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The The President administration is vowing to crack down on foreign tech companies’ exploitation of U.S. artificial intelligence models, singling out China at a time that country is narrowing the gap with the U.S. in the AI race. In a Thursday memo, Michael Kratsios, the president’s chief science and technology adviser, accused foreign entities “principally based in China” of engaging in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to “distill,” or extract capabilities from, leading AI systems made in the U.S. and “exploiting American expertise and innovation.” The administration, Kratsios wrote, will work with American AI companies to identify such activities, build defenses and find ways to punish offenders. The memo arrives at a time when China is challenging U.S. dominance in artificial intelligence, an area where the White House says the U.S. must prevail to set global standards and reap economic and military benefits. But the U.S.-China gap in performance of top AI models has “effectively closed,” according to a recent report from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI. China’s embassy in Washington said it opposed “the unjustified suppression of Chinese companies by the U.S.” “China has always been committed to promoting scientific and technological progress through cooperation and healthy competition. China attaches great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights,” said Liu Pengyu, the embassy spokesperson. In Beijing, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters Friday that the U.S. claims are groundless and were smearing the achievements of China’s artificial intelligence industry. “China firmly opposes this. We urge the U.S. to respect facts, discard prejudice, stop suppressing China’s technological development, and do more to promote scientific and technological exchange and cooperation between the two countries,” he said. Kratsios’ memo also came the same week that the House Foreign Affairs Committee offered unanimous, bipartisan support for a bill to set up a process to identify foreign actors that extract “key technical features” of closed-source, U.S.-owned AI models and to punish them with measures including sanctions. “Model extraction attacks are the latest frontier of Chinese economic coercion and theft of U.S. intellectual property,” said Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., who sponsored the bill. “American AI models are demonstrating transformative cyber capabilities, and it is critical we prevent China from stealing these technological advancements.” Last year, the Chinese startup DeepSeek rattled U.S. markets when it released a large language model that could compete with U.S. AI giants but at a fraction of the cost. David Sacks, then serving as President Donald The President’s AI and crypto adviser, suggested that DeepSeek copied U.S. models. “There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models,” Sacks said then. In a February letter to U.S. lawmakers, OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, made similar allegations and said China should not be allowed to advance “autocratic AI” by “appropriating and repackaging American innovation.” Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, in February accused DeepSeek and two other China-based AI laboratories of engaging in campaigns to “illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models” using the distillation technique that “involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.” Anthropic said distillation can be a legitimate way to train AI systems but it’s a problem when competitors “use it to acquire powerful capabilities from other labs in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it would take to develop them independently.” But it can go both ways. San Francisco-based startup Anysphere, maker of the popular coding tool Cursor, recently acknowledged that its latest product was based on an open-source model made by Chinese company Moonshot AI, maker of the chatbot Kimi. Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Washington-based think tank The Brookings Institution and an expert on China’s technology development, said it will be like “looking for needles in an enormous haystack” to separate unauthorized distillation from the vast volume of legitimate requests for data. But information sharing and coordination among U.S. AI labs could help, and the federal government can play an important role in facilitating anti-distillation efforts across labs, Chan said. It’s hard to assess how far the House bill can go, but Chan said The President may not want to rock the boat with Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of a planned mid-May state visit to Beijing. AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report. —Didi Tang, Associated Press View the full article

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google now won't use spam reports with personal identifiable information. Google's head of search...View the full article

Amid a merger with SpaceX, a $60 billion option to acquire the AI company Cursor, and an upcoming public offering, Elon Musk’s xAI firm is still losing employees. Every xAI cofounder, other than Elon Musk, has now exited the company. Dozens of people who served on xAI’s engineering and program staff have also departed, a Fast Company review shows. This overlaps with a significant share of the people meant to direct the startup under a new organizational structure that was only announced in February. While it’s natural for employees to come and go from any company, the string of xAI departures—and these are only the publicly searchable ones—is notable because they come as Musk continues to reorient xAI’s overall direction and contend with criticism of the company’s flagship chatbot, Grok. Fast Company ultimately identified about 80 people, including cofounders, technical staff, and legal advisors, who have departed xAI within the past year or so. It’s not publicly known how many people currently work at xAI in total, though Business Insider reported that about 1,200 people were employed at the company as of last March. (xAI and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.) Founded in 2023, xAI is supposed to be focused on building “maximally curious” and “pro-humanity” AI systems that compete with models under development at companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. xAI’s founding members included a range of employees who previously worked at firms like Google’s DeepMind and OpenAI, including Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic, and Christian Szegedy. But the company has continued to face a crowded field of AI labs offering large language models to consumers, enterprise businesses, and even the U.S. government. It’s also faced a notable surge in staff exits amid an AI talent war that’s seen top engineers shuffle between some of the world’s most valuable tech companies. This month alone, another cluster of staff at Elon Musk’s LLM venture indicated they’re leaving xAI. The most notable example is Anthony Armstrong, who, according to The Information, is resigning his post as chief financial officer after only a few months. Heinrich “Heiner” Kuttler—who Musk earlier this year said would be involved in directing the company’s compute and infrastructure team—said on X earlier this month that he was leaving, too. Other notable recent exits include Jack Schwaiger, who resigned after more than a year on the STEM and Medicine tutor teams, and Jeffrey Weischel, who worked on the company’s program staff. Scott Fitzgerald, a member of the technical staff, is also leaving; Jesik Min, another member of the technical staff, updated their LinkedIn to note their time at xAI ended this month. xAI’s evolving focus These departures have come amid transformative changes in xAI’s organizational structure—in particular, its deepening relationship with other Elon Musk-led companies. Last spring, xAI merged with X, Musk’s social media company, into one venture. Another major shift came this past fall, when xAI shifted its approach and scaled back a plan to improve Grok using generalist human AI trainers, called “AI Tutors”, that were meant to teach Grok. xAI subsequently laid off hundreds of people as part of the “strategic pivot” to focusing on tutors with more specialized expertise. Then, in early February, xAI initiated a merger with SpaceX as part of a new plan that partially involves building orbital data centers. Amid these changes, xAI cofounders had already begun leaving the company. By February 11, cofounders Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba had resigned, leaving xAI with just half of its original cofounders. That week, Musk also called a company all-hands, where he acknowledged that people were leaving and subsequently announced a new internal structure, per video of the meeting that xAI released online. At that all-hands meeting, several presenters, including Musk, encouraged employees to recruit their friends to join xAI, and Musk touted the company’s progress launching Grokipedia and its training centers, as well as success with products like Imagine and Grok. “When you first have a startup, you might have just a few dozen people, and they will just chat amongst themselves. As you grow to several hundred people, you have to, then, add more structure, just like an organism that grows from a single cell[…]Then you get organ differentiation, limbs. You grow a tail[…]The tail disappears, and then you become a baby,” said Musk in his opening remarks. “We’re organizing the company to be more effective at this scale. Naturally, when this happens, there are some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages,” Musk added, before thanking the people who had left. As part of this new plan, xAI was divided into infrastructure layers, and then four main areas: Grok Main and Voice (its main AI product), Coding (its coding-specific model), Imagine (for video and images), and Macrohard (digital simulations of entire companies). Several longtime employees and cofounders were also appointed to steer those efforts. Now, only a few weeks later, it appears—at least based on the first names and nicknames listed on the organizational chart displayed on a presentation screen during that all-hands—that many of the leaders involved in the February restructuring have since left, including several additional original co-founders. These employees include Haotian Liu and Guodong Zhang, who were both supposed to be leading Grok Imagine, an image generator and AI assistant for code. Liu said he was “burnt out” and taking a break, and Zhang said he was excited about his next chapter. Toby Pohlen, a founding member of the company who was supposed to be leading Macrohard, has left the company, as well as Manuel Kroiss, who is sometimes called “Makro” internally. It’s not immediately clear what either is or will be doing next. Lianmin Zheng, who, it seems, was supposed to be working on machine learning and data infrastructure, has left the company for Meta. Amid transition and scandal, the departures continue In the midst of all this turnover, xAI has continued to evolve its approach to the AI business. In March, Musk said that the company was going to be rebuilt. xAI also announced a collaboration: a joint project with Tesla that would apparently involve integrating Grok and Tesla’s hardware and software. “Grok is the master conductor/navigator with deep understanding of the world to direct digital Optimus, which is processing and actioning the past 5 secs of real-time computer screen video and keyboard/mouse actions,” Musk explained in an X post in March. “Grok is like a much more advanced and sophisticated version of turn-by-turn navigation software. “ Now, and ahead of the upcoming IPO, the company is reorganizing xAI’s engineering team yet again. This week, Elon Musk’s composite venture forged a new $60 billion deal with Cursor AI, a coding startup that SpaceX now has the rights to acquire. Notably, departures from xAI also follow several concerning incidents involving Grok. These include the chatbot declaring itself “MechaHitler” and posting antisemitic content online last year. Earlier this year, the chatbot was observed, by researchers, producing millions of nonconsensual pornographic materials, including sexual images of children (As a result, xAI is now under investigation in several countries). The company announced changes in response to both scandals. xAI has also faced serious criticism, and even a lawsuit, about air pollution in Memphis, where the company has established data center operations. Below is a Fast Company tracker of notable departures from xAI: View the full article

