You’re coming to Cleveland for MAICON 2026. Excellent choice.Now let’s make sure you get the most out of it.
Search engine optimization (SEO) teams have long used rankings, organic traffic, and conversions to understand how people find and engage with content. Those signals still matter, but they don’t show whether a brand appears in AI-generated answers. Buyers can also use ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to research software, compare vendors, and identify category leaders. When […]
Digital marketing is one of the most process-intensive functions in marketing, and AI agents for digital marketing are changing how teams handle that load. Every campaign involves the same chain of tasks. Building audiences, setting up nurture sequences, writing follow-ups, and monitoring performance all have to happen every time, across every channel. The manual version […]
Link-building and content outreach were built for search engines. Domain authority, anchor text, and referring domains were the signals that moved search rankings, and they translated directly into an SEO playbook you could run at scale. Answer engines don’t work the same way. Content the answer engine treats as authoritative and relevant for a specific […]
Content marketers are used to publishing consistently, earning trust, and measuring how content contributes to demand. But now, buyers also do their research in AI assistants and answer engines, sometimes without clicking through to a website. That changes what content teams need to measure, since it’s no longer enough to know whether a page ranks. […]
Brand marketing has always been about controlling the narrative, so that the story your company tells about itself is the one the market hears. That job has gotten harder. Answer engines construct descriptions of your brand from what’s been written about the brand across the web. That includes reviews, comparison pages, forum discussions, and third-party […]
Website accessibility in Australia is more than a technical matter. It is a legal, ethical and commercial obligation firmly embedded within the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA). Anyone offering digital products, services or information to the public, including businesses, government agencies and not-for-profit organisations, must understand their responsibilities. With nearly one in five Australians identifying […]
Traditional public relations taught marketers to pitch stories and build relationships with journalists. That work still matters, but it no longer decides whether a brand shows up when a buyer asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google’s AI Overviews for a recommendation.
Marketing financial services when you hold an AFSL presents unique responsibilities. Effective client communication demands both strong marketing and strict compliance with complex regulation. Providers must balance creative flair with ASIC’s detailed requirements. Getting this balance right influences growth and reputation, so understanding every obligation is essential in Australia’s competitive sector.
A GTM tech stack is the set of tools a company uses to run go-to-market activities across the customer lifecycle. These platforms can make it easier to connect marketing, sales, and customer teams. But, if the pieces aren’t compatible, a business’ GTM tech stack is just another layer of disconnected tools. The difference comes down […]
Marketing health services and therapeutic goods in Australia is highly regulated. Both advertisers and providers must adhere to strict rules to avoid compliance breaches. The landscape includes regulations overseen by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and requirements set by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). These rules impact how businesses present their products, handle […]
If you’ve been asked to diagnose and fix AEO gaps, the first step is to conduct an audit. For most brands, an AEO gap is any reason an AI answer engine can’t (or won’t) use its page as a source. What causes AEO gaps? Sometimes the page doesn’t exist. Or it exists, but the answer […]
Advertising in Australia stands at the intersection of trust, responsibility and strategic growth. Brands invest in promotional tactics to build reputations and drive sales, but each public claim, testimonial or review must withstand scrutiny under Australian Consumer Law advertising rules. Consumer watchdogs, led by the ACCC, closely enforce the legal boundaries of promotional conduct. Business […]
A vector embedding is a numerical representation created by an embedding model. The model converts text into a list of numbers that can be compared with other vectors, helping a retrieval system find passages with similar meaning even when they use different words. Semantic retrieval is one tool AI systems can use to find source […]
AI search optimization tools help marketers understand where a brand appears in AI-generated answers, which sources earn citations, and what to improve next. They complement traditional SEO tools rather than replace them: SEO measures rankings, clicks, and organic traffic, while AI-search tooling adds visibility signals such as mentions, citations, sentiment, and answer accuracy. Search behavior […]
The AI conversation is coming to Cleveland. And this year, you can listen to it in real time.
