Let’s go through the latest in digital marketing news, resources, tools, and jobs…

Social media best practices for 2026: 19 proven tips
Christina Newberry
Social media rules keep changing. Christina shares the 19 best practices that turn listening, testing, and AI into real growth.

5 tips for building an effective brand presence on LinkedIn
Andrew Hutchinson
Andrew shares five key tips for building the framework of an effective LinkedIn presence: examine trending content, identify the best people to reach, note key themes, and more. 

YouTube adds new tools to make creating thumbnails easier
Mariella Moon
YouTube announced that creators in the YouTube Partner Program can now upload custom thumbnails for Shorts. They can even retroactively add new thumbnails to their existing Shorts. YouTube says it will expand the capability to more users in the future. 

Social media management for startups: A complete guide
Jacqueline Zote
Jacqueline explains how startups can manage social media without a full-time team or big budget. Learn practical steps and a plan that scales as you grow.

Attribution vs. incrementality: Why you need both
Ann Robison
Ann explains why attributed conversions don’t always indicate incremental growth. Knowing the difference can lead to better campaign and budget decisions.

Google Ads Launches Lead Journey Mapping Tool
Hana Kobzová
Google Ads has quietly introduced Lead Journey Mapping, a visual drag-and-drop tool designed for lead generation advertisers. Once launched, it enables users to map their unique end-to-end customer journey, making it easier to visualize touchpoints and align campaign bidding with business goals.

Google is making passkeys mandatory for the Google Ads API
Anash P. Oommen
Google Ads API will now require users to use passkeys as part of efforts to improve security for Google Ads accounts. If you don’t have passkeys enabled, you will be prompted to add one. These updates will start rolling out from August 5, 2026, and will be enabled for all users over the next few weeks.

Google Ads Household Income Exclusions For PMax
Barry Schwartz
Google Ads is reportedly offering a new exclusion type for Performance Max campaigns. This one is called household income exclusions, which isn't new to Google Ads overall, but could be new to PMax campaigns.

How to Find Keywords That Still Drive Results in the AI Era
Goran Mirkovic
Goran gives you a three-tier framework to guide your keyword strategy, a step-by-step audit to find your most valuable SEO keywords right now, and concrete examples showing exactly which keywords are worth your time.

Study: Content Recency's Impact on AI Visibility in 2026
Sonny Vasquez
Sonny analyzed 7,683 pages carrying 47,097 citations to understand whether recency still matters in AI search: In every vertical, freshness comes from updates, not new publishing. The brands that win in AI search are not the ones writing the most. They are the ones who build a system to keep their best content alive.

Google Doesn’t Punish AI Content; It Punishes Bad Content (331k Pages Studied)
Ryan Law, Xibeijia Guan
Ryan and Xibeijia analyzed 331k pages to see whether fully AI-generated pages can rank in top positions. They found that 5.3% of top-ranking (positions 1–3) pages are 100% AI-generated. The takeaway? “I don’t believe marketers and SEOs should be scared of AI content creation—but they should be scared of spam and scaled content”.

Trust and social proof in the AI era: Why your content visibility is worthless without reviews
Graham Matthews
Graham explains why reviews should be an essential part of any content strategy, how they influence AI visibility, and where to use them effectively.

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 Why creator content belongs in your AI search strategy
Jen Cornwell
Jen goes through how creator reviews, videos, and social content shape AI citations, sentiment, and visibility, making cross-team coordination essential.

How influencer follower count affects audience expectations
Benedict Nicholson
Benedict examines how influencer follower counts affect how audiences approach creator content, from product recommendations to trust: Understand exactly what your target demographics are looking for on each platform, avoid placing your entire budget into a single high-profile activation, and evaluate potential partners based on the subjects they consistently discuss and the quality of their recent posts.

Traditional Influencer Strategies Need To Change As The Creator Economy Matures
Alejandra Rojas
As the creator economy matures, creators are asking for things brands must catch up to before it breaks their budget: The next phase of the creator economy will belong to companies that understand creators not as media placements, but as business partners whose communities, ideas, and cultural intelligence can turn creator spending into shared financial growth.

Inside Unilever’s 300,000 creator network: the logistics behind the headline number
Alyssa Mercante, Kimeko McCoy
Digiday spoke with Unilever as well as several agency execs to demystify the company’s creator push, breaking down its logistics and interrogating its limitations: “The best creator partnerships often happen because someone takes a chance in recommending someone”.

​AI Search Is a 3rd-Party Citation Problem With an On-Page Corroboration Base: The Data Across SaaS, Ecommerce and Finance​
Aleyda Solis
Aleyda compares citation source patterns across SaaS, ecommerce and finance to show why AI search optimization can't stop on the brand’s website. External coverage, communities and social platforms help shape what AI systems retrieve, while clear owned pages substantiate brand claims. The mix differs by vertical and platform, requiring coordinated on-page, digital PR and social workstreams rather than a universal playbook.

​How to Establish an AI Search Optimization (GEO, AEO) Strategy and Goals [Video]​
Aleyda Solis, Tom Capper, Judith Lewis, Jonathan Moore 
In the third episode of the AI Search Roadmap series, Aleyda, Tom, Judith and Jonathan cover the principles, process, dos and don’ts of establishing an AI search optimization strategy. They explain how to connect audience and prompt research with prioritization, measurable goals and coordinated actions instead of treating more mentions or citations as the strategy itself.

​What ChatGPT pulls, what it shows, what it cites.​
RESONEO
The RESONEO team analyzed 27,000 pages to separate the content ChatGPT retrieves, the short extracts it exposes and the URLs it ultimately cites. They also examined the search infrastructure and caches behind those decisions, reinforcing why citation monitoring alone does not describe the full retrieval and representation process.