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Less than 200 years ago, scientists were ridiculed for suggesting that hand washing might save lives. In the 1840s, it was shown that hygiene reduced death rates, but the underlying explanation was missing. Without a clear mechanism, adoption stalled for decades, leading to countless preventable deaths. The joke of the past becomes the truth of today. The inverse is also true when you follow misleading guidance. Bad GEO advice (I don’t like this acronym, but will use it because it seems to be the most popular) will not literally kill you. That said, it can definitely cost money, cause unemployment, and lead to economic death. Not long ago, I wrote about a similar topic and explained why unscientific SEO research is dangerous and acts as a marketing instrument rather than real scientific discovery. This article is a continuation of that work and provides a framework to make sense of the myths surrounding AI search optimization. I will highlight three concrete GEO myths, examine whether they are true, and explain what I would do if I were you. If you’re pressed for time, here’s a TL;DR: We fall for bad GEO and SEO advice because of ignorance, stupidity, cognitive biases, and black-and-white thinking. To evaluate any advice, you can use the ladder of misinference – statement vs. fact vs. data vs. evidence vs. proof. You become more knowledgeable if you seek dissenting viewpoints, consume with the intent to understand, pause before you believe, and rely less on AI. You currently: Don’t need an llms.txt. Should leverage schema markup even if AI chatbots don’t use it today. Have to keep your content fresh, especially if it matters for your queries. Before we dive in, I will recap why we fall for bad advice. Recap: Why we fall for bad GEO and SEO advice The reasons are: Ignorance, stupidity, and amathia (voluntary stupidity). Cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias. Black-and-white thinking. We are ignorant because we don’t know better yet. We are stupid if we can’t know better. Both are neutral. We suffer from amathia when we refuse to know better, which is why it’s the worst of the three. We all suffer from biases. When it comes to articles and research, confirmation bias is probably the most prevalent. We refuse to see flaws in how we see things and instead seek out flaws, often with great effort, in rival theories or remain blind to them. Lastly, we struggle with black-and-white thinking. Everything is this or that, never something in between. A few examples: Backlinks are always good. Reddit is always important for AI search. Blocking AI bots is always stupid. The truth is, the world consists of many shades of gray. This idea is captured well in the book “May Contain Lies” by Alex Edmans. He says something can be moderate, granular, or marbled: Backlinks are not always good or important, as they lose their impact after a certain point (moderate). Reddit isn’t always important for AI search if it’s not cited at all for the relevant prompt set (granular). Blocking some AI bots isn’t always stupid because, for some business models and companies, it makes perfect sense (marbled). The first step to get better is always awareness. And we all are sometimes ignorant, (voluntarily or involuntarily) stupid, suffer from biases or think black and white. Let’s get more practical now that we know why we fall for bad advice. Dig deeper: Most SEO research doesn’t lie – but doesn’t tell the truth either How I evaluate GEO (and SEO) advice and protect myself from being stupid One way to save yourself is the ladder of misinference, once again borrowing from Edmans’ book. It looks like this: To accept something as proof, it needs to climb the rungs of the ladder. On closer inspection, many claims fail at the last rung when it comes to evidence versus proof. To give you an example: Statement: “User signals are an important factor for better organic performance.” Fact: Better CTR performance can lead to better rankings. Data: You can directly measure this on your own site, and several experiments showed the impact of user signals long before it became common knowledge. Evidence: There are experiments demonstrating causal effects, and a well-known portion of the 2024 Google leak focuses on evaluating user signals. Proof: Court documents in Google’s DOJ monopoly trial confirmed the data and evidence, making this universally true. Fun fact: Rand Fishkin and Marcus Tandler both said that user signals matter many years ago and were laughed at, much like scientists in the 1800s. At the time, the evidence wasn’t strong enough. Today, their “joke” is now the truth. If I were you, here’s what I would do: Seek dissenting viewpoints: You only truly understand something when you can argue in its favor. The best defense is steelmanning your argument. To do that, you need to fully understand the other side. Consume with the intent to understand: Too often, we listen to reply, which means we don’t listen at all and instead converse with ourselves in our own heads. We focus on our own arguments and what we will say next. To understand, you need to listen actively. Pause before you share and believe: False information is highly contagious, so sharing half-truths or lies is dangerous. You also shouldn’t believe something simply because a well-known person said it or because it’s repeated over and over again. Don’t use AI to summarize (perhaps controversial): AI has significant flaws when it comes to summarization. For example, prompts that ask for brief summaries increase hallucinations, and source material can put a veil of credibility and trust over the response. We will see why the last point is a big problem in a second. The prime example: Blinding AI workslop I decided against finger-pointing, so there is no link or mention of who this is about. With a bit of research, you might find the example yourself. This “research” was promoted in the following way: “How AI search really works.” Requiring a time investment of weeks. 19 studies and six case studies analyzed. Validated, reviewed, and stress-tested. To quote Edmans: “It’s not for the authors to call their findings groundbreaking. That’s for the reader to judge. You need to shout about the conclusiveness of your proof or the novelty of your results. Maybe they’re not strong enough to speak for themselves. … It doesn’t matter what fancy name you give your techniques or how much data you gather. Quantity is no substitute for quality.” Just because something took a long time does not mean the results are good. Just because the author or authors say so does not mean the findings are groundbreaking. According to the HBR, AI workslop is: “AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” I don’t have proof this work was AI-generated. It’s simply how it felt when I read it myself, with no skimming or AI summaries. Here are a few things that caught my attention: It doesn’t deliver what it claims. It purports to explain how AI search works, but instead lists false correlations between studies that analyzed something different from what the analysis claims. Reported sample sizes are inaccurate. Studies and articles are mishmashed. One source is a “someone said something that someone said something that someone said.” Cited research didn’t analyze or conclude what is claimed in the meta-analysis. The “correlation coefficient” isn’t a correlation coefficient, but a weighted score. To be specific, it misdates the GEO study as 2024 instead of 2023 and claims the research “confirms” that schema markup, lists, and FAQ blocks significantly improve inclusion in AI responses. A review of the study shows that it makes no such claims. This analysis looks convincing on the surface and masquerades as good work, but on closer inspection, it crumbles under scrutiny. Disclaimer: I specifically wanted to highlight one example because it reflects everything I wrote about in my last article and serves as a perfect continuation. This “research” was shared in newsletters, news sites, and roundups. It got a lot of eyeballs. Let’s now take a look at the three, in my opinion, most pervasive recommendations for influencing the rate of your AI citations. Dig deeper: Forget the Great Decoupling – SEO’s Great Normalization has begun Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. The most common GEO myths: Claims vs. reality ‘Build an llms.txt’ The claims for why this should help: AI chatbots have a centralized source of important information to use for citations. It’s a lightweight file that makes it easier for AI crawlers to evaluate your domain. When viewed through the ladder of misinference, the llms.txt claim is a statement. Some parts are factual – for example, Google and others crawl these files, and Google even indexes and ranks them for keywords – and there is data to support that. However, there is no data or evidence showing that llms.txt files boost AI inclusion. There is certainly no proof. The reality is that llms.txt is a proposal from 2024 that gained traction largely because it was amplified by influencers. It was repeated often enough to become one of the more tiring talking points in black-and-white debates. One side dismisses it entirely, while the other promotes it as a secret holy grail that will solve all AI visibility problems. The original proposal also stated: “We furthermore propose that pages on websites that have information that might be useful for LLMs to read provide a clean markdown version of those pages at the same URL as the original page, but with .md appended.” This approach would lead to internal competition, duplicate content, and an unnecessary increase in total crawl volume. The only scenario where llms.txt makes sense is if you operate a complex API that AI agents can meaningfully benefit from. (There’s a small experiment showing that neither llms.txt nor .md files have an impact on AI citations.) So, if I were you, here’s what I would do: On a quarterly basis: Check whether companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have openly announced support. Review log files to see how crawl volume to llms.txt changes over time. You can do this without providing an llms.txt file. If it is officially supported, create one according to published documentation guidelines. At the moment, no one has evidence – or proof – that an llms.txt meaningfully influences your AI presence. ‘Use schema markup’ The claims for why this should help: Machines love structured data. Generally, the advice “make it as easy as possible” holds true. “Microsoft said so.” The last point is egregious. No one has a direct quote from Fabrice Canel or the exact context in which he supposedly said this. For this recommendation, there is no solid data or evidence. The reality is this: For training Text is extracted and HTML elements are stripped. Tokenization after pretraining destroys coherent code if markup makes it through to this step. The existence of LLMs is based on structuring unstructured content. They can handle schema and write it because they are trained to do so. That doesn’t mean your individual markup plays a role in the knowledge of the foundation model. For grounding There is no evidence that AI chatbots access schema markup. Correlation studies show that websites with schema markup have better AI visibility, but there are many rival theories that could explain this. Recent experiments (including this and this) showed the opposite. The tools AI chatbots can access don’t use the HTML. I recently tested this in Perplexity Comet. Even with an open DOM, it hallucinated schema markup on the page that didn’t match what was actually there. Also, when someone says they use structured data, that can – but does not have to – mean schema. All schema is structured data, but not all structured data is schema. In most cases, they mean proper HTML elements such as tables and lists. So, if I were you, here’s what I would do: Use schema markup for supported rich results. Use all relevant properties in your schema markup. You might ask why I recommend this. To me, solid schema markup is a hygiene factor of good SEO. Just because AI chatbots and agents don’t use schema today doesn’t mean they won’t in the future. “One could say the same for llms.txt.” That’s true. However, llms.txt has no SEO benefits. Schema markup doesn’t help us understand how AI systems process content directly. Instead, it helps improve signals they frequently look at, such as search rankings, both in the top 10 and beyond for fan-out queries. ‘Provide fresh content’ The claims for why this should help: AI chatbots prefer fresh content. Fresh content is important for some queries and prompts. Newer or recently updated content should be more accurate. Compared with llms.txt and schema markup, this recommendation stands on a much more solid foundation in terms of evidence and data. The reality is that foundation models contain content up to the end of 2022. After digesting that information, they need fresh content, which means cited sources, on average, have to be more recent. If freshness is relevant to a query – OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity use freshness as a signal to determine whether to use web search – then finding fresh sources matters. There is research supporting this hypothesis from Ahrefs, Generative Pulse, and Seer Interactive. More recently, a scientific paper also supported these claims. A few words of caution about that paper: The researchers used API results, not the user interface. Results differ because of chatbot system prompts and API settings. Surfer recently published a study showing how large those differences can be. Asking a model to rerank is not how the model or chatbot actually reranks results in the background. The way dates were injected was highly artificial, with a perfect inverse correlation that may exaggerate the results. That said, this recommendation appears to have the strongest case for meaningfully influencing AI visibility and increasing citations. So, if I were you, here’s what I would do: Add a relevant date indicating when your content was last updated. Keep update dates consistent: On-page. Schema markup. Sitemap lastmod. Update content regularly, especially for queries where freshness matters. Fan-out queries from AI chatbots often signal freshness when a date is included. Never artificially update content by changing only the date. Google stores up to 20 past versions of a web page and can detect manipulation. In other words, this one appears to be legitimate. Dig deeper: The rise of ‘like hat’ SEO: When attention replaces outcomes Escaping the vortex of AI search misinformation We have to avoid shoveling AI search misinformation into the walls of our industry. Otherwise, it will become the asbestos we eventually have to dig out. An attention-grabbing headline should always raise red flags. I understand the allure of believing what appears to be the consensus or using AI to summarize. It’s easier. We’re all busy. The issue is that there was already too much content to consume before AI. Now there’s even more because of it. We can’t consume and analyze everything, so we rely on the same tools not only to generate content, but also to consume it. It’s a snake-biting-its-own-tail problem. Our compression culture risks creating a vortex of AI search misinformation that feeds back into the training data of the AI chatbots we both love and hate. We’re already there. AI chatbots sometimes answer GEO questions from model knowledge. Take the time to think for yourself and get your hands dirty. Try to understand why something should or shouldn’t work. And never take anything at face value, no matter who said it. Authority isn’t accuracy. P.S. This article may contain lies. View the full article

