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US news publishers are spending hundreds of millions a month buying search traffic to offset AI-driven organic declines, with paid-search budgets up 274% in three years.

When a brand as word-of-mouth-rich as Dishoom pays to be found by ChatGPT, AI discovery has crossed from experiment to necessity. Inside the shift from SEO to GEO.

AI search optimisation — often called generative engine optimisation, or GEO — is the practice of making your website easy for AI assistants like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity to understand, trust and quote. The winning tactics are not exotic: answer real customer questions clearly, back your claims with statistics and sources, earn mentions on sites the AI already trusts, and keep your business details consistent everywhere. Do that and you can appear

WPP performance agency Syzygy wins insurer Huk-Coburg's search advertising in a pitch, uniting SEO and SEA under one roof — even as its chief heads for the exit.

TL;DR: Google Ads puts your business at the top of Google the moment someone searches for what you sell — and you only pay when they click. For UK small businesses, success comes down to three things: tightly-themed keywords, relevant ads that lead to a matching landing page, and conversion tracking so you know which clicks actually make money. Start small, measure everything, and scale only what works. Why Google Ads still matters for small businesses Google handles the over

Bill-pay firm Doxo will pay $2.1m to settle FTC allegations it ran misleading search ads impersonating billers and charged hidden fees — a warning on paid search tactics.

Apple has opened Apple Maps advertising to all businesses in the US and Canada, complete with a 15% launch credit — its most direct challenge yet to Google Maps ads.

Google will retire campaign-level language targeting in Search from late September 2026 — another manual lever ceded to AI, with real compliance headaches for regulated brands.

Google has made Search Console ‘platform properties’ global and shipped new Ads controls. The theme: measuring and managing a brand that now lives across other people’s platforms.

Google is moving Local Services Ads into a pay-per-lead Performance Max campaign type from August 2026 and retiring the LSA dashboard. UK service firms need to prepare now.

A quiet July terms update lets Google's AI generate targeting, ad copy and destinations on your behalf — and from September, Dynamic Search Ads start upgrading to AI Max automatically.

Dentsu, one of OpenAI's four UK launch partners for ads in ChatGPT, has teamed with Adthena to bring order to a volatile new auction where click prices swing by up to 278%.

Reddit's advertising revenue is climbing sharply as the platform leans into contextual targeting and high-intent communities — and a new search ads product is taking direct aim at budgets that usually flow to Google.

Microsoft's Bing has added AI Visibility Insights to Webmaster Tools, helping brands understand how their content appears in AI-powered search — a sign of a new SEO frontier.

New data shows most Google searches now end without a click to any website, as AI answers keep users on the results page — a profound shift for search-reliant brands.

UK regulators hand website owners a way to keep their content out of Google's AI summaries — without a search ranking penalty.