Experts have a lot of ideas about persuasion. Some suggest leveraging social proof to show that people have adopted the idea and had a positive experience. Others emphasize the importance of building trust and appealing to emotional, rather than analytical arguments. Still others insist on creating a unified value proposition. The problem is that change is not about persuasion. The best indicator of what we think and do is what the people around us think and do, and that effect extends out to three degrees of separation. It is not only those we trust, but even the friends of our friends’ friends—people we don’t even know—that affect our opinions and actions. So even if we are successful in convincing someone to adopt our way of thinking, chances are that once they re-embed in their usual social networks, they’ll be pulled right back. That’s why genuine transformation is never about crafting slogans or even training new skills. You need a strategy designed to shift the network itself and overcome resistance at its source. 1. Define the grievance and vision Every change effort starts with a grievance. There’s something that people don’t like, and they want it to be different. In a social or political movement, that may be a corrupt leader or a glaring injustice. In an organizational context, the problem is usually something like falling sales, unhappy customers, low employee morale, or technological disruption. When we work with organizations in our ChangeOS workshops, we always start by getting the team focused on the initial grievance—or the problem to be solved. Often, we find that the team has a fully fleshed out solution, but never really defined the problem and that makes it difficult to scale. Nobody wants to invest in a solution without understanding why the problem is important. From there, we move on to the vision. The best place to start is by asking yourself, “If I had the power to change anything, what would it look like?” Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for civil rights was for a Beloved Community. Bill Gates’s vision for Microsoft was for a “computer on every desk and in every home.” A good vision should be aspirational. It should inspire. One of the things I found in my research is that successful change leaders don’t try to move from grievance to vision in one step, but rather identify a Keystone Change, which focuses on a clear and tangible goal, includes multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change, to bridge the gap. For King, the Keystone Change was voting rights. For Gates, it was an easy-to-use operating system. For you, it will undoubtedly be something different. The salient point is that every successful transformation I have come across started out with a Keystone Change. That’s where you should start as well. 2. A resistance inventory In Rules for Radicals, the legendary activist Saul Alinsky observed that every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. That is the physics of change. Every action provokes a reaction because, if an idea is important, it threatens the status quo, which never yields its power gracefully. Clearly, if you intend to influence an entire organization, you have to assume the deck is stacked against you and anticipate resistance. A simple truth is that humans form attachments to people, ideas and other things and, when those attachments are threatened we tend to lash out in ways that don’t reflect our best selves. As much as we may hate to admit it, we all do it from time to time. Anyone who has ever been married or part of a family knows that. That’s why anytime you ask people to change what they think or what they do, there will always be those who will work to undermine what you are trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Once you are able to internalize that, you can begin to move forward. The key thing about overcoming resistance is to anticipate it, which is why one of the first things that we do when we start working with an organization is to do a resistance inventory, laying out the categories of resistance and discussing how they can be expected to show up, and what strategies can mitigate them. 3. Targets for action Organizational change consultants often recommend that changemakers prepare a stakeholder map. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but it is inadequate because it fails to distinguish between different kinds of stakeholders. Some stakeholders are targets for mobilization and others are targets for influence. For example, both parents and school boards are important stakeholders in education, but for very different reasons. School boards wield institutional power that can affect change, parents do not. So we mobilize parents to influence school boards, not the other way around. We need to approach constituencies and institutions in very different ways. One of the things we’ve consistently found in our work helping organizations to drive transformational change is that leaders construe stakeholders far too narrowly. Fortunately, decades of non-violent activism have given us powerful tools for both: the Spectrum of Allies for constituencies and the Pillars of Support for institutions. In both cases the same basic principle is at work: You start by identifying targets and adopting tactics to them. That’s easier said than done, because tactics can seem more concrete. We’ve seen successful actions, like hackathons and social media campaigns, so we want to jump right in. But the truth is that until you are able to identify, analyze and understand exactly what your actions are targeted at, you’re just wasting your time. We need to redefine the terms of our struggle in ways that bring relative strength to bear against relative weakness and tilt the playing field to our advantage. Applying strength to weakness In the final analysis, most would-be changemakers fail because they assume the righteousness of their cause will save them. It will not. Injustice, inequity and ineffectiveness can thrive for decades and even centuries, far surpassing a human lifespan. If you think that your idea will prevail simply because you believe in it, you will be sorely disappointed. Tough, important battles are won with good strategy and tactics, which is why successful change agents learn to adopt the principle of Schwerpunkt. The idea is that instead of trying to defeat your opponent everywhere, you want to deliver overwhelming force and win a decisive victory at a particular point of attack. Yet Schwerpunkt is a dynamic, not a static concept. You have to constantly innovate your approach as your opposition adapts to whatever success you achieve. For example, the civil rights movement had its first successes with boycotts, but moved on to sit-ins, “Freedom Rides,” community actions and eventually, mass marches. Defining the grievance and the vision, creating a resistance inventory and identifying viable institutional targets will help you apply strength to weakness. The key to success isn’t any particular tactic, leader or slogan, but strategic flexibility. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what most change efforts lack. All too often they get caught up in a strategy and double down, because it feels good to believe in something, even if it’s failing. Change, like many things, largely boils down to strategy and execution. It’s not a simple matter of belief or passion. You need to learn how to operate effectively, by studying those who succeeded and those who failed, building on your successes, dusting yourself off after the inevitable setbacks, correcting mistakes and returning to fight with renewed vigor. View the full article

