OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says ChatGPT has moved beyond being a Google alternative. Instead, the platform is increasingly focused on helping users complete complex tasks and workflows.
Speaking at Y Combinator, Altman described how ChatGPT has changed over time.
“For a long time ChatGPT was like a Google replacement… it still felt like a more advanced version of search.”
Now, he said, users can ask the AI to perform complex work like a junior employee.
“You can really give a task to code interpreter for example or to deep research… and come back to you with like a proposal.”
This shift signals a new direction for ChatGPT that could affect how businesses and marketers use AI.
Altman emphasized that ChatGPT is no longer just about retrieving information. The goal now is to help users get work done.
Altman said:
“It’s like a very junior employee that can work on something for like a short period of time.”
While the platform gets considerable traffic, Altman said ChatGPT.com is now the fifth most visited site in the world, he downplayed the idea that it’s competing with Google Search.
Instead, OpenAI is building a tool that can connect to user data, complete tasks, and act proactively.
A step toward this vision is ChatGPT’s memory feature. Altman called it his favorite feature so far this year.
This lets the AI remember previous conversations and user preferences, acting more like a personal assistant than a chatbot.
“I think memory is the first time where people can sort of see that coming.”
Altman described a future where the assistant knows when to notify users and when to take action automatically.
New models like GPT-4o and O3 are designed to handle more complex reasoning and workflows.
“Right now we’re in an interesting time where the product overhang relative to what the models are capable of is here…”
Altman said the technology is moving faster than most businesses can adapt to it. He sees untapped potential in how AI could support work like marketing, data analysis, and content development.
While Altman outlined an ambitious vision, there’s reason to be cautious.
Tools like ChatGPT face limitations like hallucinated outputs, lack of persistent memory across all contexts, and occasional reasoning failures. This is all detailed in OpenAI’s own reports.
That means, even with tools like Code Interpreter or GPT-4o, complex tasks still require hands-on oversight.
The shift away from search competition may also reflect the difficulty of challenging Google’s market dominance. Instead, OpenAI may be trying to define a new space for AI-powered task automation.
As AI tools like ChatGPT gain new features, they may change how marketers, developers, and everyday users complete tasks.
However, much of this vision depends on overcoming current limitations and delivering reliable performance across different use cases.
Altman shared that ChatGPT will soon support the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This allows it to pull data directly from tools and platforms businesses already use.
These integrations further support ChatGPT’s positioning as an assistant platform rather than a search engine alternative.
For now, marketers should focus on utilizing AI tools alongside, not instead of, traditional platforms like search engines. The two can serve different purposes in the same strategy.
Listen to the full interview with Sam Altman below:
Weather can be dramatic enough, what with tornadoes, thunderstorms, flooding, high winds, no winds, too much rain, too little rain.
For years, one constant has been the local meteorologists who have kept viewers informed about what is happening with the weather and how the community can stay safe when extreme weather hits.
But in the chaos known as modern times, media groups have attempted to hub weather forecasts to save money, the Trump administration has paring back core weather forecasting services like the NWS and NOAA, which makes chatting about the weather more than just small talk.
Madison, Wisconsin news outlet Madison Magazine writer Doug Moe took a look at the effects of changing weather staffing in the Madison market and how the local forecast is much more than just telling people whether they can picnic on the weekends. It often comes down to viewer safety.
“When that relationship is severed,” said Alex Harrington (pictured) chief meteorologist at WISC/Channel 3 (News 3 Now/Channel 3000). “You have community members whose lives are at risk because they don’t have that local connection.”
“The television weathercaster has a unique level of trust,” former KMGH and WKOW meteorologist Mike Nelson said. “At the scariest time for them, we are the ones saying, ‘Here is what is going on.’ ”
Click here to read his article.
There’s a lot of buzz around Amazon Prime Day at the moment, as retailers get prepped for one of the biggest sales events of the year. We’ve already started tracking the best Prime Day 3D printer offers, but actually, I think Bambu Lab’s 3rd Anniversary Sale is a much bigger deal (with up to 40% off), and definitely worth getting excited about.
Bambu Lab manufactures some of the best 3D printers on the market, and my fave 3D printer – the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon – has an amazing discount right now in both the US and UK. It’s reduced to only $999 / £829 for the printer with no AMS, or you can bag the full package for $1,249 / £1,049 – which is a big chunk off the usual retail price.
This edited excerpt is from Human-Centered Marketing by Ashley Faus ©2025 and is reproduced and adapted with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.
Mapping content to the traditional funnel adds no value, since the journey behaves more like a playground than a linear progression.
Pitfalls of the traditional funnel include assuming that every person in the audience intends to and will become a customer, underestimating the sophistication of the buyer, and offering limited options for post-purchase retention strategies.
