YouTube is rolling out two AI-driven features designed to enhance content discovery and deepen user engagement.
The experimental tools include an AI-powered search results carousel for Premium users and a conversational AI assistant now expanding to some non-Premium accounts in the U.S.
Premium subscribers in the U.S. can now access an AI-generated search results carousel for select query types.
The carousel surfaces curated video suggestions along with brief topic descriptions, helping users explore subjects more efficiently.
For example, searching for “best noise canceling headphones” might trigger a carousel like the one you see below:
Screenshot from: YouTube, June 2025.
This experimental feature:
YouTube’s conversational AI tool, previously available only to Premium users, is now being tested with select non-Premium accounts in the U.S.
The tool allows users to:
Screenshot from: YouTube, June 2025.
Videos related to shopping, travel, or local activities may benefit from prominent placement in AI-curated carousels.
The focus on commercially relevant search types aligns with content that often drives conversions, making this a potentially valuable for affiliate marketers and small businesses.
While promising, both tools are being deployed with restrictions. The carousel is exclusive to Premium members and only supports a narrow range of queries. The conversational tool remains in limited testing with no timeline for wider release.
These limitations suggest that YouTube is still in the data-gathering phase, evaluating how users interact with AI-generated suggestions and whether these tools improve search satisfaction.
As YouTube experiments with AI in discovery and learning, creators should focus on producing content that is topically rich and well-structured, especially in categories such as shopping and travel.
Expect further refinements as YouTube incorporates user feedback ahead of potential broader adoption.
ABC News Studios is adding its voice to the chorus of folks asking what happened to former Iowa anchor Jodi Huisentruit.
The show, called Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit starts streaming on Hulu on Tuesday, July 15.
In 1995, rising TV news anchor Jodi Huisentruit disappeared from her Iowa apartment just before dawn, leaving behind signs of a violent abduction. Her case quickly became one of the nation’s most haunting unsolved mysteries. Now, 30 years later, “Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit” follows a major break that reenergized the case. Sparked by a 2022 “20/20” episode, a tip from one of Jodi’s close friends led Mason City Police to reveal a secret clue they had kept hidden for decades. In this fast-paced, true crime series, cameras exclusively embed with the case’s law enforcement team as they doggedly follow new leads, conduct intense interviews, and embark on searches that lead them to two new persons of interest—all while growing closer than ever to answering the question: What happened to Jodi?
This three-part docuseries features over twenty new interviews, including with Jodi’s family, friends, and her former colleagues; an unprecedented archive of Jodi’s life and career, including rare access to KIMT-TV, where Jodi’s abandoned desk remains untouched; and exclusive, real-time access to the investigation and breaks in the case—including never-before-seen material and new, groundbreaking information. An exploration of the power of persistence, public memory, and journalism, “Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit” breathes new life into one of the country’s most haunting unsolved mysteries.
In Cracked with life, an artist book of scavenged archival materials – 35mm photographs, super 8mm stills, poems, drawings, text messages – creator Anna Olivia Riley wanted to portray our “ferocity to miss things”. In the FOMO generation, our culture is preoccupied with anxiety and nostalgia, watching life through curated feeds and experiencing aesthetic whiplashes. One minute it’s a beach holiday, the next it’s a plate of spaghetti, the next it’s the death of one’s beloved pet – but that’s life. Cracked with life encapsulates all of these things in what feels like a beautiful ending to an era curated exclusively through Anna’s empathetic and far-reaching eye for the art of living. In engrossing diptychs that create meaning between two (sometimes unrelated) images, Anna captures hidden moments that link life events together. A brief manifesto on the back of the book reads “Narrative is not important, the recording of thoughts, feelings and aspirations is paramount.”
