discussion.” Why TSA’s union opposes the private model The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA officers, has long opposed privatization. “We will never advocate for any privatization of any federal employees. We don’t believe that’ll work,” Johnny Jones, secretary-treasurer of the TSA union’s bargaining unit, said in a brief phone call this week. In a blog post on its website, the union argues it could weaken accountability for aviation security — one of the reasons Congress chose to federalize airport screening after the Sept. 11 attacks. The union also warned that private companies could face pressure to cut costs in ways that affect training, staffing levels and employee benefits. Relying on contractors, the union says, could create inconsistencies between airports if different companies operate checkpoints across the country, potentially complicating oversight of a system designed to maintain uniform national security standards. “We have to remember the TSA was created in the wake of 9/11 when there were no security standards or very minimal security standards,” said airline industry analyst Henry Harteveldt, president of Atmosphere Research Group. “The TSA came around, they established very stringent airport screening security requirements, which exist to this day.” Others say there are simpler ways to address the shutdown problem. Industry groups — including the U.S. Travel Association, Airlines for America and the American Association of Airport Executives — are urging Congress to pass legislation that would ensure aviation workers are paid regardless of the government’s funding status. “Every time Washington fails to fund the government, these essential workers pay the price. So do travelers. So does the economy,” Geoff Freeman, U.S. Travel Association’s president, said in a statement. “That is why America’s travel industry has come together, because this workforce is too important, and the stakes are too high, for this to keep happening.” An unintended benefit of outsourcing screeners Republican lawmakers have pushed in recent years to dismantle the agency entirely and replace its screening functions with private contractors overseen by the federal government. Last year, two GOP senators introduced the “Abolish TSA Act,” which would phase out the agency and transfer oversight to a new office charged with aviation security. Supporters of the long-shot legislation say privatized screening could be more efficient and less vulnerable to shutdowns. TSA leadership has signaled an openness to discussion. Speaking at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing last year, Ha Nguyen McNeill, a senior official performing the duties of TSA administrator, said “nothing is off the table” regarding potential privatization. “If a new privatization scheme makes sense, then we’re happy to have that discussion to see what we can come up with,” McNeill said. “It’s not an all-or-nothing game.” At SFO, officials say its screening model was adopted more than 20 years ago for reasons unrelated to government shutdowns. But with shutdowns in recent years growing longer and more disruptive, the airport says its arrangement has revealed an unintended benefit: fewer staffing disruptions at checkpoints. “The benefits, I think, are compelling,” Harteveldt said. “The real issue is making sure that any vendor, any partner to the TSA, upholds the strict standards that TSA has established and works with TSA to ensure that screening remains efficient and finds ways to make it even better.” Associated Press video journalist Haven Daley contributed. —Rio Yamat, AP Airlines and Travel Writer View the full article

The hits keep coming for fans of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen. According to a new court filing from a major franchisee, three additional Popeyes restaurants have permanently shut their doors, bringing the total number of store closures associated with the franchisee’s ongoing bankruptcy proceedings to at least 20. The franchisee, Sailormen Inc. of Miami, Florida, sought Chapter 11 protection earlier this year, citing diminished foot traffic and high inflation. In January, it closed 17 Popeyes restaurants in Florida and Georgia as part of the bankruptcy process, Fast Company previously reported. The additional three restaurants disclosed this week are all based in Georgia. According to a March 10 filing from Sailormen, all three were closed before its January bankruptcy petition. The company is now seeking to reject the leases on the three properties. Before its bankruptcy, Sailormen operated over 130 Popeyes restaurants. It was not immediately clear how many jobs have been lost as a result of the 20 store closures. At the time of its petition, Sailormen said it employed just over 3,300 employees, the vast majority of whom were hourly workers. It’s also unclear if additional restaurants will close. Sailormen did not respond to requests for comment. Which Popeyes restaurants have closed? According to a March 10 court filing, the following three Popeyes stores have closed: 1817 Glynn Ave, Brunswick, GA 31520 628 W Parker St, Baxley, GA 31513 419 S Church St, Homerville, GA 31634 The closures are in addition to 17 restaurants in Florida and Georgia that Sailormen said it closed in January. Why is Popeyes struggling? Restaurant Brands International (RBI), parent company of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, has downplayed Sailormen’s bankruptcy, stating that its underperforming locations are not indicative of the fried chicken chain’s appeal or its performance within the broader fast food market. However, Popeyes has arguably failed to keep pace with fast-growing chicken chains like Wingstop and Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, both of which are popular with Gen Z. Last month, RBI reported that Popeyes sales were down almost 5%, its fourth consecutive quarterly decline. In an earnings call, CEO Josh Kobza outlined plans to revive the brand with improved marketing and in-store coaching at low-performing locations. Popeyes had just under 3,200 locations in the United States and more than 5,400 globally as of December 2025. View the full article

Google is making Merchant Center for Agencies generally available in the U.S. and Canada today — giving agency teams a single login to manage, monitor, and optimize merchant clients at scale. What’s included: A unified dashboard for managing all client accounts from a single login Proactive diagnostics that surface critical alerts across the portfolio Merchandising-based opportunity tools to identify performance improvements feeding directly into Google Ads. Why we care. Managing multiple merchant accounts across Google’s ecosystem has historically meant jumping between logins and dashboards. Having it all surfaced in one place means problems get caught faster, before they quietly drain client revenue. And with merchandising opportunity tools built in, it’s not just a monitoring dashboard — it’s designed to actively surface ways to improve performance across your entire client portfolio. Early results. Digital marketing agency Socium piloted the product ahead of the holiday season, using it to monitor client promotions, inventory, and feed diagnostics from one place — and reported 50% faster resolution on monitoring tasks as a result. The big picture for agencies. Time spent on account monitoring and diagnostics is time not spent on strategy. Tools that compress that operational overhead — especially during high-stakes periods like Q4 — directly translate into capacity for higher-value client work. Agencies managing large retail portfolios should prioritize getting set up before the next peak season. What’s next. Full details are available in Google’s Help Center, with the rollout live in the U.S. and Canada starting today. View the full article

A new agency-dedicated experience Merchant Center experience from Google should streamline managementView the full article

Every few weeks, a new study drops declaring that Reddit (or YouTube, or Wikipedia) is the most important source for AI citations. Marketers share it. Clients ask about it. Someone starts drafting a Reddit strategy. Because it does. These analyses often flatten the nuance of prompt intent, model differences, and vertical context into a single headline number, and brands jump to start building strategies and teams around benchmarks that have nothing to do with their actual category or customer journey. The shiny object problem in AI search is real, and it’s getting more expensive. Tinuiti’s Q1 2026 AI Citation Trends Report (Disclosure: I’m the senior director of AI SEO innovation at Tinuiti) tracked high commercial-intent prompts across nine verticals and seven major AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta AI, over four months ending in January 2026. The early finding is also the most important one: there’s no universal top source. There are only patterns shaped by intent, platform, and category. Reddit grew 73% in citations, but not for every brand The Reddit headline is real. Across all categories and platforms we tracked, Reddit’s citation share grew by at least 73% from October 2025 to January 2026 and more than doubled in some industries. For Perplexity specifically, 24% of all citations in January came from Reddit alone. But a deeper look at ChatGPT social citations adds important context for brands: 99% of Reddit citations point to unique discussion threads, not subreddit pages, brand profiles, or corporate content, according to analysis from Profound. ChatGPT isn’t citing just anything from Reddit, so a Reddit presence simply isn’t going to cut it. The citation opportunity lives in whether the authentic conversations happening in your category contain useful, self-contained answers and whether your brand has any presence in those conversations at all. This means brands need to focus on driving authentic conversations, not simulating them. Fostering real community in spaces like Reddit — finding your brand ambassadors, participating genuinely, making it easy for satisfied customers to talk — is community building and reputation management. That’s the work that earns citations. The vertical variance is dramatic. Apparel AI citations included a 10% Reddit share in January. Transportation and logistics accounted for 2%. Beauty, electronics, food and beverage, and home and garden all landed in different places, each with its own growth trajectory. A brand in OTC health looking at the aggregate Reddit growth number and assuming it applies to them is starting from the wrong baseline. The platform layer makes it more complex still. Reddit’s share on ChatGPT was above 5% in January. On Google Gemini, it was 0.1%. If your audience is primarily finding your category through Gemini, the Reddit conversation is almost irrelevant to your AI visibility right now. Dig deeper: A smarter Reddit strategy for organic and AI search visibility 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 Google’s three AI surfaces are citing the web very differently Here’s where the “it depends” argument gets uncomfortable even for brands that think they’ve done the work of platform segmentation. Reddit accounted for 44% of all social media citations in Google AI Overviews in January. In Google Gemini, that number was 5%. That’s nearly a 9x difference in Reddit’s influence between two AI products built, maintained, and branded by the same company. The divergence extends across every social platform we tracked. Medium made up 28% of Gemini’s social citations and just 6% of AI Mode’s. YouTube registered 29% of Gemini social citations. 21% for AI Overviews, and essentially nothing on ChatGPT. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Quora all showed dramatic splits depending on which Google surface you looked at. A brand building its AI visibility strategy around Gemini performance data could draw nearly the opposite conclusions about Reddit than a brand tracking AI Overviews. They’d also reach different conclusions about Medium, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Same parent company. Same logo. Fundamentally different citation ecosystems. This is also why the volume of unique domains cited diverged so sharply across Google’s surfaces over the same period. By January, Google AI Mode was citing 143% more unique domains than AI Overviews – a gap that barely existed two months earlier. The surfaces are evolving at different speeds, in different directions, with different source preferences. Treating “Google” as a single AI channel is like treating “social media” as a single content strategy. Another data point adds context: roughly 17% of AI Overview citations overlap with Page 1 organic rankings, according to BrightEdge, and that share varies significantly by industry. Gemini, AI Mode, and AI Overviews cite different sources, and AI Overviews operate on logic that’s largely separate from the traditional Google rankings you’ve spent years optimizing. The surfaces diverge from each other and from organic at the same time. Dig deeper: AI Overview citations: Why they don’t drive clicks and what to do Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. What Amazon’s bot strategy means for your competitive set Consider what happened between Amazon and Walmart on ChatGPT over the past four months. In October 2025, Amazon led all major multi-category retailers in ChatGPT citations. By November, its share had dropped sharply. The major cause: Amazon has been aggressively blocking AI crawlers, with nearly 50 specific user agents restricted in its robots.txt file by late January, including all three of OpenAI’s crawlers. Walmart, which hasn’t taken the same approach, filled that gap and has seen its ChatGPT citation share rise steadily ever since. Amazon’s strategy is deliberate, but complicated. By blocking the Google-Extended crawler that feeds Gemini while allowing Googlebot (which powers AI Mode and AI Overviews), Amazon is being very intentional about what information it allows direct access to, with the trade-off that it’s not included in the marketplace set in ChatGPT embedded ecommerce. Amazon would clearly rather drive users directly to Amazon, where it controls the cross-sell, the upsell, and the recommendation via its own shopping agent, Rufus, than have its long history of product data and user-generated content fuel competitor platforms. Amazon sued Perplexity in late 2025 over exactly this kind of access dispute. The result is that Amazon’s citation share looks completely different depending on which platform you’re analyzing. In Google AI Overviews, it still holds a commanding lead over every other ecommerce player. On ChatGPT, Walmart has taken over. Dig deeper: How AI-driven shopping discovery changes product page optimization Know your category before you know your strategy Citation studies (including ours) should be used as directionals. When you see Reddit growing, check whether it’s actually part of your customers’ research journey in your category. Listen to the conversations, identify your brand ambassadors, and assess the level of effort versus the impact. When a platform dominates headlines, weigh whether it matters for your vertical before building a brand-new strategy and team around it. Value, effort, and impact look different for a beauty brand than a manufacturing company, even if they’re reading the same AI search news cycle. Test with that context. Use aggregate benchmarks to generate hypotheses, then validate them with your own data. The brands building durable AI visibility are doing the less glamorous work of understanding their own category well enough to know where to show up and why. For the full methodology and findings, see Tinuiti’s Q1 2026 AI Citation Trends Report (registration required), developed with Profound. View the full article

