The news that moves growth.
A daily digest of what's happening in search, social, AI and advertising — curated headlines linking to the original sources, refreshed every morning.
Curated from the sources we actually read.
Last updated: 19 August 2026, 04:30 IST
Search & Digital Marketing
What Top Stories Inside AI Overviews Means For Publishers And Brands In 2026 And Beyond
Most publishers think robots.txt keeps them out of AI Overviews. It doesn't. John Shehata's data shows what the wrong setting actually costs newsrooms.
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Report That Cloudflare AI Bot Blocking Prevents Googlebot From Indexing Sites
Anecdotal report that blocking AI training bots with Cloudflare blocks Googlebot from indexing websites.
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Google Now Reports AI Search Impressions. Here’s How To Read Them
Comparing which pages Google uses in AI answers against how they rank conventionally is where the new Search Console report earns its keep.
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Paid Search Absorbed Organic’s Collapse – Then Q2 Slowed Down
Google paid search growth slowed in Q2 2026. See what tougher comparisons and shifting ad spend mean for PPC budgets and H2 planning.
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WooCommerce Social Login WordPress Plugin Enables Full Site Takeover
WooCommerce Social Login vulnerability enables unauthenticated attackers to gain full control of ecommerce sites.
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Snapchat Clamps Down On AI-Generated Videos
Snap announced that it is removing wholly AI-generated videos from Snapchat's Spotlight recommendations in favor of promoting authentic human-authored experiences.
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Meta makes AI Developer Assistant its primary support option
The company is actively pushing forward with its plan to incorporate artificial intelligence agents into as many systems as possible.
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People Inc. CEO: We’re not turning off Google crawlers yet
People Inc.’s CEO Neil Vogel said the company won’t block Google’s crawlers — not because execs don’t want to, but because they don’t want to lose out on any potential…
Read on our siteWhatsApp updates polls, alerts and side chats
New features in the messaging app offer more conversational functionality and refine existing functions.
Read on our siteSnapchat offers third-party AI ad integration
The app’s Model Context Protocol server will let brands connect promotional campaigns to agents including Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini.
Read on our siteReddit offers marketing insights for beauty brands
Community discussions are focused on individuality, personal discovery and experimental makeup looks, according to a new report from the app.
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Ad Tech Briefing: Q2’s Big Tech earnings, small-scale concessions, and frustrated dealmakers
The second-quarter earnings call period is often seen as a reprieve from the traditional summer slowdown, for news junkies at least. If nothing else, it’s an opportunity…
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Stagwell’s Curate launch puts agencies’ ad tech ambitions in focus
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Spotify For years, DSPs and SSPs have been jockeying to control more of the digital ad supply chain. Now, agencies are increasingly throwing…
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WTF is a stealth crawler?
“Stealth crawler” sounds like something from a sci-fi spy story, but the term has gained momentum with recent legislation trying to crack down on these web crawlers. A…
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As Hollywood studios chase creator culture, ownership gets complicated
After the runaway success of creator-led films this year, Hollywood is hungry for creators and is looking to gobble up more and more of their IP. But the Backrooms and…
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Spotify expands AI remix and covers project with Merlin partnership
Spotify says Merlin, which represents more than 30,000 independent labels and distributors, has joined Universal Music Group in backing its upcoming AI-powered remix and…
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Texas halts new data centers as governor calls for audits
Tech companies and developers have been scouring the U.S. for places to build data centers, and they’ve been drawn to Texas’ loose regulations and seemingly abundant…
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Elon Musk spends half his time talking robots and AI on Tesla earnings calls
An analysis of the last seven years of Tesla earnings calls shows just how little attention Musk pays to Tesla's car business.
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Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
Apple says its trade secrets investigation into OpenAI has widened. In a new court filing, Apple claims additional former staff may have retained or accessed…
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Is the future of data centers portable? Runware builds a pod to find out
On Tuesday, AI infrastructure company Runware announced the launch of its own modular data center called Sonic Inference Pod.
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EON wants to move the data superhighway from ocean fiber to space lasers
Endeavor Optical Networks is planning to launch the fastest space laser communications system yet built.
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After killer quarter, Palantir CEO Alex Karp calls AI industry ‘Marxist’
After a quarter that delivered $1 billion in profit, Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Monday once again warned that AI frontier labs are too untrustworthy for enterprises.
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AWS is helping vibe-coding startup Superblocks, and the implications are big
AWS now allows vibe-coding tool Superblocks to be embedded into the private clouds of AWS customers. It's another step toward decoupling apps from models.
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Design Arena creators raise $7.9 million to bring taste to AI models
Design Arena is used by 5.3 million people around the world, providing critical human evaluations to frontier labs.
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