Last year, Canada was one of the most reliable international buyers of American whiskey. Now it’s become one of the industry’s biggest losses. U.S. spirits exports to Canada have plunged by nearly 70 percent, collapsing from what had been a roughly $250 million annual market for American distillers to just $89 million, according to data compiled by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS). The sharp downturn followed a trade clash sparked by President Donald The President’s tariffs, which prompted several Canadian provinces to remove American alcohol from store shelves. The owners of iconic American whiskey brands, like Jack Daniel’s and Jim Beam, have responded with layoffs and pausing production. Even after some tariffs were lifted, many provincial liquor systems have continued to keep U.S. spirits out of their retail stores, delivering a devastating blow to one of the industry’s most important foreign markets, according to Fox News. From second to sixth: canada’s rapid market exit Canada, once the second-largest destination for American spirits exports, has now fallen to sixth place, Fox News reported. The collapse, notably, came quickly. From March through December, U.S. spirits exports to Canada dropped from $203 million in 2024 to just $60 million in 2025, a loss of roughly $143 million, Fox News reported. The President has repeatedly used tariffs as economic leverage, arguing that the strategy helps strengthen American manufacturing and correct trade imbalances. But the spirits industry says retaliatory actions by Canada have wiped out one of its most lucrative export markets. “Our industry thrives in a zero-for-zero tariff environment,” says Chris Swonger, president and CEO of DISCUS. While Swonger said distillers recognize the administration’s efforts to address trade imbalances, he added that the provincial bans have been especially damaging. “Since Liberation Day, it’s unfortunate to report that our industry has lost over 70 percent of our exports to Canada because many provinces have decided not to carry American spirits,” he said. Few places have felt the impact more than Kentucky, the epicenter of America’s bourbon industry. The state produces 95 percent of the world’s bourbon supply, supports more than 23,000 jobs, and generates about $9 billion annually, according to the Kentucky Distillers’ Association. The export collapse is landing at a moment when the bourbon industry is already under mounting financial pressure. Several distillers have scaled back production, struggled with slowing demand, or faced mounting debt over the past year. Major producers are beginning to feel the strain. Japanese beverage giant Suntory—which owns Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark, and the House of Suntory portfolio—reported weaker whiskey sales last year. Brown-Forman, the parent company behind Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, has also warned of declining sales and profits as global demand softens. Why small brands are breaking first Smaller and midsize players are under even greater stress. Premium whiskey brand Uncle Nearest is insolvent and owes millions of dollars to vendors, including WhistlePig and American Spirits, creditors say. Meanwhile, MGP Ingredients, one of the largest contract distillers in the United States and a key supplier for many whiskey brands, has reported a sharp drop in whiskey sales as the broader market cools. The trade tensions are affecting more than just export numbers. Owen Martin, master distiller at Angel’s Envy, said the fallout from tariffs reaches deep into the bourbon-making process itself, according to Fox News. “There are the tariffs on finished goods and on us shipping abroad, but I’m even thinking a step below that,” Martin said. One example involves barrels. By law, bourbon must be aged in new American oak barrels, which can only be used once in bourbon production. But finishing casks—such as the port barrels Angel’s Envy uses to finish its bourbon—can be reused multiple times, creating a different set of logistical considerations when global trade conditions shift. “Those are the sorts of things, as a maker, that I have to be aware of in any given year,” Martin said. “You have different opportunities and different challenges.” For decades, the U.S. and Canada have been among each other’s most enthusiastic whiskey consumers. That mutual demand is what makes the current standoff particularly striking. “American consumers love Canadian whisky, and Canadians love Kentucky bourbon,” Swonger said. “We’re hoping this gets resolved.” —Leila Sheridan This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy. View the full article

If you’re looking to save at Macy’s this season, you’ll want to know about seven key coupon codes that can maximize your discounts. From 35% off when you buy three items or more to a $30 discount on orders over $100, these codes can make a significant impact. New customers likewise have unique offers that improve savings further. Comprehending these options can lead to smarter shopping decisions, so let’s explore what each code entails and how you can benefit. Key Takeaways Use code LEADGEN35OFF1ST for 35% off when purchasing 3 items or more at Macy’s. Get $30 off a $100 purchase with the code FIRST30 at Macy’s Wine Shop. New customers can enjoy 25% off their first order by signing up for emails. Take advantage of 35% off select wine purchases when buying 3 bottles with code MG35. 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Image via Google Gemini This article, "7 Must-Have Coupon Codes for Macys This Season" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

A U.S. special forces soldier involved in the military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been charged with using classified information about the mission to win more than $400,000 in an online betting market, federal officials announced Thursday. Gannon Ken Van Dyke was part of the operation to capture Maduro in January and used his access to classified information to make money on the prediction market site Polymarket, the federal prosecutor’s office in New York said. He has been charged by the Justice Department with unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud and making an unlawful monetary transaction. He could face years in prison. Van Dyke, 38, was involved in the planning and execution of capturing Maduro for about a month beginning Dec. 8, 2025, according to the federal prosecutor’s office. Even though he signed nondisclosure agreements promising to not divulge “any classified or sensitive information” related to the operations, prosecutors say the Army soldier used this information to make a series of bets related to Maduro being out of power by Jan. 31, 2026. “This involved a U.S. soldier who allegedly took advantage of his position to profit off of a righteous military operation,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post to social media. A telephone number listed for Van Dyke in public records was not in service. There was not yet an attorney listed for him in court documents. Polymarket, one of the largest prediction markets in the world, said it had found someone trading on classified government information, alerted the U.S. Department of Justice and “cooperated with their investigation.” “Insider trading has no place on Polymarket,” the company said in a statement. Second complaint filed against the soldier The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates prediction markets, announced Thursday it had filed a parallel complaint against Van Dyke. That complaint alleges that Van Dyke moved $35,000 from his personal bank account into a cryptocurrency exchange account on Dec. 26 — a little over a week before U.S. forces would fly into Caracas and seize Maduro. Van Dyke used more than $32,500 to make a series of bets on when Maduro might be removed from power, according to the complaint. He placed those bets between Dec. 30 and Jan. 2, with the vast majority occurring the night of Jan. 2 — just hours before the first missiles would fall on Caracas. In the early hours of Jan. 3, President Donald The President posted on his social media platform a photo of the now-captured Venezuelan leader, wearing a gray sweatsuit, headphones and a blindfold. The bets Van Dyke made on Maduro leaving power resulted in “more than $404,000 of profits,” the complaint said. Bets on three other Venezuela-related contracts netted the solider more than $5,000, according to the document. “The defendant was entrusted with confidential information about U.S. operations and yet took action that endangered U.S. national security and put the lives of American service members in harm’s way,” said Michael Selig, the commission’s chairman. The massive profits from the well-timed bets aroused public attention days after the raid and brought bipartisan calls for stricter regulation of the markets where people can wager on just about anything. Officials allege that shortly after the operation, Van Dyke put most of the money he won in a foreign cryptocurrency vault and then into a new brokerage account. He also asked Polymarket to delete his account, saying he had lost access to his email associated with the account, according to the federal prosecutor’s office. The President, when asked about the case Thursday, drew parallels between the embattled soldier and late professional baseball player Pete Rose, who was banned from the sport amid accusations that he placed bets on his own team. “The whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino, and you look at what’s going on all over the world and Europe and every place, they’re doing these betting things,” The President told reporters. The The President administration has been a key ally of the growing prediction market industry in a critical legal fight with states seeking to ban the platforms. The president’s eldest son is an adviser for both Polymarket and its competitor Kalshi, and a Polymarket investor. The President’s social media platform Truth Social is also launching its own cryptocurrency-based prediction market called Truth Predict. Nearly two decades in the Army Van Dyke joined the Army in 2008 and, in 2023, was promoted to the rank of master sergeant, the second-highest enlisted rank in the Army, according to the indictment. Federal prosecutors said he was part of the special forces community and was stationed at Fort Bragg near Fayetteville, North Carolina, but their indictment offered little other details about his military service. The document said Van Dyke was photographed following the raid on the deck of a ship “wearing U.S. military fatigues, and carrying a rifle, standing alongside three other individuals wearing U.S. military fatigues.” The Pentagon referred questions on the case to the Army and the Justice Department. Army officials declined to provide Van Dyke’s service record. Typically, the military services are reticent to offer details about members of the special forces and take measures to keep their identities secret. Bets on geopolitical tensions draw scrutiny The high-profile indictment comes as bipartisan lawmakers are considering legislation to ban prediction markets from allowing bets on war, assassinations or terrorist attacks. Earlier this month, The Associated Press reported that a group of new accounts on Polymarket made highly specific, well-timed bets on whether the U.S. and Iran would reach a ceasefire on April 7, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits for the new customers. On the same day the AP published the report, the White House warned staff against using private information to trade on prediction markets. On Wednesday, Kalshi fined and suspended three congressional candidates who the company said wagered on the outcome of their own elections. —Hallie Golden, Konstantin Toropin and Hannah Schoenbaum, Associated Press 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 Google Pixel Watch 4 has only been out a short time, and it’s already seeing a notable price drop—the 45mm LTE version in matte black is currently down to $389.99 (originally $499.99), the lowest the watch has dropped so far, while the smaller 41mm LTE model is also $389.99, down from its usual $449.99. In other words, you’re getting the larger 45mm version for the price of the 41mm. Google Pixel Watch 4 45mm, LTE, matte black $389.99 at Amazon $499.99 Save $110.00 Get Deal Get Deal $389.99 at Amazon $499.99 Save $110.00 The Pixel Watch 4 is positioned as Google’s premium wearable—its circular display is larger than before and can hit up to 3,000 nits of brightness, so it stays readable outdoors without much effort. Plus, the LTE model adds some independence from your phone, including the ability to send satellite SOS messages if you are out of cellular range. Dual-band GPS also improves location tracking, especially in crowded cities or areas with weak signals. The overall look leans minimal and polished, closer to a traditional watch than most square-faced smartwatches. Day-to-day use feels focused on speed and convenience. Charging is one of the standout improvements here. You can go from empty to full in about 30 minutes, and even a quick 15-minute top-up gets you to around 50%. That makes it easier to wear the watch all day and still track sleep at night without planning around long charging breaks. That said, while battery life is solid, daily charging will still be part of the routine. Most of the core experience will feel familiar if you have used a recent Pixel Watch—including built-in Gemini for voice commands, along with a full set of health sensors such as heart rate, blood oxygen, temperature tracking, and sleep monitoring. Fitness tracking is reliable for runs, walks, and gym sessions, though it still leans more toward general wellness than advanced sports metrics. In all, this is a well-rounded Android smartwatch, and it makes sense if you want a watch that looks good and stays easy to live with. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds — $148.99 (List Price $179.00) Blink Video Doorbell Wireless (Newest Model) + Sync Module Core — $35.99 (List Price $69.99) Ring Indoor Cam (2nd Gen, 2-pack, White) — $59.98 (List Price $79.99) Apple Watch Series 11 [GPS 46mm] Smartwatch with Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band - M/L. Sleep Score, Fitness Tracker, Health Monitoring, Always-On Display, Water Resistant — $359.00 (List Price $429.00) Apple iPad 11" 128GB A16 WiFi Tablet (Blue, 2025) — $299.00 (List Price $349.00) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

