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I am seeing signs of a possible Google search ranking update or volatility around January 12, 2026. This is weird in that most of the tools, not all, are mostly calm, but the chatter has picked up and many SEOs are noticing ranking fluctuations. View the full article

The administration’s war on the Federal Reserve illustrates the threat of fiscal dominanceView the full article

Google Shopping is updating its promotions policy to now allow for promotions on subscription fees and abbreviations. This was updated as of this month, January 2026.View the full article

Google seems to have a bug that prevents searchers from leaving hotel reviews directly in the Google Search desktop interface. It works fine within Google Maps and Hotel search interfaces but not in the web search interface.View the full article

Remember when a handful of links from sites in your niche could drive steady organic traffic? That era is over. Today, Google’s AI Overviews and the rise of answer engines like ChatGPT raise the bar. You have to do more to stay visible. Hiring an experienced link building agency is one efficient way to meet that challenge. It’s also one of the most important investments you’ll make. The right partner doesn’t just build links. They position your brand as a trusted, cited source in the AI era. So how do you choose the right agency for your company? While the interface has changed, the core ranking signals remain largely the same. What’s changed is their priority. LLMs need credible sources to ground their answers. That makes authoritative link building more important than ever. This article shows you how to vet and choose a link building agency that understands these new priorities and can help your brand win trust in the AI-driven SEO landscape. How link building and SEO are changing Gartner predicted search engine volume to drop by 25% as AI takes over more answers. That makes working with an agency that understands AI SEO essential. But how do you know which agencies actually do? The real indicators are holistic authority and AI visibility. Only one in five links cited in Google’s AI Overviews matched a top-10 organic result, according to an Authoritas study. Even more telling, 62.1% of cited links or domains didn’t rank in the top 10 at all. The takeaway is simple. AI systems and search engines don’t evaluate websites the same way. We’re no longer building links just for Google’s crawler. Link equity alone isn’t enough. Sites need topical authority, brand mentions, and real market presence. The goal is to build a footprint that AI models recognize and can’t ignore. The new criteria: Evaluating a link building agency for AI SEO Choosing the right link building agency comes down to how well they prioritize the factors that matter now. This section shows you what to look for. Prioritizing quality, relevance, and traffic I see this mistake all the time. A marketing director evaluates link quality based only on Domain Rating (DR). High DR matters, but at uSERP, we know it’s not the finish line. You should also look for: Relevance: A link from a DR 60, niche-specific site in your industry often beats a DR 80 general news site that covers everything from crypto to keto. Minimum traffic standards: If a site doesn’t rank for keywords or attract real traffic, its links won’t help you rank. That’s why strict traffic minimums matter. When vetting an agency, ask for contractual site-traffic guarantees. A confident agency won’t hesitate to sign a Statement of Work that guarantees every link comes from a site with a minimum traffic threshold, such as 5,000+ monthly organic visitors. If they won’t put traffic minimums in writing, they’re likely planning to place links on “ghost town” sites. These domains appear strong, but they lack a real audience, which protects their margins rather than supporting your growth. Look for a content-driven approach and digital PR Links don’t exist in a vacuum. The strongest ones come from being part of a real conversation. The best agencies no longer operate like traditional link builders. They act more like content marketing and digital PR teams. Instead of asking for links, the best agencies create linkable assets — data studies, expert commentary, and in-depth guides that journalists and publishers want to cite – because they understand: Google’s algorithms and AI models are continually getting better at identifying paid placements. A content-led approach keeps links natural, editorial, and valuable to readers. Guest posting in the AI SEO era isn’t about a disposable 500-word article. It’s about thought leadership that positions your CEO as a credible expert. At uSERP, for example, we created — and continuously update — our State of Backlinks for SEO report. image source Red flags: Recognizing outdated or dangerous tactics Choosing the wrong partner doesn’t just waste your budget. It puts your brand reputation — and potentially your company’s future — at risk. Here are the biggest red flags to avoid when hiring an agency: Guaranteed rankings No one can guarantee a number-one ranking on Google. Any agency that promises specific keyword positions on a fixed timeline is likely doing one of two things: Using risky, short-term tactics to force a temporary spike. Selling you snake oil. These agencies often rely on private blog networks (PBNs) or aggressive anchor text manipulation to manufacture fast results. You might see an early jump, but the crash that follows—and the risk of a penalty when Google’s spam systems catch up—is never worth it. Lack of transparency If an agency won’t explain how they earn links or where placements will come from before you pay, walk away. Reputable agencies are transparent. They’ll show real examples of past placements and share relevant case studies from your industry. Agencies that hide their inventory usually do it for a reason. Those sites are often part of a low-quality network or link farm. Self-serve link portfolios If you’re a marketer or SEO on LinkedIn, chances are you’ve received a message like this: This is a common tactic among low-quality link builders: reselling backlinks from a shared inventory. I understand the appeal. Strategic link acquisition is hard. Buying and flipping links is easy. The problem — for you — is the footprint. If an agency can secure a link by filling out a form, anyone can. That includes casino affiliates, gambling sites, adult content, and outright scammers. That’s not a natural link profile. Google has almost certainly already identified and burned those domains. In the best case, you pay for a link that passes zero authority. In the worst case, Google flags your site as part of a link scheme. Dirt-cheap packages SEO and link building deliver incredible ROI, but they aren’t cheap. You can’t buy a high-quality article with a real, earned link from an authoritative site for $50. Speaking as someone who runs an AI SEO agency, the true cost of quality content, editing, outreach, and relationship building is at least an order of magnitude higher. That’s why cheap packages that promise multiple high-authority links are a major red flag. They almost always rely on: Fully AI-generated, barely edited content. Low-value link farms or resold inventory. Toxic backlinks. None of those will help you show up on AI search engines or Google. Partnering with a link building agency for a sustainable market presence Link building in the AI era is a long-term investment. It’s about building a durable market presence, not chasing quick wins. The right partner sees themselves as an extension of your team. They care about: Your backlink gap compared to competitors. Your brand mentions across LLMs. Your overall search and AI visibility. They help you navigate content syndication, backlink audits, content marketing, and modern link building strategies with a unified approach. If you’re ready to move past vanity metrics and start building authority that drives revenue and AI citations, it’s time to be selective about who you trust with your domain. The right link building agency is out there. You just need to know how to spot them. View the full article

During President Donald The President’s first administration, he left hundreds of government designers, across half a dozen or more agencies, to do their jobs. But that changed the second time around, in January 2025, when a reelected The President wasted no time turning the official White House website into his personal blog, deleting resources for topics ranging from reproductive rights to the contributions of Navajo code talkers in World War II. Then in February, The President took a sledgehammer to the digital infrastructure of the U.S. when he enlisted Elon Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In a vast cost-cutting initiative, DOGE destroyed half a dozen of the government’s digital design agencies. Hundreds of talented people recruited over decades lost their jobs, according to the best estimates of former government designers. The teams who launched everything from healthcare.gov to that handy site for ordering free COVID-19 tests were decimated. Now the design of America has been entrusted to one person overseeing the skeleton crews that remain. In August, The President appointed Joe Gebbia as the country’s first chief design officer. Joe Gebbia Gebbia is in charge of the America by Design initiative, and under The President’s order has opened the National Design Studio “to improve how Americans experience their government—online, in person, and the spaces in between.” “We’ll be guided by the best user experience,” Gebbia tells Fast Company. “It doesn’t matter who you voted for or what side of the spectrum you associate with or believe in. Everyone can agree that government websites are underwhelming, and they would enjoy a better design, better user experience, and faster page load times.” It’s an attractive promise, made by a man who, in many ways, appears to be a great fit for the job. Gebbia is the billionaire design cofounder of Airbnb. He graduated from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. He’s a fast-moving, private-sector creator of one of the most popular digital services of the past 20 years. His CV is exactly right for America by Design’s mission, which is to make chores like applying for your citizenship or filing taxes “something you actually look forward to.” It’s a Silicon Valley mantra that’s overused and overly optimistic, but it’s also fundamentally hard to argue with. Yet in speaking to a dozen government designers and experts for this piece—serving across the Obama, The President, and Biden administrations—it’s clear that Gebbia’s biggest challenge isn’t making the drudgery of navigating government services delightful or even easy. It’s navigating the inherent tension of doing so in an administration that’s actively undermining basic human rights. “You can’t talk about people losing their Medicare and have a slick website,” says Paula Scher, partner at the celebrated graphic design firm Pentagram. “It just doesn’t go.” Gebbia, who promised his fortune to the Giving Pledge in 2016, has recently positioned himself as a MAGA Republican who challenges vaccinations and has promoted the idea on X that immigrants should lose their green cards. Still, his ideologically opposed peers continue to believe that the power of design triumphs over all. That includes his Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky, who defends Gebbia’s position and the good he can do as a pure digital practitioner. “As you think about it, the way that most people interface the U.S. government is through an app or a website,” says Chesky. “If those apps or websites were easier, so you could visit a national park, pay your taxes, get your benefits or Veterans Affairs stuff, that’s a good thing. It’s not inherently political.” But the work has been political. Months into his appointment, Gebbia’s promise to fix the UX of American services is far from realized. Instead, the The President administration has traded several flawed but human-centered government design agencies for a red-pilled web 2.0 propaganda czar. In his time as chief design officer, Gebbia has launched half a dozen websites that don’t so much repair the online experience of the U.S. government as promote The President’s projects like Kickstarter campaigns reskinned in vintage Apple typefaces. The high-gloss websites for The President Accounts and the Genesis Mission might give the appearance of an Apple Store-like experience, but Gebbia’s designs have also gone live with hundreds of accessibility violations. At best, the work has been cringe (have you seen the The President gold card?). At worst, it has distracted from an erasure of human rights, as trans resources and even practical words like disability have been purged from government websites this year. Still, many of the people I spoke with exhibited a certain envy for the position Gebbia finds himself in. It’s an unprecedented