Each year on the holiday that bears his name, Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered for his immense contributions to the struggle for racial equality. What is less often remembered but equally important is that King saw the fight for racial equality as deeply intertwined with economic justice. To address inequality—and out of growing concern for how automation might displace workers—King became an early advocate for universal basic income. Under universal basic income, the government provides direct cash payments to all citizens to help them afford life’s expenses. In recent years, more than a dozen U.S. cities have run universal basic income programs, often smaller or pilot programs that have offered guaranteed basic incomes to select groups of needy residents. As political scientists, we have followed these experiments closely. One of us recently co-authored a study which found that universal basic income is generally popular. In two out of three surveys analyzed, majorities of white Americans supported a universal basic income proposal. Support is particularly high among those with low incomes. King’s intuition was that white people with lower incomes would support this type of policy because they could also benefit from it. In 1967, King argued, “It seems to me that the Civil Rights Movement must now begin to organize for the guaranteed annual income . . . which I believe will go a long, long way toward dealing with the Negro’s economic problem and the economic problem with many other poor people confronting our nation.” But there is one notable group that does not support universal basic income: those with higher levels of racial resentment. Racial resentment is a scale that social scientists have used to describe and measure anti-Black prejudice since the 1980s. Notably, in our research, whites with higher levels of racial resentment and higher incomes are especially inclined to oppose universal basic income. As King well knew, this segment of Americans can create powerful opposition. Economic self-interest can The President resentment At the same time, the results of the study also suggest that coalition building is possible, even among the racially resentful. Economic status matters. Racially resentful whites with lower incomes tend to be supportive of universal basic income. In short, self-interest seems to The President racial resentment. This is consistent with King’s idea of how an economic coalition could be built and pave the way toward racial progress. Income is not the only thing that shapes attitudes, however. Some of the strongest supporters of universal basic income are those who have higher incomes but low levels of racial resentment. This suggests an opportunity to build coalitions across economic lines, something King believed was necessary. “The rich must not ignore the poor,” he argued in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, “because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny.” Our data shows that this is possible. This approach to coalition building is also suggested by our earlier research. Using American National Election Studies surveys from 2004-2016, we found that for white Americans, racial resentment predicted lower support for social welfare policies. But we also found that economic position mattered, too. Economic need can unite white Americans in support of more generous welfare policies, including among some who are racially prejudiced. At a minimum, this suggests that racial resentment does not necessarily prevent white Americans from supporting policies that would also benefit Black Americans. Building lasting coalitions During his career as an activist in the 1950s and 1960s, King struggled with building long-term, multiracial coalitions. He understood that many forms of racial prejudice could undermine his work. He therefore sought strategies that could forge alliances across lines of difference. He helped build coalitions of poor and working-class Americans, including those who are white. He was not so naive as to think that shared economic progress would eliminate racial prejudice, but he saw it as a place to start. Currently, the nation faces an affordability crisis, and artificial intelligence poses new threats to jobs. These factors have increased calls for universal basic income. Racial prejudice continues to fuel opposition to universal basic income, as well as other forms of social welfare. But our research suggests that this is not insurmountable. As King knew, progress toward economic equality is not inevitable. But, as his legacy reminds us, progress does remain possible through organizing around shared interests. Tarah Williams is an assistant professor of political science at Allegheny College and Andrew Bloeser is an associate professor of political science; Director, Center for Political Participation at Allegheny College. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

Hartford, Connecticut, topped Zillow's list of the hottest housing markets this year on the back of its nation-leading home-price appreciation forecast. View the full article

Learn how to balance upper and lower-funnel budgets across paid search and social, backed by research, frameworks, and practical strategies to drive long-term growth. The post How Much Of Your Paid Media Budget Should Be Allocated To Upper Funnel? appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Being a field dependent on big developer clients and even bigger sums of money, rarely do architects get to pick the projects they work on. Would they if they could? Absolutely. Fast Company asked architects and designers from some of the top firms working around the world to think about the kinds of projects they wish they could do, clients, budgets, and possibly reality notwithstanding. From the abstract to one very specific (and notorious) train station, seven architects shared building projects they’d love to tackle in 2026. Here’s the question we put to a panel of designers and leaders in architecture: What’s your dream project in 2026? An urban district reimagined The dream project for me isn’t a skyline object or spectacle, it’s a long-life system—a project whose structure is reused, materials are upgraded and recycled rather than replaced, and performance improves over time. Where sustainable strategies aren’t hidden in basements, or rooftops, but become part of the architectural experience. A dream project would be an urban district reimagined, edited with a scalpel (rather than a sledgehammer) with its declining building stock given a new life through subtle upgrades, modest interventions, and attention to craft and building performance. —Trent Tesch, Principal, KPF Solutions to current crises My dream project would be to design beyond the scale of a single building—at the district scale—to define a new way of living. We have the ability to overcome the segmentation we have created in the built environment and move toward convergent places where people can not only live, work, and play in the same space, but also innovate, learn, and care for ourselves and each other. Embedded in this approach are solutions to current crises like housing, access to food and care, and more: to think about community-building and what people need around them to ensure a safe, vibrant, and supported life. —David Polzin, executive director of design, CannonDesign An example of where design needs to go My dream project should break ground right near the end of the year — the New York Climate Exchange on Governors Island. It will be arguably the most sustainable project ever undertaken in the city and an example of where design needs to go in the coming decade. —Colin Koop, partner, SOM A tangible vision of a ‘heaven on earth’ A dream project with a design ethos grounded in simplicity, sustainability, and the clear expression of engineering functions, this project would function as a living laboratory at a district-to-regional, maybe even country scale, exemplifying human-centered, climate-responsive urbanism. It would demonstrate how architecture can create healthier built environments, advance decarbonization, promote human well-being, foster thriving ecosystems, and deliver scalable models for resilient cities worldwide—a tangible vision of a “heaven on earth” in a built environment. —Luke Leung, sustainable engineering studio leader, SOM Breaking down silos Our firm’s portfolio has always been shaped by the idea of architecture as social and civic infrastructure, rather than isolated objects. Our dream project in 2026 is one that will allow us to further break down overly prescriptive disciplinary and programmatic silos, to the benefit of those who use the spaces we create. This could take the form of a new kind of mixed-use district, a daycare-driven residential building, woodland cabins, or reinvented urban infrastructure, but it would be guided, as all our work is, by the idea of long-term stewardship and deep collaboration with community and our peers in architecture, engineering, and beyond. We are most interested in projects where design builds capacity and trust, and where success is measured not only by what gets built, but by what it enables over time. —Claire Weisz, founding principal, WXY architecture + urban design Destinations for learning and gathering There is growing need for cultural and community catalysts that bring people together, especially in communities that are lacking destinations for learning and gathering. Design can support a sense of belonging and grounding to the physicality of architecture that is important in this day of instant gratification. —Nick Leahy, co-CEO and executive director, Perkins Eastman A nightmare-turned-dream? Pennsylvania Station! —Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder, PAU View the full article