Fast Company will be back in Austin, Texas this March 13–16 for its 13th annual Fast Company Grill at South by Southwest. Hosted at Cedar Door Patio Bar & Grill in downtown Austin, attendees can expect four days packed with engaging programming, networking opportunities, activations and raffles, delicious food and drinks, live musical performances, and exclusive parties. We have a compelling lineup of speakers joining us, including: Ben Cohen, Cofounder, Ben & Jerry’s John Stamos, Actor, Producer, Author, and Chief Innovation Officer, Zeam RJ Scaringe, Founder and CEO, Rivian Lana Condor, Actor, “Pretty Lethal” Maddie Ziegler, Actor, “Pretty Lethal” Jen Zeszut, Cofounder and CEO, Goodles Elyse Cohen, Chief Impact Officer, Rare Beauty; President, Rare Impact Maddie Ziegler, Actor, “Pretty Lethal” Phoebe Gates, Cofounder, Phia Sophia Kianni, Cofounder, Phia Andy Pearson, VP of Creative, Liquid Death Anthony Wood, CEO, Roku Stef Strack, Founder and CEO, Voice in Sport David Lafitte, President and CEO, Tecovas Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO, Stack Overflow Amy Webb, CEO, Future Today Strategy Group Throughout the event, we’ll host happy hours featuring live music performances from talented up-and-comers, including the winner of The Voice Season 28 Aiden Ross, former American Idol contestant Maurice the Music, Latin R&B artist Henao, and Josh Abbott of the eponymous Texas-based band. For the first time ever, Fast Company is partnering with Texas A&M University to present “In Good Company” on March 16, a day of programming that recognizes and celebrates companies making an outsized impact in their respective sectors. In partnership with live illustration company Secret Walls, Texas A&M will also bring to life an interactive art experience at the Fareground Austin parking lot, across the street from the Fast Company Grill. Attendees are invited to collaborate on the project—a custom design for a flagship mobile clinic to be used by BUILD, a Texas A&M student organization focused on deploying mobile care to those in need—with a renowned muralist. If you’re not already a Fast Company premium subscriber, now’s a good time to sign up in order to receive fast-tracked access to the Fast Company Grill, specialty cocktails, and the ability to enter a daily raffle for exciting prizes from Dagne Dover, SharkNinja, Homecourt, and Tecovas. Speaking of Tecovas, Fast Company Premium subscribers are also invited to a a special afterparty at the Western apparel brand’s South Congress store on March 15 for cocktails, live music from country singer Cory Cross, custom iron branding and hat shaping, and discounted in-store shopping. Spots are limited, so be sure to sign up now. To register for the Fast Company Grill, visit our event website. A special thanks to Fast Company Grill’s sponsors: Texas A&M, Adobe, Bristol Myers Squibb, Capital One Business, IHG Hotels & Resorts, National Cryptocurrency Association, PwC, and Solo Stove. See you in Austin! View the full article