moment in which design has been elevated to the top of the country, backed by an executive order to get things done. With the assistance of Musk, The President razed America’s design services as we know them, leaving nothing in Gebbia’s way to build anew. “He’s inheriting the blank check kind of environment . . . [so] according to the laws of physics, he should be able to get a lot done,” says Mikey Dickerson, founding administrator of the United States Digital Service (USDS). “But if the things that he’s allowed to do, or the things that he wants to do, are harmful, then he’ll be able to do a lot of harm in a really short amount of time.” Redesigning the government In January 2025, Josh Kim was working for the State Department through a private contract agency, building the department’s updated digital accessibility standards. A dashboard tracked all the pages the government needed to modernize, from passport applications to adoption pages, to ensure everyone could access them. Following The President’s reelection, the administration sent out a memorandum to end DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility) projects—with a mandate to cancel all related private contracts. Kim says he was told by management to erase every mention of “disability” and “accessibility” from his work immediately, before his firm was audited or asked to do so. “There was definitely this wave of fear that the consultancies were kind of like, ‘Oh shit, they’re going to cancel our contracts if we mentioned any of these things,’” Kim says. His experience was far from isolated. In the early days of the The President administration, similar erasure happened across government design agencies—with much of the work documented on GitHub. It wasn’t just words that were lost in this purge. One week after the memorandum, the Veteran’s Affairs site relabeled “Accessibility at the VA”—a webpage that allows disabled veterans to flag interface issues—to “508 Compliance (accessibility).” The code refers to the law for IT accessibility, but sounds like a plot twist from Stranger Things. While the page still exists, it’s the kind of update that obfuscates information to many of the people who need it. A third of veterans rely on the VA for disability benefits, and the update fundamentally damages the feedback loop between the government and the people it serves. It’s but one example of how government design services readied themselves for an invasion, and an invasion they got. In February 2025, Musk’s DOGE team arrived in D.C. and began cleaning house. By March, hundreds of government designers were gone as the most powerful design agencies inside the government were functionally dismantled. The (sometimes necessary) pangs of democracy Modernizing UX has been a big initiative of the government since President Barack Obama launched the Office of Digital Strategy in 2009 to connect the White House to digital channels. He then established a Presidential Fellows program in 2012 to recruit a new wave of technologists to public service. To date, 250 people have joined for 12- to 24-month tours of duty, including product leads on the Nest thermostat, Nike+ FuelBand, and talents who had worked at Disney. Even with this added technological firepower, government services still needed more day-to-day design support. That arrived in 2014, when two critical internal agencies—the USDS and 18F—were created out of one of the biggest digital failures in U.S. history, the botched launch of healthcare.gov. On the day healthcare.gov launched in 2013, 250,000 people tried to purchase health insurance, only to find a website that was unusable, with dozens of problems ranging from account registration failure to frequent crashes. It was so bad that only six people were able to sign up for healthcare coverage on the day of launch. Mikey Dickerson recalls arriving from Google to found what would become USDS. His first job of fixing healthcare.gov was done in just two months, from October to December 2013. “I mean, that was approximately a miracle, honestly,” he says, noting that entrenched government employees got a wake-up call from a disgraced Obama administration. “This was a very rare case where doing nothing was going to have consequences, because doing nothing meant that this very visible policy failure wiped out all of their careers.” Both the USDS and 18F doubled down on longer-term, private-sector recruiting. These two organizations alone recruited 18 people from Google, along with talents from Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and the popular Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator. Nikki Lee, a former product manager at 18F, created the stylus interaction used by Windows 10 and 11. The recruiting effort was enough to catch the attention of OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman in 2015, who called the talent grab “on par with the best Silicon Valley startups.” It’s a recent history that Gebbia has entirely ignored when promising to build a “dream team” of the “best talent of our era—the best designers, the best software engineers”—as if that’s a new concept for the government. (A government initiative called Tech Force launched in December 2025 to address the government’s loss of talent under DOGE.) When I ask Gebbia about his thoughts on the USDS and 18F—and whether he thought these groups were overrated and needed to be rebuilt—he shrugs off the topic as before his time. “Without knowing too much about the groups you mentioned, I do know that the air cover and the urgency around design is in a place it’s [never] been before,” he says. Whether Gebbia acknowledges them or not, USDS and 18F offer precedent for America by Design. The agencies were designed to work across different parts of government. USDS was a crisis agency focused on triage. 18F was an internal design consultancy built for longer-term digital solutions. Combined, they had an approximately 350 head count at their peak with a combined budget of around $40 million (though the USDS received a $200 million grant in 2022 to invest in tasks like modernizing Social Security IT and getting low-income Americans online). It’s easy to frame the progress across a constellation of government design services as too slow, too bureaucratic, and, most of all, too unusable. No one recognized these issues more than the government designers working to address them. “It is not like a corporate setting. It is not like a nonprofit setting. It is not like higher ed,” says Rachael Dietkus, the first social worker hired at USDS, who describes her first two years of working for the government as very difficult. “The learning curve is absolutely massive. It can be very confusing. There is a lot of hierarchy.” These agencies weren’t perfect, but they represented progress. Yes, they still had to operate around entrenched government employees who weren’t always motivated to move fast. But the bigger obstacle was often legislation the government had already decided upon. “Sixty percent of why the design of things sucks is because the policy sucks,” Dickerson says. “If you wanted a SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] application to be really simple, like, you could absolutely do it. You could do it the same way we did the [free] COVID test.” When the government sent out free COVID-19 tests in 2021, policymakers decided that they could be available to anyone who requested them. “We’re not going to go around checking whether you have the money. If you wanted to do that exact same program but you want to do it means tested, where I have to prove that I can’t afford my own COVID tests? Well, guess what? Now you’ve got an application process that is nine months long. And we’ll have an appeal, and an appeal to the appeals,” Dickerson says. Her point mirrors what I heard from many government designers: You cannot have simplicity in government services in the face of eligibility verification, legal due process, and the ability to apply for services without a computer. That’s ultimately why many digital services aren’t as simple as the public would like. Clare Martorana, who was appointed chief information officer under President Joe Biden, left the role alongside that administration. She updated legacy systems that had been infiltrated by China and Russia, launched IRS direct file with 18F and others to sidestep the TurboTax ecosystem, and responded to the pandemic with the aforementioned COVID-19 test site (developed alongside the U.S. Postal Service by a handful of designers) that simply made tests appear at your door, no questions asked. But a lot of Martorana’s job was simply keeping projects moving, and to circumvent old, dated policies that perpetually impeded her work. “I received numerous emails from [managers] asking me, ‘There’s a guy here in our team that won’t move forward with this thing because of this 1995 e-government [policy]. And can you please write me back so I can share that, from your vantage, sitting under the president, your interpretation is that this is no longer the primary regulatory thing that someone should focus on?”’ she recalls. “But you know, we over-indexed in adding new rules and regulations and never did the housework of cleaning our closets.” As an optimist who began in the private sector, she believed DOGE could do a lot of good in removing this “calcified bureaucracy.” Instead of hyperfocusing on trying to run these inefficient structures more efficiently by cutting head count, she believed Musk would bring in “blue sky thinking.” Instead of fixing broken systems, Musk’s team could have simply built a better, cheaper version of things that existed. These systems could have duplicated old public services—albeit through modern technology that proved out its own benefits and cost savings—without breaking anything. Elon MuskPolitico “That’s what I thought Elon Musk was going to bring to the party,” Martorana laments. “I don’t think he built SpaceX by mimicking NASA.” No doubt, government design systems were too bureaucratic and needed a shake-up to move faster. But DOGE’s approach did nothing to build resilience or retain the government’s design progress of the last decade. “I’m not ashamed to say, like, ‘Yes, I absolutely covet the blank check that they were handed.’ If I had that in 2014, I could have gotten a lot of shit done,” says Dickerson. “But if Donald The President’s administration were to say, ‘You can be the new Elon Musk,’ I’d still pass on that job. Because what they’re trying to do is destroy everything.” Lobbying for the job Of course, one designer wanted that job. And he lobbied hard for it. Gebbia joined DOGE in February 2025, two months before Musk’s departure from the organization. His government work under that team began with his takeover of a multiyear initiative to digitize the paper-based retirement system of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). He claims that in six months, his team evaluated the work, threw out all the code, and launched a new system that’s operational more than a year ahead of schedule. Ashleigh Axios, founder of the consultancy Public Servants, served as creative director and digital strategist under Obama and later worked on OPM digitization under her former firm, Coforma. She cautions, “As with many long-running federal modernization efforts, it’s common for new administrations to spotlight progress that began under earlier contracts.” In any case, those efforts garnered the attention of several The President Cabinet members: Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Kelly Loeffler of the Small Business Administration. Gebbia met with them to discuss the work. “It was really these conversations across the government where I started to dream a little bit,” he says. “I started to think, Wow, there is actually a real demand here for this. I started to think . . . The government’s kind of like a design desert, and everyone’s reaching out asking for a glass of water. I know how to find . . . a cold glass of water for them.” But Gebbia says he wasn’t simply offered a job. Rather, the entire pitch process was more like fundraising in his Silicon Valley days. In May, he began a three-month lobbying campaign to create the National Design Studio. He started with a traditional Keynote presentation, before learning that the government preferred big foam-core boards. He ended up carrying 20 of them at a time. “I remember the first day, going to a Secret Service checkpoint, and I put [the pile] through the X-ray machine. And the whole thing was a mess. And I’m like, Oh man, I gotta make a case for these things,” he recalls. “I custom built this foam-core case—just this big white case. I’m kind of walking around D.C., walking around the White House compound.” After meeting with enough agencies and Cabinet members, honing his pitch along the way, he eventually got an audience with The President’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Gebbia calls that meeting “one of the best pitches of