“Cracked with life feels like an open doorway into bookmaking,” says Anna. “I’m playing with how writing might be part of a visual practice.” The book is laid out wonderfully with touching books and often sparse images – snags of moments, zoomed in jpegs, cropped paintings that show just the right amount so that the viewer can write the rest of the story. Some pages offer questions, others answer them, but in a scattered and challenging way that encourages exploration into the larger story around pictures, within poems and outside of the page, or as Olivia puts it: “In the greys between feelings, making and discovery.” This is a coffee table book for someone looking to exercise narrative muscles as well as be visually delighted.
Google announced a new multi-vector retrieval algorithm called MUVERA that speeds up retrieval and ranking, and improves accuracy. The algorithm can be used for search, recommender systems (like YouTube), and for natural language processing (NLP).
Although the announcement did not explicitly say that it is being used in search, the research paper makes it clear that MUVERA enables efficient multi-vector retrieval at web scale, particularly by making it compatible with existing infrastructure (via MIPS) and reducing latency and memory footprint.
Vector embedding is a multidimensional representation of the relationships between words, topics and phrases. It enables machines to understand similarity through patterns such as words that appear within the same context or phrases that mean the same things. Words and phrases that are related occupy spaces that are closer to each other.
The distances between words, phrases and concepts (technically a mathematical similarity measure) define how closely related each one is to the other. These patterns enable a machine to infer similarities between them.
The MUVERA research paper states that neural embeddings have been a feature of information retrieval for ten years and cites the ColBERT multi-vector model research paper from 2020 as a breakthrough but that says that it suffers from a bottleneck that makes it less than ideal.
“Recently, beginning with the landmark ColBERT paper, multi-vector models, which produce a set of embedding per data point, have achieved markedly superior performance for IR tasks. Unfortunately, using these models for IR is computationally expensive due to the increased complexity of multi-vector retrieval and scoring.”
Google’s announcement of MUVERA echoes those downsides:
“… recent advances, particularly the introduction of multi-vector models like ColBERT, have demonstrated significantly improved performance in IR tasks. While this multi-vector approach boosts accuracy and enables retrieving more relevant documents, it introduces substantial computational challenges. In particular, the increased number of embeddings and the complexity of multi-vector similarity scoring make retrieval significantly more expensive.”
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust lawsuit resulted in testimony that revealed that one of the signals used to create the search engine results pages (SERPs) is called RankEmbed, which was described like this:
“RankEmbed is a dual encoder model that embeds both query and document into embedding space. Embedding space considers semantic properties of query and document in addition to other signals. Retrieval and ranking are then a dot product (distance measure in the embedding space)… Extremely fast; high quality on common queries but can perform poorly for tail queries…”
MUVERA is a technical advancement that addresses the performance and scaling limitations of multi-vector systems, which themselves are a step beyond dual-encoder models (like RankEmbed), providing greater semantic depth and handling of tail query performance.
The breakthrough is a technique called Fixed Dimensional Encoding (FDE), which divides the embedding space into sections and combines the vectors that fall into each section to create a single, fixed-length vector, making it faster to search than comparing multiple vectors. This allows multi-vector models to be used efficiently at scale, improving retrieval speed without sacrificing the accuracy that comes from richer semantic representation.
According to the announcement:
“Unlike single-vector embeddings, multi-vector models represent each data point with a set of embeddings, and leverage more sophisticated similarity functions that can capture richer relationships between datapoints.
While this multi-vector approach boosts accuracy and enables retrieving more relevant documents, it introduces substantial computational challenges. In particular, the increased number of embeddings and the complexity of multi-vector similarity scoring make retrieval significantly more expensive.
In ‘MUVERA: Multi-Vector Retrieval via Fixed Dimensional Encodings’, we introduce a novel multi-vector retrieval algorithm designed to bridge the efficiency gap between single- and multi-vector retrieval.
…This new approach allows us to leverage the highly-optimized MIPS algorithms to retrieve an initial set of candidates that can then be re-ranked with the exact multi-vector similarity, thereby enabling efficient multi-vector retrieval without sacrificing accuracy.”
Multi-vector models can provide more accurate answers than dual-encoder models but this accuracy comes at the cost of intensive compute demands. MUVERA solves the complexity issues of multi-vector models, thereby creating a way to achieve greater accuracy of multi-vector approaches without the the high computing demands.