A good XML sitemap serves as a roadmap for your website, guiding Google to all your important pages. XML sitemaps can be beneficial for SEO, helping Google find your essential pages quickly, even if your internal linking isn’t perfect. This post explains what they are and how they help you rank better and get surfaced by AI agents. Table of contents What are XML sitemaps? Why do you need an XML sitemap? Do XML sitemaps matter for AI search? Adding XML sitemaps to your site with Yoast Frequently asked questions about XML sitemaps Check your own XML sitemap! Key takeaways An XML sitemap is crucial for SEO, as it guides search engines to your important pages, improving crawl efficiency XML sitemaps list essential URLs and provide metadata, helping search engines understand content and prioritize crawling With Yoast SEO, you can automatically generate and manage XML sitemaps, keeping them up to date XML sitemaps support faster indexing of new content and help discover orphan pages that aren’t linked elsewhere Add your XML sitemap to Google Search Console to help Google find it quickly and monitor indexing status What are XML sitemaps? An XML sitemap is a file that lists a website’s essential pages, ensuring Google can find and crawl them. It also helps search engines understand your website structure and prioritize important content. Fun fact: XML is not the only type of sitemap; there are several sitemap formats, each serving a slightly different purpose: RSS, mRSS, and Atom 1.0 feeds: These are typically used for content that changes frequently, such as blogs or news sites. They automatically highlight recently updated content Text sitemaps: The simplest format. These contain a plain list of URLs, one per line, without additional metadata These are HTML sitemaps that are created for visitors, not search engines. They list and link to important pages in a clear, hierarchical structure to improve user navigation. An XML sitemap, however, is specifically designed for search engines. XML sitemaps include additional metadata about each URL, helping search engines better understand your content. For example, it can indicate: When a page was last meaningfully updated How important is a URL relative to other URLs Whether the page includes images or videos, using sitemap extensions Search engines use this information to crawl your site more intelligently and efficiently, especially if your website is large, new, or has complex navigation. Looking to expand your knowledge of technical SEO? We have a course in the Yoast SEO Academy focusing on crawlability and indexability. One of the topics we tackle is how to use XML sitemaps properly. What does an XML sitemap look like? An XML sitemap follows a standardized format. It is a text file written in Extensible Markup Language (XML) that search engines can easily read and process. As it follows a structured format, search engines like Google can quickly understand which URLs exist on your website and when they were last updated. Here is a very simple example of an XML sitemap that contains a single URL: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>https://www.yoast.com/wordpress-seo/</loc> <lastmod>2024-01-01</lastmod> </url> </urlset> Each URL in a sitemap is wrapped in specific XML tags that provide information about that page. Some of these tags are required, while others are optional but helpful for search engines. Below is a breakdown of the most common XML sitemap tags: TagRequirementDescription<?xml>MandatoryDeclares the XML version and character encoding used in the file.<urlset>MandatoryThe container for the entire sitemap. It defines the sitemap protocol and holds all listed URLs.<url>MandatoryRepresents a single URL entry in the sitemap. Each page must be enclosed within its own <url> tag.<loc>MandatorySpecifies the full canonical URL of the page you want search engines to crawl and index.<lastmod>OptionalIndicates the date when the page was last meaningfully updated, helping search engines know when to re-crawl the page.<changefreq>OptionalSuggests how frequently the content on the page is expected to change, such as daily, weekly, or monthly.<priority>OptionalSuggests the relative importance of a page compared to other pages on the same site, using a scale from 0.0 to 1.0. Note: While sitemaps.org supports optional tags like <changefreq> and <priority>, Google and Bing generally ignore them. Google has officially discarded them. Instead, it prefers <lastmod> to signal (last modified) when content actually updates. What is an XML sitemap index? A sitemap index is a file that lists multiple XML sitemap files. Instead of containing individual page URLs, it acts as a directory that points search engines to several separate sitemaps. This becomes useful when a website has a large number of URLs or when the site owner wants to organize sitemaps by content type. For example, a site may have separate sitemaps for pages, blog posts, products, or categories. Here’s a breakdown of how XML sitemap and XML sitemap index differ: FeatureXML SitemapXML Sitemap IndexPurposeLists individual URLs on a websiteLists multiple sitemap filesContentContains page URLs and optional metadataContains links to sitemap filesUse caseSuitable for small or medium-sized sitesUseful when a site has multiple sitemapsStructureUses <urlset> and <url> tagsUses <sitemapindex> and <sitemap> tags. Search engines support sitemap limits. A single sitemap can contain up to 50,000 URLs or be up to 50 MB in size. If your website exceeds these limits, you can create multiple sitemaps and group them together using a sitemap index. Submitting a sitemap index to search engines allows them to discover and process all your sitemaps from a single file. In short, an XML sitemap helps search engines discover pages, while a sitemap index helps search engines discover multiple sitemaps. Below is a simple example of what a sitemap index file looks like: ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <sitemap> <loc>https://www.example.com/sitemap-pages.xml</loc> <lastmod>2025-12-11</lastmod> </sitemap> <sitemap> <loc>https://www.example.com/sitemap-products.xml</loc> <lastmod>2025-12-11</lastmod> </sitemap> </sitemapindex> In this example, the sitemap index references two separate sitemaps. Each one can contain thousands of URLs. This structure helps search engines efficiently discover and crawl large websites. Why do you need an XML sitemap? Technically, you don’t need an XML sitemap. Search engines can often discover your pages through internal links and backlinks from other websites. However, having an XML sitemap is highly recommended because it helps search engines crawl and understand your site more efficiently. Here are some key benefits of using an XML sitemap: Improved crawl efficiency Sitemaps help search engines like Google and Bing crawl large or complex websites more efficiently. By listing your important URLs in one place, you make it easier for crawlers to find and prioritize valuable pages. Faster indexing of new content When you update or add new pages to your site, including them in your sitemap helps search engines discover them sooner. This can lead to faster indexing, especially for websites that publish content frequently, such as blogs, news sites, or e-commerce stores with changing product listings. Discovery of orphan pages Orphan pages are pages that are not linked from other parts of your website. Because crawlers typically follow links to discover content, these pages can sometimes be missed. An XML sitemap can help ensure these pages are still discovered. Additional metadata signals XML sitemaps can include additional metadata about each URL, such as the <lastmod> tag. This information helps search engines understand when a page was last updated and whether it may need to be crawled again. Support for specialized content Sitemaps can also be extended to include specific types of content, such as images or videos. These specialized sitemaps help search engines better understand and surface media content in results like Google Images or video search. Better understanding of site structure A well-organized sitemap gives search engines a clearer overview of your website’s structure and the relationship between different sections or content types. Indexing insights through Search Console When you submit your sitemap to tools like Google Search Console, you can monitor how many URLs are discovered and indexed. This also helps you identify crawl issues or indexing errors. Support for multilingual websites For websites targeting multiple languages or regions, XML sitemaps can include alternate language versions of pages using hreflang annotations. This helps search engines serve the correct language version to users in different locations. Do XML sitemaps matter for AI search? Yes, but indirectly. AI-powered search experiences like AI Overviews or Bing Copilot still rely on the traditional search index to discover and retrieve content. That means your pages usually need to be crawled and indexed first before they can appear in AI-generated answers. This is where XML sitemaps still help. By listing your important URLs in one place, a sitemap makes it easier for search engines to discover and index your content. Keeping the <lastmod> value accurate can also help search engines prioritize recently updated pages, which is especially useful for AI systems that aim to surface fresh information. In short, a sitemap won’t make your content appear in AI answers by itself. But it helps ensure your pages are discoverable, indexed, and up to date, which increases their chances of being used in AI-powered search results. Adding XML sitemaps to your site with Yoast Because XML sitemaps play an important role in helping search engines discover and crawl your content, Yoast SEO automatically generates XML sitemaps for your website. This feature is available in both the free and premium versions (Yoast SEO Premium, Yoast WooCommerce SEO, and Yoast SEO AI+) of the plugin. A smarter analysis in Yoast SEO PremiumYoast SEO Premium has a smart content analysis that helps you take your content to the next level! Get Yoast SEO Premium »Only $118.80 / year (ex VAT) Instead of requiring you to manually create or maintain sitemap files, Yoast SEO handles everything automatically. As you publish, update, or remove content, the plugin updates your sitemap index and the individual sitemaps in real time. This ensures search engines always have an up-to-date overview of the pages you want them to crawl and index. Yoast SEO also organizes your sitemaps intelligently. Rather than placing every URL in a single file, the plugin creates a sitemap index that groups separate sitemaps for different content types, such as posts, pages, and other public content types, with just one click. Read more: XML sitemaps in the Yoast SEO plugin Another important advantage is that Yoast SEO only includes content that should actually appear in search results. Pages set to noindex are automatically excluded from the XML sitemap. This helps keep your sitemap clean and focused on the URLs that matter for SEO. Controlling what appears in your sitemap While the plugin automatically manages sitemaps, you still have full control over which content is included. For example, if you don’t want a specific post or page to appear in search results, you can change the setting “Allow search engines to show this content in search results?” in the Yoast SEO sidebar under the Advanced tab. When this option is set to No, the content will be marked as noindex and automatically excluded from the XML sitemap. When set to Yes, the content remains eligible to appear in search results and is included in the sitemap. This makes it easy to keep your sitemap focused on the pages you actually want search engines to crawl and index. In some cases, developers can further customize sitemap behavior. For example, filters can be used to limit the number of URLs per sitemap or to programmatically exclude certain content types. Because all of this happens automatically, most website owners never need to manage sitemap files manually. Yoast SEO keeps your XML sitemap clean, up to date, and optimized for search engines as your site grows. Read more: How to exclude content from the sitemap Make Google find your sitemap If you want Google to find your XML sitemap quicker, you’ll need to add it to your Google Search Console account. You can find your sitemaps in the ‘Sitemaps’ section. If not, you can add your sitemap at the top of the page. Adding your sitemap helps check whether Google has indexed all pages in it. We recommend investigating this further if there is a significant difference between the ‘submitted’ and ‘indexed’ counts for a particular sitemap. Maybe there’s an error that prevents some pages from indexing? Another option is to add more links pointing to content that has not yet been indexed. What websites need an XML sitemap? Google’s documentation says sitemaps are beneficial for “really large websites,” “websites with large archives,” “new websites with just a few external links to them,” and “websites which use rich media content.” According to Google, proper internal linking should allow it to find all your content easily. Unfortunately, many sites do not properly link their content logically. While we agree that these websites will benefit the most from having one, at Yoast, we think XML sitemaps benefit every website. As the web grows, it’s getting harder and harder to index sites properly. That’s why you should provide search engines with every available option to have it found. In addition, XML sitemaps make search engine crawling more efficient. Every website needs Google to find essential pages easily and know when they were last updated. That’s why this feature is included in the Yoast SEO plugin. Which pages should be in your XML sitemap? How do you decide which pages to include in your XML sitemap? Always start by thinking of the relevance of a URL: when a visitor lands on a particular URL, is it a good result? Do you want visitors to land on that URL? If not, it probably shouldn’t be in it. However, if you don’t want that URL to appear in the search results, you must add a ‘noindex’ tag. Leaving it out of your sitemap doesn’t mean Google won’t index the URL. If Google can find it by following links, Google can index the URL. Example: A new blog For example, you are starting a new blog. Of course, you want to ensure your target audience can find your blog posts in the search results. So, it’s a good idea to immediately include your posts in your XML sitemap. It’s safe to assume that most of your pages will also be relevant results for your visitors. However, a thank you page that people will see after they’ve subscribed to your newsletter is not something you want to appear in the search results. In this case, you don’t want to exclude all pages from your sitemap, only this one. Let’s stay with the example of the new blog. In addition to your blog posts, you create some categories and tags. These categories and tags will have archive pages that list all posts in that specific category or tag. However, initially, there might not be enough content to fill these archive pages, making them ‘thin content’. For example, tag archives that show just one post are not that valuable to visitors yet. You can exclude them from the sitemap when starting your blog and include them once you have enough posts. You can even exclude all your tag pages or category pages simultaneously using Yoast SEO. However, this kind of page could also be excellent ranking material. So, if you think: well, yes, this tag page is a bit ‘thin’ right now, but it could be a great landing page, then enrich it with additional information and images. And don’t exclude it from your sitemap in this case. Frequently asked questions about XML sitemaps There are a lot of questions regarding XML sitemaps, so we’ve answered a couple in the FAQ below: What happens when Google Search Console says an XML sitemap has errors? An invalid or improperly read XML sitemap usually indicates a specific error that needs investigation. Check the reported issue to understand what is causing the problem. Make sure the sitemap has been submitted through the search engine’s webmaster tools. When the sitemap is marked as invalid, review the listed errors and apply the appropriate fixes for each one. How can I check whether a website has an XML sitemap? In most cases, you can find out if sites have an XML sitemap by adding sitemap.xml to the root domain. So, that would be example.com/sitemap.xml. If a site has Yoast SEO installed, you’ll notice that it’s redirected to example.com/sitemap_index.xml. sitemap_index.xml is the base sitemap that collects all the sitemaps on your site into a single page. How can I update an XML sitemap? There are ways to create and update your sitemaps by hand, but you shouldn’t. Also, there are static generators that let you generate a sitemap whenever you want. But, again, this process would need to repeat itself every time you add or update content. The best way to do this is by simply using Yoast SEO. Turn on the XML sitemap in Yoast SEO, and all your updates will be applied automatically. Can I use <priority> in my XML sitemap? In the past, people believed that adding the <priority> attribute to sitemaps would signal to Google that specific URLs should be prioritized. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do anything, as Google has often said it doesn’t use this attribute to read or prioritize content in sitemaps. Check your own XML sitemap! Now you know how important it is to have an XML sitemap: it can help your site’s SEO. If you add the correct URLs, Google can easily access your most important pages and posts. Google will also find updated content easily, so it knows when a URL needs to be crawled again. Lastly, adding your XML sitemap to Google Search Console helps Google find it quickly and lets you check for sitemap errors. So check your XML sitemap and find out if you’re doing it right! The post What is an XML sitemap and why should you have one? appeared first on Yoast. View the full article

German defence group has been one of the biggest corporate winners from the Ukraine war View the full article