Before you apply for a new role, it’s important to prepare for marketing salary negotiations and learn how to pursue fair pay with practical, realistic guidance. Whether you work in SEO, PPC, or somewhere in between, salaries remain a contentious topic. They are often hard to discuss, difficult to quantify, and challenging to change. While many resources cover salary negotiations in general, this article focuses specifically on negotiating pay for marketing roles. Difficulties with marketing salaries Several factors make marketing roles harder to benchmark than many other professions, complicating salary expectations and negotiations. No industry standard Unlike fields with national governing bodies and defined career grades, marketing lacks standardization. This makes it difficult to align salary bands across companies or compare roles on an equal footing. Inconsistent job titles Job titles in marketing vary widely. A VP of marketing at one company may perform duties similar to a junior account manager elsewhere, while in another organization, the title represents the most senior marketing leader. Because titles are used inconsistently, it can be challenging to assess role seniority and determine which salary ranges are appropriate. Major market shifts in recent years Marketers who last negotiated pay during the COVID-driven digital boom of 2020-2021 may find today’s job market markedly different. Just five years ago, businesses rapidly shifted to online-first marketing, driving strong demand for digital talent. Performance and organic marketers benefited from a candidate-favorable market, with new roles being created, frequent poaching, and rising salaries. Today, conditions have changed. The rise of AI, global economic uncertainty, and company downsizing have reduced salary pressure for many marketing roles. There is also more uncertainty around job stability, leading fewer marketers to change roles unless necessary. As a result, the salary levels seen in 2020-2021 are largely a thing of the past. Well-paid marketing roles still exist, but they are harder to find. That reality should inform your salary negotiations, not discourage them. Some marketing channels can be misunderstood Less marketing-savvy companies often advertise a single role intended to cover three or more distinct specializations, typically at bottom-of-the-market pay. Even organizations that better understand marketing skill sets may struggle to grasp the full complexity and breadth of knowledge required to perform a role effectively. This can lead to significant undervaluation of marketers. Given that marketing salaries can be difficult for employers to navigate, how can you ensure you are fairly compensated for your experience and expertise? The following nine tips can be broadly grouped into four areas: Know what you bring to the table. Know what is realistic. Identify and demonstrate what is valuable to the company. Stick to your boundaries. Know what you bring to the table We’ll start with the side of salary negotiations that, for some, can be very difficult: accurately valuing your own skill set. If you are in a position to negotiate a salary, you have either already been offered the job or you work for the company and are hoping to secure a raise. In either case, the company must already believe you are suitable for the role. That does not stop it from trying to secure your services at the most economical price. Knowing what you bring to the table is key to having the bargaining power and confidence to negotiate a fair salary. This does not just mean how much direct experience you have in the role you have landed. Tip 1: Demonstrate your experience in the industry Don’t underestimate how much employers value candidates who have knowledge and experience within their sector. You may also find that some industries struggle to hire marketing professionals, and your willingness to join that industry can command a higher salary. If you’ve worked in notoriously difficult industries, such as gambling, adult entertainment, or pharmaceuticals, you may be able to negotiate higher pay because of it. This can be due to the perception of difficulty in marketing within these industries. Dig deeper: How to become exceptional at SEO Tip 2: Promote your prior experience in and out of similar roles Your years of experience in a role may feel like an obvious bargaining chip when negotiating salary. However, don’t forget that an employer may also benefit from the knowledge and experience you gained outside the role you are applying for. Just because your previous job titles may not sound similar to the role you are negotiating now doesn’t mean the skills you developed there aren’t directly relevant. Review your CV and compare it with the role you are applying for. Identify the parts of your work history that align with the job description. Look beyond the obvious and consider transferable skills such as communication, problem-solving, and stakeholder management. Tip 3: Highlight extra skills outside your job specification Think about the skills you’ve developed over the years that may not be listed in the job description but are likely to be important for success in the role. This can be particularly helpful if you are earlier in your career and lack directly relevant experience in similar positions. Consider what you learned through volunteer roles, a first summer job, or even hobbies. They may seem far removed from marketing, but you have likely gained lessons through those experiences that can support your current career. Tip 4: Show your financial impact in previous roles As with any ROI calculation, employers want to know whether the salary they may pay a candidate will deliver a return on that investment. If you are negotiating a higher salary than originally offered, you need to demonstrate why it is financially worthwhile for the employer. Be strategic in the examples you share. Rather than focusing only on increases in traffic or rankings, emphasize the revenue or cost savings you delivered. You may be limited by NDAs and unable to share specific figures, but you can still reference outcomes, such as increasing organic search revenue by 5x or reducing a PPC budget by 20% while maintaining performance. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Know what is realistic It’s one thing to understand your value based on the skills and experience you bring to a company. It’s another to assess that value accurately in the job market. Ultimately, salaries are limited by what employers are willing to pay. Tip 5: Be familiar with industry benchmarks Do some research when considering your salary. You may have been paid above or below the market average in your current or previous role, which can skew your expectations. Review job ads in your geographic area that require similar skills and experience, and note the lower and upper ends of the stated salary ranges. Be careful not to compare roles based on job titles alone. As noted earlier, marketing titles are often inconsistent, and you may be comparing your role with one that is more senior or more junior. Also consider the industry. Salaries in charities, for example, are unlikely to match those in tech or finance. Salary benchmarking reports can also be useful, such as: Remote, content SEO roles in decline: Report Salary and Career survey: How much search marketers make These resources can provide a more objective view of the market. Keep in mind that salaries vary significantly by country, so avoid comparing U.S. and UK salaries directly. Tip 6: Find out the internal salary ranges When applying for a role, it is always helpful to understand the salary range being offered, although this is not always possible. Some companies wait for candidates to make the first move on salary and may avoid sharing ranges to prevent offering more than necessary. This is why it’s important to follow Tip 5 first, so you understand what your skills and experience are worth in the broader market. Some organizations use salary banding. For example, a senior SEO specialist may be classified as a level 4 role, while a junior SEO role may sit at level 2. If a recruiter is unwilling to share the exact salary range, you can ask about role levels or banding instead. This can provide insight into where the role sits within the company hierarchy and what the potential salary ceiling might be. If you are able to identify the salary range, try to determine what qualifies a candidate for the top of the band. Is the company looking for additional “nice to haves” to justify the highest salary? In some cases, it may be reserved for candidates with experience in a specific industry. Once you understand which skills command higher pay, you can emphasize them in your CV and during interviews. Dig deeper: What 15 years in enterprise SEO taught me about people, power, and progress Identify and demonstrate the values of the company As many candidates discover during interviews, what a company truly wants is not always clearly stated in the job description or early conversations with recruiters. Hiring managers may not fully define what they are looking for in a successful candidate until they have interviewed several people for comparison. As a result, you may be unclear about what matters most for the role, making it harder to demonstrate your suitability and justify the salary you are requesting. Interviews can provide an opportunity to explore these values in more detail. Ask interviewers what “success” looks like in the role or how they would describe the traits of their top-performing colleagues. This can help you understand the characteristics and behaviors the company values. Tip 7: Demonstrate how you live up to those values Once you understand what the company values, identify how you can deliver that through the role. For example, if “initiative” is highly valued, you can use the interview process to highlight how you demonstrate initiative in your work. Use examples from past experience to show how you embody the company’s values, citing specific projects or situations where you demonstrated them. If “transparency” is important to the organization, you might reference a time when you acknowledged a mistake. Demonstrating alignment with the company, in addition to job proficiency, can make you a more attractive candidate and support a stronger salary case. Dig deeper: Becoming AI-native: The next leap for SEO professionals Stick to your boundaries When negotiating your salary, you need to know your absolute minimum. This is not just the lowest salary you can afford to accept. It also means identifying what you need from a role to feel respected and valued, and what the overall compensation package must include to support that. Going into negotiations with clear boundaries makes it easier to say no when an offer does not meet them. Tip 8: Consider other benefits that may offset a lower salary In some situations, accepting a lower salary may make sense. You may be moving into a different role where you have less experience and are starting at a more junior level. The opportunity to develop new skills can justify a lower salary. Other tangible benefits, such as strong health coverage, additional paid time off, shorter working hours, or a gym membership, may also make a lower salary acceptable. Tip 9: Identify other positives that may justify a lower salary You may be moving into an industry you care deeply about. For example, joining a charity may provide enough personal satisfaction to offset lower pay. Be sure to factor these considerations into your salary expectations when defining your boundaries. Tip 10: Decide how little is enough for you to walk away After working through the previous tips, you should have a clear understanding of the minimum compensation you are willing to accept, or remain in, a role for. Keep this in mind during negotiations. You may feel pressure not to lose the role by asking for more money, or worry about appearing overly focused on pay. Joining a company and immediately feeling underpaid is not sustainable. At the same time, asking for a raise as soon as you start is unlikely to help you establish yourself. You may be better off declining a role if the company cannot close the gap between its offer and your minimum salary expectations. Dig deeper: 12 skills every SEO specialist must master by 2026 Empower yourself in marketing salary talks You deserve to be paid what you are worth. Use these tips to define your value, account for any mitigating factors, and arrive at a salary you are willing to accept. Once you have that number, negotiating becomes a matter of clearly demonstrating the value you bring to the company compared with other candidates. If the gap between what a company is willing to pay and what you believe your skills and experience are worth is too large, walking away may be the better option. View the full article