MUVERA shows how modern search ranking increasingly depends on similarity judgments rather than old-fashioned keyword signals that SEO tools and SEOs are often focused on. SEOs and publishers may wish to shift their attention from exact phrase matching toward aligning with the overall context and intent of the query. For example, when someone searches for “corduroy jackets men’s medium,” a system using MUVERA-like retrieval is more likely to rank pages that actually offer those products, not pages that simply mention “corduroy jackets” and include the word “medium” in an attempt to match the query.
Read Google’s announcement:
MUVERA: Making multi-vector retrieval as fast as single-vector search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/bluestork
There’s no shortage of conversation about giving marketing a seat at the table. Over the years, we’ve seen dozens of articles calling for marketing to be treated as a strategic partner, not just a service department.
But the real problem isn’t just that marketing lacks a seat at the table. Even when we’re technically invited, strategic decisions are already made, and marketing is just there to execute them.
That leads to the root issue: a tactical vs. strategic disconnect, most clearly visible in misaligned KPIs. It’s hurting growth for some companies.
Marketing is often handed KPIs set by finance or executive leadership without marketing input. Things like:
Are these metrics important? Sometimes. But without context or collaboration, they often miss the bigger picture. They don’t reflect what marketing is capable of impacting. Or worse, they incentivize behavior that looks good on a dashboard but doesn’t move the business forward.
Up to 40% of Fortune 500 companies don’t have a single growth- or customer-related role in their executive committee, per a 2023 McKinsey study. It also found that CEOs who place marketing at the core of their growth strategy are twice as likely to have greater than 5% annual growth than their peers.
What happens then? Marketing must execute someone else’s vision and chase targets built without marketing’s input or insights.
This results in teams focused on driving short-term wins instead of long-term business growth. Tactics are optimized to capture current demand instead of balancing them with creating future demand. The results might check a few boxes but won’t drive real growth.
Dig deeper: How shared goals and incentives improve marketing results
Here’s a scenario we see often: marketing is asked to promote multiple products equally or at least have some budget behind all products. Leadership wants to see marketing dollars spread across the board to every product. It sounds good and balanced, but in practice, it doesn’t always work that way.
Some products just don’t perform as well. Maybe:
Still, marketing is stuck trying to push all of it. Instead of focusing on the products driving efficient growth, the team is stretched thin. The dollars don’t go as far. And when results lag, marketing gets pressure, even though the strategy wasn’t built to win in the first place.
The better approach? Focus marketing efforts on the one or two products that convert efficiently. Let those become the door openers. Then, build systems — sales enablement, CRM automation and lifecycle campaigns — to introduce the rest of the product portfolio after that initial traction. Maybe it’s a month or a year later. But that cross-sell opportunity still exists; it just doesn’t need to happen on the first click.
That is a perfect example of KPI misalignment. Instead of a strategic conversation about how to grow or which products, channels and sequences to use, marketing is handed a checklist and told to make the math work. That’s not a strategy, it’s wishful execution.
It’s a strategic-tactical disconnect. Marketing is held accountable for outcomes requiring cross-functional input and long-term thinking, but told the KPIs after the planning has already happened.
Dig deeper: 5 ways to transition from tactical to strategic marketing
This isn’t supposed to be a rant about how marketing is not getting input on strategy. Marketers are part of the problem, too.
They must effectively translate what we do into business terms. We need to show how brand equity impacts conversion and how paid media strategy can scale revenue and long-term business growth.
We also need to get comfortable having tough conversations. Not confrontational, but in a collaborative, problem-solving mindset focused on ensuring you’re addressing the right issue.
If the direction given is “Hit X ROAS,” it’s fair to ask:
This can earn strategic trust. Help reshape KPIs into something that reflects reality, not just vanity metrics.
If you’re a marketing leader and you’re being handed KPIs that don’t tie to business goals, don’t just start building campaigns. Pause. Ask how those goals were set. Push for clarity.
