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Sienna Mcpherson

Contributing writer

Sienna has a marketing degree and five years of freelance work behind her, most of it online for software teams that needed a marketer before they could afford to hire one. She writes about the practical end of the job — the campaigns, pages and emails that have to earn their keep straight away.

Sienna Mcpherson

Google opens a self-serve path for any app to join Gemini and Search

Safari blocks third-party identity resolution, and ad tech's answer is to move tracking server-side

Google ends its five-year Gmail and Photos ad pledge, and advertisers can't see the effect

Anthropic's IPO filing shows sales and marketing spend up 26x in six months

1Password launches a trust layer for AI agents, and its own growth numbers back the bet

Google adds a license check for financial ads in the US and Canada, and fintech's partner-bank deals don't fit it yet

Canva launches an AI image model built to get ad text right, and the agent integration it promised is still coming

Most bots claiming to be Googlebot or GPTBot are fake, and two countries want a law to unmask them

ChatGPT sends under 1% of Google's traffic, and three new studies now agree on it

Cloudflare and OpenAI's pilot surfaced hundreds of millions of pages ChatGPT search had missed

China writes the first rulebook for GEO, and bans claims vendors already sell

Salesforce buys Braze for $5.66 billion, paying 6.8 times revenue to close Marketing Cloud's messaging gap

DeepSeek opens its search API to developers, and says it already blocks GEO manipulation

Researchers planted a fake concept online, and 8 of 10 AI search tools cited it within a week

AI inbox summaries now decide which PR pitches journalists actually read

Marketing labor costs rose despite the AI rollout, and two studies blame a skills gap, not a headcount gap

Google and OpenAI's API only match a quarter of what ChatGPT actually cites, a new study finds

HubSpot caps AI credit overages by default, and lets customers swap seats for credits without waiting for renewal

G2 finds only 9% of buyers call seat pricing fair for AI agents, and 74% are ready to shop a rival at renewal

ChatGPT referral traffic fell by half this month, and it was a tracking bug, not fewer visitors

Google puts inline links higher in AI Overviews, and preferred-source usage is up sevenfold this year

Bing Webmaster Tools adds topic-level AI citation data, and shows exactly where rivals get cited and you don't

Google is poisoning SERPs to stop scrapers, and rank trackers can't tell the difference

Google Ads adds channel prioritization and budget allocation, and your current Display setup expires in February

Salesforce buys Loops to make Tableau explain why your numbers moved

Honeyjar launches an AI PR agent that pitches reporters, but says when you're not ready

Google's new Gemini agent gets its own Workspace email address and a seat in your inbox

Anthropic bans Claude-powered content networks built to sway AI answers

ChatGPT's Intelligent UI builds calculators inside the chat, and SaaS lead-gen tools are in its path

The Document Foundation writes down six conditions for adding AI to LibreOffice, and says none are met yet

OpenAI recruits software vendors to train its models on their own products, starting with Ironclad

OpenAI watermarks ChatGPT and Codex text in the EU, and editing cuts detection from 92% to 66%

Chargebee's billing overhaul shows how CodeRabbit, Gorgias and Zapier actually price their AI features

Google's helpful-content guidance now calls fabricated author bios deception, and ghostwritten SaaS blogs are exposed

Cloudflare starts charging AI agents per API call, and four companies are already collecting

OpenAI launches Dots, an always-on agent that watches for you but can't act on what it finds

Google tells sites to fact-check AI content before publishing, and the rule now reaches your title tags

Salesforce agrees to buy Listen Labs, giving marketers an AI shortcut to test messaging before real customers see it

Reddit shuts off RSS in November and its public API by March, and marketers lose a free window into its communities

OpenAI opens an enterprise marketplace with 32 partners, and there's no checkout button yet

Braze opens its AI assistant to Claude and ChatGPT, and its CEO says the dashboard still wins the review

RevenueCat data shows annual SaaS trials converting best at 30 days, not 14

Software has the shortest average CMO tenure of any industry, at 27 months

Salesforce, HubSpot and Atlassian are now pricing AI agent access separately from seats, and the rates don't agree

Google Ads adds IP address and timestamp matching to Customer Match, and it must be uploaded unhashed

Two in three top AI companies now charge by usage, and Stripe says pricing pages haven't caught up

Google search referrals to publishers dropped 40% this year, and AI still isn't filling the gap

Gorgias put its own AI agent in a public benchmark, and published every place it lost

AI agents are running your GTM stack, and a third of ops teams can't say how many

Software companies' creator video use jumped 55% this year, and AI is already citing it in shopping answers

Martech category labels have stopped describing products, and a blind test shows buyers can't tell CRMs apart

Marketo's co-founder launches Phave, an AI marketing platform priced by reach, not database size

Google adds AI Max reporting, two years after advertisers called it a black box

IAB gives AI ad-buying agents a shared proposal format, and measurement contracts get a template

ChatGPT's share of AI prompts fell to 50% from 70% in six months, and most GEO dashboards still watch only one assistant

OpenAI now discloses when its AI misbehaves, and few software marketers have written their own accountability document

SaaStr's inbound agent runs on renewal data, which marketing usually doesn't own

AI job-loss expectation rises with income and awareness, and that describes your buyer

Google can pick a stranger's domain as your canonical, and Search Console won't show you the traffic

Gross margin is now a benchmark metric, and a great magic number can mean you under-invested in marketing

SaaStr wrote 214 free articles about Replit, and what earned them was one engineer nobody reassigned

Google's Search profile bar drops to 10,000 followers, and yours may already exist unclaimed

HubSpot now scores how complete your context is, and its 3.6x proof compares AI users with non-users

Blocking AI training no longer costs you Googlebot, and it still won't keep you out of AI answers

AI search is now the top media challenge, and buyers are answering it with brand spend

Google has started paying for grounding, and the panel shows earnings but not usage

Harvey puts an ex-lawyer in every deployment, and now certifies people it doesn't employ

The same 3-4 word query now drives 46% of paid conversions and almost no organic clicks

The FTC wants three facts disclosed on a personalized price, and it never mentions business buyers

Only 16% of CMOs feel able to defend their AI spend, and the price of it is still subsidized

Content marketing hit a 12-year performance low, and AI adoption does not explain it

Automated campaigns take 12% of US ad spend, and Google's targets no longer beat themselves

Google's geo experiments go global, and its new uplift metric counts conversions, not customers

Google may still judge your site on the programmatic pages you already deleted

Google's EEA rebuild gives aggregators the top unit, and splits your rank data by region

More than half of web requests are automated, and retargeting is where the budget leaks

A B2B ChatGPT ads test matched 336 clicks to 146 companies, and only five fit the ICP

Agencies are capping their AI agents' tokens, because a rule in a prompt is only a suggestion

Your old product name wins the AI answer, because it matches the question