Online reviews influence billions of dollars in consumer spending every year. 89% of people use reviews when researching a product or service, and BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey puts that number at 97% for local businesses in the US. But how many of those reviews are fake? Key Fake Review Stats How Many Online…
Over the last 20-30 years, search engines, and Google in particular, have become a regular part of everyday life. Whatever you need to find, a search engine has typically been the solution. Your search would result in a list of links. You’d click the one that seemed likely to answer your question and, hopefully, find…
A decade ago, most Google searches sent someone to a website. That’s no longer true. Google has confirmed it processes more than 5 trillion searches a year, up from the “more than 2 trillion” figure it last shared in 2016. But a growing majority of those searches end on the results page. The user finds…
AI tools are widely credited with speeding up work and increasing output, and rightfully so. But a growing body of data suggests that productivity gains are also creating a new burden for the people reviewing that work. Managers, directors, and senior leaders are increasingly spending time checking and fixing AI-generated output from their teams. According…
Someone inyour target audience asks ChatGPT to compare two specific products before buying, and acts on the recommendation without ever opening Google. Somewhere else, a person reads the AI summary at the top of a Google results page, gets their answer, and closes the tab. Neither of them touched a search result the way people…
If you’ve searched for something on Google recently, you’ve probably noticed that the results page looks a lot different than it did a few years ago. Before you even get to the list of links, there’s often an AI-generated summary (sometimes called an “overview”) sitting at the top, pulling information from various sources and presenting…
Backlinks still matter in 2026, but the rules around earning them have changed considerably. Google has spent years refining how it evaluates link quality, and the gap between a link that helps and a link that does nothing (or hurts) has never been wider. The cheap tactics that worked a decade ago, like low-quality directory…
For years, online visibility has mostly been about ranking in organic Google searches, with heavy emphasis on link building and optimizing content for specific keywords. That framework still has value, but it misses a lot of what’s actually happening when a business becomes visible online today. Brand mentions are part of what’s missing. When a…