Most organizations still hire for culture fit—even those that loudly champion diversity and inclusion. The phrase sounds benign, even wise: who wouldn’t want colleagues who “fit in”? But behind this feel-good notion lies one of the biggest obstacles to innovation and progress in modern workplaces. Culture fit has become a euphemism for cultural cloning: selecting people who already look, think, and behave like the incumbents. It’s a polite way of saying, we want people like us, because there’s nothing more comforting than working—and hanging out—with people who are just like you! The irony, of course, is that such homogeneity kills the very things organizations claim to want: creativity, adaptability, and innovation. As Adam Grant notes, originality thrives in contexts that tolerate dissent and deviance, not conformity. Yet the more organizations glorify “fit,” the more they drift toward cultish sameness. The difference between a culture and a cult, after all, is just one letter—and often one lawsuit. This tendency isn’t new. Social psychology has long shown that we’re drawn to those who resemble us; similarity reduces friction and uncertainty. But comfort is the enemy of progress. Uniformity might make life easier for recruiters and managers, but it makes systems fragile. Nature offers a cautionary tale: the Irish potato famine. For decades, Ireland depended almost entirely on a single potato variety, the Lumper. When a blight struck in 1845, the lack of genetic diversity turned one crop failure into a national catastrophe. Organizations that over-rely on a single “type” of employee risk the same fate—a cultural monocrop vulnerable to shocks, blind spots, and collective stupidity. The cost of fitting in too well Empirical research supports this. Studies show that while culture fit predicts short-term satisfaction and commitment, it’s often negatively related to long-term innovation and change readiness. A large meta-analysis by Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman, and Johnson found that person–organization fit strongly predicts employees’ attitudes but not their creativity or performance in changing environments. Similarly, Michele Gelfand’s cross-national study on cultural “tightness” found that organizations and societies that enforce conformity underperform in dynamic contexts, while “looser” cultures—those that tolerate rule-bending and deviance, are more innovative and adaptive. There are also considerable costs for businesses that hire for culture-fit: when everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks at all! In line, cultural homogeneity reduces innovation, creativity, and curiosity, as well as increasing conformity and resisting change. By contrast, organizations that value constructive misfit—hiring people who stretch or challenge the dominant mold—show higher rates of creativity and problem-solving. Google’s famous Project Aristotle study on team effectiveness found that the best-performing groups weren’t the most harmonious or homogenous, but those with psychological safety—teams where people felt free to disagree without social punishment. The best cultures, in other words, don’t eliminate tension; they use it productively. Unfortunately, many companies still confuse alignment with excellence. “Fit” becomes the criterion for hiring and promotion, even as executives pay lip service to diversity. As illustrated in Don’t Be Yourself: Why Authenticity is Overrated and What to Do Instead, in practice, “bring your whole self to work” often means “bring the parts of yourself that look and sound like the rest of us.” The result is a well-intentioned echo chamber. Everybody belongs—and nobody thinks. The case for the moderate misfit So, what happens if you don’t quite fit in? If you’re the person who feels slightly out of sync with the corporate rhythm—too analytical for the sales culture, too candid for the political one, too global for the parochial one? At first, it’s uncomfortable. You’ll have to work to fit in, even as the company insists you shouldn’t have to. “Inclusion” sounds effortless, but it usually requires emotional labor—the cognitive gymnastics of decoding unspoken norms, managing impressions, and adapting without losing yourself. Yet being a moderate misfit—someone who respects the system but doesn’t worship it—comes with real advantages. You bring a different perspective. You see what insiders can’t because you aren’t fully hypnotized by the culture. Research on task conflict shows that moderate levels of disagreement improve decision quality and innovation, as long as they’re respectful. The worst decisions in history (from Enron to the Challenger disaster) share one trait: too much agreement. You’re more likely to become a change agent. Because you don’t fully identify with the status quo, you’re less invested in preserving it. Decades of research on minority influence show that consistent dissenters (even when initially unpopular) eventually shift group norms. You’ll stay an independent thinker. Irving Janis’s classic work on groupthink revealed that cohesive groups under pressure tend to suppress dissent, leading to catastrophic decisions. Misfits disrupt that comfort. They’re less likely to self-censor or outsource their thinking to the hive mind. Even when they play along, they keep a mental escape hatch open—a capacity for self-reflection that prevents total ideological capture. And you might even grow. Working alongside people who aren’t like you forces you to reconsider your assumptions. A widely cited meta-analysis shows that exposure to difference reduces prejudice and increases cognitive complexity. Growth happens when you’re challenged; when you collaborate, debate, and adapt outside your comfort zone. Leadership, progress, and the art of misfitting Ultimately, leadership is not about comfort but progress. As Gianpiero Petriglieri reminds us, leadership is always an argument with tradition, a dialogue between what is and what could be. Fitting in completely, therefore, is not a strength but a symptom of stagnation. When everyone agrees, nobody leads; they merely administer. The playwright George Bernard Shaw put it even more bluntly: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Moderate misfits are those “unreasonable” people, balanced enough to survive within the system but different enough to question it. They’re the ones who stretch cultures, challenge orthodoxies, and prevent organizations from fossilizing. Yes, it can be exhausting to swim against the current. It takes empathy, restraint, and strategic impression management. But the payoff is immense: you remain curious, independent, and relevant in a world that worships conformity. To be sure, many don’t survive so pragmatically it is worth wondering whether you want to be part of an organization or system that regards and treats you as an outlier or part of the outgroup—it requires a great deal of willpower and resilience . . . the struggle is real!. So, here’s to the misfits, the ones who don’t quite belong, who ask inconvenient questions, and who resist the seductive comfort of sameness. They may never win the “culture fit” award, but they’re the reason culture evolves at all . . . if we are brave to hire them in the first place! View the full article

Google announced late on Friday that Gemini 3 Pro is now powered Google AI Overviews for complex queries. Google actually said this last November, but then edited its story to say it was just AI Mode that was powered by Gemini 3 Pro and not AI Overviews. Now both AI Overviews and AI Mode can use Gemini 3 Pro.View the full article

Google is appealing the ruling that it is an illegal search monopoly - which surprises no one. Plus, Google asked the court to pause the remedies during the appeal phase.View the full article

Google's John Mueller once again warned about hosting your website on free subdomain hosting service because they are magnets for a "lot of spam & low-effort content."View the full article