my life.” A week later, he had the ear of the president, who greenlit the vision. As of August, Gebbia was operating as chief design officer, reporting directly to Wiles. “It [had] to be a presidential initiative for this to work at scale. And that was really one of the only ways that I was going to stick around to do this,” Gebbia says. “The whole architecture of this . . . was done in such a way that we’re one foot away from the president.” Gebbia wastes his blank slate When Gebbia first took the job, he connected with Scher of Pentagram and discussed the position, noting his excitement for the possibilities to get a lot done. “[The President’s] an autocrat. That’s the best corporate client you can have,” says Scher. “Just one opinion, and you’ve sold the damn thing.” The problem is that Gebbia’s governmental work thus far has been shallow at best, and fundamentally hypocritical at worst. While he’s promised to improve usability to core government services that serve a majority of Americans, his most visible projects have been little more than advertising campaigns for the The President administration. These efforts include sites like The Presidentrx.com, The Presidentaccounts.gov, and The Presidentcard.gov. “The gold card’s embarrassing. The typeface is hackneyed. If I were judging a design show, that’s what I’d say about it,” Scher says, examining the websites before offering a more nuanced criticism. “But it isn’t terrible. . . . There’s nothing wrong with it particularly as a piece of design except I think it’s incredibly inappropriate.” Should Americans be excited about a 12 Days of Design advent calendar, published as their healthcare premiums have quadrupled from The President’s elimination of Obamacare subsidies? Should the Americans who’ve lost food security—as the The President administration refused to release earmarked funds to provide food stamps during the government shutdown in 2025—be excited about the new food pyramid telling them how to eat? These projects read as promotion of Gebbia’s glossy vision for government design, rather than an American government resource, with little to no actual service attached to it. “[The President] wants to make it look like a business. It’s not a business,” Scher says. “The government is a place that creates laws and programs for society—it’s not selling shit.” Silicon Valley sells innovation by default. Overzealous promises and jokey 404 errors are just part of the vibe of move fast, break things culture. But designers who worked at design agencies across the government call out how that sort of easy breezy Valley perspective misses the point of public service—that you are often supporting people in the worst moments of their lives, and there’s a level of decorum you need to exhibit in consolation. “My grandfather passed away a couple years back. We filed VA forms to have him buried in a VA facility. That’s a whole process,” says Axios. “I don’t expect that to be delightful. I’m grieving.” Gebbia’s Valley-inspired work is evident in other sites, too. His design for genesis.energy.gov—a new federal AI research initiative—borrows the sans serifs and black backdrops of modern Apple ads. Viewed in full, it lands as any stereotypical technology site, full of servers and glowy sci-fi nonsense (though the presentation was enough for Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian to proclaim “this is awesome”). Perhaps if the The President administration hadn’t gutted America’s university system, reduced National Institutes of Health research grants, and ostracized its pipeline of overseas talent that’s driven a century of innovation in our country, a government AI program might feel like progress. Instead, let’s call this what it is: not much more than a Squarespace page glossing over an unprecedented rollback of federal funding for scientific research across the U.S. But Gebbia’s page for the National Design Studio is the most unintentionally apropos. The logo features a black-and-white flag with three stripes and no stars: an attempt at modernism that lands closer to looking like a country in mourning. These criticisms are largely superficial. But so is the work. Gebbia has referenced solving real UX pain points for Americans. We’ve yet to see him do more with front-end design than posting bold mission statements and offering a few data collection forms. When I flag these early projects as simple, Gebbia offers a fair retort. “Are we going to reimagine a hardcore corner of the government in eight weeks with a brand-new team?” he asks. “[Or] are we going to pick some quick wins and learn how to work together and ship some things so that we understand what’s involved with deploying great code?” Still, these randomly branded, stand-alone sites further bifurcate an already confused system of government services. Critics I spoke to point out that even with pared-back designs, they feature sloppy code, large download sizes, and fail reasonable accessibility standards. (Gebbia claims accessibility has been addressed. Anna Cook, an accessibility expert and designer at Microsoft, notes some fixes have been made, but “most of the core issues identified earlier remain unchanged.”) These sites also introduce more risk of malicious parties spoofing government resources. Most of all, they are inherently more concerned with how America looks than how it works. When I point out that much of his work seems to prioritize storytelling over functionality, Gebbia replies with a touch of exasperation. “I don’t know, should it be boring? I guess it’s sort of the bar at the moment,” he says. “You go to a government website, you kind of feel like you’re on a government website. I don’t know, can it be a little more magic? Because Americans deserve more than that.” Veneer, however, is easy for any designer. It’s untangling government services that’s hard. “Unless you’re actually delivering services to the public, you’re [not] simplifying the digital experience,” says Martorana. Before leaving with Biden, Martorana wanted to simplify the cacophony of digital services with a visual system that would unite all government websites under USA.gov. While the project ended with the Biden administration, the proposed brand featured a logo from Pentagram, with a stoic U and A, but a stylish, energetic S in the middle. Its simple brilliance was that it could then be paired with every seal used across the government, coalescing many government services into a more ideal entity. And it didn’t simply ignore the existing network of 450 agencies that provide ongoing services to the American public. Martorana laments the feature creep in which the government added more and more websites, even before Gebbia, when in fact the top nine government websites represent 160 million visits every month. Those sites should be getting the most immediate attention, she argues. And getting people to the right one, faster, could be the best thing we can do immediately. Gebbia shares that his team is, indeed, currently charting out a strategy for updating some of the largest government websites, and is entering the research phase now. That work could hold significant promise, and any single one of those projects would dwarf the National Design Studio’s efforts thus far. But he’s choosing to keep the work secretive, in what appears to be the setup for a larger, more dramatic reveal than we typically see in publicly funded government projects. “What you’ve seen so far are short stories, and we started on the novels,” Gebbia says. “Let’s just say that.” The great undoing Gebbia believes deeply in the power of design to better the life of everyone. He has promised to fund the teachings of his design idols Ray and Charles Eames in perpetuity, the midcentury designers who first inspired him to take up design, and brought good taste to America through mass-produced furniture. Yet he does not share their ideals. According to Eames biographer Pat Kirkham, the Eames “definitely had liberal politics” as Democratic donors who quietly backed many of their Hollywood friends during McCarthy’s Red Scare. Ray Eames went so far as to buy corsages for children whose parents had been jailed for their leftist beliefs. The duo did contribute to the Federal Design Improvement Program under President Richard Nixon—an initiative that Gebbia has cited as a precedent for America by Design. But if The President had asked the Eames to help the government today, or take on a chief design officer role for his administration? “My sense is that the Eames might have said, ‘No thanks,’” Kirkham says. “I just think that [The President’s politics] would have appalled them, really.” Gebbia remains an excellent storyteller who has mastered the art of the promise. But when asked questions on specifics—for example, could his own hypothetical Gebbia version of the VA site use the word disability instead of “section 508”—he dismisses the point. “I haven’t been involved in this. I can’t speak to it,” he says. Or when asked if he’d rebuild IRS.gov after the The President administration pulled the working platform from 25 states, he replies, “Before my time.” Gebbia says his unwillingness to engage in the politics of design is in service of design itself. “I think that at the end of the day, our focus is just [to] make the best user experience,” he says. Yet this is one of the most dangerous narratives coming from Gebbia and some of his Silicon Valley peers. These new government technologists believe that the politics at play right now do not really matter, and that a strong design sense—a core understanding of UX—can repair the loss of government resources. “It makes me very proud of our country for a moment. . . . Having this role, and it being an executive order, that the president has ID’d as important is probably the best way to signal to all people [working on] these experiences there should be intentionality,” says Katie Dill, who led experience design in the early days of Airbnb and is currently head of design at Stripe. “At its core, design is intentionality.” If design is the manifestation of intent, then good design can be born only from good intent. Gebbia’s intent as a designer is directly tied to that of the administration for which he works—one that has been systematically dismantling the rights of the people it is meant to serve. Given the administration’s current priorities, it seems unlikely for Gebbia to execute positive design on a wide scale. For now, many designers are eyeing Gebbia’s position with a mix of fear, envy, and patience, waiting for the political tables to turn so they can continue their work again. “Silicon Valley’s really getting trend-based. Everyone’s swinging to The President. But there’s a greater than 50% chance that the next president will be a Democrat. That’s just how it goes,” says Chesky. “I do think the country has needed the chief design officer. I think it’s a good post. And I hope when a Democrat is president—whenever that is—they keep the position.” View the full article

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“How often should I post on social media?” is a question that has plagued marketers and creators since the invention of social media marketing. So, what’s the right number? In this guide, I’ll share data-backed tips on how often you should post on the most popular social media platforms. Jump to a section: At a glance: How often you should post on every social media platform How often should you post on Facebook? How often should you post on Instagram? How often should you post on TikTok? How often should you post on X (formerly Twitter)? How often should you post on LinkedIn? How often should you post on Pinterest? A note: The rules look different for small business content calendars Ideal posting frequency is only a piece of the social media puzzle FAQ about the best posting frequency More social media insights At a glance: How often you should post on every social media platformFacebook: 1–2 posts/dayInstagram: 3–5 posts/weekTikTok: 2–5 posts/weekTwitter (now X): 3–4 posts/dayLinkedIn: 2–5 posts/weekPinterest: 15–25 pins/dayYouTube: 1 video/weekYouTube Shorts: 1–3 videos/week👑Consistency is king: Our analysis of more than 100,000 Buffer users found that regular posting means 5x more engagement. How often should you post on Facebook?You should post on Facebook once a day. According to a HubSpot study of over 13,500 Facebook users, the ideal frequency for Facebook posts is one to two posts a day. 