Australian businesses send millions of marketing emails every week, yet confusion remains about what the Spam Act 2003 truly requires. Many organisations believe they comply, but frequent errors result in warnings, fines and reputational harm. Commercial messaging, particularly via email, presents unique challenges for both B2B and B2C brands. Understanding consent email marketing, unsubscribe requirements […]
The market is answering questions before a brand’s website ever loads AI Overviews now appear on roughly one in five Google searches. When they do, click-through rates to the open web fall by close to 60%, according to a 2026 SparkToro analysis. But brands cited inside those AI answers are rewarded for it. Seer Interactive’s […]
Paul Roetzer, Founder and CEO of SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, will kick off MAICON 2026 with a keynote titled “The Architect, The Orchestrator and The Apprentice: Rethinking Work in the Age of AI and Agents.”
A few weeks ago in Zurich, at the W3C × GS1 workshop on e-commerce and AI agents, I had the chance to meet Amit Handa, one of the creators of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), and see him present where the protocol is going next. What caught my attention was the direction of travel. UCP […]
Winner of the Best Student Paper Award at SEMANTiCS 2026 Developers Workshop, Belgium We’ve talked before about SEOntology, our open-source framework for giving AI agents a shared vocabulary for SEO. Now it has independent, peer-reviewed validation: our research paper, SEOntology: A Domain Ontology for Semantic Modeling of Search Engine Optimization Workflows, has won the Best […]
An AEO checker tells you whether the AI answers your buyers rely on actually mention your brand. People increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini a question and act on the reply without clicking a link, so visibility that once showed up in your rankings can vanish into an answer you never see. To manage that, […]
AI enables marketers to publish a lot of content quickly. But keeping up with fact-checking and copy editing can be a challenge. And mistakes erode credibility.
If you’re the one who has to defend your AI spend next quarter, don’t bring your CEO another chart showing how many prompts your team ran. Bring them a better question: how much valid work are we getting from the compute we’re buying? You now pay for intelligence twice: once in money, and once in […]
Most marketing teams have rolled out AI tools. Far fewer have changed how they work with them in their jobs.
In 2025, most of the major answer engines made an almost identical update. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and many others started to show what they were thinking. Answer engines would tell the user which websites it was searching, which documents it had opened, and which assumptions it was second-guessing. According to Anthropic, the company that owns […]
Fifteen years after IKS and Apache Stanbol, entity resolution is becoming core infrastructure for AI. Generative AI has made producing text remarkably easy. Understanding what that text is actually about remains much harder. Take a simple sentence: Apple opened a new store in Paris. A language model reads it effortlessly. A system that wants to […]
Most websites already did their schema.org homework. Products carry Offer markup. Articles carry NewsArticle. Hotels carry LodgingBusiness. But AI agents still get stuck at the exact moment they need to do something with that information, not just read it. That gap was the subject of Andrea Volpini’s talk at “E-commerce for Humans and AI Agents,” […]
There are many AI tools to help build presentations or slide decks. We’ve experimented with many of them and found some are pretty good, others are generic or pretty awful.
The agency model is being rewritten in real time. A growing gap is emerging between those embracing artificial intelligence and those sticking with the status quo. The most forward-thinking agencies aren’t simply adding AI to existing services. They’re reimagining what an agency can be, developing AI-powered systems, expanding into consulting, and finding entirely new ways […]
Few phenomena within the creator economy have moved as fast as AI’s embrace. What was once treated with anxious suspicion is now more widely viewed as a necessary strategy. Last year, according to Kameron Buckner, founder of Social Docket, which helps creators navigate the legal implications of their work, the conversation around AI was […]
Most email marketing teams know the basics. Authenticate your domain. Clean your list. Write a compelling subject line—test before you send. But for enterprise and mid-market teams, doing the basics well is rarely where performance stalls. The gap shows up later — when a growing contact database starts fragmenting sender reputation, when automation workflows built […]