Artificial intelligence capabilities have rapidly shifted from nice-to-have extras to essential requirements across industries and job levels. Employers now prioritize candidates who can harness AI tools to multiply productivity, accelerate innovation, and solve complex problems with lean resources. In this article, experts reveal how mastering AI skills can unlock career opportunities, faster promotions, and competitive advantages in today’s job market. Own One System and Share Insights For me, the secret to standing out in the age of AI was pretty simple: if your company is starting to use AI, use it. Don’t wait for someone to tell you where to start. Pick one tool, go deep, and let curiosity lead you. When I was a learning designer at Zapier, I decided to focus on one thing, a new tool that had just rolled out: AI Agents by Zapier. I pushed everything nonessential to the side and gave myself two weeks to learn it inside and out. Along the way, I realized that to make my Agents even better, I needed to understand other tools too: AI fields in Tables, Chatbots, and AI steps in automation workflows. That one deep dive became a crash course in the future of work. I started filming myself as I learned, sharing the process and mistakes with others. Soon, teammates were reaching out for help. Product teams asked me to test new features and give feedback. And before I knew it, I’d become the go-to AI person — without a technical background. Eighteen months later, I was promoted to senior AI automation engineer. If you want to stand out and make yourself indispensable, start there: Go deep on something. Master one AI tool instead of dabbling in many. Share what you learn. Help your teammates, post your insights, and be generous with your knowledge. Be strategic. Know when AI is the right solution (and, importantly, when it’s not). Being proactive about AI isn’t just about saving time. It’s about showing that you can drive change, not wait for it. That’s what makes you valuable, no matter how much technology evolves. Emily Mabie, AI Automation Engineer, Zapier Start Companies With Generative Help Generative AI is not just a differentiator; it’s a career accelerator that can expand career opportunities far beyond traditional paths. AI literacy empowers individuals to create entirely new opportunities that would previously have been inaccessible to them without significant resources or institutional backing. One powerful example is how generative AI tools, even free ones like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, can enable someone to launch a company instead of simply searching for yet another corporate role. With AI, an aspiring entrepreneur with a business idea is empowered to research and draft a well-thought-out business plan in hours, create and iterate on a brand identity without hiring a creative agency, develop a full-fledged marketing plan, and even simulate customer feedback by asking AI to role-play as an ideal customer persona to review, critique, and evaluate offerings through their lens. This ability to work with AI on tasks that once required significant investment and teams of consultants, designers, and executive focus groups fundamentally changes the opportunities for career advancement. It lowers the barrier to entry for entrepreneurship, allowing individuals to test ideas, refine messaging, and build expertise at a fraction of the cost and time it would take without AI. It’s like having an entire team of executives, business planners, marketers, and writers at your fingertips. When I began building my consultancy, I used free generative AI tools to do just that. One of the biggest advantages my AI skills created was being able to use AI to role-play as my ideal customer persona, asking it to critique my offerings, evaluate my positioning, and highlight my blind spots. That iterative feedback loop gave me insights into how the C-suite would look at my services so I could better address their needs and concerns, and “speak” their language so it would be easier for me to build trust and, ultimately, close the deal. I believe the real power of AI skills is not that it just makes you better at your current job, but that it opens doors to entirely new ones. It helps individuals transform from simply being a “job applicant” to being an “opportunity creator.” That’s how AI is truly going to reshape the future of work. Because AI skills don’t just prepare you for the future — they give you the agency to create it for yourself. Kristin Ginn, Founder, trnsfrmAItn Scale Impact With Lean Force Multipliers AI skills are no longer optional—they are becoming fundamental for every job seeker, regardless of profession. The reason is simple: AI is transforming how work gets done in three very clear stages—first by automating routine tasks, then by enhancing our abilities, and finally by transforming what individuals and small teams can achieve. Most people stop at the first stage, using AI to save time on emails, reports, or documentation. But the real opportunity lies in the next two stages. When you use AI to enhance your thinking, creativity, and output, you suddenly operate at a much higher level. And when you reach the transformation stage, AI becomes a force multiplier—enabling you to do work that previously required large teams and significant resources. I’ve experienced this personally while building my company. Thanks to AI, we have been able to build and scale one of the best all-in-one AI platforms for teachers and students with a two-member team. Everything from product management to engineering to content, design, marketing, and operations has been streamlined because AI handles a significant portion of the heavy lifting. What would traditionally require 20–25 people can now be executed by a lean, agile team that is able to move quickly and deliver high-quality output across every area. This is the true power of AI—not just automating tasks but transforming the very structure of how teams and companies operate. This is why AI proficiency is becoming a defining skill for today’s workforce. People who know how to use AI don’t just work faster—they think better, create better, and adapt better. They become more strategic, more creative, and more capable. In every field—teaching, engineering, design, marketing, HR, sales — the professionals who embrace AI will accelerate, and those who don’t will find it increasingly difficult to stay competitive. The reality is that AI is not here to replace human talent; it is here to elevate it. It levels the playing field, giving individuals access to capabilities that once required entire departments. For job seekers, students, and professionals, mastering AI tools is the most direct way to stand out in a crowded job market and open doors to opportunities that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. And if a two-member team can build and scale a platform like ours using AI, imagine what individuals can do in their own careers with the same mindset. That’s the future of work. Binit Agarwalla, Founder, TeachBetter.ai Pair Technology With Irreplaceable Human Strengths AI skills are essential because they sit at the heart of how work gets done now. But here’s what matters more: AI can’t replace the human skills that truly differentiate us—listening, building relationships, making judgment calls. When people master AI tools, they gain time and headspace to focus on what makes them irreplaceable. You can work faster, produce better quality output, and tackle projects that once felt impossible. Combined with your human abilities—empathy, curiosity, strategic thinking—you become far more valuable to any organization. When I built my company, AI became my operational backbone. While I focused on listening to clients and shaping their transformation stories, AI helped me analyze feedback, test messaging, and turn rough ideas into polished content. This meant I could build a coaching practice at startup speed while staying focused on the deeper human work—understanding what people really need. AI gave me velocity. But the human insight—the listening, the connection, the meaning-making—that’s what made the work valuable. That combination opened doors to bigger stages and leadership conversations I wouldn’t have reached as quickly otherwise. The future belongs to people who can combine AI efficiency with irreplaceable human skills. Tünde Lukacs, Founder Executive Coach Keynote Speaker, The Change Republic Launch Software Through Prompt Mastery AI tools are erasing technical gatekeeping—opening up high-value, technical jobs and paths to starting companies to nontraditional candidates. There used to be a four-year coding college prerequisite to building production-quality software, gluing stuff together, or making things happen. The most striking effect of AI I’ve seen in the last year is people bypassing it. One of the most impressive career leaps I’ve encountered was of a former VC CFO whom I talked to recently. He used Replit’s AI pair programmer to build and launch his own SaaS app in under 3 months. He had zero software experience. He just sat down with Excel and workflows he knew from his finance job and threw them right into AI co-pilot to make an app. This was not possible two years ago. He couldn’t become a “real” engineer, and this app that he’s making is not an Excel-based macro. He literally taught himself how to make software with the AI acting as his partner in the driving seat. Prompt engineering—talking in English to make AI do complex things—is now as valuable a skill as coding was 10 years ago. We see that the primary accelerant is not coding per se, but prompt engineering. Many of the most effective users of our service are not coders. They have to figure out how to give the AI goals and constraints and hammer out a detailed process, all in English. They have to turn their thoughts into instructions that involve their home context. This skill is getting to be worth more than coding. Now people can go to sleep thinking up videos they want to show, and then by morning have those videos done, without having to learn VFX or hire a studio. That’s a sea change. That’s why I tell job seekers to put “prompt engineering” on their resumes. Runbo Li, Cofounder & CEO, Magic Hour Drive Uptake and Unlock Bigger Roles AI skills are becoming essential because, obviously, they save time and effort. And it’s not about just handing everything over to a tool and hoping for the best—instead, it’s about knowing what to ask, how to review the output, and when to trust your own experience over the suggestion. In essence, AI allows everyone to become a kind of manager rather than someone who just executes tasks. Employers know this, which is why they’re increasingly looking for people who can get better results with AI. And, if you’re the person who consistently does more without working more, you naturally become the one invited into bigger projects, strategy conversations, and cross-functional work. That’s where bigger opportunities tend to open up. A good example is our Sr. Director of Communications & Creative, who recently moved into an AI Operations Manager role. He stayed current on new tools, tested them, and openly promoted what worked across the company. In under one year, he switched from Replit to Cursor, which is typically seen as a tool for more tech-savvy users. Eventually, he also pushed for a company-wide effort to upskill by launching “AI Days”—a monthly initiative where everyone focuses only on AI projects for the day. We use that time to build custom tools with platforms like v0.dev, create custom GPTs, or test new third-party AI solutions to boost productivity. Dovilė Gelčinskaitė, Senior Talent Manager, Omnisend Adopt Smart Tools to Accelerate Advancement The requirement for AI skills is increasing rapidly, as virtually every occupation includes aspects of the artificial intelligence sector. The capacity for tools to obtain greater levels of intelligence, and the expectation that workers will be able to work side by side with technology, has increased dramatically. Those who possess the ability to effectively use AI will have the potential to work faster and achieve better outcomes. This skill has evolved to be a primary skill as opposed to an additional skill. Having an understanding of AI also opens up new opportunity avenues. You can transition to a different occupation, automate your mundane tasks, and illustrate your adaptive capabilities. This indicates that you are prepared for the future of work, not the present. A brief example from my experience. I hired a junior level analyst who had no prior experience in technical fields, but had extensive knowledge and understanding of artificial intelligence tools. This junior level analyst utilized AI tools for tasks such as data organization, analysis, and report creation. Within a few months of being with us, she became the premier person within the organization to utilize AI workflows and gained considerable recognition, leading to a promotion to a higher level role, as part of the product development team, much sooner than anticipated. The AI tools that this analyst used did not supplant her work, but rather enhanced what she was doing. Therefore, for everyone today, this is the opportunity available to them. Mr Edward Tian, Founder/CEO, GPTZero Adapt Swiftly and Clarify Decisions AI skills have become essential because the pace and complexity of work have outgrown what anyone can hold in their head. The job seekers who thrive are the ones who know how to pair their human judgment with tools that help them think, create, and decide more effectively. It’s no longer about what or how much we know. It’s what we do with this information and how we apply it in innovative and influential ways. AI isn’t the destination. It’s a method of reaching it. It is the way we clear mental clutter and speed up the work that bogs us down. When we define AI as a resource and a tool rather than an identity, the whole conversation shifts, allowing us to move faster, solve problems with greater precision, and spend more time on work that advances us personally and professionally. I am an executive coach and leadership development facilitator. Two recent clients proved how much AI can sharpen career clarity. One used AI to compare three possible career paths against his 20 years of experience, which helped him choose the strongest direction and craft a short bio for informational interviews. Another uploaded her 360 feedback and used AI to distill pages of comments into a clear summary for her managers, outlining the skills she wanted to strengthen and the support she needed to evolve. But let’s be real. There’s no “mastering” AI. How can we when this tool is evolving by the hour? The real skill is learning to adapt to AI, get comfortable with it, and shape it to our own work. AI is the how behind better thinking, better decisions, and, fortunately for job seekers, better storytelling about our value. When job seekers show they can work with a rapidly changing tool set, they signal agility, curiosity, and the kind of problem-solving that sets them apart in an AI-shaped workplace that’s changing in real time. Tina Robinson, Founder and CEO, WorkJoy Gain Capacity and Elevate Quality AI skills will transform an individual’s ability to be able to increase efficiency creating capacity to either do more or to utilize excess capacity to improve quality of their deliverables. The ability to do more and improve their effectiveness will allow those earlier in their career to develop quicker and accelerate through the organizational stack sooner. For more senior folks, in addition to the personal benefits of the above-mentioned efficiency and effectiveness principles, the knowledge and exposure of AI skills will allow them to build and transform their organizations to have higher levels of throughput, distinctive competitive muscle, and an ability to serve existing as well as gain new customer segments. For me, this was transformative when I was launching my podcast in Q2 of 2024. Having never done it before, I was initially relying primarily on manual editorial work using video and sound editing tools, manually transcribing interviews, and going through numerous keyword iterations to post a single video. This effort was taking over 40 hours for a single episode. In the last five quarters while I have had to invest my time in learning and keeping up with the pace of rapidly developing AI-enabled tools, my efforts on each episode are now down to less than four hours. From transcription, to video and sound editing, to intelligent copywriting, posting, and engagement, the use of AI-enabled tools has given me hours of capacity back and the product quality is far superior than what I was able to previously achieve with manual work. Rohit Bassi, Founder & CEO, People Quotient (PQ) Prove Relevance to Overcome Bias I’ve reviewed hundreds of job postings in the past year, and the common theme is showing some understanding of how AI can be used to become more efficient. You don’t necessarily need to be an AI expert, but you do need to show that you are upskilling and aware of how you can use AI to do your job better. This is important for job seekers of all ages, but especially for experienced job seekers who can often face ageism and/or assumptions that they aren’t staying on-trend with current technology. However, demonstrating AI skills can definitely mitigate ageism risk. I recently worked with an IT analyst client in his late 60s—we led off his résumé/LinkedIn with his generative AI experience and he landed his dream job within months in spite of the challenging market. The key is being clear that you know how to leverage this technology to improve the company’s bottom line. Colleen Paulson, Executive Career Consultant, Ageless Careers Harness New Leaps to Build Empires Many fear AI will replace white-collar jobs. I argue that AI will instead re-skill them, favoring those who master it as a strategic tool. Our primal “fight or flight” response makes us see AI as a foe, but every technological leap in human history has been driven by those who dared to harness a powerful new force. Consider the transition just a century ago: horses were the dominant mode of transportation. Those who daringly mastered the automobile and aviation, often through self-teaching, built the next generation of empires. Today, early adopters of AI are positioned to dominate the next half-century. New enterprises will be founded, and a new cohort of technology leaders will emerge. This is simply the natural progression of every technological revolution, from controlling fire to inventing the wheel. In my own case, I started small, using ChatGPT and Gemini to research and draft content for a liquor store blog I was operating. Initially, my prompt engineering was clumsy. However, as I improved, the tools made producing content (listicles, cocktail trends, spirits history) significantly more efficient. This AI-fueled content strategy provided strong SEO and value, helping the brand scale from a single store to three, eventually leading to my successful exit with a 3X ROI. I am now leveraging these newly acquired skills to capture Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) business—specifically, using AI to rapidly generate, refine, and optimize marketing content for discovery across platforms. This has enabled me to scale my marketing agency, which had not actively onboarded new clients in three years. What began as an efficient way to pump out content for a single store has transformed into a core, highly profitable service offering. At 52, I can attest that this proficiency is not age-limited; mastering AI adds tangible, immediate value to clients and unlocks significant career growth. Mr. Steven Paul Matsumoto, Founder, Chief Strategist, Stigmare Inc Prototype Solutions Fast to Win Offers Many companies today test candidates’ creativity by giving them a very specific problem to solve with little to no time. This is precisely where AI can help you in your next job application. Four months ago, I started at Productive, and one of the tests I had was to create a functioning cold outreach campaign from scratch in four hours without spending too many resources. In those two hours, I learned the basics of n8n and used it to create an almost completely autonomous sequence by connecting tools like Ocean.io, Apify, ChatGPT, and Reply.io. Of course, it did not work perfectly, but the concept was enough to get me the job. Milos Radic, Marketing Partnership Manager, Productive.io Automate Workflows and Earn Rapid Promotion I had a content manager at our marketing agency who was mostly responsible for ensuring his content team was creating the right content and enough of it, but he’d often have to help them out himself. He’s always been a huge AI fan, talking about new advances and boring most of us. Over a period of 3–5 months, he’d occasionally want to show me something he’d built that either integrated with or utilized AI to automate or semi-automate tasks and processes that were responsibilities of his content team. After about four months of this and him getting better and continually creating more automated tasks/work by AI, he’d reduced the amount of human work needed by the content team by almost 60%. My concern was always quality or mistakes, so I’d test things and double check, but the end result was consistently BETTER than human work. Long story short, he quickly received a promotion to a new job that didn’t exist at our company before, so I made it up, and his title became chief operational efficiency officer. He went from a lower-level manager to an executive in a few months due to his AI proficiency and ability to implement. Landon Murie, CEO, Goodjuju Marketing View the full article

OpenAI announced on Friday it will begin testing ads in the ChatGPT responses in the coming weeks. The ads will show on the free product and low-cost subscription tier, ChatGPT Go. The ads will show under the main response and not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Advertisers will not get conversations with ChatGPT. The ads will be clearly labeled as ads.View the full article

Google's John Mueller said that link spam left in the comments section have no effect on Google Search or SEO, (and maybe even your website's performance in Google Search?). He wrote on Bluesky, "These links all have no effect - they're from spammers dropping links into comments. These would not have any effect, positive nor negative, on your site."View the full article