There’s a common misconception that GEO is a technical problem. Just scroll through LinkedIn or X for 30 seconds, and you’ll find the next viral GEO hack. Like “create an AI info page” so LLMs can easily understand your brand. Maybe “create markdown versions of your content” to skyrocket AI visibility. Perhaps “get an automated Claude audit” that scans your robots.txt and automatically generates an llms.txt file for you. But most of these tactics have limited impact because they don’t address how LLMs actually decide which brands to recommend. GEO performance is shaped less by technical tweaks and more by how consistently your brand is positioned, categorized, and validated across the web. Most widely promoted GEO tactics have marginal impact If GEO performance is driven by positioning and consensus, it’s no surprise that many widely promoted tactics fall short. Just search [GEO tactics for LLM visibility], and you’ll see the same tired ideas. The recommendations below aren’t wrong, but they’re mostly table stakes. Many have misinterpreted this advice and taken these ideas to extremes. Useless FAQ insertions Google’s own documentation recommends implementing FAQs with schema. But all the hype around FAQs for GEO has led brands to make poor choices about which FAQs to include in their content. Instead of answering questions that actually matter, they end up slapping useless questions at the bottom of the page because they think it “helps with GEO.” Meanwhile, it accomplishes nothing for the end user. Here’s one such example: Putting ‘key takeaways’ at the top of every article Another glorified tactic that isn’t inherently bad, but the upside is overhyped. Short answer summaries can improve readability for humans, but there’s no strong public evidence that a “key takeaways” block materially improves AI visibility on its own. Over-formatting pages for LLM readability This would mean forcing every page into rigid Q&A patterns, stuffing bullet points into every section, and jamming HTML tables into sections where they don’t belong. Some assume LLMs need heavy formatting assistance in order to retrieve content, so they resort to copywriting tricks like “chunking” which can overcomplicate the editorial process. Dig deeper: How to chunk content and when it’s worth it Chasing Reddit for GEO Others are obsessed with chasing Reddit for GEO, and it’s causing brands to spam Reddit. This is bad for countless reasons already outlined by Eli Schwartz, but it further supports the argument that GEO isn’t a technical problem. Reddit represents the voice of real people, and that’s why moderators are vigilantly hunting down inauthentic activity like astroturfing or “SEO shaping” on threads where software evaluation is happening. 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 GEO is a brand positioning problem GEO is a strategic issue at the executive level, not an SEO issue at the operational level. The biggest GEO upside doesn’t come from technical optimization — but rather, the coordination of brand positioning, messaging, and reputation management across on-site and off-site channels. Everyone assumes the SEO team should be 100% responsible for all aspects of GEO, yet they control only a limited portion of how LLMs form their opinions of a brand. SEO teamOn-site content pages, blogs, comparison guides, resource pages, etc. Brand team / PMMHomepage messaging, product pages, solutions pages, pricing. PR teamExternal validation, press, and news. PartnershipsAffiliates, analysts, resellers, etc. Customer marketingReddit, social media, and review websites. Ross Hudgens recently posted about this problem. If none of these sources aligns with a consistent narrative, it will be challenging for LLMs to reach a consensus about your brand. GEO is a category alignment problem Let’s examine [best AI SDR agents] where Coldreach has the No. 1 ranking position with an AI citation. Despite a high web ranking plus earning the URL citation, there’s no recommendation for their brand regarding the best AI SDR agents. This tactic worked phenomenally well during the traditional SEO golden era when rankings and clicks were the goal. AI, being the great normalizer, has reduced the effectiveness of this playbook dramatically. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Listicles won’t brute force your brand into AI recommendations The main difference between SEO vs GEO is that you can’t bulldoze your way into brand recommendations for a topic your brand lacks recognition for. We just saw that above with the best AI SDR agents example. Here’s another example: [best insider threat management] where the URL citations are earned by Exabeam, SpyCloud, and Pathlock. None of these brands is recommended in the answer summary, yet they are all deploying listicles. AI is the great neutralizer of this tactic, since it just scrapes and summarizes their listicles and recommends every other brand. This is another reason why reporting on “citations” as a GEO success metric is a failure in isolation, given that there’s no corresponding brand recommendation. Instead, the AI Overview recommends the brands that actually deserve to be there, such as Teramind, Proofpoint, DTEX, etc. Most brands have no idea how they’re actually represented across LLMs Despite the unavoidable element of randomness in AI answers, you should reverse-engineer how LLMs piece together information about your brand. Start with bottom of funnel prompts like: “What’s the best [category] solution for an enterprise B2B company in the [industry] with [features]?” Then evaluate the answers and sources systematically. New research by Kevin Indig found that web search position has the greatest impact on LLM citation rates. This is further validation that GEO is fundamentally connected to traditional SEO, as LLMs rely on web search (grounding) to generate answer summaries, especially for bottom-of-funnel product evaluation queries. The key takeaway is that if your pages aren’t ranking highly in traditional SEO, third parties and external websites may control the narrative about your brand. Most high-volume, high-competition categories are dominated by third parties It’s useful to understand which product categories are dominated by third parties versus first-party so you can prioritize marketing efforts accordingly. In this example of [best employee monitoring software], the brand recommendation rate is around 90% meanwhile the citation rate is around 15%. This suggests the brand is well covered across third-party pages where LLMs are extracting relevant information. If we examine the SERP, it’s clear that third-party sources account for the overwhelming majority of citations. Citations are coming from affiliates such as Business.com, CurrentWare, PC Mag, Gartner, and other reputable sources. The key takeaway: if your brand wants to compete in high-volume categories, you may be forced to play the affiliate game. What this means for your GEO strategy Technical website hygiene still matters. If you have a vibe-coded, JavaScript-heavy website with poor internal linking and flat architecture, you’re unlikely to perform well in GEO. Things like XML sitemaps, page indexing, site taxonomy, and internal linking structure are still crucial for retrieval-augmented generation and training data ingestion. However, these are the fundamental pillars of SEO that only create the foundation for GEO to be built upon, rather than accelerating GEO itself. GEO is a brand positioning and category alignment exercise, not a technical SEO audit. Questions you should be asking about GEO: Are LLMs actually recommending our brand, or only citing our pages? When our brand appears in AI answers, what category is it bucketed into? And is that the category we want to own? Do LLMs associate our brand with the right buyer, use case, and problem set? Or are they grouping us with legacy competitors? Are third-party sites, review platforms, Reddit threads, and analyst pages shaping more of our AI visibility than our own content? Is there a consistent positioning narrative across our homepage, product pages, comparative content, review websites, and third-party affiliates? Are we trying to force visibility with listicles and formatting tricks instead of earning recommendation status through market and category alignment? Do we know which prompts matter most at the bottom of the funnel, and have we tested how our brand appears for those prompts? Within our flagship category, are AI answers being shaped mostly by first-party sites or by affiliates and review platforms? If third parties dominate the category, do we have a plan to earn stronger coverage there? What is the role of YouTube in our niche? How often does YouTube influence LLM answers, and are we represented there? Are we publishing content that actually helps buyers understand our positioning and differentiators? Or are we just adding FAQ blocks and “key takeaways” because it looks like productive GEO work? What outdated, inaccurate, or weak brand associations keep resurfacing in AI answers? Which team owns fixing those associations once we find them? Stop chasing GEO hacks The core GEO problem is whether LLMs believe your brand belongs in the answer. LLMs need to reach consensus on your brand, shaped by reputation, category alignment, and repeated confirmation across the web. Technical SEO provides the foundation, but it doesn’t help LLMs reach a conclusion about your brand’s market positioning. The bigger opportunity is to align messaging across every surface that influences how LLMs interpret your brand and why it deserves to be recommended. That means GEO isn’t a siloed optimization problem, but rather an ecosystem visibility problem. It’s time to stop chasing GEO hacks, because AI is neutralizing ineffective and outdated techniques once and for all. View the full article