Building a seamless, delightful journey on a foundation of trust means that we must fundamentally rethink our framework for the audience journey.
Most marketers are familiar with the traditional funnel to outline the buyer’s journey, focusing on three key phases: awareness, consideration, and decision.
The funnel assumes that the audience journey begins with awareness, when, in fact, the audience journey begins long before marketers recognize that this person is on a journey.
We need to think about the journey as a playground: people can go up, down, sideways, and around. They can go to the equipment (content) in any order. They can enter and exit as they please. And they can use the content in the “wrong” way.
How many times do you force your audience to go through unnecessary steps because you’re trying to make them buy when they’re not ready; or, worse, you add friction to the buying process because you need to check the boxes on providing a white paper and a demo and a case study?
Why does this happen? It stems from the idea that we need to push prospects down the funnel to become leads and keep moving them through until they become customers.
Ultimately, every customer journey map ends with the prospect becoming a lead and deciding to purchase the company’s offering. This linear journey map ignores retention, cross-sell, up-sell, and expansion opportunities.
While the looping journey does, at least, acknowledge the additional post-purchase phase, it fails to capture the complexity.
For example, many software-as-a-service companies have user limits for different tiers of their product offerings.
With the rise of product-led growth (PLG) as a key go-to-market motion, many SaaS products include a free tier, with user gates, feature gates, or both, to prompt free users to become paying customers.
Traditional journey maps obscure the messy middle of the customer journey, with weird hacks to stay under the user limit, lengthy negotiations on larger contracts for seat expansion, and fighting competitors when it comes time for the customer to renew.
This highlights another pitfall of the funnel and associated journey maps to move people through the funnel. It’s a retrospective measurement tool, not a forward-looking strategy tool.
If you map the journeys of people who did, in fact, become customers, then you are correct in starting with a prospect having a problem, searching for a solution, and ultimately, choosing your offering.
If, however, you are trying to build a net-new audience, hone your narratives to resonate with that audience, and map your content and distribution strategy, you can’t simply look at what happened in the past, on owned platforms, in the condensed time period where the buying process “officially” started.
In addition, consider a post-purchase scenario where the marketer makes the journey more difficult for a customer precisely because they want to track the interaction in more detail.
Collecting more information gives us a false sense of security. If we know just a bit more about this person, surely we can convince them to spend more money.
Traditional funnel models also fail to recognize the differences between a user and an economic buyer. Many marketers recognize that buying involves multiple different people, but they assume that each stakeholder joins the process in a linear way.
For example, in larger companies, an economic buyer might need to go through a procurement process that includes a security assessment, compliance checklist, and legal or contract review before bringing in a new tool.
The linear funnel assumes that these stakeholders need to be addressed in the “decision” phase of the buying process.
And yet, ask anyone who’s been through procurement in a large enterprise, and they’ll tell you that it’s difficult, and, often, a deterrent to even starting a buying process.
In order to convince me to buy, you need to convince me that I’ll be able to buy. If you make it easy for me to make it through the procurement process, I’m much more likely to choose you as a vendor because I know that I’ll be successful in completing the process.
Consider another scenario, where individual teams are empowered to purchase tools and services on their own. These teams are all in the “post-purchase” phase.
At some point, the invoices might be large enough to warrant consolidation, which might trigger a wider vendor review. In that case, you’ve won over many users, but the economic buyer is now in the “awareness” phase, as they’ve just discovered you as a vendor.
Or, they might need to be convinced that solving this problem should continue to be a priority at all. Alternatively, the buyers might immediately move to the “consideration” phase by opening a request for proposal (RFP) or researching competitors.
Maybe they’ve bought in on the problem, but they want to explore different solutions. They might need to learn about different possible solutions, even though there’s already a vendor solving this problem.
Once you decide to consolidate a contract, the spend might be big enough to require a more thorough vetting by the procurement, security, compliance, and legal teams.
At this point, who knows which phase of the funnel you’re in? Is it “retention” with the users who no longer actually have buying power?
Is it awareness or consideration with the economic buyer? Is it awareness or decision with teams who have the ability to block the deal, but aren’t the economic buyer?
As you can see, attempting to map content to a linear funnel by also mapping linear personas becomes quite a challenge!
These scenarios also minimize or ignore the sophistication of the buyer. In a B2B (business-to-business) context, most buyers are quite sophisticated. They’re well-versed in the problem space, and might have purchased solutions in the past.
They’re equipped to do their own research, and often prefer working through the initial vetting phases before reaching out to a company to initiate a buying process.
In fact, TrustRadius found that, in 2021, 43% of buyers reported consulting with vendor representatives, and that number dropped to an average of one out of four buyers in all but the largest deal sizes.