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Last week, Modern CEO shared reader recommendations of books leaders should read to get ready for 2026. Lyft CEO David Risher submitted a classic, writing: “If you’re looking for inspiration on how to write a comeback story for your company, there’s no better tale than The Odyssey.” Risher knows a bit about penning comeback stories. He’s undertaking the Homerian task of reviving rideshare company Lyft and narrowing the gap between the company and rival Uber. Taking on a turnaround When Risher became CEO of Lyft in April 2023, after serving on its board of directors for almost two years, the company’s stock was trading at about $9 per share, well below its IPO price of $72 per share. At the time, its U.S. market penetration was about 26% or 27%. Lyft, once hailed as an innovator and a whimsical alternative to Uber, was stagnating. Risher had previously worked at Amazon, where founder Jeff Bezos instilled an ethos of customer obsession, and he quickly assessed that Lyft had lost sight of its riders. Its employees also tended to overthink issues. Risher has sought to address both issues: Early in his tenure, for example, he noted that customers experienced a cancellation about 15% of the time. When Risher expressed concern over the stat, employees shrugged it off. Eventually a driver would show up, and rides were completed 99% of the time. “I said, ‘Okay, but 100% of the time, it’s annoying,’” Risher recalls. When some team members suggested they address Risher’s concerns by conducting research, he replied: “I don’t think we have to do a study. I can tell you right now, it’s just really annoying. So, let’s stop doing that, please.” Getting driver cancellations down required operational and technical work, but Lyft has made progress, with rates now below 5%. Risher believes that reliability helps customer loyalty. Other rider-centric moves include the national rollout last year of Lyft Silver, a service for older adults, and Women+ Connect, an opt-in feature that increases the odds of pairing female and nonbinary riders with female and nonbinary drivers. Still, Lyft has been called out on safety issues: A recent New York Times investigation into sexual assault by Uber drivers noted that Lyft bans all drivers with convictions for violent felonies but it, too, is facing sexual assault lawsuits from passengers. “We’re committed to continuously strengthening our systems and working with safety experts, advocates, and regulators to set the highest standards for our industry,” the company told The Times. Risher has also worked to expand Lyft’s reach via the recent acquisition of Freenow, a European mobility platform, a move that he says doubles the company’s addressable market. “Now we truly are a global company,” he says. Under Risher’s leadership, Lyft has eked out gains: Its market share has climbed to about 30%, and the stock now trades at about $19 per share, up about 40% over the past 12 months, outperforming Uber and the broader market. Some analysts have speculated that Lyft could be an attractive acquisition for Amazon, Tesla, Google, or Waymo as they look to expand their autonomous transportation ambitions. “As a public company, we’re on sale every day on the market,” Risher responds. “People can buy our shares anytime they want, but we’re not out looking for suitors.” Indeed, Risher—who was a comparative literature major at Princeton University—sounds like someone who hasn’t finished writing Lyft’s comeback story. When I asked what stage the turnaround is in, he says, “It might well be 10%.” What’s left to be done? “Having really focused on people, customer obsession, and a deep culture of operational excellence,” he says, “now, frankly, it’s asking: How do we grow in new ways?” He calls autonomous vehicles “one of the biggest opportunities we’ve had since the beginning of the company” and envisages a hybrid network that allows riders to decide whether they want a self-driving car or one with a driver. “I think that’s going to be a big unlock,” he adds. Tell us your turnaround tales Are you trying to turn around a company? What are some of the tactics you’re deploying to increase sales, grow market share, or restore your brand? Send me a few lines about what you’re doing at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. We’ll publish top insights in a future newsletter. Listen and read more: comeback kids Brian Niccol, Starbucks’s $100 million man, shares his vision Elliot Hill on his mission to “make epic shit” at Nike How to turn your company around after a crisis View the full article

Boeing aircraft, bourbon, motorcycles and soyabeans among targeted products if Donald The President makes good on his threats View the full article

NIIPing an outlandish idea in the budView the full article

Trade war with US risks ‘huge damage’ to UK, warns British prime ministerView the full article

To an outside observer (honestly even to the average American), the jurisdiction of the United States government appears convoluted—it’s a collection of states with one set of rules that can be overturned by the larger federal government. Holidays can sometimes fall into liminal space, and it can get confusing as to what is open and closed on days such as today (Monday, January 19), Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Let’s take a look at the man behind the holiday and the fight to get his birthday recognized, before we dive into how the day is observed. How was Martin Luther King Jr. Day established? Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) was a civil rights leader, Baptist minister, and social activist whose legacy cannot be overstated. King was instrumental in organizing the Montgomery bus boycott, which began in 1955. He cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to continue the advancement of Black people in American society. He also organized the 1963 March on Washington, which helped usher in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and he was the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The movement to create MLK Day started just four days after King’s death in 1968. Representative John Conyers introduced the idea in the House of Representatives, but it would take 11 years before a vote would be held on the motion. It would take even longer for the vote to pass. Stevie Wonder got involved, dropping a single in an effort to get King’s birthday formal recognition. Another march on Washington was organized by King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, where around 500,000 people took to the streets to show their support of the cause. Finally in 1983, the House passed the bill, although the Senate proved to be another battle, as Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina attempted to block the bill with a filibuster. President Ronald Reagan signed it into law in 1983 and the first federal holiday was observed three years later. It wasn’t until 2000 that all 50 states recognized the holiday. Now that we know the history behind the observance, here’s what to know about the potential disruption of normal day-to-day services. Are banks open on MLK Day? No. Most banks are closed because it is a federal holiday. Online banking is available. ATMs are available if you need fast cash. Is the post office open on MLK Day? No. The United Sates Postal Service (USPS) is closed on federal holidays, and most physical post offices won’t be open. Mail will not be delivered. Are Fedex and UPS operating? UPS will be closed in observance of MLK Day. FedEx will remain open with modified service. Is the stock market open? No. Both the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq exchange will be closed. Are schools open? No. Most public schools will be closed in observance of the holiday. If your loved one attends or works at a private school it’s a good practice to double check. Are restaurants open? Yes. Most large chain restaurants will be open but some will modify their hours. This includes major fast-food chains such as McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and others. Smaller mom-and-pop establishments can make their own rules so it is best to call ahead. Are retail chains open? Yes. Most major retailers and big-box stores are open. This includes Walmart, Target, Costco, and Home Depot. Are pharmacies open? Yes. If you happen to catch the flu or a cold that always seems to go around at this time of the year, Walgreens and CVS are available to soothe your ailments. Are grocery stores open? Yes. Groceries stores are typically open, including major chains such as Whole Foods, Kroger, and Aldi. Are national parks free on MLK Day? Not anymore. Under President The President, the National Park Service changed its policy and eliminated the free admission days that were previously available on both MLK Day and Juneteenth. Free admission is now available on Flag Day, which coincides with the president’s birthday. Many civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), are upset about this change because of the gravity of both of these observances. Ways to observe MLK Day There are many ways to honor the legacy of King on this day. You could volunteer at a local nonprofit and help your community, or you might consider visiting a Black history museum. You could even honor the day by simply reading a book about the visionary leader or watching one of his many moving speeches. View the full article

That felt impossible. For instance, YouTube has been the internet’s default video platform for nearly two decades. It’s frequently dubbed the second-largest search engine. So I asked Xibeijia, Ahrefs’ superstar data scientist, to pull our data and double-check. Turns out,…Read more ›View the full article

What did the latest holiday shopping season reveal about consumer confidence going into 2026? Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach unpacks the signals he’s seeing across global spending—from shifting consumer sentiment to AI’s growing role in financial security. Miebach also explores how credit cards fit into a future shaped by crypto, digital wallets, and agent-driven commerce, and what it will take for businesses to stay competitive amid continued market disruption. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You have a unique vantage point on consumer activity. So many payments run through your system. From this past holiday season, do you have any observations about consumer spending or customer sentiment? Any sort of emerging trends or lessons you’ve seen yet? When you think about what we do, we facilitate payments all around the world, so that provides a really interesting data set across all sectors, across all countries, 220 countries and territories. Last year we’re about 160 billion transactions through our network, so it does provide quite a unique view. The past holiday season, 3.9% was the year-over-year growth. So that’s a strong holiday season. You think political uncertainty, you think trade alignments and all these kinds of things, but the consumer held up well. One thing that I thought was striking was apparel sales. So we see this by categories. We don’t see individual Mastercard holder data, but the aggregate data of what are people buying and where are they buying it? So apparel sales had a real moment. So 7.8% growth in apparel, really a stick-out kind of category. One of the interesting things that I saw there in the data this particular season compared to last holiday season, consumers came in early. Probably it’s a continuation of what the consumer has done throughout 2025. “I can look for a better deal. I can look for a promotion.” So Black Friday was particularly strong, and then you look thereafter. So the savvy consumer is doing that, and so are businesses. Businesses were also worried about potentially sitting on inventory through that. So they’re trying to sell their inventory and put out offers earlier. So interesting to see what we’re going to see in 2026. The word affordability, at least in the U.S., has become like this big buzzword. And it sounds like you’re sort of seeing that in some of the data that that’s where people are leaning. When you look at some of the post-tariffs, certain prices have gone up, others have come down. But it’s very interesting when you look at the 3.9% overall. Is that inflation? No. It’s about half price increases, so pretty tame. And the other half is real volume increase where people were just still making investments into the things that they wanted to buy. It’s interesting. You must see data every day about spending patterns and changes. I’m curious how that impacts your planning and strategy. I had a CEO on the show out of the tech world recently who said he’s now replanning every week, that even monthly is too late. Very different leadership perspective from three-year, five-year plans. Is your system different because of the speed of the feedback you get? It’s not. Five years ago, we re-architected Mastercard’s network. We’re in more and more countries around the world. We’re facilitating more and more types of payments that might have been from an account-to-account are now happening on card rails or stablecoins or you name it. So we had to re-architect. From that perspective, that is not really changing our plans. What is changing our plans is if consumer behaviors and consumer choices are changing in more fundamental ways. Younger consumers like “buy now, pay later.” So we got to have that built into our system. Those are the kind of changes [we are tracking], not short-term changes. It’s ups and downs from the economy. Where are the payment trends going? Where do we invest to really understand where consumer or business payments are going? The payments need to be smarter, they need to be faster, they need to be safer. All those kinds of things, that’s where we’re investing. But that’s not week on week. We look out two, three years, and then we make those technologies available for our customers, which are generally banks or large merchants or airlines. Those are our customers. You mentioned “buy now, pay later,” a business like Klarna, which went public last year. Isn’t a credit card “buy now, pay later?” What’s the distinction? Why do people get so excited about it? It’s yet another payment choice out there. So, payments have not been more competitive than they are today. So you can pay in stablecoins, you can have a push payment, you can have a prepaid payment. You can have a buy now, pay later. This goes straight to essentially a personal loan kind of equivalent. So those are choices. And those are the choices that if we see them amongst consumers or the customers of our customers, then we make them available. If you are a buy now, pay now—a pure play company—you’re going to find large merchants, large brands that are going to have these offers on their websites and in their stores if they have physical stores. The way that we did it, we built it just as an offer into our network. So wherever Mastercard is available, one of our acquiring partners can offer at the checkout terminal in an in-store and someone can buy now, pay later. So JPMorgan or Galileo are partners like that of us, they make that pay available. So the initial craze of buy now, pay later has died down a bit. I think it’s a very credible choice. We offer it. And a lot of young people think this is a good idea because it gives you more planability of your interest payments and all that. We also think loans on cards where you say, let’s say you pay $500 on a card and you turn that into three payments and many banks just offer that and it’s not going into a buy now or pay later route, but it’s the same outcome. So in the end, people want more control over their finances and more flexibility to buy bigger things that they maybe cannot afford in the moment. And different solutions to that. We’re all about consumer choice and we make all of that available. Obviously we’ve had this drastic evolution from physical cards and checks and even cash to contactless tap and digital wallets. Right. Is this new standard going to stay or do you think things will keep moving to things like biometrics or face scanning? I mean, I know you’ve talked about more personalized payments. Is that what you mean? That’s not quite what I mean. But when you think payments, it’s a constant evolution, so it’s not going to stay where it is. It took 10 years for contactless to get what it is today. So you tap with your phone, you tap with your card. It’s about two-thirds of global transactions on our network are now contactless. What is now a big driver for the next kind of experience is where checkout really becomes a non-issue. It just going to disappear. So we put a lot of focus on making checkout a non-event, and an enabling technology for that is tokenization. So you take your card data and you turn it into a one-time code that can only be used for the transaction that’s securely shot between the different participants and the payment ecosystem, very safe. Now you can do the same thing with your biometric identity, be your fingerprint or your facial, and that comes along with that transaction token and anybody on the other side can see that is the transaction and it should go through. So it increases security dramatically. So we invented tokenization in the payment side many years back, and it’s now scaling. So we made a commitment starting with Europe that by 2030, every transaction will be tokenized. Really the checkout moment is just going to really recede to the background. View the full article