Marketing is in a great position to spot when the math doesn’t add up or when a target sounds good on paper but won’t hold up in practice. Use that. Share what you’re seeing. Show how you’d reframe the problem. Sometimes, even a slight shift in direction early can save a ton of wasted effort.
The goal here is to align on what moves the business forward. That’s the real seat at the table: not being louder but objective, strategic, and realistic.
Dig deeper: KPIs that connect — 5 metrics for marketing, sales and product alignment
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. Contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
Hit the back button this second if you haven’t already seen The Simpsons 36th season finale. Have you done it? Gone? Good.
For everyone else, let me try to console you at this difficult time. Like many fans, you may be mourning the latest death of a much-loved character in the long-running animation. And this time, it’s a major figure. But, let’s remember that this is the Simpsons; things aren’t always final (see our guides to the best animation software and the best laptops for animation if you want to make your own tribute).
Growing up with The Simpsons and seeing Marge Simpson’s ending in the last episode of season 36 feels like losing a family member. 💔 Thank you for everything, Marge. 🙏#news #lossimpson #TheSimpsons #MargeSimpson #margesimpsons 📺 pic.twitter.com/Dh6muyNIv1June 26, 2025
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The travel and tourism industry thrives on inspiration, discovery, and experience. While increasingly being challenged by social media and friend & family referrals, the first point of discovery for many travelers is still a search engine.
For operators in this competitive sector, ranging from boutique hotels and niche tour providers to vacation rental property owners and managers, as well as local attractions, a commanding online presence isn’t just beneficial – it’s fundamental to survival and growth.
This is where Local SEO emerges as a critical driver, connecting businesses with high-intent travelers actively seeking their next destination or experience.
As the search journey includes more AI-driven results, a sophisticated and adaptive Local SEO strategy is crucial.
This guide will navigate the essentials of Local SEO tailored for travel and tourism, incorporating strategies to thrive in the era of Google’s AI Overviews and other AI search platforms.
We’ll explore established best practices and new frontiers to help you enhance visibility, attract qualified leads, and convert searches into bookings.
Today’s travelers are digital nomads even before they pack their bags. They meticulously research, compare, and seek out authentic local experiences, with search engines as their primary guide.
A staggering 87% of consumers used Google to evaluate local businesses in 2022, according to BrightLocal, and this trend is particularly pronounced in the travel sector.
A robust Local SEO strategy ensures your offerings are prominent when potential customers conduct geographically specific searches. Consider these compelling reasons:
Local SEO puts your business in front of users searching for “boutique hotels in downtown Austin” or “eco-tours near me,” connecting you with an audience demonstrating clear local intent.
Higher visibility in local search translates to more qualified traffic to your website, reducing reliance on commission-heavy Online Travel Agencies (OTAs).
Businesses appearing in top local search results, especially those with strong reviews, are perceived as more trustworthy. Indeed, according to Expedia group, studies show that 95% of travelers read reviews before booking
In a crowded marketplace, a sophisticated Local SEO strategy will differentiate your unique local offerings from larger, and perhaps less localized competitors.
Compared to paid advertising, organic Local SEO can deliver a higher return on investment (ROI) over the long term by building sustainable visibility.
To maximize visibility and capture the attention of modern travelers, operators must build their SEO strategy on several key pillars:
For businesses with a physical presence or those catering to broader service areas, a Google Business Profile is arguably the most potent Local SEO tool currently available.
It’s often the first interaction a potential customer has with a brand online, as Google Maps appears at the top of most local searches.
Here are the key GBP best practices you need to implement to leverage this important channel.
Your website is your digital flagship, where inspiration meets transaction.
Websites remain a core focus for all businesses because they are still the place where primary product and service content is housed, as well as for travel businesses where bookings begin, even if they are ultimately completed off-site.
Several components are involved in optimizing a site for local search.
Identify terms your target audience uses at each stage of the travel planning funnel, and particularly those used during the Engage and Booking stages.