Personalized needs refer to the specific preferences and expectations that vary from one consumer to another. In today’s marketplace, 72% of customers expect customized communication from brands, highlighting the relevance of personalization. This approach not only improves customer loyalty but can likewise drive significant revenue growth. As businesses adapt to these evolving demands, grasping the factors that influence personalized needs becomes vital. What strategies are companies using to meet these expectations effectively? Key Takeaways Personalized needs refer to individual consumer preferences and expectations for tailored experiences in their interactions with brands. 72% of customers expect personalized communication, making it a critical factor for brand consideration. Personalization fosters strong relationships, leading to increased customer loyalty and repeat purchases. Companies prioritizing personalization can achieve a substantial revenue boost, enhancing overall business performance. Balancing personalization with privacy concerns is essential to maintaining consumer trust and satisfaction. Understanding Personalized Needs Grasping customized needs is fundamental for businesses aiming to connect effectively with their customers. These needs refer to the specific preferences and expectations of individual consumers. With 72% of customers expecting personalized communication, recognizing and comprehending these unique interests is critical. A substantial 76% of consumers deem personalized communication indispensable for brand consideration, emphasizing that addressing their personalized needs can greatly impact their choices. Furthermore, effective personalization can drive a revenue lift of 10-15%, showcasing its importance for business growth. In addition, 81% of customers favor companies offering personalized experiences, highlighting the link between personalized needs and customer satisfaction. As consumer behaviors evolve—75% have recently tried new shopping habits—businesses must adapt their strategies accordingly. This continuous evolution demands customized instruction designed to individual preferences, ensuring that businesses remain relevant in an ever-changing market environment. Grasping personalized needs eventually improves customer loyalty and drives successful engagement. The Importance of Personalization in Business Personalization in business isn’t merely a trend; it’s a necessity. With over 70% of consumers expecting customized experiences, companies that prioritize personalization not solely meet these demands but additionally boost their revenue by 40%. Enhanced Revenue Opportunities As businesses navigate an increasingly competitive environment, grasping the importance of customized experiences becomes crucial for maximizing revenue opportunities. Personalized content marketing plays a pivotal role; studies show that 78% of consumers are more likely to repurchase from brands offering tailored content. By implementing personalized offers, companies can achieve three times higher ROI compared to traditional mass promotions. This illustrates how strategic personalization can drive significant financial benefits. Additionally, 81% of customers prefer brands that deliver personalized experiences, highlighting the need for effective personalized communication. Companies that focus on data-driven customer intimacy not only see improved engagement but likewise gain a competitive edge, with potential revenue lifts of 10-15% for those excelling in personalization. Building Strong Relationships In today’s marketplace, where competition is fierce and customer expectations are high, building strong relationships with your audience is essential for success. Personalization plays a key role in this process. By using personalized communication, you can address your customers’ unique needs and preferences. When you do this effectively, your customer will provide valuable insights that improve their experience. Benefits of Personalization Impact on Business Increases customer loyalty 78% more likely to repurchase Improves positive brand perception 76% frustrated without it Boosts revenue 40% more revenue Cultivates deeper connections Organization-wide strategy Encourages customized recommendations Personalized content delivery Ultimately, businesses that prioritize personalization can cultivate meaningful connections that lead to long-term success. Meeting Consumer Expectations How do businesses keep up with rising consumer expectations in an increasingly competitive environment? To meet these demands, companies must prioritize personalization. Over 70% of consumers see personalized communication as a baseline expectation, and 76% feel frustrated when it’s absent. By planning for personalization, businesses can customize content to improve customer experiences. Those that excel in this area can generate 40% more revenue than average performers. Additionally, 78% of consumers are more likely to repurchase from brands that provide customized interactions. Organizations that adopt personalization as an overarching strategy not only enhance customer lifetime value but also drive significant revenue growth. In the end, comprehending and meeting consumer expectations through personalization is essential for long-term success. How Personalized Needs Influence Purchasing Decisions Personalized needs play an integral role in shaping purchasing decisions, as businesses that recognize and address individual preferences can greatly impact consumer behavior. A significant 72% of consumers expect brands to comprehend their interests, which directly influences their buying choices. When companies personalize interactions, they can achieve a 10-15% revenue lift, emphasizing the significance of catering to these needs. Additionally, 76% of consumers deem personalized communications vital for brand consideration, highlighting how customized messaging improves the likelihood of purchase. Customers who receive personalized content are 78% more inclined to repurchase, underscoring the value of recognizing individual preferences in building loyalty. To further illustrate this concept, think of personalized learning. When businesses define personalized learning as adapting to individual customer needs, they improve satisfaction and cultivate brand loyalty. Grasping “what is personalized learning” in this context can help businesses connect effectively with their audience, eventually influencing purchasing decisions. The Evolution of Personalization Over Time The expedition of personalization has shifted dramatically over the years, reflecting changes in consumer expectations and technological advancements. In the 1800s, shop owners used customer information cards to customize services, like cobblers crafting custom shoes. Nevertheless, the Industrial Revolution prioritized efficiency, leading to a decline in personalized services. With the rise of web-based companies in the late 1990s, such as Amazon, personalization evolved through recommendation engines analyzing customer behavior. As technology advanced, data analytics became essential for segmenting and customizing marketing efforts, paving the way for modern strategies. Today, the environment is dominated by data-driven interactions. Time Period Key Development 1800s Customized services using customer information cards 1990s Rise of web-based recommendation engines Present 92% of marketers report positive ROI from AI Benefits of Meeting Personalized Needs Meeting personalized needs offers significant benefits that can improve your engagement with customers and elevate their loyalty to your brand. When you tailor experiences to individual preferences, you not only create more meaningful interactions but likewise encourage repeat purchases, as many consumers prefer brands that understand their unique desires. Enhanced Engagement Opportunities When consumers feel their individual needs are recognized and addressed, engagement with brands markedly increases. This connection can lead to substantial benefits for both consumers and businesses. Here are four key advantages of improved engagement through personalization: Increased Attention: 76% of consumers value personalized communications, making them more likely to reflect on your brand. Revenue Growth: Personalized experiences can drive a revenue lift of 10-15%, showcasing the financial impact of customized interactions. Repeat Purchases: 78% of consumers are more inclined to repurchase from brands offering personalized content. Stronger Brand Perception: 72% expect businesses to recognize them individually, improving overall brand perception. Improved Brand Loyalty Personalization plays an important role in nurturing brand loyalty, as it allows consumers to feel recognized and valued by the brands they choose. When brands provide customized content, 78% of consumers are more likely to repurchase, enhancing loyalty considerably. Companies focusing on personalization often see a revenue increase of 10-15%, directly correlating with better customer satisfaction. Personalized interactions yield a threefold higher ROI compared to mass promotions, showcasing the financial advantages of addressing individual needs. In addition, 76% of consumers regard personalized communications as critical for brand consideration, emphasizing the necessity of customized messaging. Organizations excelling in personalization generate 40% more revenue, illustrating that effectively meeting personalized needs is important for strengthening brand loyalty and customer retention. Challenges in Addressing Personalized Needs Even though many companies recognize the importance of addressing personalized needs, they often encounter significant challenges that complicate their efforts. Here are some key obstacles you might face: Data Accuracy: 66% of consumers report experiencing at least one inaccurate or invasive personalized interaction recently. Data Silos: Misalignment between marketing and sales teams can lead to fragmented data, hindering cohesive customer experiences. Aggressive Retargeting: Overly persistent retargeting can annoy consumers, damaging brand perception and reducing personalization effectiveness. Resource Allocation: Implementing effective personalization strategies requires substantial resources, and many companies struggle to allocate the necessary budget and talent. Additionally, steering through privacy concerns is critical, as consumers are increasingly wary about data collection practices. Transparency in how you handle their data is fundamental for building trust and maintaining effective personalized communications. Addressing these challenges is significant for achieving successful personalization. Strategies for Effective Personalization To effectively address personalized needs, companies must implement strategies that utilize data and analytics to gain a thorough grasp of their customer segments. This granular view allows you to craft customized marketing messages that resonate with individual preferences and behaviors. Rapid activation capabilities, fueled by predictive analytics, improve your responsiveness in delivering relevant content to customers in real-time. Aligning your marketing technology and data resources with specific customer outcomes guarantees that your personalization initiatives are both effective and measurable regarding ROI. Utilizing a hub-and-spoke model for agile team collaboration across departments cultivates a unified approach, integrating customer insights seamlessly into all aspects of marketing. Finally, continuous improvement of your personalization programs is vital, as evolving customer expectations and behaviors demand that you adapt your strategies. By staying proactive and responsive, you can maintain relevance and engagement with your audience, ultimately driving better results for your brand. The Role of Data and Analytics in Personalization Data and analytics play a crucial role in shaping effective personalization strategies for businesses today. Comprehending your customers requires a granular view of their behavior and preferences. Here’s how data and analytics drive personalization: Customer Segmentation: It helps you tailor marketing messages and experiences to specific customer groups. Opportunity Identification: Advanced analytics reveal valuable personalization opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle, enhancing engagement and satisfaction. Revenue Growth: Companies excelling in data-driven personalization see a revenue lift of 10-15%, giving them a competitive edge. Predictive Analytics: This enables you to activate personalization quickly, aligning marketing efforts with specific customer outcomes. High-quality data is crucial for AI-driven personalization. Poor data can lead to ineffective interactions and damage brand trust. Balancing Personalization With Privacy Concerns In today’s digital environment, you’re likely aware that Google collects vast amounts of data to personalize your experience. Nevertheless, this raises important questions about data collection ethics, as many consumers have encountered inaccurate or intrusive interactions that can erode trust. To maintain a healthy balance, brands must prioritize transparency in their practices and allow you to control your data sharing preferences, ensuring a respectful relationship between personalization and privacy. Data Collection Ethics Though personalized marketing can enhance customer experiences, it raises significant ethical concerns regarding data collection and privacy. You must recognize the importance of responsible data practices to maintain customer trust. Here are four key considerations: Data Accuracy: 66% of customers have faced inaccuracies in personalized marketing, so ensuring data relevance is vital. Transparency: 80% of customers prefer personalized experiences from brands they trust, highlighting the need for clear data usage policies. Privacy Regulations: 72% of consumers expect businesses to understand their interests as they safeguard their data security. Consent Mechanisms: A lack of proper consent can alienate consumers, who are increasingly aware of their privacy rights. Balancing these factors is fundamental for nurturing loyalty as well as respecting privacy. Trust and Transparency As consumers increasingly encounter personalized marketing, they likewise become more aware of the implications of data collection on their privacy. With 66% of individuals reporting invasive or inaccurate personalized interactions, it’s vital for marketers to prioritize privacy and transparency. Simultaneously, 80% of customers are comfortable with personalized experiences; they expect brands to handle their data responsibly. Transparency about data collection and usage can strengthen a brand’s reputation, especially as concerns about security breaches rise. Moreover, organizations must navigate data privacy regulations as they meet consumer expectations, as 76% of consumers feel frustrated when personalization is lacking. Successfully balancing personalization and privacy can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, making it important for businesses to execute these strategies thoughtfully. Case Studies: Successful Personalization in Various Industries Successful personalization strategies have become a crucial component across various industries, demonstrating how customized approaches can greatly improve customer experiences. Here are four notable case studies that highlight the effectiveness of personalization: Banking: Jyske Bank boosts customer loyalty by leveraging transaction data to send timely, relevant communications, resulting in personalized offers that resonate with individual clients. Insurance: The industry uses predictive analytics to customize offers, considerably reducing churn rates and improving customer satisfaction through personalized services. Retail: Retailers integrate physical and digital experiences for targeted engagement, where personalized recommendations elevate customer interaction and increase sales conversion rates. Public Sector: Digital transformation initiatives enhance service delivery speed, allowing for personalized interactions that effectively meet constituents’ unique needs. These examples illustrate the financial impact of customized marketing efforts, with companies reporting revenue increases of 10-15%. Future Trends in Personalization and Customer Expectations As consumer expectations evolve, businesses must increasingly focus on customized experiences to maintain relevance and competitiveness in the market. A staggering 72% of consumers now expect companies to recognize them individually and understand their interests. Furthermore, 76% consider personalized communications vital for brand consideration, pushing brands to adapt their messaging strategies. To visualize these trends, consider the following table: Trend Percentage Implication Consumers wanting recognition 72% Need for customized interactions Importance of personalized communication 76% Adapt messaging strategies Preference for personalized experiences 81% Prioritize personalization efforts Marketers seeing positive ROI from AI 92% Improve content delivery As 66% of customers have faced inaccurate personalized experiences, it’s important for brands to guarantee accuracy and relevance in their strategies. Embracing these trends will be key for success. Frequently Asked Questions What Is Personalization and Why Is It Important? Personalization involves creating customized experiences and marketing messages based on consumer data and preferences. It’s important since over 70% of consumers expect businesses to recognize their individuality. Companies that excel in personalization can boost revenue by 40%, whereas 78% of consumers are more likely to repurchase from brands offering personalized content. Effective personalization improves customer loyalty, satisfaction, and ultimately contributes to long-term business growth, making it a crucial strategy in today’s marketplace. What Does It Mean When Etsy Asks for Personalization? When Etsy asks for personalization, it means they want to customize your shopping experience based on your preferences. This can involve selecting specific product options, like color or size, ensuring the items resonate with your tastes. Why Is Personalized Learning so Important? Personalized learning is essential since it tailors education to fit individual student needs, preferences, and learning styles. This approach improves engagement and retention, leading to enhanced performance. Research shows that personalized learning can boost student outcomes by 30%. In addition, it empowers educators to identify specific areas where students struggle, enabling timely interventions. What Are the 4 D’s of Personalization? The 4 D’s of personalization are Data, Determination, Delivery, and Dynamic. Data involves gathering customer information to tailor experiences effectively. Determination reflects an organization’s commitment to prioritize personalized interactions, enhancing customer loyalty. Delivery guarantees that personalized messages reach customers at the right time and through various channels. Finally, Dynamic signifies the need for personalization strategies to adapt continuously based on real-time data and evolving customer expectations, maintaining relevance in the marketplace. Conclusion In summary, comprehending personalized needs is vital for businesses aiming to thrive in a competitive market. By recognizing and addressing these unique consumer preferences, companies can improve customer loyalty and drive revenue growth. The evolution of personalization, driven by data and analytics, underscores the significance of tailoring interactions to meet individual expectations. Nevertheless, balancing personalization with privacy concerns remains fundamental. As consumer expectations continue to evolve, businesses must adapt their strategies to guarantee they meet these demands effectively. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "What Are Personalized Needs and Why Matter?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