NASA is looking not to the stars but back to our planet for inspiration. In honor of Earth Day, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center shared an interactive digital tool turns satellite images of the planet’s landscapes into a typeface. “The planet can spell your name—literally,” the Kennedy Space Center’s X post says. Using a feature called “Your Name in Landsat,” users can type in whichever word they choose into the generator’s textbox. The site will then generate the phrase using landscapes from Earth, like rivers, lakes, farmland, and more. When hovering over each “letter,” users can learn more about where the landscape is located and even its coordinates. NASA first unveiled the tool in August of 2024 for Camp Landsat, a virtual summer camp the agency runs. The letters are part of an extensive record of satellite images from Landsat—the longest ongoing series of Earth observing missions—which spans more than 50 years. The Landsat mission was first launched on July 23, 1972 and has since successfully launched eight satellites that have photographed the planet. The project has not only awarded earthlings with high-resolution imagery for fun visualizations like “Your Name in Landsat”; it has also provided valuable data for scientists and policy makers alike to make decisions regarding the environment and natural resources. The images that feed into the word generator are part of the satellite program’s Alphabet Image Gallery, with images sourced from the NASA Earth Observatory, NASA Worldview, USGS EarthExplorer, and the ESA Sentinel Hub. Some letters get more than one iteration depending on how complex and prevalent the shape is in nature. Take the “A” which has five different options, with landscapes ranging from Yukon Delta, in Alaska, to Lake Guakhmaz, in Azerbaijan. The “G” in comparison, is somewhat rarer, with only one option currently available in the gallery: an image from Fonte Boa, a municipality in the Amazonas state of Brazil. People love the tool. The social media post received over 22 million views and more than 1,300 people posted their creations in the comments. (Even brands like Xbox got in on the fun.) “I’m here for this,” one user replied. Another added, “that’s cool as hell, are you kidding me.” Beyond serving as a delightful interactive feature, Your Name in Landsat is also a powerful visualization that reminds us of how vast the world is and why its natural landscapes are worth saving. View the full article

April is shaping up to be yet another brutal month for job cuts in the technology sector. But the announcements may not have the immediate effect that many companies are hoping for. Here’s the latest on the situation. Microsoft to offer buyouts to 7% of its US workforce While Microsoft hasn’t announced another round of layoffs, the Windows giant is planning job reductions of another kind. As Fast Company reported yesterday, the Redmond, Washington, company is expected to offer buyouts to 7% of its U.S. workforce by the end of June. A buyout is when a company offers an employee a financial incentive to resign. Buyout helps companies avoid being forced to choose which employees to let go, while still reducing their workforce and achieving their goal of lowering operational costs. An employee who accepts the buyout loses their job, but generally gets a significant financial incentive for the voluntary move. Buyouts typically target employees who are closer to retirement age. As for the reason for the buyouts, it’s the same reason driving most of the tech industry’s recent layoffs: the drive to cut labor costs so more money can be spent on building out the huge data centers needed for AI training and services. Meta to lay off 10% of its workforce While Microsoft is giving some of its employees the option of voluntary buyouts, Meta isn’t providing its employees an option at all. Yesterday, the company told its employees that it will lay off about 8,000 of them—roughly 10% of its workforce—on May 20. An additional 6,000 currently open roles will not be filled. Meta’s latest layoff comes after the company has committed $135 billion in capital expenditure to its latest round of AI initiatives. Much of that expenditure will go to building massive data centers that the company needs to run its AI systems. As Fast Company reported yesterday, Meta says the job cuts aim to boost efficiency while also offsetting its “heavy spending on artificial intelligence.” Nike announces 1,400 tech job layoffs Also yesterday, shoe giant Nike announced it was laying off around 2% of its workforce, or about 1,400 employees. While the company is primarily known as a maker of apparel and footwear, the job cuts will mostly hit Nike’s technology roles. But while Nike’s job cuts will primarily target its tech workforce, the company is one of the few to not suggest that AI is behind the layoffs. Instead, Nike says the job cuts are part of its “Win Now” strategy, which aims to modernize its manufacturing, merge parts of its supply chain, and reshape its technology division. Nike’s layoffs will reportedly impact employees globally, including in North America. Snap to lay off 16% of its global workforce The trifecta of tech job cuts announced yesterday aren’t the only ones in April. On April 14, Snapchat maker Snap Inc. announced it would cut 16% of its global workforce. As CNBC reported, that equates to about 1,000 jobs, while another 300 currently empty roles will remain unfilled. The primary driver behind the job cuts is the desire to cut costs by leveraging AI instead of a human workforce. “We believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers,” CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in a letter announcing the job cuts. GoPro to reduce its workforce by 23% Finally, earlier this month, on April 7, wearable camera maker GoPro announced that it planned to lay off 145 workers. But while that may seem small in comparison to the other companies on this list, it represents a staggering 23% of the company’s workforce. According to the Wall Street Journal, GoPro’s job cuts come as the company struggles with profitability amid macroeconomic pressures, including increased memory costs as AI demand drives prices higher and tariffs add costs. The company reportedly hopes to reduce operating costs in order to help it return to profitability by the end of the year. Company stock prices react to layoffs While layoffs are devastating to the affected workers and their families, investors usually cheer the news of job cuts. That’s because reducing the workforce is usually the fastest way for a company to cut costs. It’s why share prices tend to increase after a company announces major job cuts. But this time, investor response has been a mixed bag. Since GoPro, Inc. (Nasdaq: GPRO) announced its job cuts, the stock has climbed an impressive 73%. Likewise, Snap Inc. (NYSE: SNAP) stock rose immediately after it announced its job cuts. After the announcement, SNAP stock was up about 7%. However, as of yesterday’s close, the stock had given back some of those gains, now up only about 4.3% since the layoffs were announced. But the other companies’ stock prices have hardly reacted. Shares in Meta Platforms Inc. (Nasdaq: META) fell more than 2% yesterday, and are barely up half a percent in premarket trading this morning, as of the time of this writing. Shares in Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT) fell nearly 4% yesterday and are up only about 1.3% in premarket trading today. Nike Inc (NYSE: NKE) shares fell nearly 2% yesterday and haven’t even recovered half of that this morning. In other words, announcing major job cuts no longer seems guaranteed to get investors excited about a stock—and that’s something the tech giants are likely taking note of this morning. View the full article