Focus on location-specific queries (“luxury safari tours Kenya”), property types (“beachfront villas Maui”), and unique selling propositions (“pet-friendly cabins in the Blue Ridge Mountains”).
Craft unique, keyword-rich Title tags, hierarchical heading structures, and internal/external links for every key bottom-of-the-funnel page.
Review keyword rank, search volume, organic search traffic, and conversion data to determine the primary pages to focus on.
Larger organizations will want to take a broader, scalable approach with page templates, but will still hone attention and focus on key locations where some level of authority and visibility has already been established, upon which momentum can be built.
If you cater to multiple distinct areas or offer specialized tours/services per location, create unique, detailed landing pages for each location.
These pages should include unique localized content (particularly if services or products differ by location), local team information, testimonials, contact details, and embedded Google Maps.
Use descriptive filenames and alt text for all visuals, incorporating relevant keywords and location data, where applicable.
Optimize image file sizes for fast loading (the WebP format is recommended) without compromising quality. This is admittedly a challenge for many in the travel space as images and video can make or break a property, tour, or experience listing.
With a significant portion of travel searches and bookings occurring on mobile (mobile devices made up 70.5% of global online travel traffic in 2024), a responsive, fast-loading website is critical.
Furthermore, site speed is a recognized ranking factor, for which tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals are available to gauge and diagnose potential bottlenecks.
Develop content marketing plans to address traveler questions and showcase your local expertise via detailed itineraries, destination guides, “things to do” lists, and booking information.
Implement relevant schema, such as:
Schema helps search engines (and AI models) understand your content contextually.
Relevant, comprehensive structured data will improve your content’s eligibility for rich snippets and AI Overviews in Google, which are showing up in organic search results with increasing regularity across travel and all industries.
A seamless UX with intuitive navigation, clear calls-to-action, and an easy booking process directly impacts conversion rates.
Further, ensuring your website is accessible to people with disabilities (based on WCAG Guidelines) broadens your target audience and is widely considered SEO best practice.
Off-page signals from relevant local and/or industry-specific sources significantly influence your local ranking and perceived trustworthiness.
Brand mentions, whether linked or not, are being recognized as an important factor in AI Search visibility.
Businesses looking to boost their local visibility need to consider their broad web presence, in addition to the content they control on their website and GBP.
High-quality, relevant content is fuel for both visibility in traditional organic and AI-driven search.
We can’t have an SEO conversation today, Local or otherwise, without considering the impact of AI on search.
Google’s AI Overviews and other AI tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT are changing how users find information.
In a recent Whitespark study, it was determined that AI Overviews are appearing for a significant 68% of local business-type searches.
To optimize for this new paradigm at a local level, there are a few things to consider, some of which you’ll note are in line with the SEO recommendations made above:
Any worthwhile and effective Local SEO effort is backed by data.
Use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other SEO tools to monitor key metrics, including organic traffic, keyword rankings (especially local), Google Business Profile insights (views, clicks, calls, direction requests), conversion rates, and referral traffic from local sources.
This data will be key to helping you continually refine your strategy as modern SEO (and now GEO or AEO) is a moving target.
Local SEO is no longer a niche tactic, but a foundational element of a successful digital marketing strategy for any travel and tourism operator.
By focusing on providing genuine value to travelers, creating exceptional local experiences, and meticulously optimizing your online presence across all relevant platforms, you can attract more customers.
As AI continues to reshape search, the emphasis on high quality, authoritative, and clearly structured content, along with a broad-based, brand-forward web presence, becomes even more important.
Embrace the principles and tactics here, stay agile, and you’ll be well-positioned to navigate the evolving digital landscape and welcome more guests through your virtual and physical doors.
More resources:
Featured Image: RobinRmD/Shutterstock
The latest round of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is expected next week (July 3), with more recent statistics indicating the upcoming numbers are unlikely to cause much positivity in the space, as the wider marketing industry goes through a period of unparalleled disruption.