A business roadmap is an essential tool that visually outlines your organization’s long-term goals and strategies. It breaks down complex objectives into clear initiatives and milestones, making it easier for your team to align efforts and resources. Comprehending its key components and how it differs from a business plan can improve your strategic approach. As you explore the importance of a roadmap, consider how it can greatly impact your organization’s growth and adaptability in a changing market. Key Takeaways A business roadmap is a visual plan that outlines long-term strategic goals and aligns daily operations with the company vision. It breaks down goals into manageable initiatives, epics, and milestones for improved clarity and alignment among team members. Unlike business plans, roadmaps focus on high-level strategies and are designed for internal teams, making them easier to understand. Regularly updating the roadmap ensures responsiveness to market changes and helps allocate resources efficiently. A well-structured roadmap enhances collaboration, communication, and overall performance within the organization by providing clear direction. Understanding the Concept of a Business Roadmap What exactly is a business roadmap, and why is it vital for your organization? A business roadmap is a visual plan that outlines your long-term strategic goals and the necessary steps to achieve them. It serves as a bridge between daily operations and your company’s vision, providing clarity by breaking down organizational goals into manageable initiatives, epics, and milestones. This strategic roadmap improves comprehension and alignment among team members, as everyone knows their roles and responsibilities. Unlike a traditional business plan, a roadmap offers a clear, visual representation of priorities and resource allocation. Regular updates guarantee it remains relevant as your growth strategy evolves, making it an indispensable tool for stakeholders like executives, project managers, and investors. Key Components of a Business Roadmap A business roadmap comprises several key components that collectively guide an organization toward its long-term objectives. First, the vision provides the overarching direction, ensuring alignment with the company’s mission and values. Next, goals are specific, measurable objectives that help you track progress, often defined with clear timelines. Milestones act as significant checkpoints throughout your roadmap, breaking down larger goals into manageable steps, which helps facilitate progress monitoring. Finally, strategies outline the approaches and initiatives necessary to achieve your vision and goals, taking into account market analysis and resource allocation. Together, these elements form a thorough roadmap growth strategy, ensuring that your strategy and roadmap effectively steer your organization toward success. Differences Between Business Roadmaps and Business Plans Although both business roadmaps and business plans serve essential roles in guiding an organization, they differ markedly in purpose and presentation. A business plan is a thorough document that details your operational strategy and financial projections, often focusing on securing funding and identifying market opportunities. By contrast, a business roadmap is a visual representation that outlines your long-term strategic goals and the steps needed to achieve them. Whereas business plans are usually dense and text-heavy for external stakeholders, roadmaps provide a clearer format for internal teams. Business plans emphasize day-to-day operations, whereas roadmaps concentrate on high-level strategies. Furthermore, roadmaps can adapt to specific topics or transformational activities within the organization, unlike business plans that cover the entire operational framework. Steps to Create an Effective Business Roadmap Creating an effective business roadmap involves a systematic approach that translates your organization’s long-term vision into actionable steps. Start by defining your long-term vision and establishing specific, measurable goals that align with your overall strategy. Next, conduct thorough market research and gather input from key stakeholders to guarantee that the initiatives you outline address real challenges and opportunities in the business environment. Organize this information into themes and prioritize initiatives based on their alignment with your goals, allocating resources effectively. Include key milestones that break down your goals into manageable steps for tracking progress. Finally, regularly review and revise your roadmap to adapt to changing market conditions, making sure it remains a relevant and dynamic tool for guiding your strategic efforts. The Importance of a Business Roadmap for Organizations Grasping the significance of a business roadmap is crucial for any organization aiming to achieve its strategic goals. It provides a structured approach that aligns team efforts and clarifies the vision. Here are four key reasons why a business roadmap is critical for your organization: Alignment: It aligns team efforts toward common objectives, enhancing collaboration. Clarity: Breaking down complex ideas into manageable milestones facilitates informed decision-making. Responsiveness: Regular updates guarantee your organization adapts to market changes effectively. Resource Allocation: By outlining specific actions, it helps allocate resources efficiently, minimizing risks and maximizing growth potential. Utilizing a business roadmap can markedly improve communication and overall performance, making it an indispensable tool for any organization working for success. Frequently Asked Questions What Is a Business Roadmap? A business roadmap is a visual representation of your long-term strategic goals, outlining the steps needed to achieve them. It helps you align your team, track progress, and maintain clear direction within your organization. By defining goals, initiatives, and timelines, it bridges the gap between daily tasks and overarching objectives. Regular updates guarantee it stays relevant, adapting to market changes and operational needs, in the end facilitating innovation and organizational growth. What Is the Purpose of a Roadmap? The purpose of a roadmap is to provide a clear visual plan that outlines your long-term strategic goals and the steps needed to achieve them. It helps you align your team by assigning specific responsibilities, ensuring everyone knows their role. The roadmap likewise allows you to track progress and milestones, measure accomplishments, and adapt to changing market conditions, finally enhancing your organization’s clarity and direction during transformational efforts. Regular updates are crucial for maintaining relevance. What Is the Difference Between a Roadmap and a Business Plan? A roadmap and a business plan serve distinct purposes. Whereas a business plan details operational strategies and is often used for securing funding, a roadmap visually outlines long-term goals and the initiatives to achieve them. Roadmaps focus on strategic alignment and adaptability, making them useful for internal guidance, whereas business plans are more static and geared toward external stakeholders. Comprehending these differences helps you choose the right tool for your business needs. What Is a Product Roadmap and Why Is It Important? A product roadmap is a strategic document that outlines your product’s vision, priorities, and key features over time. It’s important as it aligns your cross-functional teams by clearly communicating goals and timelines. This guarantees everyone understands their roles in achieving the product’s objectives. Conclusion In conclusion, a business roadmap is an essential tool for any organization aiming to achieve its strategic goals. It clearly outlines initiatives, milestones, and resources, encouraging alignment among team members. By distinguishing itself from a traditional business plan, a roadmap focuses on the execution of objectives rather than just outlining them. Implementing an effective business roadmap improves communication, prioritizes efforts, and enables responsiveness to market changes, finally guiding your organization toward successful growth and improved performance. Image via Google Gemini This article, "What Is a Business Roadmap and Why Do You Need It?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Five takeaways from Liz Reid on AI agents, the future of Google Search, and why originality now matters more than ever. The post 5 Things I Learned About The Future Of Search From Liz Reid’s Latest Interview appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The new Blink Outdoor 2K+ (5-Camera System) is currently $226.99 on Amazon, down from $349.99, and price trackers show this is the lowest price it has reached so far. Spread across five cameras, that works out to about $45 per camera, which is cheaper than buying them individually. A five-camera kit like this generally makes the most sense for a typical single-family home or townhouse, where you might want coverage at the front door, backyard, garage, and a couple of side entrances. In a small apartment, it may be more cameras than you need, but for a house with multiple outdoor entry points, the bundle saves you from piecing together a system one device at a time. Blink Outdoor 2K+ (Five-Camera) $226.99 at Amazon $349.99 Save $123.00 Get Deal Get Deal $226.99 at Amazon $349.99 Save $123.00 The cameras themselves are small and easy to place almost anywhere. Each measures approximately 2.8 x 2.8 x 1.6 inches and features an IP65 weather-resistant design that is dust- and water-resistant. Setup is straightforward because the cameras run on two AA lithium batteries that Blink says can last up to two years, depending on how often motion is detected. The bundle comes with the required batteries, mounting hardware, and a Sync Module Core that connects everything to your home wifi. Once installed, the cameras record 2K video (2,560 × 1,440) with a 135-degree field of view, which is wide enough to capture most entryways or driveways without much repositioning. In real use, footage tends to look sharp, with enough detail to pick out faces or license plates at reasonable distances. The cameras also offer two-way audio, motion alerts, night vision, and a temperature sensor that can send notifications if conditions cross a set threshold, according to this PCMag review. Plus, the Outdoor 2K+ adds new software features, including AI-generated descriptions of recorded events that summarize what the camera sees. Those tools are helpful, but they highlight the system's main trade-off: many advanced features require a Blink subscription plan, starting at $3.99 per month for one camera or $11.99 per month for unlimited cameras (to include AI features, the basic plan starts at $6.99 for a single camera). Without a subscription, you lose access to cloud-stored video clips. Another limitation is ecosystem support. The cameras work with Amazon Alexa and IFTTT, but they do not support Apple HomeKit or Google Home, which may matter if your smart home runs on those platforms. 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) 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