Airlines worldwide have begun canceling flights as the war in the Middle East strains jet fuel supplies and pushes up prices — but the disruption doesn’t end there. For travelers, it can mean having to navigate a confusing web of passenger protections that vary widely depending on where they’re flying. And the timing is amplifying the impact. “These pressures are arriving at a time when summer travel demand is ramping up, with major events such as the World Cup expected to put additional strain on airports,” said Eric Napoli, chief legal officer at AirHelp, a company that helps travelers secure compensation for flight disruptions and advocates for passenger rights. Here’s what to know if your flight is canceled. Are these cancellations happening at the last minute? In most cases, no. At least for now, fuel-related cuts are often being made days or weeks in advance. Lufthansa Group, for example, said this week it is cutting 20,000 short-haul flights across its network through October. That gives you more time to adjust plans than you’d typically get with weather-related disruptions, which tend to trigger last-minute cancellations. My flight was canceled. What should I do first? Check your airline’s app or website immediately for rebooking options. If you’re flying on a U.S. carrier, that’s often the fastest and easiest way to secure a new seat, according to Tyler Hosford, security director at International SOS, a global risk management and travel security company. Non-U.S. carriers tend to have fewer digital tools, Hosford said, so it’s worth trying multiple channels, including the airline’s customer service lines or airport desks. Do I have the right to a refund or a new flight? In most cases, yes. Airlines typically offer either a refund or a rebooking on the next available flight. The exact rules vary by country, but those are the baseline options you can expect. In the U.S., for example, if your flight is canceled and you choose not to travel, the airline must refund you, regardless of the reason. Airlines may offer travel credits instead, but you’re entitled to a full refund for airfare and any extras you didn’t use, such as baggage fees or seat upgrades. Are passenger rights the same everywhere? No, and protections vary widely by region — from the Montreal Convention, which governs airline liability across more than 140 countries, to specific consumer protection laws in the U.S., Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Turkey and Brazil. Europe has some of the strongest protections, including compensation in certain cases. And they apply to any flight departing from an EU airport, regardless of the airline, as well as to passengers flying on an EU-based carrier into the EU — even if the journey starts outside Europe. The United Kingdom maintains a similar framework. The U.S. and Canada offer more limited protections. Policies vary widely across Asia, and in some cases travelers may need to rely more on airline policies than formal regulations. To get a clearer picture, experts recommend searching the name of the country you’re departing from and “passenger rights” before your trip. What protections apply? It depends. Airlines may cite fuel shortages or rising fuel costs as the reason for cancellations. But whether you’re entitled to compensation often comes down to if the disruption is considered within the airline’s control under local laws. Regardless of the cause, Napoli said, airlines in the European Union, for example, still have a “duty of care,” meaning they must provide “necessary support” to travelers, including rebooking. “While airlines are citing fuel shortages as a reason for upcoming cancellations, travelers need to know that this does not automatically waive their rights” under EU laws, Napoli said. How can I prepare before a trip to avoid headaches? A few steps can make disruptions easier to manage. Sign up for flight alerts to stay informed, and book directly with the airline when possible — it’s much easier to resolve issues with the carrier directly than through a third-party booking site. Knowing your options ahead of time and having a backup plan can make a significant difference if plans change. What do I need for a claim or complaint? Documentation is critical. Save everything: boarding passes, receipts, cancellation notices and any communication from the airline. Take screenshots of app or website updates and any communication taking place online, and jot down key details from phone calls. Napoli also recommends asking the airline for written confirmation of a flight disruption, including the stated reason. Should I accept the first alternative flight the airline offers? Not necessarily. Experts say one of the most common mistakes travelers make is taking the first option without checking alternatives. Look at other flights, routes or even nearby airports because you may find a faster or more convenient way to reach your destination. Can I book a different flight myself? Yes, but proceed carefully. If the airline’s rebooking option doesn’t meet your needs — especially if your new flight isn’t for several days — you can look for alternatives and request a refund instead. Just be aware you may need to pay any fare difference up front, and you might not be reimbursed later. Any other tips to avoid getting stuck? — Book flights earlier in the day so you have more rebooking options if something goes wrong. — Set up flight alerts through tracking apps such as Flighty to get early notice of cancellations or delays. In some cases, Hosford said, notifications arrive before the airline’s. — Consider nearby airports as backup options. — Be kind. Airline agents may be more willing to help when interactions stay calm and respectful. “Ultimately, the shortage is squeezing the entire system, from travelers to airlines, and is something to watch as the industry looks for any relief ahead of the summer travel season,” Napoli said. —Rio Yamat, AP Airlines and Travel Writer View the full article

Google documents deep link best practices and signals robots.txt doc expansion. The EU proposes Google share search data with rivals and AI chatbots. The post Google’s Robots.txt Docs Expand, Deep Links Get Rules, EU Steps In – SEO Pulse 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. At $109.99, the Apple AirPods (3rd Generation) are selling at a clear discount from their usual $159.97 price at retailers like Best Buy. Shipping is free with Prime, while non-members pay an extra $6, and the deal is set to end in three days or when stock runs out. These are not Apple’s top-tier earbuds, but they cover the basics most people expect, especially if you already use an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Apple AirPods (3rd Generation) $109.99 at Woot $169.00 Save $59.01 Get Deal Get Deal $109.99 at Woot $169.00 Save $59.01 Day-to-day use is about as simple as it gets. The H1 chip connects quickly to Apple devices and switches between them without much effort. Audio leans toward a balanced, slightly bass-forward profile that works fine for playlists, YouTube videos, and calls. Spatial Audio with head tracking is here too, adding a directional effect when watching supported content, though it feels more like a nice extra than a reason to buy. Battery life holds up at around six hours per charge, with the case bringing total listening time close to 24 hours. You can top them up with a Lightning cable, MagSafe, or any standard Qi wireless charger. Said, these earbuds use an open-ear design without silicone tips, so they sit loosely compared to other in-ear models. That can make them more comfortable for long stretches, but also less secure if you are moving around a lot, notes this PCMag review. The lack of a seal also means outside noise comes through, since there is no active noise cancellation or transparency mode. You don't get built-in EQ controls, either. And while the stem controls are responsive, it’s easy to press them by mistake when adjusting them. Still, for a straightforward, low-hassle pair of earbuds that work best inside Apple’s ecosystem, these third-generation Apple AirPods do a serviceable job. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds — $148.99 (List Price $179.00) Blink Video Doorbell Wireless (Newest Model) + Sync Module Core — $35.99 (List Price $69.99) Ring Indoor Cam (2nd Gen, 2-pack, White) — $59.98 (List Price $79.99) Apple Watch Series 11 [GPS 46mm] Smartwatch with Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band - M/L. Sleep Score, Fitness Tracker, Health Monitoring, Always-On Display, Water Resistant — $359.00 (List Price $429.00) Apple iPad 11" 128GB A16 WiFi Tablet (Blue, 2025) — $299.00 (List Price $349.00) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