💡Related: How to Create the Perfect Facebook Business Page to Promote Your Small BusinessNote: The above numbers are for your Facebook Page (where you primarily post high-quality content about your products and services) and not your Facebook Group (where you build a community and interact with your followers). How often should you post on Instagram?You should share three to five Instagram posts weekly. When it comes to in-feed Instagram posts, like carousels, reels, and single-image posts, our data on how often you should post on Instagram shows that posting three to five times per week is likely the sweet spot. We analyzed median reach per post, and found that accounts that post more tend to get more views on every piece of content. Compared to posting just 1–2 times per week: Posting 3–5 posts/week = ~12% more reach per postPosting 6–9 posts/week = ~18% more reach per postPosting 10+ posts/week = ~24% more reach per postThis also has a powerful impact on follower growth. We found a similar pattern when increasing weekly posting frequency there: 1–2 posts per week: +0.12% follower growth rate3–5 posts per week: +0.26% follower growth rate6–9 posts per week: +0.44% follower growth rate10+ posts per week: +0.66% follower growth rateSo if more posts = more reach and more follower growth, why are we not recommending that? Well, data savvy folks will likely notice that in both those analyses, the returns are diminishing. In other words, the lift in both reach and follower growth rate is slightly lower with each jump. You'll get the most bang for your buck when you shift from posting once weekly to 3-5 times. And, perhaps most importantly: at that cadence, you can keep your content quality high — and you run far less risk of burning out. To get the most out of the Instagram algorithm, experiment with various types of posts for different kinds of content and see which performs the best for you. 💡Learn more: The Complete Guide to Use IG Stories to Boost Engagement for Your BrandHow often should you post on TikTok?You should post on TikTok two to five times a week. Our data on how often to post on TikTok shows that going from posting just once to two to five times per week on TikTok can offer the most meaningful lift in views. Buffer’s data shows that moving from one post a week to this range delivers the biggest bang for your buck, with up to 17% more views per post. Posting even more can help, but the gains taper off: 6–10 posts can lift views by around 29%, and 11+ posts by about 34% — which is a lot to juggle if you have a day job. The real win isn’t that every post performs better. Median views stay pretty flat. Instead, posting more simply gives you more chances for a breakout hit. So if you’re looking for the most sustainable, high-impact cadence, bumping up from one post to a few each week is where the effort really pays off. Remember that while the recommendation of posting frequency is high for TikTok, the TikTok algorithm prioritizes engagement and user interaction. If you want to get more followers on TikTok, it’s crucial to post high-quality, relevant, and engaging content for your audience. Pro tip: Start by posting twice a week and increase your cadence by cross-posting and repurposing existing content from other platforms. 💡Related: How to Grow a Brand Account on TikTok, From Someone Who Did ItHow often should you post on X (formerly Twitter)?You should post on X three to four times every day. A study of 30 top X accounts by EverywhereMarketer showed that the frequency of posting on X varies widely, with some posting multiple times a day and others only a few times per month. On X, posting more often really works in your favor because the timeline is fast-moving and strongly influenced by recency. The X algorithm prioritizes newer posts it thinks people are likely to engage with, which means tweeting once a day can disappear pretty quickly. A solid, sustainable sweet spot is around three to five posts per day, spread out over time. This gives your content more chances to show up in different timelines and grow your following on X. Think of it less as “posting more to game the algorithm” and more as staying present in the conversation — a mix of original posts, replies, and reshares keeps your account visible, relevant, and human. How often should you post on LinkedIn?You should post on LinkedIn two to five times per week. Buffer’s data on how often to post on LinkedIn shows that moving from 1 post to 2–5 posts per week is the real turning point, where LinkedIn starts distributing your content more widely and rewarding you with stronger performance per post. This cadence is the most sustainable sweet spot for most people, delivering meaningful lifts in reach and engagement without overwhelming your schedule. Posting more often can amplify results even further: 6–10 posts per week push reach and engagement higher, and 11+ posts unlock the biggest gains of all — nearly triple the engagements per post compared to once a week. LinkedIn’s posts have a longer shelf life than other social media platforms. This means your LinkedIn posts can appear in your audience’s feed for weeks after you’ve shared them. Thus, investing time in creating an intentional LinkedIn strategy where every piece of content is well thought-out becomes essential. Pro tip: Posting more consistently helps every post travel further, no matter your audience size, so the best cadence is the one you can maintain while still showing up with quality content. 💡Learn more about how the LinkedIn algorithm works.How often should you post on Pinterest?You should post on Pinterest 15–20 times a day, or at least once a week, Pinterest recommends. The platform highlights that they value quality over quantity, so focus more on creating high-quality, useful content than boosting your post frequency for your Pinterest marketing strategy. You aren't alone if once a week seems too little for you. Initially, you might need to post more fresh Pins to grow faster. Tailwind found its most successful users pin around 15 – 25 Pins per day. They also found the upper limit: Pinning more than 50 times a day can hurt your distribution on Pinterest. Like with any other social network, Pinterest prioritizes new content over old content. The same Tailwind article also recommends creating fresh pins rather than duplicate ones to achieve traffic and engagement and multiply your Pinterest audience. How often should you post on YouTube?A good rule of thumb is to post on YouTube once a week. Dexxter Clark ran an experiment and found daily posts are the best YouTube growth strategy. If that’s impossible for you, share a video once a week. In his study, posting three times a week or five times a day didn’t significantly increase engagement compared to once weekly. It’s important to note that the YouTube algorithm values audience satisfaction — so it’s beneficial to focus on growing an engaged audience rather than tallying up an empty subscribers list. Even the YouTube Creators channel advises uploading as much as realistically possible. The key is sticking to a schedule and maintaining consistency for a long period of time. A note: The rules look different for small business content calendars“How often to post on social media” and “How often small businesses should post on social media” are two different questions. That’s because small businesses aren’t often equipped with the resources, time, and budget needed to win over the ideal posting frequency of social media algorithms. So, the “right” number is the number you can stick to. If the platform recommends posting social media content all days of the week, but you can only post every weekday, it’s A-OK. Accommodate a sustainable number of posts in your social media strategy — a number you can meet comfortably without shaking hands with creator burnout. That’s your sweet spot. Not to mention: There’s no universal “right number” for any social media platform, just like there’s no worldwide best time to post on social media. The optimal number of social media posts depends on your industry, audience, follower size, and the admin load you can handle. When you read the ideal posting frequency in the following sections, remember they’re a rule of thumb, not social media commandments set in stone. Ideal posting frequency is only a piece of the social media puzzleIn the social media world, meeting the ideal number of posts is only one piece of the pie. There are several other factors affecting your social media growth, such as: If you’re on the right social channels (where your target demographic is)If you’re engaging with your audience (responding to comments and DMs)If you’re posting content that’s relevant, helpful, and engaging for your audienceIf you’re sharing interactive content that keeps followers hookedIf you’re posting at the right time on social platforms (when your target audience is online)💡If you’re looking for the best time to post on social media platforms, here’s our guide for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube.That’s a lot to figure out. Ideally, you’d create a social media calendar (steal our content calendar template!), batch-create content, and stick to a posting schedule that works for you. This is where scheduling tools like Buffer come in: You can connect your social channels, schedule content in advance, and it’ll publish at your selected time automatically. The best part is that Buffer is an all-in-one social media management tool that can not only schedule posts for you across platforms but also help you determine the best time you should post, your best-performing content, and give in-depth analytics of your social media posts. Try Buffer free todayFAQ about the best posting frequencyHow often should you post on social media?The ideal posting frequency depends on the social media platform, your target audience, and what you can sustain long term. As a rule of thumb, consistent posting beats perfect volume. Is it better to post daily or focus on quality?Quality content always wins over just volume. Posting frequently helps with visibility, but high-quality, engaging content is what earns saves, shares, and community engagement. What’s the best posting frequency for businesses?For most business profiles, the best posting frequency is one you can maintain without burnout. A consistent posting schedule — even if it’s fewer posts per week — performs better than posting daily and disappearing. How often should small businesses post on social media?Small businesses should aim for a sustainable social media posting frequency that fits their resources. Posting 2–5 times per week on key social channels is often enough to maintain consistent visibility and social media growth. Does posting more increase engagement?Posting more often increases your chances of reach and engagement, but it doesn’t guarantee every post will perform better. The biggest gains usually come from moving from very low posting frequency to a consistent cadence. How do I choose the optimal posting frequency for each platform?Each social network rewards different behaviors — for example, Instagram Stories and X (formerly Twitter) favor frequent posts, while LinkedIn posts have a longer shelf life. Use platform-specific benchmarks, then adjust based on your content mix and audience response. Is there an industry average for social media posting frequency?Yes, but it varies widely by platform and industry. Treat industry averages as a starting point, not a rule — your ideal posting frequency should reflect your goals, audience, and content quality. Can scheduling tools help with consistent posting?Absolutely. Scheduling tools make it easier to plan ahead, batch content, and stick to a consistent posting frequency across social media platforms without posting manually every day. Do I need a social media calendar?A social media calendar helps you plan posting content in advance, maintain consistent posting, and balance different formats like static posts, short-form videos, and behind-the-scenes content. What matters more than how often you post?Posting frequency is just one part of a strong social media strategy. Engaging content, audience interaction, posting at the right time, and sharing relevant industry insights are what truly drive the most engagement over time. More social media insights TikTok Analytics for Creators and Brands: The Metrics That Actually Matter12 Social Media Metrics You Should Be Tracking (And Why)Social Media Dashboard: Why You Need One and How to Create ItFacebook Insights 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Analyzing Facebook Performance10 Content Marketing Metrics to Track (+5 Experts on the Ones that Matter to Them)More Data, Better Results: Introducing LinkedIn Analytics and MoreView the full article