Instead, buyers preferred to conduct their own research, with a bias towards non-vendor-provided material.
Buyers favored free trials or accounts (56%), user reviews (55%), and community forums (37%) over vendor-provided materials such as customer references (15%), blogs (14%), and marketing collateral (14%).1
This trend continued in a 2024 report from 6sense, a company that arms revenue teams with data to accelerate deal conversions. It found that, when B2B buyers directly engage sellers, they are already 70% through their buying process.2
We see over and over that, by the time a marketer becomes aware that someone is in the buying process, they’re significantly behind the buyer’s knowledge of the problem space, research into the solution space, and affinity for a select list of solution providers.
They’re not coming to the company website cold, or blindly reaching out to a salesperson.
Instead, they’ve consulted a curated list of trusted sources, including conversations with their personal network, crowdsourcing information, and recommendations from peers on social media and forums, and they’ve read about the pros and cons of different providers from people like themselves.
To read the full book, SEJ readers have an exclusive 25% discount code and free shipping to the US and UK. Use promo code SEJ25 at koganpage.com here.
More Resources:
[1] TrustRadius (2022), 2022 Buying Disconnect: The Age of the Self-Serve Buyer, go.trustradius.com/rs/827-FOI-687/images/TrustRadius_2022_ B2B_Buying_Disconnect_6.27.22.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/ TG6X-UU8T)
[2] 6sense Research (2023), Out of Sight, Almost Out of Time: The 2023 6sense B2B Buyer Experience Report, 6sense, 6sense.com/report/ buyer-experience (archived at https://perma.cc/XJ3Z-ULJ4)
Featured Image: Natalya Kosarevich/Shutterstock
Salesforce this week announced Agentforce 3, which the company says will give Agentforce customers the visibility and control they need to scale their AI agents.
Visibility is a fundamental problem for early AI agent deployments. Simply put, teams can’t see what their agents are doing. It’s no surprise Agentforce 3 takes steps to increase control for businesses deploying AI agents.
Here’s a look at the key elements of Agentforce 3.
Agentforce Command Center, which is built into Agentforce Studio, is an observability solution that delivers a single pane of glass to monitor agent health, measure performance and optimize outcomes.
Teams can use Command Center to analyze every AI agent interaction, drill into specific moments, understand usage trends, and see AI-powered recommendations for tagged conversation types. This can all be used to continuously improve the agent experience.
Live, detailed analytics will help teams monitor for latency and escalation frequency, while real-time alerts can be triggered when the unexpected happens.
Command Center offers detailed dashboards that track agent adoption, feedback, success rates, cost and topic performance, which means teams can see what’s gaining traction and where to improve.
Agentforce captures agent activity in a native, extensible session-tracing data model in Salesforce Data Cloud, which powers analytics, monitoring and real-time alerting. The OpenTelemetry standard allows teams to integrate these agent signals with popular tools, including Datadog, Splunk, Wayfound and other Salesforce monitoring partners.
Dig deeper: Salesforce Agentforce: What you need to know
Agentforce will soon include a native model context protocol (MCP) client, allowing Agentforce agents to connect to any MCP-compliant server without any custom code. That gives access to enterprise tools, prompts and resources — governed by existing security policies.
Central to the MCP strategy are a pair of companies owned by Salesforce.
New MCP connectors for MuleSoft will convert any API and integration into an agent-ready asset, complete with security policies, activity tracing and traffic controls.
Heroku Managed Inference and AppLink will make it fast and easy to deploy, register, maintain and connect custom MCP servers. With Heroku’s secure infrastructure and DevOps automation, developers can bring trusted custom actions to Agentforce.
Agentforce customers can discover MCP servers from more than 30 partners through AgentExchange. Launch MCP partners include AWS, Box, Cisco, Google Cloud, IBM, Notion, PayPal, Stripe, Teradata and WRITER.
Dig deeper: Salesforce introduces new Agentforce pricing models
Agentforce 3 includes an enhanced Atlas architecture with lower latency, greater accuracy, global availability, and additional control options through new LLMs hosted on Salesforce infrastructure.
Agentforce can now use Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model hosted via Amazon Bedrock within the Salesforce trust boundary to meet customers’ needs in high-compliance industries. Anthropic will work with Salesforce to help customers in regulated industries scale Agentforce adoption with Claude. Later in 2025, Salesforce will also allow customers to use Google’s Gemini in Agentforce.