President Donald The President plans to visit Ohio and Kentucky on Wednesday to argue that his policies can steady an economy facing shock waves from the war on Iran and to try to defeat one of the few congressional Republicans who has dared to defy him. In Cincinnati, the Republican president is touring Thermo Fisher Scientific, a pharmaceutical company. There, he’ll tout efforts to lower prescription drug prices, a key part of his attempts to show his administration is focused on making the cost of living more affordable for many Americans ahead of November’s midterm elections. After that, The President will visit a logistics packing facility in nearby Hebron, Kentucky, part of the district of Rep. Thomas Massie. The President is backing a primary challenger to Massie. The trip presents a test of The President’s ability to cleanse his party of those who oppose him but also to try to stay on an economic message increasingly strained by the military action launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran. He’ll be “talking about the economy, which is, of course, the utmost importance to him,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Polls showed that Americans were increasingly wary of The President’s handling of the economy even before the conflict with Iran began, and fighting there has derailed The President’s messaging, as the low gas prices he once bragged about are now surging and stocks that had set record highs have slipped. Employers also cut an unexpectedly high 92,000 jobs in February, and revisions trimmed another 69,000 jobs from December and January payrolls — which the White House had previously hailed as “blockbuster.” None of that has stopped The President from continuing to insist the country is booming — and blaming the Democrats for everything else. “They’re the one that caused the problem,” he told a House Republican meeting in Florida on Monday. “But we’re really bringing down prices big.” Democrats offer a sharp contrast to The President’s depiction of the nation, arguing that costs remain high for many Americans more than a year into his second term and that families are still struggling under his policies. The President’s affordability tour meets his opposition to Massie After Democrats won the Virginia and New Jersey governors’ races in November, the White House announced that The President would travel the country to show that he’s taking kitchen table issues seriously and reassure voters nervous about still-rising prices and economic growth. Since then, the president has made stops in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Texas — though his speeches sometimes have been more focused on his own political grievances than his plans to try to help lower everyday costs around the country. This trip, however, marks the first time this primary cycle that The President has sought to keep promises to punish members of his own party who oppose him on key issues. The president has endorsed Ed Gallrein, a farmer, businessman and retired Navy SEAL, who is running against Massie in Kentucky’s Republican primary on May 19. The President and Gallrein will appear together on Wednesday. Massie is an outspoken The President critic who opposed the White House-backed tax and spending measure and bucked The President by pushing to have files related to the sex trafficking investigations into Jeffrey Epstein released. He’s also opposed the U.S. strike on Venezuela that toppled then-President Nicolás Maduro and, most recently, the war in Iran. “This isn’t America First,” Massie posted on X on Sunday, blaming the war for causing gas prices to jump. —Will Weissert, Associated Press View the full article

Some of the best mortgage companies to work for discuss how they incorporate community service in their plans and the resulting business and personnel benefits. View the full article

In domestic and foreign policy, the British right’s vulnerability is its America-worshipView the full article

WebMCP is a proposed browser-level web standard that lets any webpage declare its capabilities as structured, callable tools for AI agents. View the full article

Optimizing your client’s TripAdvisor listing is an important part of the local SEO ecosystem, even though it’s often treated as a secondary channel. Done well, it can increase visibility, drive more qualified website traffic, and strengthen brand positioning and online reputation. TripAdvisor frequently appears in search results for tourism and hospitality businesses and often serves as a key third-party discovery touchpoint. Treating it as a strategic SEO asset — not just a review site — can create meaningful advantages in visibility, trust, and conversions. How Tripadvisor fits into the local search ecosystem TripAdvisor is a travel booking and decision-making platform where users arrive with clear conversion intent, typically in the mid-to-lower funnel stages. It functions as both a comparison tool and a marketplace for hotel reservations, excursions and attractions, restaurants, and cruises. Reviews on TripAdvisor matter, but they don’t operate in isolation. Their impact depends on the overall quality of the business profile, including the clarity of its unique value proposition and the strength of its brand image. TripAdvisor offers less control than an owned website and doesn’t align with classic technical SEO frameworks the way platforms like Amazon or LinkedIn do. Still, Google continues to surface TripAdvisor prominently across tourism and local business searches, reinforcing its role as a trusted external source. TripAdvisor is also known for operating one of the most powerful programmatic SEO architectures in the industry, with millions of URLs indexed by city, category, search intent, and experience type. The platform is estimated to receive around 490 million unique visits per month. Dig deeper: Local SEO sprints: A 90-day plan for service businesses in 2026 Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with Why Tripadvisor SEO is about much more than simply collecting reviews Optimizing your business profile on Tripadvisor doesn’t just mean hoping users will leave positive reviews of your location or services. Follow these three strategies to strengthen your listing. 1. Respond to reviews with intention Strategically responding to reviews can strengthen semantic SEO by enriching the contextual signals around your business and increasing the likelihood of being referenced in AI-powered search experiences and LLMs. For example, if a guest mentions enjoying the hotel pool during a family trip but provides little detail, your response can thank them for their stay while highlighting the range of water-based activities available for children and older guests. This builds richer context around the hotel’s leisure facilities beyond the original review. It’s also important to guide guests when possible. For example, when using QR cards to encourage reviews, briefly explain the value of writing a detailed, descriptive review rather than a one-line comment. 2. Using fresh, high-quality images with descriptive captions Images on TripAdvisor act as immediate scroll stoppers. They must be visually strong, eye-catching, and vibrant, clearly conveying a positive emotion and a high-quality experience within seconds. If you’re unsure which images to place in cover or top positions, review performance data from platforms like Instagram or TikTok to identify visuals that generated the highest engagement. Ideally, refresh images every 4 to 6 weeks. Each caption should include a clear description, written in natural, fluent language, that provides context for the dish or service, the target audience, and the type of experience offered. For example: “Grilled salmon served on our sea-view terrace, a popular choice for solo travelers during the summer.” Dig deeper: The local SEO gatekeeper: How Google defines your entity 3. Categories and tags: Getting the basics right Proper tagging and categorization is one of the most poorly handled aspects of TripAdvisor. Incorrect categorization or missing relevant tags directly affects internal visibility, influencing rankings, filters, and curated lists. As part of TripAdvisor’s programmatic SEO architecture, these signals also influence how pages are structured and surfaced in Google when users search for local businesses. For example, to appear in TripAdvisor rankings like [The 20 Best Restaurants for a Romantic Valentine’s Day Dinner in New York], your categories and tags must cover the full range of real experiences your business offers. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. How Tripadvisor strengthens local and brand signals It’s surprising how many businesses still have duplicate listings on TripAdvisor in 2026. This usually happens because creating a listing is relatively easy and doesn’t require official business verification—something the platform could improve. However, claiming and merging duplicate listings does require official documentation to verify ownership, such as a business registration certificate or a recent utility bill linked to the business address. Make sure your business description, menu item names or services, opening hours—especially public holiday hours—and any other sensitive business information match exactly what appears on your Google Business Profile. From a brand SERP perspective, particularly in tourism and hospitality, TripAdvisor is often the main third-party channel where users discover your brand. In many cases, a TripAdvisor listing appears above your own website. An incomplete, outdated, or poorly optimized profile can weaken trust before users reach your site. Optimizing TripAdvisor means owning a critical part of your brand’s search footprint. Dig deeper: Want to win at local SEO? Focus on reviews and customer sentiment Tripadvisor optimization is a competitive advantage One advantage of TripAdvisor business profile SEO, which receives relatively little attention, is that when you execute it properly and quickly, it can become a clear competitive advantage and a strong strategic position against competitors. Just keep the following in mind for TripAdvisor rankings: Review velocity: A consistent flow of reviews is just as important as overall volume. Freshness signals: Maintain updated photos, current menus (including holiday menus), and seasonal activities. Engagement: Profile clicks and interactions indicate how well a listing captures user attention. Owner activity: Regular activity or responses from the business owner or a dedicated representative is crucial to send strong signals of a well-managed, customer-focused business. Profile completeness: Having a complete, robust profile demonstrates commitment and clarity in the value proposition. TripAdvisor SEO depends on consistency, attention to detail, and understanding how reviews, content, and engagement signals work together to influence rankings and user decisions. When you do it well, your customers become your strongest marketing asset. View the full article

Canva’s new AI tool, launching today, is going to save time, money, and headaches for so many people. Called Magic Layers, it turns any flat bitmap image into a fully editable Canva project, extracting text, objects, and components into individual layers. This tool marks a fundamental shift in how we handle digital assets. Until now, a rendered image was basically a locked vault of pixels. If you wanted to change a typo or swap a background, you had four options: 1) Hunt down the original project file, 2) painstakingly change it in Photoshop, 3) accept a generative AI patch job, or 4) close the laptop and escape to live a real life somewhere by a nice beach. Magic Layers shatters the vault. By reverse-engineering a flat picture into its constituent parts, Canva cofounder and Chief Product Officer Cameron Adams tells me, Magic Layers empowers users to resurrect and tweak any image they have on their hard drive. Canva uses many models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other developers, but the secret sauce behind this new layering capability is its proprietary AI design model, which the company unveiled last October. Think of it not just as a random design and image generator, but as a model that understands the elements of design. It looks at a picture and sees its skeletal structure—distinguishing the foreground subjects from the background scenery, and recognizing typography as actual text rather than just colored shapes. When you feed it an image, whether it was spat out by an AI prompt or dragged from an old folder, it dissects those elements perfectly. The new Canva multilayer tool is the implementation of those abilities. “Most AI outputs are fixed, really flat things, and they’re not easy to edit. You either have to, like, live with an 80% solution or you have to spend time reprompting, trying to get that little bit of the image that you wanted to get fixed,” Adams says. But now, he adds, “the model identifies everything in the frame and converts it into native Canva objects.” So text isn’t just a cutout anymore. It becomes a live, editable text box. You can correct spelling errors, swap the font, adjust the size, or even translate the copy for international markets. The same goes for visual objects. Once separated, elements like a product bottle or a butterfly become completely independent actors on the canvas. You can move them, resize them, change their color, or banish them from the composition entirely without leaving a gaping hole behind, Adams explains. And since these extracted layers are treated exactly like standard Canva design elements, you can apply all of the platform’s existing tools to them, including upscaling or generative tweaks like Magic Edit. “That’s the beauty of it, that it’s now a proper Canva design. So you can change any of those elements in any way,” Adams says. Because Canva operates in the cloud, this newly resurrected file is immediately ready for multiplayer collaboration. You and your team can jump into the project simultaneously and start moving things around. It’s getting better all the timeThere is an interesting parallel here with Adobe’s recent launch of a new AI assistant for its web and mobile Photoshop apps. Both companies are trying to fix the fundamental flaw of current generative AI models like Google’s Nano Banana. When you ask a standard AI to remove a single item from a picture, the machine recalculates the whole picture from scratch, inevitably introducing random errors or “hallucinations.” Adobe tackles this problem by allowing users to point at or draw around an object. The AI then places these modifications on independent, clear overlays suspended above the base image, preserving the underlying raw pixels flawlessly. While Adobe’s method builds new, highly controlled edits—including text—on top of an existing foundation to guarantee precision, Canva’s Magic Layers takes the opposite route: It dismantles the foundation itself, breaking the flat image apart into discrete, fully interactive components. While these tools from both companies do, indeed, appear to be magical, to me they feel like features that are not going to stick around for too long. They’re more like patches that solve generative AI’s current problems with output uncertainty. Once engines like Nano Banana or Seedream can nail down every pixel, every text and typography, every single human, animal, tree, pair of jeans, or shampoo bottle ever—and it will happen—we will no longer be worrying about things being in layers. Objects, type, and components will simply exist in the reality of the image; the models will understand them just like humans do, allowing users to change anything they want instantly, and with precision. Everything will be “liquid” for you to touch and change. Software will follow your exacting and most complicated whims with perfection. But for now, Magic Layers is going to solve a lot of problems for a lot of people and companies all around the world. View the full article