Earlier this week, in a live interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box, President Donald The President was asked for his reaction to reports that Apple, Amazon, and some other companies had not filed refund requests for tariffs they paid over the past year—tariffs the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional. “I think it’s brilliant if they don’t do that,” The President replied. “If they don’t do that, I’ll remember them.” To be clear, this wasn’t negotiation posturing. This was the president openly signaling that companies who forfeit money to which they are entitled will be “remembered” for a symbolic display of loyalty. The government has collected a combined $166 billion or so from U.S. importers; an act the Supreme Court ruled an overstep of presidential power. The companies in question are in effect taking the administration’s side despite the court’s ruling. Left unspoken but clearly implied is that those who exercise their legal rights may find themselves remembered, too, but certainly not for being “brilliant.” Given the Iran war, as well as the panoply of controversies and alleged scandals swirling around the administration, this incident was easy to miss. But it’s worth pausing over and paying attention to what companies affected by the illegal tariff scheme ultimately do. The tariffs, imposed last year and affecting U.S. trade with practically every country on earth, were struck by way of a 6-to-3 Supreme Court ruling in February, resulting in the $166 billion forced refund. Despite this lack of ambiguity, it’s not hard to imagine why a company might at least ponder whether it’s worth trying to stay on the president’s good side. The The President administration has not been shy about involving itself in the actions of private commerce, taking an unusually active stance over mergers, regulation, even bailouts or direct ownership stakes. Nevertheless, The President’s not-so-veiled threat is one that companies should firmly resist. It amounts to betraying shareholders and customers alike. For starters, the board members and executives of publicly traded companies obviously have fiduciary obligations to their shareholders. Shrugging off millions (or even billions) of dollars in legally recoverable refunds does not square with those duties. Moreover, it’s a bad look for a brand. Many companies passed along tariff costs through higher prices. Declining to pursue refunds in effect tells customers: We raised your prices because of costs we are now choosing not to recover, because the president said he’d be impressed if we didn’t. As a contrast, consider Costco, which has been among those striking an aggressive stance on the refunds. In November 2025, well before the high court’s ruling, the discount club chain filed a federal lawsuit challenging the tariffs as unlawful, asking the courts to order full refunds including interest on all tariffs paid. Costco executives have told investors the company would in effect pass along the refunds to its customers through “lower prices and better values.” Admittedly, that sounds a bit vague, but the company has said it will be open about the process. And compared to speculation about ignoring the refunds to curry favor with the administration, Costco’s simple clarity about adhering to the rule of law practically sounds like a profile in courage. Plenty of businesses have shown no hesitation about collecting refunds, particularly smaller enterprises. And shipping businesses FedEx, DHL, and UPS have all indicated they’ll be passing along refunds to customers who were billed to cover tariff fees. For many others, the process will admittedly be more complex. The payout fund is designed to reimburse entities that paid directly to import the tariffed goods—not the end consumers who may have ultimately absorbed those costs in the form of higher prices. Unlike the case of shipping, there’s usually not a clean paper trail to quantify what an individual customer might be owed. (Class action lawsuits are already coming together to challenge how the money is being distributed.) Still, this seems like a moment for companies to at least make clear their intent. The Costco response is a handy and straightforward example: Collect the refund and be vocal about returning value to customers. Treat this as an opportunity to demonstrate loyalty to shoppers. At the very least, signaling a greater interest in pleasing the administration than in pleasing your own shoppers seems like a shortsighted way to treat consumers, particularly in a moment when affordability is in the zeitgeist. “I’ll remember” cuts both ways. View the full article

Google updated its spam report page for the second time in the past week or so, this time to say that if you include personally identifying information, the spam report will not be processed or used. This comes just a week after Google said that information would be used and passed along to the reported site. What changed. Google posted on its spam report page a new highlight box which says two points: (1) Don’t include personally identifying information in your spam report. (2) If you do include personally identifying information, then Google won’t process your submission. The text block reads: “Don’t include any personally identifying information in your submission. To comply with regulations, we must send the submission text to the site owner to help them understand the context of a manual action, if one is issued. Because of this, we won’t process your submission if we determine it contains personally identifying information to protect privacy. Not including such information fully ensures your information is safe and prevents your submission from being discarded.” What was before. As we covered about a week ago, Google said then: “If we issue a manual action, we send whatever you write in the submission report verbatim to the site owner to help them understand the context of the manual action.” This caused a lot of concern in the industry, not just from fear of being caught calling out your competitors or spammers. But also for legal concerns. Google’s new wording above says this is now to “comply with regulations” where I guess it can’t share personally identifying information. Why we care. If you want to submit a successful spam report, make sure to not include any personally identifying information. And if you do include personally identifying information by accident, you do not have to worry that the information will be passed along to the reported site. The spam report will just not be processed at all and you can resubmit it. View the full article

Professional service firms appear to be braced for flatlining growthView the full article

This week, we covered new heated Google search ranking volatility. Google's Danny Sullivan spoke about commodity versus non-commodity content. Google now wont use spam reports with personality identifiable...View the full article

The fallout from an ambassadorial appointment like no other threatens even worse procedural ‘sludge’ in WhitehallView the full article