In 2018, the NYU social scientist Jonathan Haidt co-authored a book titled ​The Coddling of the American Mind​. It argued that the alarming rise in mental health issues among American adolescents was being driven, in part, by a culture of “safetyism“ that trained young people to obsess over perceived traumas and to understand life as full of dangers that need to be avoided. At the time, the message was received as a critique of the worst excesses of the academic left and wokeism. But in the aftermath of Coddling, Haidt began to wonder if he had underestimated another possible cause for these concerning mental health trends: smartphones and social media. In 2019, working in collaboration with the demographer Jean Twenge (who wrote the classic 2017 Atlantic cover story, ​“Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”​), and researcher Zach Rausch, Haidt began gathering and organizing the fast-growing collection of academic studies on this issue in an ​annotated bibliography​, stored in a public Google Document. At the time, the standard response from elite journalists and academics about the claim that smartphones harmed kids was to say that the evidence was only correlational and that the results were mixed. (See, for example, this ​smarmy 2020 Times article​, which amplified a small number of papers that Haidt and his collaborators ​later noted were almost willfully disingenuous​ in their research design.) But as Haidt continued to make sense of the relevant literature, he became convinced that these objections were outdated. The data were increasingly pointing toward the conclusion that these devices really were creating major negative impacts. Haidt began writing about these ideas in The Atlantic. His 2021 piece, ​“The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls,” ​forcefully declared that we had transcended the shoulder-shrugging, correlation is not causation phase of the research on this topic, and we could no longer ignore its implications. The sub-head for this essay was blunt: “The preponderance of the evidence suggests that social media is causing real damage to adolescents.” (Around this time, I interviewed Haidt for a New Yorker column I wrote titled,​ “The Questions We’ve Stopped Asking About Teenagers and Social Media: Should They Be Using These Services At All?”​) In 2024, Haidt assembled all this information into a new book, ​The Anxious Generation​, which became a massive bestseller, moving more than a million copies by the end of its first year, and many more since. As of the day I’m writing this, which is almost two years since the book came out, it remains in the top 20 on the ​Amazon Charts​. In the aftermath of The Anxious Generation, as new research continues to pour in, and we hear from more​ teenagers​ and parents about their experiences with these devices, and schools (finally) start to ban phones and discover ​massive benefits​, it has become increasingly clear that Haidt was right all along. Last month, even the Times technology reporter Kevin Roose, a longtime skeptic of Haidt’s campaign, ​tweeted​: “I confess I was not totally convinced that the phone bans would work, but early evidence suggests a total Jon Haidt victory.” All of this history points to an urgent question for our current moment: Given that Haidt was so prescient about the harms of smartphones, what are the technologies that are worrying him now? Presumably, these looming dangers are ones we should take seriously. To answer this question, I went back to read what Haidt and his collaborators have been writing about in the months following The Anxious Generation’s release. Here, I’d like to highlight three technology trends that seem to be causing them particular concern… Online Gambling After a 2018 Supreme Court ​decision​ lifted many long-standing controls on gambling, online versions of this vice, powered through low-friction, attractive smartphone apps, rapidly spread. A July article on Haidt’s ​After Babel​ newsletter, titled ​“Smartphone Gambling is a Disaster,”​ catalogs some truly alarming statistics about how prevalent this activity has become: 33% of American men and 22% of American women now have a sports betting account. Nearly half of men between the ages of 18 and 49 have these accounts. Almost 70% of college students living on campus now bet on sports. What about younger kids? A 2022 report found that 60% of high school students had gambled in the last year. The speed with which this once frowned-upon pastime has spread is truly astonishing. Not surprisingly, it’s accompanied by negative side effects. A 2023 study found that 60% of sports bettors who deposited $500 or more per month said they would be unable to pay at least one of their bills or loans. Another study, commissioned that same year by the state of New Jersey, found that close to 20% of 18 to 24-year-olds who gamble qualify as having an unhealthy addiction. The conclusion: Adolescents and young adults should steer clear of online gambling. They’re at high risk for addiction, and the activity will 100% cost them non-trivial amounts of money. (As I learned from a recent ​Michael Lewis podcast series​ on the topic, the online sports betting services will kick you off the platform if you start winning with any consistency. You literally cannot make money over time on these services. If they’re letting you bet, you are, by definition, bad at it.) For parents, this means having frank conversations with your kids about the addictive and financially exploitative nature of these services. Online Video Games Another concern of Haidt and his collaborators is the rise in popularity among kids of multiplayer (often free-to-play) games such as Roblox, Minecraft (in online mode), and Fortnite. As reported in a 2025 After Babel article titled ​“It’s Not Just a Game Anymore,”​ both Minecraft and Fortnite attract roughly 30 million monthly active users (MAU) under the age of 18. Roblox, however, is the major player in this field, attracting an astonishing 305 million MAU under the age of 18 worldwide. Roblox estimates that around 75% of US children between the ages of 9 and 12 are active users of their platform. Why is this a problem? Because Roblox is a loosely-regulated carnival of terribleness and predation. For those unfamiliar, Roblox is not a single game, but instead a vast collection of virtual worlds created by individual users. There are far too many of these worlds, changing far too fast, to be adequately moderated. Here are just some of the Roblox worlds described by the After Babel article’s authors: A game in which you’re trained to hide a body after a murder. A simulation of a concentration camp where users carry Nazi flags. A classroom in which teachers have sex with students. A simulation of killing children in an elementary school classroom with an AK-47. In 2023, Roblox reported over 13,000 instances of child exploitation, leading to over 1,300 law enforcement requests. Online Minecraft and Fortnite feature more controlled virtual environments, but here, the problem lies with third-party chat. Often, without their less tech-savvy parents being aware, young players of these games install mods that allow them to make use of third-party chat software such as Discord. The result is an unregulated and often anonymous virtual locker room of sorts in which horrible things may unfold. Here’s how the article’s authors summarize what goes on in these chats: “In these unfiltered and unregulated spaces, adults contact children and extreme content can flow freely: bestiality, violent porn, animal abuse, self-harm, stabbings, and an array of extreme ideologies to name a few.” Indeed, many of the memes referenced by Tyler Robinson, the accused murderer of Charlie Kirk, ​are popular​ in the video game Discord chats where Robinson reportedly spent a large amount of time. These issues are not rare. A survey of adolescent gamers cited in the article found that 51% had encountered extremist content, while 10% of girls had been directly sent sexually explicit content while playing. And all of this isn’t even taking into consideration the addictive nature of these games and the massive amount of time they consume. Over 40% of boys report that gaming is hurting their sleep, while a 2022 study found that 15.4% of adolescent males who play these games meet the criteria for Internet Gaming Disorder. The conclusion: Kids and adolescents should not play multiplayer video games with people whom they don’t know. Period. Keep in mind, if you’ve given your kid an iPad or a video game player on which you haven’t specifically activated internet restrictions, then, spoiler alert: they’re not innocently playing Angry Birds; they’re almost certainly involved in these games and all the harms that accompany them. Chatbots The final technology concern I’ll discuss is also one of the most recent: kids and adolescents having unsupervised conversations with AI-powered chatbots. As explained in an After Babel article from November, co-authored by Haidt, and bluntly titled ​“Don’t Give Your Child Any AI Companions,”​ the use of these tools is rapidly rising among young people. A 2025 survey found that 72% of US teens have used an AI companion at least once, and more than half use them multiple times a month. Why should we care? Here’s Haidt: “Early research, journalistic investigations, and internal documents show that these AI systems are already engaging in sexualized interactions with children and offering inappropriate or dangerous advice, including sycophantically encouraging young people who are considering suicide to proceed. As ChatGPT put it in one young man’s final conversation with it: ‘Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity.’” As of this fall, OpenAI is already facing​ eight different wrongful death​ lawsuits involving advice given by ChatGPT. The volume of these cases is likely to skyrocket in the near future. What about younger kids? They’re being exposed to chatbot companions indirectly through a growing number of toys that utilize chatbots to have conversations with their owners. As you might imagine, this isn’t going well. ​A recent study ​of three new AI-powered toys found that they can easily veer into dangerous conversation territory. In the study, the toys provided advice on where to find knives in the kitchen and how to start a fire with matches. They even engaged in explicit discussions about sex positions and fetishes. The conclusion: Do not let kids or teens use chatbots without supervision. Think of it as similar to letting them have an unsupervised conversation with a random drunk at the end of the bar. It might be harmless, but there’s a good chance the interaction will head to dark places. (There’s a misguided notion out there that kids need to be using tools like ChatGPT so that they’ll be prepared for the “AI-powered future.” This is overstated. The technology is moving so fast that whatever form of AI your kids will eventually encounter in the workforce will likely look and operate nothing like circa-2026 chatbots. Also, these existing tools are dead simple to use. Your kids will figure them out in roughly 19 seconds if/when they’re in a professional circumstance that requires this.) The post What’s Worrying Jonathan Haidt Now? appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