AI coding agents have become one of the fastest-growing categories in enterprise software. In the span of just a few years, these development tools have evolved from simple autocomplete assistants into autonomous systems capable of taking over the complete software development cycle, all via natural language prompts. As vibe-coding takes off, tools from startups like Cursor and Anthropic’s Claude Code have quickly reached multibillion‑dollar revenue run rates. Cursor reportedly crossed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2025 and has since approached $2 billion in Q1 of 2026. Anthropic’s Claude Code has scaled even faster, reaching an estimated $2.5 billion annualized run rate within its first year, making it one of the fastest‑growing products in the category that accounts for a large share of Anthropic’s $14 billion ARR. Yet inside large enterprises, writing code is rarely the hardest part of the job. Data scientists, engineers, and analysts spend much of their time maintaining and augmenting pipelines rather than building new ones. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI, therefore, is not software development itself, but operating complex data systems in production. Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi believes that the gap represents the next frontier for AI automation. In his view, the next generation of AI agents won’t just write software, but operate the data systems that modern businesses depend on. That strategic bet is behind Genie Code, a system of autonomous AI agents unveiled today, designed for data engineering, data science, and analytics operations. The system extends the company’s existing Genie platform ecosystem, which allows knowledge workers to ask questions about enterprise data in natural language. (More than 20,000 organizations already used Databricks’s data management and analytics tools; the company’s ARR surpassed $4.8 billion annual revenue in October.) “Instead of functioning merely as a coding assistant or helping generate code faster, these agents actually understand the structure of the data and existing data problems,” Ali Ghodsi says. “It can automatically set up pipelines, analyze why something is failing, and understand issues like when a dataset schema changes or when permissions are modified.” For instance, Genie Code can help determine how a dataset should be prepared for modeling—randomizing the data, separating part of it into a test set, or training a model on the remaining portion. After training, the system can aid in evaluating the results using metrics such as F1 scores or the area under the curve, and then analyzing them to determine whether the model is performing well or requires improvement. “It can suggest trying different approaches—maybe retraining the model or generating plots and graphs to visualize performance, and uncover reasoning about what changes might improve the results,” Ghodsi explains. “It’s not about just generating random code snippets, but understanding the entire structure of the data problem and working through the modeling workflow the same way a data scientist or engineer would.” Databricks and Enterprise Context A major reason many AI coding agents struggle in enterprise data environments is context. Most developer tools train primarily on public code repositories and general programming examples. Enterprise data systems, however, add another layer of complexity. Data carries business semantics, governance rules, and access policies that determine how information can be used. Without that context, an AI agent may generate technically correct code that fails once deployed in production. Genie Code attempts to address that problem by integrating directly with Unity Catalog, Databricks’ governance framework for enterprise data. This integration allows the system to understand data lineage, access permissions, and organizational policies across an enterprise’s entire data estate. “Maintaining pipelines and making sure they are reliable and always running is a big part of a data engineer’s job, and this is where Genie Code can augment them significantly,” Ghodsi says. “It can monitor systems continuously and respond immediately when something breaks, even in the middle of the night, analyzing complex traces and diagnosing what happened so that the pipeline can be fixed and kept running reliably.” The architecture relies on a multi-agent architecture powered by multiple AI models. Ghodsi explains that the system combines LLMs from providers including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, alongside smaller open-source models optimized for specific tasks. “There are many things inside a workflow where you don’t need a huge model—you just need something fast that can perform a very specific operation reliably.” The larger models provide the reasoning capabilities necessary for complex problem-solving and planning. Smaller open-source models are trained to handle more routine operations quickly and efficiently. Moreover, the architecture is built around multiple collaborating agents rather than a single monolithic AI system. Each agent specializes in particular functions, such as diagnosing pipeline failures or analyzing data patterns. These agents share context, memory, and skills, allowing them to coordinate their actions and execute complex workflows across the data stack. Databricks describes this approach as “agentic data work.” Rather than prompting an AI assistant for small pieces of code, users can delegate entire objectives to the system. Another challenge with autonomous AI systems is maintaining reliable performance in production environments over time, as agents often encounter unfamiliar scenarios that degrade performance. To address that issue, Databricks has acquired Quotient AI, a startup specializing in evaluation and reinforcement learning for AI agents. The company’s technology helps evaluate agent behavior, continuously measuring output quality and detecting regressions before they cause production failures. Quotient AI’s founders previously worked on improving the quality of GitHub Copilot, giving them deep expertise in evaluating AI coding systems. Vibe-coding for data systems The rise of vibe-coding has created a new battleground for agentic AI-powered coding tools and reshaped the competitive landscape in software infrastructure. Databricks is approaching the market from a different direction. Ghodsi says the AI coding market and the enterprise data automation market are evolving in parallel but distinct directions. While tools like Cursor and Anthropic’s coding agents are reshaping how developers write software, Databricks is focused on transforming how companies manage and operate their data systems. “Even though our product name includes ‘code,’ what it really focuses on is data work,” Ghodsi says. Genie Code targets the workflows that occur after data enters an organization’s platform. By focusing on the data layer, the company aims to address problems that general-purpose coding assistants are not designed to solve. “The other tools in the market help software engineers write application code, which is great,” says Ghodsi, “But for us the end goal is the data: transforming data reliably, and helping organizations work with their data.” Several organizations, including SiriusXM and Repsol, have already begun experimenting with the technology. SiriusXM uses Genie Code to help build and maintain internal data products, generate SQL queries, and debug pipelines. According to Ghodsi, the company has reported around 20% productivity improvements in data engineering tasks. Genie Code assists engineers in creating data products with defined service-level agreements and reliability guarantees. Likewise, multinational energy and petrochemical company Repsol is using the technology to accelerate forecasting and production workflows. Instead of manually connecting notebooks, pipelines, and models across different systems, engineers can rely on Genie Code to orchestrate these processes automatically. Ghodsi added that thousands of other customers are already experimenting with the technology, although many deployments are still in early stages. The Future of Human Engineering Ghodsi does not expect autonomous agents to replace human engineers. Instead, engineers may spend less time writing code and more time designing architectures, supervising automated systems, and ensuring that AI-driven workflows operate reliably. “The cost of automation is going down and the tools are becoming easier to use, so naturally the demand for automation increases. If you look at some of the numbers already, a huge percentage of activity on machines is actually agents operating in the background,” he says. According to the company’s recently released State of AI Agents report, AI agents now create 80% of databases and 97% of test and development environments on the Databricks platform. Just two years ago, agents barely registered in database activity, with human developers handling nearly all of that work. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that number goes from something like 80% to 99% in a short period of time. But that doesn’t mean humans disappear from the process,” Ghodsi explains. “You also have to think about legal responsibility and quality guarantees. Those are areas where you still need a human in the loop.” View the full article

The increase in borrowing costs coincides with a sharp rise in the 10-year US Treasury yield, which is correlated with mortgage rates, as war with Iran disrupted oil flows and sparked concerns about inflation. View the full article

Permit is crucial to growth strategy of Europe’s most valuable fintechView the full article

Each year, some of America’s greatest artists, thinkers, and business leaders have a chance to come together at SXSW in the spirit of creativity, innovation, and future-building. And with everything currently happening in technology and the workforce, this year’s gathering feels particularly timely. Of course, questions around AI will take center stage and remain our primary cultural fixation: How long until the next incredible breakthrough? Should Americans be fearful about an impending AI apocalypse or hopeful about the prospect of unlimited productivity gains? These topics are all valid, urgent, and deeply worthwhile to explore, but I also believe the most important workforce story unfolding in the U.S. today is less about what AI will do next, and more about what everyday Americans are doing right now in response to and in preparation for AI’s growing impacts. If technological advancement is going to keep accelerating faster than our institutions can or are willing to adapt, the fact that workers have already begun adapting on their own in real time is a story of deep-rooted resilience within our culture and communities. It is also a story that seems to be signaling a pragmatic and optimistic reimagining of the American Dream. WORKFORCE DISRUPTION IS WELL UNDERWAY The speed of AI advancement is likely to continue to be astonishing. Although we can neither predict nor control the pace of innovation, we can acknowledge that AI is no longer a hypothetical but an economic force reshaping job security, hiring, and career planning. We also need to understand that while AI adoption has added pressure, workforce fragility in the U.S. was deepening long before generative models like ChatGPT entered the picture. Education costs have been compounding at an unhealthy rate in America for nearly half a century, with rising tuition costs significantly outpacing inflation since the 1980s. Meanwhile, the country’s student debt crisis also continues deepening, with total student loan debt in the U.S. exceeding $1.7 trillion in 2024, all while broader confidence in traditional education and career pathways has been gradually eroding. AI isn’t causing workforce uncertainty but merely adding weight on top of existing cracks in the system. To focus solely on predicting the pace and extent of AI-driven job loss misses the real story: U.S. workers are already adapting, and it’s a process involving a bold reimagining of American values and stability. AMERICANS ARE CHOOSING DURABILITY Despite so much uncertainty, Americans don’t appear to be giving in to fear as much as they’re leaning into resilience and practical decision-making. There are some strong cultural signals indicating a radical shift in the U.S. workforce’s strategic mindset, particularly in evolving views around traditional education and career pathways in this AI age. More specifically, a new survey of American workers we conducted at the Business For Good Foundation via the Harris Poll revealed a clear and widespread departure from most conventional ways of thinking about professional and economic fulfillment. For example, 75% of Americans shared that their views of a “good job” does not look the same now as five years ago, while 80% agreed more people are choosing trade training over four-year degree programs. Similarly, more than 78% said they believe long-lasting social and cultural stigmas around blue-collar work are beginning to dissipate in the U.S., with 76% saying they believe trade jobs are less likely to be replaced by AI. Rather than fearing widespread job loss and sustained unemployment, Americans are envisioning a future workforce defined by durability, where the workforce’s economic value is concentrated less in white-collar sectors and more by the durable, hands-on skills that have always played an indispensable role. It suggests an overall mood of pragmatic optimism, with Americans appearing to adjust to AI adoption much faster than our political and educational systems. GET AHEAD OF CHANGE While everyday Americans seem eager to get ahead of AI’s inevitable changes, this likely won’t happen at scale without the appropriate support from organizations and U.S. business leaders. Recognizing this heightened need for more hands-on programs to increase access to skilled trade training, we at the Business for Good Foundation committed $100,000 to advancing workforce development in the first half of 2026. Of course, this will also require strategy and coordination, grounded in shared recognition that this shift away from traditional white-collar pathways is not an error but a process of economic regeneration. The growing emphasis on hands-on trades is not nostalgia, but necessary to strengthen the U.S. innovation infrastructure. Skilled work continues to underpin all non-negotiable aspects of American society, including access to housing and healthcare. At the same time, U.S. business owners are grappling with critical, pre-existing skilled labor shortages, meaning they’ll increasingly need to depend on talent pipelines beyond traditional degree models. One recent example of what we’ve done at the Business for Good Foundation is a New York Capital Region pilot. As part of our commitment to workforce development, the foundation awarded a $25,000 grant to the Social Enterprise and Training (SEAT) Center to expand trade skills programming in the region and help bridge the gap between untapped talent and industry demand. I’ve seen firsthand that simple, practical investments like in the SEAT Center—those that better align workforce pathways with employer needs and expand access to education and career opportunities for motivated talent in underserved communities—can go a long way toward creating a real and sustainable path to upward economic mobility. I’m encouraging leaders across the country to take similar action, at any scale. However, such a model will largely remain limited without other like-minded business leaders and philanthropists willing to build on and replicate it at scale, and who are prepared to fully embrace a new American dream defined less by credentials and more by individual capabilities, determination, and human resilience. While this kind of change certainly won’t happen overnight, I hope that those of us who attend SXSW this week might begin aligning our business priorities with the unique spirit of this event, working together to intentionally build a brighter, more prosperous, and innovative future for the U.S. workforce. Ed Mitzen is cofounder of Business for Good Foundation. View the full article