BLS numbers for May 2025 indicate the total number of jobs in the advertising, PR, and related services numbered 488,600, representing a monthly decrease of 2,100 roles compared to the previous month and (more alarmingly) a 9.9% decrease compared to 12 months beforehand.
For some, this marked drop, which represents 54,000 job losses in the last year, represents the necessary pain brought on by the disruption wrought by generative, or agentic, AI, with such optimists likely to point to BLS projects which forecast that employment in the sector will grow by 8% from 2023 to 2033, outpacing the 4% average across all occupations. Still, that’s not to say all, and to keep the champagne and rosé flowing, Cannes-style.
For example, the same BLS analysis states that roles such as advertising sales agents face downward pressure, primarily due to automated ad buying tools, i.e., agentic platforms, that streamline media planning and executions. Additionally, it forecasts growth in the number of managerial roles and a decline in transactional positions, such as ad operations or account strategists.
However, even the most casual of industry observers note how such trends are already visible on Madison Avenue, with the extensive layoffs at WPO Media, which are estimated to impact 45% of roles, expected to be echoed elsewhere, especially should the proposed merger between Interpublic Group and Omnicom receive the green light.
While AI adoption is gradual and uneven across job types, it often augments rather than replaces roles outright. According to BLS analysts, roles involving strategic oversight and complex storytelling, such as brand positioning, will continue to require human judgment, with several indicating that client-facing roles will remain crucial to such workforces during this era.
Employers — especially in Big Tech — now prioritize hybrid skill profiles blending AI strategy, data literacy, and client management. Meanwhile, agencies are reportedly realigning training and roles accordingly (e.g., AI ethicists, data strategists, AI‑tool integrators), matching labor market shifts toward managerial and technical media roles, according to sources.
Brian O’Kelley, CEO of Scope3 — a company that launched its “agentic platform” earlier this year — told Digiday that it’s important to make sure there is a “human in the loop of the calibration model” to maintain clients’ confidence.
“As of today, AI can’t play golf,” he quipped, adding that, “the most important skill is working with people to help them understand what they’re trying to do, like figuring out what those objectives really are and refining it.”
He goes on to note, “If you’re doing things that can be ticketed [such as managing campaign management],” that’s risky. So if I can send you a ticket that says red line this contract, like, how do I know if a human or an AI is redlining that?”
Meanwhile, Matt Barash, chief commercial officer at Nova, further emphasizes the importance of client-facing roles and the need for human oversight in AI-driven processes, building on O’Kelley’s observations. For example, this points to the overall shift toward media agency holding companies adopting a centralized service model, which reduces the need for duplicated roles.
“I think that the safest role within the holding company today is if you’re client-facing, the relationship matters now more than ever,” he says, noting how brand-side marketers often deem the right personnel in such roles as crucial to their partnerships. “Client leads will not be replaced. If you’re client-facing, you know, you’re in a pretty good place.”
Several sources advised professionals in campaign management (either planning or execution) to familiarize themselves with AI tools and consider self-teaching or entrepreneurial opportunities, with some noting how generative AI will impact the consulting landscape.
Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, observes that the current stage of AI development is “very much point-and-shoot,” adding that the emergence of agentic AI is the most likely to impact the job market, given its more purpose-driven nature. He further observes that “a lot of people are not prepared“ for the oncoming disruption it will have on the job market, both in terms of the number of roles and the impact on remuneration levels.
“Agentic AI is: ‘I need you to achieve XYZ-KPI’ on this advertising campaign,” he says, adding that such platforms are more goal-oriented compared to more task-driven platforms. “That’s where agentic AI can really come into play in terms of media buying and optimization, or combating fraud, they’ll be able to spot patterns in the supply chain.”
“I think anyone, whether you’re in the digital advertising industry or other industries that could be impacted [by AI], the best thing you could do is get educated,” advises Katsur. “Learn all the tools, get familiar with ChatGPT, get familiar with Claude… learn how those tools can interoperate and make you an AI-operator, because then that will give you a career path for the next decade.”