In 2018, the NYU social scientist Jonathan Haidt co-authored a book titled ​The Coddling of the American Mind​. It argued that the alarming rise in mental health issues among American adolescents was being driven, in part, by a culture of “safetyism“ that trained young people to obsess over perceived traumas and to understand life as full of dangers that need to be avoided. At the time, the message was received as a critique of the worst excesses of the academic left and wokeism. But in the aftermath of Coddling, Haidt began to wonder if he had underestimated another possible cause for these concerning mental health trends: smartphones and social media. In 2019, working in collaboration with the demographer Jean Twenge (who wrote the classic 2017 Atlantic cover story, ​“Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”​), and researcher Zach Rausch, Haidt began gathering and organizing the fast-growing collection of academic studies on this issue in an ​annotated bibliography​, stored in a public Google Document. At the time, the standard response from elite journalists and academics about the claim that smartphones harmed kids was to say that the evidence was only correlational and that the results were mixed. (See, for example, this ​smarmy 2020 Times article​, which amplified a small number of papers that Haidt and his collaborators ​later noted were almost willfully disingenuous​ in their research design.) But as Haidt continued to make sense of the relevant literature, he became convinced that these objections were outdated. The data were increasingly pointing toward the conclusion that these devices really were creating major negative impacts. Haidt began writing about these ideas in The Atlantic. His 2021 piece, ​“The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls,” ​forcefully declared that we had transcended the shoulder-shrugging, correlation is not causation phase of the research on this topic, and we could no longer ignore its implications. The sub-head for this essay was blunt: “The preponderance of the evidence suggests that social media is causing real damage to adolescents.” (Around this time, I interviewed Haidt for a New Yorker column I wrote titled,​ “The Questions We’ve Stopped Asking About Teenagers and Social Media: Should They Be Using These Services At All?”​) In 2024, Haidt assembled all this information into a new book, ​The Anxious Generation​, which became a massive bestseller, moving more than a million copies by the end of its first year, and many more since. As of the day I’m writing this, which is almost two years since the book came out, it remains in the top 20 on the ​Amazon Charts​. In the aftermath of The Anxious Generation, as new research continues to pour in, and we hear from more​ teenagers​ and parents about their experiences with these devices, and schools (finally) start to ban phones and discover ​massive benefits​, it has become increasingly clear that Haidt was right all along. Last month, even the Times technology reporter Kevin Roose, a longtime skeptic of Haidt’s campaign, ​tweeted​: “I confess I was not totally convinced that the phone bans would work, but early evidence suggests a total Jon Haidt victory.” All of this history points to an urgent question for our current moment: Given that Haidt was so prescient about the harms of smartphones, what are the technologies that are worrying him now? Presumably, these looming dangers are ones we should take seriously. To answer this question, I went back to read what Haidt and his collaborators have been writing about in the months following The Anxious Generation’s release. Here, I’d like to highlight three technology trends that seem to be causing them particular concern… Online Gambling After a 2018 Supreme Court ​decision​ lifted many long-standing controls on gambling, online versions of this vice, powered through low-friction, attractive smartphone apps, rapidly spread. A July article on Haidt’s ​After Babel​ newsletter, titled ​“Smartphone Gambling is a Disaster,”​ catalogs some truly alarming statistics about how prevalent this activity has become: 33% of American men and 22% of American women now have a sports betting account. Nearly half of men between the ages of 18 and 49 have these accounts. Almost 70% of college students living on campus now bet on sports. What about younger kids? A 2022 report found that 60% of high school students had gambled in the last year. The speed with which this once frowned-upon pastime has spread is truly astonishing. Not surprisingly, it’s accompanied by negative side effects. A 2023 study found that 60% of sports bettors who deposited $500 or more per month said they would be unable to pay at least one of their bills or loans. Another study, commissioned that same year by the state of New Jersey, found that close to 20% of 18 to 24-year-olds who gamble qualify as having an unhealthy addiction. The conclusion: Adolescents and young adults should steer clear of online gambling. They’re at high risk for addiction, and the activity will 100% cost them non-trivial amounts of money. (As I learned from a recent ​Michael Lewis podcast series​ on the topic, the online sports betting services will kick you off the platform if you start winning with any consistency. You literally cannot make money over time on these services. If they’re letting you bet, you are, by definition, bad at it.) For parents, this means having frank conversations with your kids about the addictive and financially exploitative nature of these services. Online Video Games Another concern of Haidt and his collaborators is the rise in popularity among kids of multiplayer (often free-to-play) games such as Roblox, Minecraft (in online mode), and Fortnite. As reported in a 2025 After Babel article titled ​“It’s Not Just a Game Anymore,”​ both Minecraft and Fortnite attract roughly 30 million monthly active users (MAU) under the age of 18. Roblox, however, is the major player in this field, attracting an astonishing 305 million MAU under the age of 18 worldwide. Roblox estimates that around 75% of US children between the ages of 9 and 12 are active users of their platform. Why is this a problem? Because Roblox is a loosely-regulated carnival of terribleness and predation. For those unfamiliar, Roblox is not a single game, but instead a vast collection of virtual worlds created by individual users. There are far too many of these worlds, changing far too fast, to be adequately moderated. Here are just some of the Roblox worlds described by the After Babel article’s authors: A game in which you’re trained to hide a body after a murder. A simulation of a concentration camp where users carry Nazi flags. A classroom in which teachers have sex with students. A simulation of killing children in an elementary school classroom with an AK-47. In 2023, Roblox reported over 13,000 instances of child exploitation, leading to over 1,300 law enforcement requests. Online Minecraft and Fortnite feature more controlled virtual environments, but here, the problem lies with third-party chat. Often, without their less tech-savvy parents being aware, young players of these games install mods that allow them to make use of third-party chat software such as Discord. The result is an unregulated and often anonymous virtual locker room of sorts in which horrible things may unfold. Here’s how the article’s authors summarize what goes on in these chats: “In these unfiltered and unregulated spaces, adults contact children and extreme content can flow freely: bestiality, violent porn, animal abuse, self-harm, stabbings, and an array of extreme ideologies to name a few.” Indeed, many of the memes referenced by Tyler Robinson, the accused murderer of Charlie Kirk, ​are popular​ in the video game Discord chats where Robinson reportedly spent a large amount of time. These issues are not rare. A survey of adolescent gamers cited in the article found that 51% had encountered extremist content, while 10% of girls had been directly sent sexually explicit content while playing. And all of this isn’t even taking into consideration the addictive nature of these games and the massive amount of time they consume. Over 40% of boys report that gaming is hurting their sleep, while a 2022 study found that 15.4% of adolescent males who play these games meet the criteria for Internet Gaming Disorder. The conclusion: Kids and adolescents should not play multiplayer video games with people whom they don’t know. Period. Keep in mind, if you’ve given your kid an iPad or a video game player on which you haven’t specifically activated internet restrictions, then, spoiler alert: they’re not innocently playing Angry Birds; they’re almost certainly involved in these games and all the harms that accompany them. Chatbots The final technology concern I’ll discuss is also one of the most recent: kids and adolescents having unsupervised conversations with AI-powered chatbots. As explained in an After Babel article from November, co-authored by Haidt, and bluntly titled ​“Don’t Give Your Child Any AI Companions,”​ the use of these tools is rapidly rising among young people. A 2025 survey found that 72% of US teens have used an AI companion at least once, and more than half use them multiple times a month. Why should we care? Here’s Haidt: “Early research, journalistic investigations, and internal documents show that these AI systems are already engaging in sexualized interactions with children and offering inappropriate or dangerous advice, including sycophantically encouraging young people who are considering suicide to proceed. As ChatGPT put it in one young man’s final conversation with it: ‘Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity.’” As of this fall, OpenAI is already facing​ eight different wrongful death​ lawsuits involving advice given by ChatGPT. The volume of these cases is likely to skyrocket in the near future. What about younger kids? They’re being exposed to chatbot companions indirectly through a growing number of toys that utilize chatbots to have conversations with their owners. As you might imagine, this isn’t going well. ​A recent study ​of three new AI-powered toys found that they can easily veer into dangerous conversation territory. In the study, the toys provided advice on where to find knives in the kitchen and how to start a fire with matches. They even engaged in explicit discussions about sex positions and fetishes. The conclusion: Do not let kids or teens use chatbots without supervision. Think of it as similar to letting them have an unsupervised conversation with a random drunk at the end of the bar. It might be harmless, but there’s a good chance the interaction will head to dark places. (There’s a misguided notion out there that kids need to be using tools like ChatGPT so that they’ll be prepared for the “AI-powered future.” This is overstated. The technology is moving so fast that whatever form of AI your kids will eventually encounter in the workforce will likely look and operate nothing like circa-2026 chatbots. Also, these existing tools are dead simple to use. Your kids will figure them out in roughly 19 seconds if/when they’re in a professional circumstance that requires this.) The post What’s Worrying Jonathan Haidt Now? appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

The ex-employee was accused of violating conflict of interest rules and submitting falsified documents for $1.7 million worth of loans in her six-month tenure. View the full article

And, naturally, we wanted to remind you of some of our best blogs 😉 Below, we’ve used Ahrefs Web Analytics to find our most-viewed articles published in 2025. We were inspired by Amanda Natividad’s SparkToro post. Great stuff from Amanda…Read more ›View the full article

Russian president’s spokesperson says Moscow is ‘studying all details of the offer’ to join board overseeing GazaView the full article