After last month's massive security update, Microsoft's Patch Tuesday push for March seems relatively light, withtwo publicly disclosed zero-day flaws among the 83 vulnerabilities fixed in total. The breakdown of security flaws is as follows, according to BleepingComputer: 46 elevation-of-privilege vulnerabilities, two security feature bypass vulnerabilities, 18 remote-code-execution vulnerabilities, 10 information disclosure vulnerabilities, four denial of service vulnerabilities, and four spoofing vulnerabilities. Two of the remote code execution vulnerabilities and one of the information disclosure vulnerabilities are labeled "critical." Patch Tuesday is typically pushed at 10 am PT on the second Tuesday of every month. Two publicly disclosed zero-days for this Patch TuesdayZero-day vulnerabilities are flaws that have been either actively exploited or publicly disclosed before an official fix is made available by the developer. This month, both of the zero days being patched have been publicly disclosed, but Microsoft hasn't indicated that either has been actively exploited by attackers. The first, labeled CVE-2026-21262, is an elevation of privilege vulnerability in the SQL Server that grants SQLAdmin privileges to an authorized attacker over a network. Erland Sommarskog has been credited with discovery. The second zero-day, labeled CVE-2026-26127, is a .NET denial of service vulnerability that has been attributed to an anonymous researcher. The March update also includes two patches for remote code execution vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office and a handful of fixes for flaws in Microsoft Excel, so users should ensure these applications are up to date as well. View the full article

Apple’s iOS 26 for iPhone got off to a rough start when it was finally released to the public in September of last year. Its new Liquid Glass design language remained unpolished in many areas, and the operating system harbored a fair amount of bugs. But since iOS 26.0 debuted, Apple has released three major updates for it, further polishing the interface and adding new features. And soon, Apple will update iOS 26 once again with the release of iOS 26.4. It’s a release that is set to not just eliminate bugs and enhance the details of Liquid Glass, but is also set to add some significant new features to your iPhone. Here’s what’s coming, and when you can get iOS 26.4. What new features are coming to iOS 26.4? Apple has been beta testing iOS 26.4 since last month. Originally, the software update was rumored to include the company’s revamped Siri, powered by Google’s Gemini LLM. However, Siri’s AI revamp has been absent from all iOS 26.4 betas to date, so it looks like a truly useful Apple digital assistant is still a ways away. But that doesn’t mean iOS 26.4 doesn’t have any new features. Quite the contrary. Besides your normal user interface polishes and bug fixes, iOS 26.4 is set to include some major upgrades to its media apps, notes 9to5Mac. Those upgrades include: AI-powered music playlist creation: iOS 26.4 will add a feature to the Music app called “Playlist Playground.” The feature allows you to generate music playlists from natural-language text descriptions. So you could instruct the Playlist Playground feature to make a playlist of “80s rock ballads under five minutes long,” and the Music app will generate a playlist based on your prompt. Podcasts app video overhaul: Apple’s Podcasts app has supported video podcasts for some time. But in iOS 26.4, its video capabilities are getting a major upgrade. Now you can quickly switch between the audio and video versions of a podcast. This feature will be great for those times when you are watching a video podcast, but then suddenly need to be on the move—soon you’ll be able to easily switch to the audio version of the podcast, ensuring you can still enjoy it when your eyes are needed on other things. Redesigned album and playlist interface: Also in the Music app, Apple has redesigned the look of the interface that you see when displaying playlists or albums in full screen. In iOS 26.4, the Music app will now tint the entire screen based on the album art color scheme, giving each playlist and album its own unique look. And that’s not all: iOS 26.4 will add numerous small refinements and additions across the operating system, including new emojis, new Ambient Music widgets for your Home Screen, automatic activation of Stolen Device Protection, and more. iOS 26.4 beta: Download it now While Apple hasn’t released iOS 26.4 to the general public yet, it has released four betas of the software to developers and public beta testers. And if you are in any of those two groups, you can download the latest beta of iOS 26.4 onto your iPhone today. To download the developer beta, you’ll need to be a member of the Apple Developer Program. If you’re not a developer, but still want to try out the new software early, you can join the Apple Beta Software Program for free and get access to public betas—including the iOS 26.4 beta—today. Of course, the usual warning applies: betas are buggy, and in rare cases, they can cause data loss or otherwise harm your phone. So always proceed with caution if you decide to download a beta. iOS 26.4 final release: Download it later this month If a beta isn’t your thing, you’ll have to wait until Apple releases the final version of iOS 26.4 to the public. Thankfully, you probably won’t have to wait too much longer. Apple generally has a 5-6 beta development cycle for iOS “point” upgrades like iOS 26.4. Apple released the first iOS 26.4 beta in mid-February, which means the final public version of the beta is highly likely to be released between mid-March and the end of the month. Once Apple releases the final version of the software, you’ll be able to download iOS 26.4 right to your iPhone using the device’s Software Update feature in the Settings app. View the full article

OpenAI confirmed on March 6 that it is delaying the rollout of “adult mode” in ChatGPT, a feature that would give verified adults access to less-restricted content. The company first announced plans to begin age-gating users last year but has now pushed back the launch twice. Segregating adult users from minors could help in some of OpenAI’s legal and revenue challenges, but nailing the technology may not be easy. Adult mode had been expected this quarter and still is, just later than originally planned. OpenAI referred Fast Company to a comment it gave to Alex Heath’s Sources newsletter saying it was pausing the feature to focus on improvements to ChatGPT, including “gains in intelligence, personality improvements, personalization, and making the experience more proactive.” (It also told Axios it needs more time. “We still believe in the principle of treating adults like adults, but getting the experience right will take more time,” the company said.) OpenAI first hinted at the feature last October in an X post from CEO Sam Altman responding to questions about ChatGPT’s safety for underage users. “As we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults,” Altman wrote. Adult mode depends on OpenAI’s new age-prediction and verification system, a homegrown AI model that estimates a user’s age based on prompts and media generated with tools like Sora. OpenAI said in January it had begun rolling out the technology globally within ChatGPT. When the system detects a user may be underage, it restricts things like violent content and romantic role-play. The company also uses a third-party verification platform called Persona, which allows users to confirm their age if the AI system places them in the wrong category. But accurate age prediction and verification isn’t easy, and using it to age-gate chatbot users is a relatively new idea. How, for instance, can an AI model distinguish between a 16-year-old in high school and a 19-year-old in college when the two talk to ChatGPT about similar things? “You can imagine . . . if you input anything that looks like a homework question, ChatGPT flags you as a minor, and then you’re automatically in the minor bucket,” says Alissa Cooper, executive director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute, a tech policy group. “That would pretty seriously constrain the service for college students or people who might just happen to have asked a question that looks like a homework question.” Naturally, some younger users will try to trick the age-prediction model into thinking they’re adults. “There’s not really a way to prevent circumvention regardless of the architecture or the system design,” Cooper says. “So there’s this balance between locking things down to try to prevent circumvention, and allowing a full-featured experience for users who are age appropriate for whatever that experience is meant to be.” One of Cooper’s main concerns is that the world outside OpenAI won’t know how well the system is performing. And, so far at least, OpenAI isn’t sharing much information about its system. “I think it’s correct to be skeptical,” Cooper says, adding that she believes companies should provide enough transparency about how their age-verification systems are tested so that independent experts can evaluate whether they actually work and examine the data used to estimate the ages of potentially hundreds of millions of users. OpenAI was put on notice last year when it was twice sued by people claiming that earlier versions of ChatGPT had led an adolescent loved one toward suicide. This set the stage for the company first applying more guardrails to its models for all users, then attempting to cordon off a safe experience for younger users. With younger users safely segregated, OpenAI could loosen or remove some content restrictions for adult users, the thinking goes. That adult mode could become a real selling point, and right now ChatGPT could use one. ChatGPT, which has 800 million weekly active users, once faced little real competition among AI chatbots. ChatGPT still has the most users, but competition has heated up with Google’s improvement of its Gemini chatbot, and with Anthropic’s Claude gaining more mainstream name recognition. Not only is OpenAI under pressure to fend off those rivals, but it’s also under pressure to increase revenue from the chatbot to help offset the massive expenditures it plans to make in new data centers over the next five years. Signing up millions of new adult users to that experience would not only increase OpenAI’s subscription revenues, but it could mean millions more highly engaged eyeballs to look at advertisements (the company said in January it’ll soon start showing ads to some of its U.S. users). “So I think it’s segmentation of the user base in multiple directions,” says Cooper. “It’s keeping minors away from experiences that nobody wants them to have, but also being able to offer adults experiences that are truly adult-oriented that some adults want to have.” View the full article