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
How Perplexity Actually Picks Sources (I Read The Stream, Not The Answers)
Perplexity never skips the web, so every query is winnable. Here's what its live answer stream reveals about citations, video, and local.
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How prompt injection puts your brand and AI workflows at risk
Simple hidden prompt injection — white-on-white text, HTML comments, and invisible Unicode — no longer works against modern LLMs. Pattern recognition, boundary…
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Google’s Open Knowledge Format Adds Five Trust Signals
Google announced version 0.2 of the Open Knowledge Format, introducing five new trust signals.
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What 15.7 million AI Mode citations reveal about getting quoted by Google by Pillarbase
Click a citation inside Google’s AI Mode and watch what happens. You don’t land at the top of the page. The URL carries a text-fragment directive (it ends in…
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Google’s Mueller: Fix Conflicting Metadata, Don’t Test It
Google's John Mueller says if sites are serving conflicting metadata, they should fix the conflict, not test which source wins.
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YouTube Views Rose While Long-Form Ad Revenue Fell, Data Shows
Metricool data shows views per long-form YouTube post increased while estimated ad revenue and average view duration fell.
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Google’s Illyes Unsure On Shifting unavailable_after Dates
Google's Gary Illyes said he would need to check whether pushing an unavailable_after date forward on every renewal causes problems. He gave a first read.
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AI Recognizes 96% Of Brands But Mentions Almost None, New Study Finds
Find out how AI accurately describes brands but struggles with visibility. Explore Victorious' findings in this insightful report.
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Google On SEO Impact Of URLs Injected By CMS Platforms
Google's John Mueller explains the SEO impact of random URLs injected into web pages by CMS platforms.
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AI Opt-Out May Cost Sites A Google Top Stories Spot
Google is putting Top Stories carousels inside AI Overviews, raising the stakes on its new AI opt-out setting in Search Console.
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SMX Advanced expands in 2027: See you in San Diego and Boston
It’s official: There will be two SMX Advanced events in 2027. The shows are scheduled for March 17 to 19 in San Diego and Sept. 20 to 22 in Boston. This is the first…
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The Future Of Search & AI: What I Learned From Google’s Latest Earnings Call
Is Google still a search engine? Its Q2 2026 earnings call suggests the answer is changing, and website owners should plan accordingly.
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Google Search Results Still Rank Heavily AI-Flagged Pages
Data ties higher AI detector scores to lower positions and to fewer pages in Google's index, though heavily flagged pages still rank in top 10.
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Kia takes a Reddit staple for a spin during WNBA All-Star Weekend
The brand’s AMA featured a claw machine of preselected questions answered live on video and generated 61,000 views in 72 hours.
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How to build a brand on Facebook
Meta’s flagship app has more than 3 billion users and has seen a resurgence due to the popularity of Reels.
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The platform offers significant engagement opportunities, but its privacy-focused approach can make it harder for brands to develop the right messaging and promotions.
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Future of TV Briefing: FreeWheel adds show-level reporting to tackle streaming’s transparency problem
This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at Comcast-owned FreeWheel enabling streaming ad sellers to directly show-level reporting to programmatic ad buyers. Showtime…
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Omnicom CEO: ‘The marketplace hasn’t seen what the cost of this AI is’
Omnicom CEO John Wren just said the quiet part out loud: nobody’s actually priced AI yet. The admission came on the holdco’s Q2 earnings call yesterday, in response to…
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‘They haven’t been given the receipts’: Why one brand is auditing its DSPs for greater transparency
Buoyed by the shift of sports programming to streaming, ad spend on digital video continues to climb, but that growth comes with greater scrutiny around transparency and…
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As AI content floods the internet, Pangram raises $9M to detect it
Pangram has raised $9 million to scale its AI detection software. The startup has also released a new AI text detection model, Pangram 4, and an AI image detection model…
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Cyera agrees to acquire Oasis Security for $1B to safeguard proliferating AI agents
The deal is Cyera's third acquisition this year.
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Bot-detection startup Spur nabs $200M from Insight
Spur Intelligence has raised a $200 million round from Insight Partners for its tech that can identify legit human traffic from bots.
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MCP startup Runlayer accuses Rippling of stealing its product idea
Runlayer is suing Rippling after Rippling evaluated the startup's MCP gateway product and then opted to build one itself.
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Sam Altman is ready to decelerate
His change of position comes after "the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally."
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