Awareness of this need is what drove Helena McAleer, formerly a marketer, and Dave Birrs, formerly a campaign creative, to co-found the Gen AI Academy earlier this year. Both observed that many organizations are still at the basic level of understanding AI and require introductory training.
Currently, the outfit offers courses catered toward enterprises, smaller teams within such outfits, as well as individuals, with the pair noting how much “handholding” is required at present, as many need help “distinguishing genuine AI solutions from outsourced, or overhyped ones.”
The pair cite statistics from clients noting how, on average, about 7% of company employees are very early adopters of AI, i.e., they’re already using tools to make their jobs easier whether their employers have mandated it or not, with “11% of employees are wired to resist.”
McAleer, adds, “Most of the companies that approach us just want to get the use of AI established and embedded in the company, just to make sure people are on board with it.”
Editor’s note. This story was updated on July 27, 2025, to correct an earlier error. Digiday previously reported that WPP had layoffs affecting 45% of its total staff. The layoffs affected 45% of staff within WPP Media specifically.
What happens when you meet the Fast And Furious franchise with the panopticon? Imagine the underground, neon vibes of Tokyo Drift with the fuzzy analogue of CCTV cameras – that’s what the Málaga-based studio Free Practice has done with Nike’s new campaign Infinite Drift, which sits somewhere between underground car meet, art film, and high-speed graphic experiments. It’s a visceral exploration of motion, identity, and design to match and coincide with the launch of the Nike AirMax DN8.
Free Practice’s concept brings together eight Serbian drift drivers, eight custom-built cars, and eight international illustrators, who transformed each vehicle into a moving portrait of its driver. The studio paired each driver with an artist, such as Ram Han, Jonathan Castro and Gustavo Eandi – who created bespoke car liveries inspired by interviews and insights into the drivers’ personalities and styles behind the wheel. The team also created a film, directed by Henrik Alm and photographed by Gabriela Alatorre.
At the centre of the campaign, the twin ideas of beauty and burn were explored. In beauty, there is rituals of care, motor aesthetics, reflective car bodies, effortless drift dances, and cinematic night rides – with burn, there is sensorial overload, aggression, power, smoke, petrol and screaming engines. “Within this conceptual framework, the director and photographer then set about to capture the cars, atmosphere and energy from both micro and macro lenses to find the tension of beauty and burn in each shot,” says Free Practice. Every still in the series is obscured in the smoke of melted rubber on the tarmac, long exposures and heat maps show giant etchings into the earth created by the blistering cars and their manoeuvres. A rough masculinity is paired with the muscularity of racing machines, creating a unique eroticism rendered by the grit and grime of images that look like they’re straight from the queer thriller Titane.
Google’s transformation into an AI-driven search platform represents more than just a technological advancement. It’s a fundamental shift in how the search giant views itself as a company and the value it provides to users.
Cindy Krum has spoken at several events this year about her theory that Google might merge AI Overviews, Discover, and international results to build the next-gen search engine.
The overview of Cindy’s thoughts is that Google is not only internationalizing its platform, but is also converging AI Overview, Google Discover, and AI Mode into a unified, hyper-personalized search experience.
This evolution aligns with Google’s broader push toward understanding search as “journeys” rather than static queries, underlined by MUM.
My theory is that the move into heavily personalized search journeys builds on the past 20 years that Google has been striving to be a personal assistant. AI has made that possible.
Cindy is the founder of MobileMoxie and is described as being “years ahead of the pack.” I spoke to her about the implications for SEO and what part of this shift to AI-organized search and journeys SEO professionals are underestimating right now.
You can watch the full interview with Cindy on IMHO below, or continue reading the article summary.
Cindy believes that, currently, there is a bigger shift than what some SEO professionals have been talking about: A fundamental shift in the way Google sees itself as a company and the way that it sees the value that it provides.
The real shift was in 2018, just after Google launched mobile-first indexing, when Google began organizing search results around entities. It said it wanted to be more predictive, more conversational, and more personalized.