At first glance, the most striking part of the SunRise, a recently redeveloped residential tower in Edmonton, Alberta, is the boldly colored facade, with strips of primary color and a lively mural. Called The Land We Share, the vibrant landscape sketch has sparkled on the skyline since its unveiling this past summer. But the mural is far more than a pretty picture. Covered on all sides in a kind of colored solar panel called BIPV made by Canadian firm Mitrex, the mural and the rest of the structure generate roughly 267 kilowatt hours, enough to cut the building’s carbon emissions in half. Typically, high-rises generate solar power primarily via their rooftops. But that’s limiting, says Mitrex founder and CEO Danial Hadizadeh. “High-rises are exposed to the sunlight, and we can infuse them with panels at a minimal cost, so why not?” he says. A smaller part of the cladding company Clarify, Mitrex (named after the Iranian god of the sun) launched five years ago, after solving some of the unique technical challenges around making these colorful panels work. The panels are safe and easy to hang and can be colored in numerous shades in addition to the standard bluish tint. They have been reformulated to be noncombustible and now are cost competitive with other facade choices. Hadizadeh says that next year the company will introduce a new model that’s cost competitive with aluminum cladding, and he hopes to see larger real estate portfolios start coating multiple buildings in the panels to reduce their energy costs. “Increasing efficiency, lowering cost, and implementation on all elevations and every aspect of the building, that’s where we are going,” Hadizadeh says. While it is true that, say, a 10-square-foot section of a vertical array on the side of a skyscraper will generate less energy than a similar-size section on a rooftop panel, due to the latter’s ability to capture more direct sunlight, it’s still generating considerably more than an un-panelized facade. There might be some difficulty getting every side of a building to provide adequate generation in a super-dense collection of skyscrapers such as in Midtown Manhattan, but that’s a relatively small part of the market. In the case of SunRise, the building’s owner, Avenue Living Asset Management, needed the building upgrade to meet certain carbon emission reduction targets to qualify for retrofit funding, and the Mitrex panel made the project pencil out. In fact, Mitrex panels hang atop what’s called the rainscreen, a waterproofing and insulating layer on the facade of the building; not only does this approach create power, but it also improves the building’s overall energy efficiency at the same time. Mitrex projects slated to open next year include a medical center on the University of Toronto campus and a series of high-end residential towers in Dubai. View the full article

Financial markets took a tumble Monday morning after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announced that he was the subject of a Justice Department inquiry concerning the central bank's headquarters renovation. Lawmakers and former Fed officials decried the move as political intimidation. View the full article

A cozy, neutral sameness defines our era of interior design. Velvet sofas. Bouclé armchairs. All-white living rooms. Beds layered with fluffy faux-fur blankets. Calming sage green kitchen cabinets. You see it in furniture catalogs, social media feeds, perhaps even your own home. And we’ve got algorithms to thank. A decade ago, social platforms shifted from chronological feeds to algorithmic ones, optimized to show users what they were most likely to engage with. As many cultural critics have pointed out, those systems reward what is broadly appealing and shareable. In interiors, that has meant rooms that are soothing and inoffensive—but largely devoid of personality. “Algorithms are a mathematical equation based on the statistical middle,” says Christiane Robbins, a founding partner of architectural firm MAP Studio, who has studied algorithms’ influence on design. “Over time, the middle becomes what everybody thinks they want.” Over time, algorithmic aesthetics begin to feel familiar, then comfortable, then indistinguishable from your own taste. “It’s subtle,” says Sara Sugarman, founder and CEO of Lulu and Georgia, a furniture brand that she launched in 2012, just before algorithms reshaped the internet. “Your personal style is influenced by these trends whether you realize it or not. You might decide you like a shade of gray without realizing it’s because you’ve seen it hundreds of times.” But experts like Katherine Lambert, Robbins’ business partner, believe that change is coming. Consumers are getting tired of the visual sameness all around them. Home brands are realizing that they no longer have a distinct point of view that sets them apart from competitors. “We’re seeing a ‘design resistance’ emerging,” says Lambert. “Designers are rebelling against the algorithm.” Sugarman considers herself a member of this resistance. At Lulu and Georgia, she’s pushing back against algorithm-inspired design across her business. Instead, she’s empowering designers who have a strong point of view to create idiosyncratic pieces that draw the customer in. The majority of the brand’s revenue comes from products that it designs and manufactures itself, allowing it to create an aesthetic that stands out from other brands. This strategy has been good for Lulu and Georgia’s bottom line. The company, which is self-funded and profitable, has been growing at a rate of 30% year over year for the past few years. And customers tend to be loyal, with a repeat rate of more than 50%, which is roughly double the industry standard. Lulu and Georgia offers a glimpse into how the world of mass-market interior design might be changing, as consumers want to break free from AI-generated sameness. The Democratization of Design Sugarman grew up immersed in design. Her grandfather, Louis Sugarman, founded Decorative Carpets in West Hollywood in 1955, catering to elite interior designers. As a child, she spent time in the showroom watching designers create custom pieces for wealthy clients. It was a closed system, where professionals controlled access and defined taste. That began to change in the 2000s, as the internet and social media gave a broader audience access to design inspiration. Mass retailers like Target, Ikea, and Wayfair made it possible to recreate high-end looks at lower prices. Sugarman didn’t see this shift as a threat. “It was incredible,” she says. “Design became more accessible, and it helped the industry overall.” She launched Lulu and Georgia as a digitally native rug brand before expanding into furniture and decor. But as platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and later TikTok came to dominate visual culture, Sugarman noticed customers arriving with increasingly fixed ideas of what they wanted—labels like “modern,” “coastal,” or “traditional” that all pointed toward the same neutral, minimalist end point. For Robbins, this convergence makes sense. The rise of algorithmic feeds coincided with years of global upheaval—from the pandemic to political instability. “In uncertain times, people gravitate toward what feels familiar,” she says. “Sameness offers a subliminal sense of security.” Algorithmic Design is Good for Business For home brands, flattened taste is operationally convenient. When consumers want the same sofas, colors, and textures, demand becomes easier to forecast and inventory risk shrinks. Searches for white sofas and bouclé furniture have steadily increased over the past decade, making those products reliable bets. “If your business depends on scale and predictability, algorithmic sameness is incredibly efficient,” Robbins says. “You can optimize your supply chain, minimize risk, and flood the zone with products.” But Lambert is seeing signs of fatigue in her conversations with designers and clients. “People sense that something is off, even if they can’t articulate it yet,” she says. “Especially in [hotels and restaurants], everything looks interchangeable. There’s a global scroll now—where everything looks the same no matter where you are.” In response, Sugarman has deliberately pushed back against algorithmic design. Lulu and Georgia does not use any trend-forecasting firms and resists letting past sales data dictate future products. This sets it apart from other furniture retailers. The forecasting agency WGSN has a robust interior design division which many manufacturers and brands (like LG and Knoll) use to decide what to make. Target, for its part, has built its own generative AI-powered forecasting platform called Target Trend Brain. By contrast, Sugarman empowers designers with distinct points of view to create pieces that don’t yet exist in the market. Roughly 55% of the company’s revenue comes from products that it has designed and manufactured itself; the remaining 45% comes from products it has curated from other suppliers whose aesthetic fits in to Lulu and Georgia’s. The strategy is bearing fruit. Many of the designer collaborations sell out within days. Some of Lulu & Georgia’s bestsellers over the last few years look very different from the soft neutral styles that dominates our feeds: A red marble dining table with rounded leg, a wooden dining table with perforated holes on the base, dining chairs with unusual shapes cut out on the back. The brand collaborates with interdisciplinary designers including ceramicist Lalese Stamp, architect Ginny Macdonald, lighting designer Eny Lee Parker, textile designer Élan Byrd, and fashion designer Carly Cushnie, encouraging them to design what they genuinely want in their own homes—even if it means making a objects with no track record of selling. Products are often manufactured in small quantities to test demand. One example is a small wooden vanity chair designed by longtime collaborator Sarah Sherman Samuel. Sugarman initially doubted it would sell. “Most people don’t have vanities anymore,” she says. Still, they made a small run. The chair quickly sold out, with customers using it as a sculptural accent in living spaces. As with other furniture retailers, Lulu and Georgia also experiments with color through made-to-order pieces. A sofa designed by Macdonald is available in bold shades like mustard yellow and paprika red, produced only after a customer places an order. The approach allows the brand to test unconventional colors without overcommitting inventory. “Sometimes,” Sugarman says, “those experiments become massive hits.” For Robbins and Lambert, this strategy works because it is rooted in specificity. “Specificity is the secret sauce that throws off the algorithm,” Lambert says. “The more cultural, historical, and contextual knowledge you bring in, the harder it is for systems to flatten taste.” As algorithmic sameness reaches its limits, they believe consumers will increasingly seek out brands willing to take risks. “We’re seeing fatigue percolate,” Robbins says. “I think we’re approaching a cultural tipping point. Designers who resist the algorithm are going to win.” View the full article

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About a year ago, an advertisement caught the attention of Ashleigh Ruane, a PhD student in physics at the University of Cambridge. The ad was simple but unusual: Teach AI about physics. Curious, she clicked. She learned that experts across fields—from physics and finance to healthcare and law—were now being paid to help train AI models to think, reason, and problem-solve like domain specialists. She applied, was accepted, and now logs about 50 hours a week providing data for Mercor, a platform that connects AI labs with domain experts. Ruane is part of a fast-growing cohort of professionals who are shaping how AI models learn. According to Freelancer, thousands of new AI data training and annotation roles have appeared on their marketplace, with most of the growth taking hold in just the past 18 months. These roles range from highly technical expert tasks, like evaluating complex reasoning or diagnosing model errors, to nuanced judgment calls that large models still struggle with. “We’re entering a really interesting time period,” says Freelancer CEO Matt Barrie. “AI models need more and more data. We’re seeing professionals from every field in every part of the world taking part in this AI data training work.” The trend raises bigger questions: If AI models have already been trained on the open internet and vast corporate datasets, why do they still need human experts? What exactly are these experts doing? And how long will this new kind of work be around? AI has ‘read the whole internet’—and still needs real experts There’s a common assumption that today’s largest AI models already know everything they need to know. After all, they’ve been trained on millions of books, articles, papers, and posts. But industry leaders say domain experts are now more important than ever. “Models trained on the entire internet can get you to an 80% answer, but in legal or tax, 80% isn’t useful,” explains Joel Hron, CTO of Thomson Reuters. “Our customers demand a high level of accuracy and trust. Leveraging experts ensures accuracy to the highest degree that we can.” Ana Price, vice president of supply at Prolific, which provides human data for AI labs, agrees that experts are becoming even more important as AI models move into regulated, high-stakes domains. “The demand for human expertise and domain specific feedback from AI models is growing and growing and growing,” says Price. “As these models have gotten bigger, the errors are becoming harder to spot. Real expertise is needed to judge the substance of what models are producing, and not