Whether you lead a scaling brand or an established global enterprise, you already know the frustration. You’re watching massive digital budgets yield diminishing returns, while agile disruptors consistently beat you to the punch. When you audit the citations within AI Overviews, ChatGPT responses, and Claude summaries, the reality is stark. Smaller, faster competitors are claiming more of the most lucrative, bottom-of-funnel commercial queries. It’s time to challenge the outdated assumption that legacy domain authority is enough to protect your pipeline. We’ve entered an era where operational agility often beats legacy brand equity. AI models demand rapid, machine-readable data to establish a verifiable consensus. Enterprise red tape, what we call the “bureaucracy tax,” is actively preventing established brands from deploying these assets. You didn’t build this red tape intentionally. As your business scaled, stability simply choked out agility. Why legal approves data faster than marketing claims When deployment speeds are slow, marketing teams inevitably blame legal, risk, or compliance. However, in highly regulated sectors, rigorous compliance is completely non-negotiable. The operational failure isn’t the legal team; the failure is what marketing is sending them. To win the AI search race, you must completely decouple your factual data from your marketing narrative. Here’s the human truth of corporate risk: Lawyers argue over adjectives, not APIs. Legal departments take months to review creative copywriting and subjective marketing claims (e.g., “We are the fastest, most innovative solution”). On the other hand, they can review a static, factual data table, a product specification sheet, or a pricing index in a matter of days. Consider a global payments company trying to capture AI search traffic for enterprise payment gateways. Legal will immediately block a 2,000-word marketing post titled “The most secure way to process payments” — it’s a compliance nightmare. But if that same marketing team builds a “Transaction fee and API uptime matrix” that simply aggregates factual processing costs and server SLAs into a structured table, legal signs off in 24 hours. When a CFO asks Perplexity, “Compare enterprise payment gateway fees,” the AI bypasses the competitor’s blocked blog post and cites your factual matrix as the definitive answer. Dig deeper: Why most SEO failures are organizational, not technical Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with How much does the bureaucracy tax actually cost? The bureaucracy tax is a measurable, devastating hit to your P&L. Consider the standard deployment cycle for an established enterprise. A new strategic initiative requires a brief, creative production, legal review, compliance sign-off, and an IT staging ticket. This often results in a sluggish 180-day cycle from ideation to publication. When a major industry shift occurs, such as a sudden change in regional shipping tariffs, the AI consensus is entirely up for grabs. Imagine you’re a global shipping company. While your 1,500-word thought leadership piece on “Navigating APAC supply chain changes” is sitting in a three-week IT staging queue, an agile mid-market logistics disruptor publishes a simple, structured “Current freight delay and tariff matrix.” The LLM scrapes the matrix, establishes it as the consensus, and instantly captures the most lucrative, high-intent logistics leads of the quarter. They get the revenue, while you get a Jira notification saying your staging ticket has been updated. To quantify this, we analyzed the AI citation share of top global brands across ChatGPT-4, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. By tracking the original publish dates of their digital assets against the AI’s preferred recommendations for high-value commercial queries, a brutal algorithmic truth emerged: recency can beat relevancy. When a market shift occurs, disruptors who deploy structured data within 14 days capture, on average, a 32% higher share of AI voice than legacy competitors who take 180 days to publish similar insights, even if the legacy brand has a higher traditional domain authority. For the slower enterprise, this isn’t a temporary dip in traffic. That deficit takes an average of nine months and $120,000 in defensive paid media to win back. You’re bleeding capital every single day your content sits in an approval queue. Dig deeper: How to build an enterprise SEO strategy that actually gets buy-in Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. The technical bypass: The schema-locked GEO template To understand why established brands are losing this race, you must look at the underlying technology. Many marketing teams are trapped on monolithic, legacy CMS platforms. Generative engine optimization (GEO) requires the constant, rapid deployment of complex JSON-LD schema markup and proprietary data tables. If your marketing team has to submit an IT ticket just to update an author tag, the disruptor has already won. The solution isn’t to go rogue and build insecure shadow IT. Instead, you must negotiate a schema-locked GEO template. Go to your CIO or lead developer and negotiate one single IT sprint to build a rigid, unbreakable CMS template designed exclusively for data. What does a schema-locked template actually look like? Picture a proprietary “comparison engine” for a consumer electronics brand. IT builds the template once, stripping out all design flexibility. Marketing never touches the code. Instead, a marketer simply fills in three backend text boxes: [Competitor TV model]. [Our refresh rate]. [Their refresh rate]. The template automatically wraps those inputs in perfect JSON-LD schema, specifically injecting Dataset, SoftwareApplication, and ItemList markup that LLMs actively hunt for, and renders a clean HTML table. IT loves it because marketing can’t break the site architecture. Marketing loves it because they can spin up 50 competitor comparison pages in a single afternoon, feeding LLMs exactly what they need. Don’t try to change your entire corporate culture; just build a fast track. Create an AI-readiness pod. This is a cross-functional alignment consisting of one technical SEO lead, 10% of a developer’s sprint capacity, and a dedicated compliance liaison who only reviews data, not copy. Dig deeper: Why governance maturity is a competitive advantage for SEO From compliance to consideration in record time You must engineer workflows that satisfy your risk officers and your CTO while radically accelerating your speed to market. Use these strategic frameworks to protect your AI consensus: If you’re an enterprise CMO bottlenecked by legal, then pivot your GEO strategy entirely. Publish pre-approved, proprietary data tables that require zero narrative oversight to capture the AI citation immediately. If you’re a mid-market founder with zero dev resources for marketing, then mandate the creation of the one-time “schema-locked GEO template” so your marketing team can operate autonomously for the rest of the year. If your traditional analytics show stable organic traffic, but your pipeline velocity is dropping, then immediately audit your LLM visibility. You’re likely being actively replaced by a disruptor in the AI research phase. See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with Agility is the new authority The rules of digital acquisition have fundamentally changed. The biggest budget doesn’t guarantee victory. The fastest route to machine-readable consensus wins. You can no longer afford to let legacy infrastructure and misaligned compliance workflows dictate your market share. The bureaucracy tax is an unforced error that’s quietly draining your bottom-line revenue. Ruthlessly audit your deployment timelines tomorrow morning. Stop treating GEO as a traditional marketing campaign, and start treating it as a high-velocity data operation. Dismantle your own red tape and empower your teams to become the undeniable, cited authority at the exact moment the consumer asks the machine a question. View the full article

British pension schemes will soon be forced to support my portfolioView the full article

Here is another interview from Google's head of search, Liz Reid. This one was done on the Odd Lots Bloomberg podcast and is titled "Google's Liz Reid on Who Will Own Search in a World of AI."View the full article

Google is working to fix a bug in AI Mode where it is changing the title links and citations. This bug was spotted by Lily Ray who wrote on X, "Google is changing title links / citations in AI Mode - just the name of the person, with a link to the place they were mentioned."View the full article

There is an “unprecedented degree of change in the business environment,” as one CEO in the latest Fortune/Deloitte CEO survey put it. If you’re struggling to scale your company, you’re not alone. Growth is harder and fatigue is everywhere. This volatile environment makes focus all the more important. I have worked with over a hundred VC or Private Equity backed startups through scaleups, and there are consistent barriers that every CEO and C-Suite, no matter your industry or business model, must overcome in order to grow successfully. As my old boss at Cisco, John Chambers, used to say “Concentrate on what you can control, not on what you can’t.” As a leader, here are five common factors that you can control that could be holding you back: 1. Confusion brings you down As an organization grows and scales, teams often lose sight of their core objectives. This leads to confusion, misalignment, and diluted motivation. When people are unclear why they are doing what they’re doing, their engagement and performance drop. Many leaders fall into the trap of chasing too many opportunities or reacting to the latest market noise, rather than sticking to a clear, differentiated strategy. Without radical focus, energy and resources are watered down. Scaling requires a disciplined plan—knowing exactly what you want, why it matters, and how you’ll get there, and then saying “no” to distractions. Regularly revisit your strategy and ruthlessly prioritize your core purpose and values. 2. Measure what matters Many companies mistake activity for progress, but it’s not just about having a plan for growth—it’s about working that plan with discipline. In scaling organizations, it’s common for teams to operate without clear, shared metrics for success. But without visible progress markers and regular, disciplined check-ins, accountability wanes. This makes it easy for priorities to drift and for mediocrity to creep in. Ask yourself, are you tracking the right metrics, measuring outcomes, and iterating based on what you learn? If you’re not measuring execution at a granular level, you risk drifting or burning out while making little real progress. Track everything and celebrate small wins to fuel momentum. 3. What got you here will not get you there What worked when your organization was smaller often breaks when you try to scale. As complexity increases, teams often lack robust ways of processing information, making decisions, and solving problems. If these old, informal methods persist, teams get bogged down in confusion, judgment, and finger-pointing rather than curiosity and shared learning. Processes that were once efficient become bottlenecks. In order to overcome this, technology, workflow, and decision-making structures must evolve. If your infrastructure, from sales processes to financial controls, can’t handle growth, execution will falter. Don’t be afraid to rebuild core systems to support the next stage of scale. 4. People don’t scale, teams do No amount of ambition or capital can compensate for the wrong team or a lack of alignment. Scaling exposes weaknesses in team leadership, skills, and coordination. Ask yourself: do you have the right people in the right seats? Are your team leaders and teams aligned, and does everyone understand the goals and the urgency? Invest in hiring and developing talent density in teams. Ensure the team’s incentives (care why) and goals are in sync with the business’s direction (know why). 5. Have clear values, structure, and role definition Scaling brings new people, changing structures, and evolving roles. When new employees are added to an organization, it can create friction with existing employees if their values don’t align. A study by Columbia Business School found that the tipping point for shaping existing employees’ values is when 20-40% of new employees have different values—this can be positive, but can also lead to a negative impact on company culture. It’s also true that without clear definition and communication about who is responsible for what, teams become inefficient, drop balls, and experience internal friction. This lack of structure undermines performance and accountability. With rapid change, new joiners, shifting priorities, and changing values, team cohesion and psychological safety can break down. When people don’t feel safe to speak up, take risks, or admit mistakes, trust erodes and collaboration suffers. This leads to siloed behavior and stunted learning. All this needs to be taken into account in order to ensure your employees are contributing to growth, not hindering it, and have opportunities to reach their full potential. The key to successful scaling Successful scaling isn’t just about increasing revenue—it’s about building the durable systems, culture, and relationships that make growth sustainable. If you’re stuck in your scaling plans, step back and diagnose your organization across these five areas. Often, the real obstacle is not just one thing, but a combination that needs clarity and focused action. View the full article

A couple of weeks ago, Google stunned many by saying that they updated their spam report to pass along all information to the site that you enter in the spam report. There was a lot of backlash to that and Google reverted, now saying if there is personally identifying information, it won't process the spam report at all.View the full article