According to Cindy, Google’s current AI initiatives aren’t new developments but rather the culmination of a strategy.
“Everything they’ve been doing since 2018 has been feeding this goal of getting us into this AI search reality,” she explains.
The AI Overviews, Google Discover expansion, and AI Mode we see today are direct results of this seven-year journey.
One of the most overlooked aspects of Google’s current transformation is its renewed attempt to consolidate international domains.
Google previously tried to eliminate country-specific versions (CCTLDs) before mobile-first indexing but had to roll back the initiative. Now, it is trying again, and the timing is significant.
“If you separate everything by country and language, you’re limiting your learning pipeline. You have smaller, fragmented datasets.” Cindy explains.
When you consolidate and abstract at the entity level, you can disambiguate meaning and link keywords to entity ideas across all languages. That speeds up the learning process.
Google can then apply what it learns in one language to another; we’re already seeing this with AI Overviews.
When it can’t find the right answer in a local language, it translates English content because it knows the English answer is probably also correct in other languages. This saves time and money on crawling, indexing, and ranking.
I asked Cindy if she thought Google might try to monetize AI Mode, but she believes Google’s strategy is more sophisticated.
“We can’t forget how Google makes money, it’s ads,” Cindy emphasizes. The real value lies in building comprehensive user profiles that enable precision ad targeting.
Google’s goal is to present ads only to users likely to convert, making its advertising platform more attractive to businesses while creating a seamless experience for users.
“They’re not monetizing AI Mode directly. They’re using it to collect data that allows them to monetize ads more effectively.”
This strategy extends to Performance Max campaigns on the paid search side, where Google controls optimization based on metrics it doesn’t trust advertisers to manage effectively.
Despite Google’s technological advances, some users are losing trust in the quality of search results.
However, the solution isn’t abandoning Google but rather understanding how different platforms serve different purposes in the modern search ecosystem.
Cindy’s opinion is that Google is no longer the place where discovery happens.
Users increasingly conduct research across multiple platforms. TikTok for discovery, Reddit for authentic opinions, and eventually Google for final purchase decisions.
This multi-platform journey reflects a more sophisticated approach to information gathering and decision-making.
Cindy stresses the need to understand real branding, not just SEO branding or digital PR.
“To be able to influence the narrative in any kind of AI search result, you have to be actively influencing all those things,” she notes. “SEOs for years have been so focused on their website to the detriment of every other branding opportunity out there.”
For SEO professionals looking to optimize for journeys rather than just keywords, Cindy recommends studying Google’s own navigation suggestions.
When performing searches, Google often displays additional navigation layers that reveal its understanding of user intent and likely next steps.
“This is where Google is kind of showing their cards and saying these are the queries that we expect you’re going to narrow down this query,” she explains.
By mapping these suggested pathways, SEO professionals can identify where their content fits into the user journey and where Google needs education about additional aspects of that journey.
I asked Cindy if she were starting from the beginning now, what she would do and where she would invest, her immediate answer was TikTok.
She explains, “It’s where young audiences are, the algorithm promotes discovery, and content is repurposed across all other platforms. Importantly, it’s not just a fad; businesses are being built and scaled directly on TikTok.”
And while influencer saturation is real, Cindy sees TikTok as a smart, scrappy way to build awareness with a small budget and scale fast.
The shift toward AI-organized search results and journey-based optimization requires a fundamental rethinking of digital marketing approaches.
Success in this new era of AI search demands understanding the complete customer journey, from initial discovery through final purchase, and ensuring brand presence at every touchpoint.
This includes active participation in the broader digital conversation about your industry, products, and services.
The future of search isn’t just about ranking higher; it’s about being present wherever your audience might encounter your brand throughout their decision-making journey.
“The future of search is understanding the entire journey, not just the keyword or the query.”
Thank you to Cindy Krum for offering her insights and being my guest on IMHO.
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Featured Image: Shelley Walsh/Search Engine Journal