just the surface level correctness.” In other words, the internet alone is not a substitute for structured professional knowledge. The more organizations rely on AI for serious, high-stakes work, the more they need experts to show models how real professionals think. What expert AI trainers actually do Linda Yu spent the last decade as an investor, deploying $4 billion of investments into technology enabled businesses. She started working with Mercor as an expert contributor a year ago, where typical projects involve coaching AI models to think like an investment professional. “My role as a domain expert is to evaluate whether the model response is not just technically correct, but whether the complex reasoning behind the response is accurate—including assumptions the model made, where it may have overreached, where it missed, and what a better answer would be,” shares Yu. “The work feels less like training an AI model, and more like mentoring a junior analyst.” Experts like Yu say the work varies from project to project, and is being applied across industries from law, medicine, engineering, and beyond. Participants are typically paid hourly—$85 per hour on average—and may be asked to evaluate a model’s reasoning on a technical question, rewrite incorrect answers into correct, step-by-step explanations, and compare multiple model outputs and choose which best reflects real-world practice. The output isn’t generic content, but high-fidelity reasoning data designed to shape how AI systems operate. AI interviewers interviewing AI trainers The work requires real expertise, which means AI labs need data from experts who are vetted. To assist with the vetting, some platforms rely on AI interviewers to assess the actual expertise of potential AI trainers. “Experts jump on a call, and they interview with AI,” says Arsham Ghahramani, founder of Ribbon, an AI interviewer with more than 500 customers, including an AI training data provider who is interviewing more than 15,000 experts a month. “You’ll likely be asked the best interview questions you’ve ever been asked.” AI interviewers assess experts for signals that would indicate red flags around expertise, like irregular response cadence, whether they respond naturally, and of course, whether they have the required expertise for a given domain. “It was actually my first interview with not a real person,” says Yu. “It scanned my resume and came up with really relevant questions. After each answer, the AI interviewer acted like a real person and summarized what I said and asked a question that was a natural extension of our conversation topic. I was fascinated by the technology.” AI now evaluates the humans teaching it, a reflection of just how far people have advanced model capabilities. The ‘last mile of information’ still belongs to humans One of the clearest explanations for why expert data remains essential comes from Mark Quinn, senior director of AI operations at Pearl and former head of Waymo engineering operations. He draws a connection between today’s AI challenges and autonomous driving. “At Waymo, we worked towards the last mile of autonomous mobility. Now, we’re working towards the last mile of information,” Quinn says. “Even though AI systems are being developed to close the last mile of information, the reality is that people may still prefer human expert validation if they need an answer on what to do if their dog ate some chocolate.” The metaphor resonates across the industry. Even as models get smarter and larger, there’s a world full of edge cases—situations that require judgment, ethical reasoning, or domain-specific logic that isn’t easily captured in general datasets. Some leaders believe the last mile will shrink but never disappear entirely. Hron of Thomson Reuters notes, “The base models still have a long way to go to be truly deep. Expert systems and expert knowledge will help models climb to the next level.” Price of Prolific adds, “We’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what AI can do. Humans are a critical piece of the puzzle, especially in niche domains.” In other words, the future isn’t about replacing experts. It’s about scaling the expertise that’s essential to making AI models better and safer. A new kind of knowledge work For Ruane, the physics PhD student, expert data work has become a significant source of income. She recently accepted a full-time position, but notes that her new job will only be 38 hours per week—leaving time to continue contributing to AI training projects. What she’s experiencing is quickly becoming common: skilled professionals treating AI training work as a supplemental career path, flexible side hustle, or even full-time job. The work plays an increasingly central role in how AI systems operate. As models get more capable, the value of real-world expertise is being redefined, not diminished. Experts aren’t just using AI. They’re teaching it how to reason, think, and act like an expert. View the full article

It’s a little-known fact that Columbia University, in Manhattan, was home to the first mining school in America—the School of Mines—founded in 1864. For the past three decades, the university’s program has been mothballed. Parts of its curriculum were subsumed into the more fashionable subjects of earth and environmental engineering. But next fall, Columbia University will offer a bachelor of science degree in mining engineering once again. Other schools are barreling down, as well. The University of Texas at El Paso is also relaunching its mining engineering degree, starting in the fall of 2027, after a 60-year hiatus. The University of Texas system is providing $20 million to reestablish the program, which plans to produce up to 100 mining engineers annually. Existing programs at some of the top schools for mining—including the Colorado School of Mines, the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and Montana Technological University—are also reporting upticks in enrollment, reversing years of declines. “Until the 1970s, most universities had pretty robust programs in mining engineering,” says Greeshma Gadikota, professor of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University, who will also teach in the revived mining program. This rebirth in mining education in the United States is happening for a reason. It’s a response to a crisis that’s been decades in the making. The underground scene In key measures of mineral wealth and production, the U.S. is failing to keep up. Rising global demand across clean energy, defense, and tech industries has driven prices for critical minerals like copper, silver, and tungsten to record highs. Geopolitical tensions have threatened access to many others. For decades, the U.S. had deprioritized mining and has instead come to rely on rare minerals produced in China. China dominates production of at least 15 critical minerals and mineral groups; it mines about 70% of the world’s “rare earth elements” and processes about 90% of the global supply. (The U.S. is entirely dependent on China to meet its demand for graphite, an essential component in lithium-ion batteries, for example.) But over the past year, in retaliation for The President’s tariffs, China has banned the export of three rare earth products—gallium, germanium, and antimony—to the U.S. And it has put export restrictions on many others, including ones for which China is the sole supplier, including dysprosium, essential for building superfast computer chips, and samarium, a rare earth metal used in many military applications. Last fall, prices for gallium (used in electronics, semiconductors, and batteries) and germanium (critical to infrared technology used in fighter jets and missiles) hit a 14-year high. Tapping into a domestic supply of rare minerals has become not just an economic imperative for the U.S. but a strategic one. Yet that requires rebuilding a declining workforce. More than half the people currently working in the U.S. mining industry—roughly 221,000 workers—are expected to retire or switch industries by 2029. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts 400 annual job openings for mining engineers through 2034. That may not sound like a lot—after all, the Bureau of Labor Statistics anticipates about 5,500 annual openings for civil engineering technologists and technicians, and 17,500 openings for electrical and electronics engineers in the same period. But consider that in 2023, only 312 mining engineering degrees were awarded by U.S. universities. That means it’s a seller’s market for new mining grads—a stark contrast to the outlook for computer science graduates and computer engineering majors, who faced 6.1% and 7.5% rates of unemployment, respectively, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (It’s no wonder Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he would study physical science if he were starting out today.) But the ability of the U.S. to mint new mining engineers is limited by the number of schools that still offer mining and mineral engineering programs, which has fallen from 25 in 1982 to about a dozen today. “Those programs started shutting down one after the other, because so much of the work was getting shifted abroad,” Columbia University professor Gadikota says. Other countries took advantage of that, and they started building up capabilities.” Today, China has more than 38 mineral processing schools and more than 44 mining engineering programs, according to the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies. China’s largest mineral processing program, at Central South University, alone has 1,000 undergraduates and 500 graduate students preparing for the field. Now, schools and businesses are trying to spread the word that the mining industry has well-paying jobs to fill—and that mining today is different. Graduates in mining engineering regularly earn $70,000 and up, right out of school. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the median annual pay for mining engineers is $101,200. Specific expertise in the extraction of rare earth elements, for example, and a willingness to work in remote locations can boost compensation. A new gold rush for mining engineers From aluminum and antimony to zinc and zirconium, there are currently 60 “critical materials” on the U.S. Geological Service’s list, minerals and rare earth elements that are vital to batteries, semiconductors, planes, lasers, medical imaging devices, cancer therapies, cars, electronics, nuclear power plants, and more. As defined by the Energy Act of 2020, these materials are “essential to the economic or national security of the U.S.; have a supply chain that is vulnerable to disruption; and serve an essential function in the manufacturing of a product, the absence of which would have significant consequences for the economic or national security of the U.S.” Many of these materials exist in the U.S., but most of them are still stuck in the ground. That’s starting to change, as big mining companies and startups alike race to develop new domestic sources. MP Materials, a rare earth mining and processing facility on the Nevada-California border, signed a guaranteed-pricing contract in 2025 with the Pentagon and saw its stock surge more than 240% for the year. MIT-founded startup Phoenix Tailings raised $76 million in venture funding last year, supporting the build-out of a next-generation rare earth processing facility in New Hampshire. In December, Ionic Mineral Technologies announced it had discovered rare earth and critical technology metals, including gallium, germanium, cesium, and tungsten, that it says are comparable to China’s deposits. Global mining giants like Glencore, BHT, and Rio Tinto are also developing critical mineral assets in the U.S. Each of these companies employs its own mining engineers—and most of them also contract with other companies that employ them. The growth in critical minerals is creating new kinds of opportunities for young people getting into the industry. And schools are scrambling to revamp curricula to reflect the shifting industry landscape. Kwame Awuah-Offei, who leads the Missouri University of Science and Technology’s Department of Mining and Explosives Engineering, says the school’s graduates typically fall into three career “buckets”: construction aggregate materials (a $35 billion-a-year business in the U.S.), mineral mining, and mining services (working for equipment makers, software companies, and others that support the mining industry). Even though U.S. coal mines still employ some 44,000 people, Awuah-Offei says, coal recruiters are having a tough go of it with new grads. “There is concern among students that if they want to have a 30- or 40-year career, it’s not in coal. Whether it’s true or not, the numbers have shrunk quite a bit.” Interest in critical minerals is a big factor contributing to larger recent class sizes, Awuah-Offei says. Domestic need for resources is just in the news more—he mentions The President’s talk of invading Greenland—“and it drives curiosity on the issue.” While undergrad mining engineering enrollment is still small compared with mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, and fast-growing nuclear engineering, it has grown over the past couple of years. Awuah-Offei is confident that graduates will find jobs when they graduate—thanks to the new demand in rare metals mining and processing, coupled with “very strong job opportunities in the construction materials and aggregate side of the business.” The latter type doesn’t pay as much as metal mining jobs, but the attraction is that they tend to be around metro areas. “Lifestyle is an important factor for this generation of students,” Awuah-Offei says. “Even if a job in Bagdad, Arizona”—a remote copper mining hub—“is paying $10,000 more, they’d rather live in Dallas than be in Bagdad.” “Things come in waves,” says Columbia University professor Gadikota. “We had a wave around climate. Right now we have a wave around metals and foundational materials.” Of course, the two things aren’t unrelated—which might be key to mining engineering’s widening appeal. Sustainability and social considerations increasingly define industry practices. Mining meets AI, entrepreneurship, and environmentalism “When people see today’s mining tech, they are surprised,” Awuah-Offei says. This includes not only massive excavators and tunnel boring machines, but also increasingly common autonomous trucks and robotic equipment. Advances in technology have led to changes in mine design and operation, which in turn have created new challenges that require engineering-based solutions. “For example,” says Sebnem Düzgün, associate department head of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, “one of my students recently analyzed problems with BEV [battery electric vehicle] operations in underground environments. It’s highly interconnected—there’s a societal need for these critical minerals, and mining itself also needs them, to electrify the mines.” Sebnem Düzgün Düzgün recently led a recent curriculum update at the school, which included adding classes in things like data science, AI and machine learning, robotics, and autonomous operations. “All engineering departments have an industrial advisory committee,” she says, “and we frequently reflect their requests in our curriculum.” Modern mining involves using AI models to analyze geological and satellite data during the exploration phase, deploying predictive analytics to improve mine traffic flow and minimize equipment downtime, and creating digital twins to process real-time sensor data and optimize processes. “If you go to the control room of a modern mining processing plant, all you see is big banks of computer screens with someone monitoring data streaming in from sensors,” Awuah-Offei says. “They don’t necessarily need to walk out there to see what’s going on.” Technology has enabled a new breed of mining startups to flourish, which has prompted another change to the traditional curriculum. “Mining is mainly governed by large industry,” Düzgün says. “But as new businesses have emerged, we’ve started incorporating entrepreneurship into our curriculum, and now some of our graduates are entrepreneurs.” Some technology-enabled mining startups are even being funded at levels typically associated with AI companies. In January 2025, KoBold Metals, an AI-powered U.S. mining startup backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, raised a $537 million Series C round. Another part of the mining engineering syllabus is environmental stewardship. “To be honest, we’ve been incorporating the social and environmental aspects of mining—things like mine closure and reclamation issues—into our curriculum for almost 20 years,” Düzgün says. “But the industry’s handling of these concepts became more pronounced.” At Columbia, Gadikota says the mining program had morphed into earth and environmental engineering as the public became more focused on mining’s environmental footprint. ”We went so much toward managing environmental impacts that it reached the point where we didn’t even want [mines] in our backyard.” Now, the pendulum is swinging back. “We are rediscovering and repurposing our mining roots and bringing back all of that knowledge, but not just in the same outdated manner. We need the metals. We also need to clean up the tailings”—materials left over after ore has been extracted from rock—“and the emissions, and develop sustainable water systems. We want to be conscious about managing tomorrow’s liability today,” she says. Gadikota oversees a sponsored research agreement, announced in November, between Columbia University and Locksley Resources, which is targeting rare earth elements and antimony (used in energy storage) in California. Students at Columbia will explore approaches including AI-driven ore analysis, innovative electrochemical recovery, and carbon-dioxide-assisted mineral processing to help the company develop sustainable practices that improve upon current methods. “If we wanted to build metal recovery capabilities based on technology that exists in other countries, we can certainly do that,” Gadikota says. “But we know that some of those mining pathways are not as energy-efficient, they’re not as material-efficient. They contribute to a lot of emissions. Then there is the processing side. How do we process the material in a way that allows us to produce not just one product, but multiple co-products? And how can we lower the environmental footprint of doing that? These are all key factors to consider, and that’s why we do what we do.” Government spends heavily, but gaps remain Last March, President The President signed an executive order, “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production,” that outlined numerous steps to increase funding and cut red tape for domestic mining and metals processing projects. The government responded: The U.S. Department of Energy announced in August that it would issue nearly $1 billion in funding to advance and scale mining, processing, and manufacturing technologies across critical minerals and materials supply chains. Three months later, the Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy announced that it would provide up to $275 million to build U.S. industrial facilities capable of producing valuable minerals from existing industrial and coal byproducts, and $80 million to establish “Mine of the Future” proving grounds to test next-generation mining technologies. But there hasn’t yet been much federal funding specifically earmarked for mining education. “We’ve seen an uptick in research funding for faculty to go after,” Awuah-Offei says. “Traditionally, when there’s a lot of funding, universities are more willing to hire people in that area. So that has been good. But apart from programs in some states, like Texas, there hasn’t been direct investment in education, necessarily.” Introduced in the House of Representatives in March, the Technology Grants to Strengthen Domestic Mining Education Act of 2025 (aka the Mining Schools Act) would establish a grant program to support schools in recruiting and educating future mining professionals, including engineers. It is currently awaiting action by the House Committee on Natural Resources. “Most of us support that because it will put direct funding into schools,” Awuah-Offei says. “Training mining engineers is expensive. You have to have an experimental mine. It’s lab-based and hands-on.” There’s little time to waste. “We’ll work on cute little mining projects,” Gadikota says. “But if you want to scale them up and you need a domestically trained workforce to implement and grow them, does that workforce actually exist? The answer to that question is: We are behind, and we are doing everything that we can to develop that talent and get them out again.” View the full article

As utilities struggle to keep up with surging energy demand, they’re starting to turn to an unexpected tool: windows that insulate like walls. “Think of it like a thermos bottle in your walls,” says LuxWall CEO and founder Scott Thomsen, who worked in the semiconductor and flat-panel display glass industry before taking on the challenge of windows. Energy-efficient windows aren’t new. But a radical design from LuxWall, a Michigan-based startup, goes further. Rather than relying on double or triple panes, it uses a vacuum to block heat transfer, the same way your Yeti tumbler can keep a drink ice-cold or steaming hot while the outside stays close to room temperature. Cutting energy bills in half A typical energy-efficient window might have an R-value (the measure of a material’s resistance to heat transfer) of R3. Luxwall’s windows have a rating of R18, similar to a solid wall. When they’re used to replace single-pane windows, they can cut energy use by as much as 45%. Some of the startup’s first customers are large building owners, like JPMorgan Chase, looking for ways to slash energy bills. Homeowners are beginning to adopt the windows for the same reason. On large projects, the payback period for the windows can be three to seven years. Now, some utilities, like Con Edison and Eversource, are starting to offer incentives to use LuxWall as they look for new ways to help the power grid. “When we go in and we retrofit a building from R2 to R18, the amount of kilowatt hours that we’re saving is dramatic,” Thomsen says. “Yes, we save energy efficiency and save costs for the property owner. But we’re realizing our biggest benefit is that we’re keeping electrons on the grid. … When you don’t send electrons to HVAC units, you’re sending electrons to data centers. Our theory is that you can retrofit buildings faster than you can build power plants.” Making a super-insulating window The idea of vacuum-insulated glass isn’t new, and first showed up in a lab in the 1960s. But unlike insulated bottles that can be mass-produced in a single size, windows of multiple sizes and shapes are difficult to scale. “In my mind, the reason it had never been successfully commercialized was that you have to really blend material science with advanced manufacturing,” Thomsen says. As the startup developed a feasible manufacturing process, it also got funding from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures and other VCs to build a factory. The company has raised $167 million to date. Inside a 217,000-square-foot factory in Litchfield, Michigan, a highly automated production line makes windows in custom sizes. (In one current project, they’re producing windows for a 40-story high-rise in New York City.) Large sheets of clear and low‑emissivity glass are cut, edged, drilled, and tempered. Then they’re carefully joined on a vacuum assembly line, with tiny support pillars and sealants applied using lasers and heat. The air is removed between the panes, creating a vacuum that turns the window into a wall‑like insulator. Another 276,000-square-foot factory is under development in Detroit. The project previously won a $31.7 million grant from the Department of Energy that was canceled last year in a round of DOE funding cuts; the company is appealing the cancellation while still moving forward with construction. The building is complete, with some equipment on the way, and will be running early next year. “We’re cranking up the output,” Thomsen says. “So we’re going to really drive better unit economics. The goal is to start replicating this in multiple locations beyond Detroit.” View the full article

Sitting on a coffee table in his Chelsea office in New York City and surrounded by framed wedding invitations on the walls, Justin McLeod is worrying about AI. Specifically, the cofounder and CEO of dating app Hinge is concerned that his users—many of whom have asked him to their weddings over the years—might fall in love with it instead of one another. McLeod has spent the greater part of the past 15 years studying the dynamics of human relationships, including what makes one person fall for another, and he sees that chatbots offer exactly what many people crave. “Why would I invest in these hard human relationships with people that are not always available or might reject me when I can talk to this thing that is right here and will always say the right thing?” he wonders. On this sunny afternoon in late September, chatbots aren’t yet upending dating apps, but something sure is. Bumble, once the women-first darling, has shed 460,000 paying users since the end of 2024, prompting the return of founder Whitney Wolfe Herd in March. She’s embarked on an aggressive retrenchment campaign that has included laying off 30% of the staff. Tinder, meanwhile, has lost more than 1.5 million paying users since its peak in 2022. Its parent company, Match Group, has also recorded steady revenue declines for the past three years for its business unit that includes former stalwarts like Match.com and OkCupid. Match appointed Spencer Rascoff as a wartime CEO in February 2025; he’s slashed head count by 13%. But one app in Match Group’s portfolio stands out. Hinge, which has 15 million monthly active users, saw its paying users grow by 17% year over year to 1.87 million in the third quarter of this year. The app took in $550 million in revenue in 2024, and more than $500 million in the first nine months of 2025. “We’re the fastest-growing—and, in fact, the only growing—major dating app,” McLeod says. (That’s not quite true: Grindr, with 1.3 million of what it calls “average paying users,” is also on the upswing.) “Simply put, Hinge is crushing it,” Rascoff said on Match Group’s Q2 earnings call. Hinge’s competitors are facing problems of their own making. First was their aggressive pursuit of users, favoring quantity over quality, which has degraded the overall experience of many dating apps. Meanwhile, their lax policing of junk profiles and bots—and simultaneous price increases for increasingly important features—has forced users to pay ever more to find decent matches. People are just tired of endless, expensive swiping that doesn’t convert into dates. And now a rising generation is emerging with an entirely different approach to dating than earlier users, putting apps that don’t evolve at risk of being left behind. Gen Z’s relationships are increasingly mediated—even defined—by screens. They still use dating apps, but they’re skeptical. Gen Z has “set a higher bar,” Match CFO Steven Bailey told attendees at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media, and Telecom conference in March. “They want [dating apps] to be safe, they want them to be effective, and they want them to drive the outcomes they’re looking for.” But Hinge keeps growing because it has stuck to its promise that it succeeds only if users end up deleting it altogether. “We want people to meet up and find love in person,” McLeod says. That sounds obvious, but in the world of dating apps, it hasn’t always been a priority. While other apps favored ease of use (all that endless swiping) over outcomes, McLeod remained relentlessly focused on designing ways to get his users off the app and dating, even if that meant inserting friction into the user experience. “A lot of apps grew much faster than us because they were more engaging and exciting,” McLeod admits. But he was playing the long game. McLeod is now preparing for the next stage of Hinge. The company has been rolling out a suite of AI-powered features to appeal to users with rustier social skills (ahem, Gen Z). McLeod is also taking his matching algorithm up a notch, extracting even more information from users to personalize and refine Hinge’s picks for them. To stop people from falling in love with chatbots, he’s fighting AI with AI—and trying to engineer something incontestably human: a messy, authentic love story. McLeod knows something about the complexities of the heart. He founded Hinge in 2011 while at Harvard Business School to help people find real-world connections. At the time, though, he was recovering from heartbreak. He had dated someone as an undergrad, but they broke up and got back together several times as he battled substance abuse issues. By the time he got out of rehab, she had moved on. Several years later, with Hinge starting to grow, McLeod conducted an interview with a New York Times reporter where he recounted the story of the one who got away. That inspired him to look up his lost love, who was living in Europe and engaged. Though they hadn’t seen each other in nearly a decade, something sparked. She called off her wedding, and a few years later she and McLeod married. He’s recounted this story numerous times. It was even turned into a New York Times Modern Love column and then an episode of the Amazon show based on the column. But as polished as the anecdote is, there’s a deeper truth within it: Vulnerability creates possibilities. A decade ago, when Tinder, Bumble, and other apps were orienting themselves around engagement—making the user experience addictive but the outcomes questionable—McLeod mapped out a different strategy, aimed at fostering emotional risk-taking. He would require users to put in more work during the sign-up process and would place deliberate hurdles for them along the way, all in an effort to get them to open up, not just swipe. Jackie JantosmarketingEvelyn Freja Today, Hinge requires users to upload a minimum of four photos and fill out at least three prompts about themselves. The process is designed to get users to slow down, think about what they really want, and present a more unfiltered profile. McLeod says the app tries to give users tasks that “signal a level of intention and create a level of vulnerability so that you can actually create connection between two people.” The longer sign-up process has made a difference: Hinge has found that users are 47% more likely to go on dates when they engage with the written answers on someone’s profile rather than simply the photos. Last year, Hinge introduced another hurdle—a feature called Your Turn Limits—to curb ghosting. Now Hinge users with too many unanswered messages must send a reply or end the conversation before they can resume swiping. The company even gently nudges users into the real world: Its AI will invite users to set up a date if they’ve been chatting online for a couple of weeks and seem compatible based on their conversations. Hinge also uses AI to scan the content of messages and deploys a notification to double-check with a user before they send a message that might not be well received. That’s all well and . . . millennial, but the app’s newer challenge is helping Gen Z users—who make up 56% of Hinge’s overall user base—find value in the app. CMO Jackie Jantos sees a generation that was isolated during the formative years when relationships develop, and that often reverts to interacting on social media rather than in real life. Hinge’s Gen Z users tend to be uncomfortable with small talk and hyperfocused on “digital body language,” Jantos says. “So there’s a lot of reading into the speed [with which] someone replies, how long the person’s message is, and what type of emojis and punctuation” they use. Match CEO Rascoff puts it more succinctly: “They have atrophied social skills and need more help showing up and connecting with other people.” Hinge’s first feature for younger users, launched in 2021, was inspired by TikTok voice-overs. Instead of making users write out their responses to profile prompts, Hinge now allows them to record a 30-second audio introduction. “It hit the sweet spot of willingness to do it if I’m the person who’s posting it and extremely informative if I’m the person [experiencing] it,” McLeod says. With more than one in five Gen Z adults identifying as LGBTQ, according to Gallup, Hinge has also given users an expanded menu of gender and sexuality identifiers to choose from as they set up their profiles. “Gender, relationships, and relationship types are being redefined,” Jantos says. In February, the company added Match Note, which allows users to privately share information with matches before chatting with them. People have used it to disclose their STI status or gender identity. (McLeod says single parents also use the feature to let matches know about their kids.) Hinge is tuning its marketing for Gen Z as well. The company has long featured real couples in its campaigns. But Hinge is now focused on stories that showcase all the intricacies and uncertainties of real relationships to show Gen Z that they don’t have to be perfect. For 2024’s “No Ordinary Love” campaign, Hinge enlisted writers like Roxane Gay and Hunter Harris to tell the nuanced, real-life stories of people who connected on the app, then published the essays in a zine. This year, Hinge followed up with a second collection, released as a printed book and on a dedicated Substack—supporting it with a flurry of ads in major cities. In one, a couple meets, hits it off, then breaks up for a few months before getting back together. Another tells the story of Lia and Ole, a couple fighting against their preconceived ideas of what they want from a relationship (“Lia had imagined a romance with someone more established, more mature”). Spoiler: Five years after their first date—when they jointly deleted Hinge from their phones—they’re still together. Despite his fears of AI keeping Hinge users from meeting real people, McLeod is embracing it to help improve their prospects. In January, Hinge launched an AI-powered coaching tool to help users refine their profiles. Instead of just asking users to type in their response to a profile prompt, an AI chatbot can now interview the answer out of them. If a user says they like to travel, the chatbot might ask them for their best travel story to add to their profile. Those interviews serve an additional purpose: helping improve the app’s matching algorithm. Until the advent of generative AI, Hinge’s algorithm primarily considered the profiles that users liked as they swiped and tried to surface similar ones—but it never really understood why a user might have certain preferences. Now, McLeod says, the algorithm can take in the content of a user’s profile to deliver better matches. “It’s thinking about what you’ve said, what they’ve said, what your prompts say, what your photos are, and using it to predict whether you might like someone,” he says. “It’s not waiting for you to send a whole lot of likes for us to learn your taste.” If McLeod succeeds, he could lift the fortunes of Match beyond just Hinge’s revenue. Match’s data shows that Hinge subscribers already tend to use the app alongside one or more of the company’s other apps. Rascoff now wants to encourage that behavior, letting users populate their profiles across other apps with one tap. “From a financial standpoint, we’ve found that it’s additive,” he says. “The user spend on the second app does not detract from their spend on the first.” Rascoff envisions that the matching algorithm behind these apps could also be standardized. “We don’t want to do AI stuff for the sake of it,” McLeod insists. Even so, he’s staking his app’s future on it. McLeod anticipates that within five years Hinge will work more like a personal matchmaker. Users will spend less time on the platform sifting through profiles and sending messages. Instead, they might provide more information to the app on the front end and simply trust it to show them fewer, better matches. That would represent a sea change for the entire industry, McLeod says: “We’ll think of swiping through endless profiles to find dates as a bit archaic.” View the full article

Yoast AI Brand Insights now lets you track how your brand appears in Google’s Gemini. You can see your Gemini data alongside ChatGPT and Perplexity, all in one dashboard. With a single analysis, you can see how different AI platforms describe your brand with the Yoast SEO AI+ plan. You’ll see which sources they use and how sentiment compares across the tools your customers use most. Why this matters AI platforms use different methods to answer questions about your brand, often leading to different results. Seeing these results side-by-side helps you spot gaps or missed opportunities in your brand’s AI presence. ChatGPT is designed as a conversational assistant, focusing on natural dialogue and using multi-step reasoning to explain complex topics. Perplexity positions itself as an “answer engine”, emphasizing transparency by grounding every response in cited web sources. Gemini presents itself as a search-driven LLM, leveraging Google’s vast index to show how your brand appears in real-time search contexts. As these tools frame your brand differently, from conversational reasoning to source-heavy citations, you need a single dashboard which covers all to see which sources they rely on and how their sentiment compares. What’s new You can now: Run brand visibility analyses in Gemini, in addition to ChatGPT and Perplexity. Compare results across all three platforms with the added benefit of a built-in historical view. Track brand mentions, sentiment, and citations in one place. Monitor changes over time in your AI Visibility Index. How to get started If you’re already using Yoast SEO AI+, nothing changes in how you work. Log in and at your next analysis, Gemini data is now included automatically at no extra cost. You can select the AI platform from the dropdown, and your dashboard will show a broader view of how your brand appears across AI search and chat. To upgrade If you don’t yet have Yoast SEO AI+, you’ll need to upgrade to access the Yoast AI Brand Insights tool. The AI+ plan brings brand visibility tracking together with on-page SEO tools, content optimization, and AI-powered insights in one package, so you can analyze how your brand is mentioned and act from the same workflow. Upgrade to Yoast SEO AI+ to start scanning your brand across Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. The post New: Track brand visibility in Gemini with Yoast AI Brand Insights appeared first on Yoast. View the full article