Other Agentforce 3 enhancements include:
Agentforce 3 features and availabilityAvailable todayIn pilot or Beta todayTo be released soonAgentforce 3Anthropic Claude models hosted within the Salesforce trust boundary — GA in JulyAgentforce native MCP support – July 2025Agentforce adoption analyticsMuleSoft MCP and A2A support — GA in July 2025Agentforce Command Center and Agentforce Studio app – August 2025Testing Center enhancementsHeroku AppLink — GA in July 2025100+ new, pre-built industry actionsSession Tracing Data Model — GA in August 2025New Agentforce add-on SKUs with unlimited employee action usageAgent health monitoring — GA in August 2025Heroku managed MCP server hostingIncreased speed and response streamingWeb Search for Agentforce Data LibrariesAgentforce for Government Cloud Plus with FedRAMP High authorizationExpanded global availability (Canada, U.K., India, Japan, Brazil) and language support (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese)
Born to a Texan mother and a French father, the photographer spent his formative years between Austin and Toulouse and growing up, Alex recalls being enamoured by Western films. “With their strong male leads, they had a big impact on me growing up. They shaped my early perception of what a ‘real’ man should be,” Alex says. “While those portrayals can be inspiring, I now see how they can also be misleading, especially for young boys who look up to these heroes.”
To really tune into modern cowboy culture, Alex left his Berlin base and returned to his childhood home and cowboy heartland: Texas. He travelled across the state meeting ranchers at rodeos and through prior connections, he lived and worked on various ranches for a few days or weeks, immersing himself in the local community. Visually, Alex was intent on “reproducing the visual language that has historically been used to construct and romanticize the cowboy myth”. Rather than trying to enhance his surroundings, Alex instead preferred to “imitate” them, using film, avoiding flash, working with natural light and seeking out visual atmospheres often recreated in Westerns, like sunsets and dark shadows.
Such dedication to theme has resulted in a collection of images that feel hard to place chronologically. They feel as though they could have been plucked from a dusty, pre-21st century photo album, that is, until you spot the small signals of modernity. The only group shot from the Memories of Dust is a high-school rodeo, a breathtaking mid-action shot that shows a group of teenagers (the next generation of riders) watching on as a peer rides a bucking horse into the ring. In this image, two things stand out to Alex: the teenagers’ stares and smartphones pointed at the rider. For Alex, the phone does more than simply signal era. In line with philosopher Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, the phone, in Alex’s eyes, becomes an “analogy for masculinity as performance, a comment on the power of myth-making through visual media”. Here, Alex posits the idea that rather than individuals willingly maintaining the hyper-masculine cowboy myth, it’s simply the image they’ve been taught to fabricate and present to the outside world.
AI is being rapidly implemented, but that doesn’t mean it’s being used effectively.
The current lack of clear benchmarks and data about AI usage has meant that everyone has been operating in the dark.
This led us to create our first State Of AI In Marketing report, so that chief marketing officers and marketing decision-makers can have insights to make better informed decisions as they navigate the fast-moving developments in our industry.
We asked eight key questions about generative AI in marketing to a selection of U.S.-based decision-makers and leaders.
We got 155 responses from mostly senior marketers, directors, and C-suite to offer fresh insights into how industry leaders perceive AI, and how they are using AI right now.
While some marketers are unlocking major gains in efficiency, others are struggling with poor output quality, lack of brand voice consistency, and legal uncertainties.
Our whitepaper presents their responses, broken down across five core themes:
Whether you’re leading a team or building a roadmap, this report is designed to help you benchmark your AI strategy to make confident decisions as our industry moves at an unprecedented pace.
Over 83% of marketers said ChatGPT has positively impacted their efficiency or effectiveness.
But it’s not the only player: Tools like Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Canva AI are also making their mark, with many marketers assembling AI “stacks” that combine different strengths across platforms.
Unsurprisingly, the most impact in marketing so far among our respondents is based around content, where 64.5% experienced value with content creation, 43.9% with content optimization, and 43.9% with idea generation.
However, AI is not replacing creativity; it’s augmenting it. Marketing teams are using tools to speed up, optimize and break through creative blocks, not to replace human insight.
The report also shares other key areas where AI has delivered the most value to those surveyed.
The majority of respondents (76.8%) cited time savings as the biggest improvement since adopting AI.
To enhance productivity and efficiency, marketers are gaining hours back to relocate their time to more strategic work.
While operational efficiency is clearly impacted, strategic metrics like customer lifetime value, lead quality, and attribution remain largely unchanged.
In other words, AI is streamlining how we work, but not necessarily improving what we deliver without human oversight and a sound strategy.
More than half (54.2%) of respondents identified inaccurate, unreliable, or inconsistent output quality as the biggest limitation in using AI for marketing.
This highlights a central theme that AI still requires substantial human oversight to produce marketing-ready content.
The most cited concern about AI’s rise in marketing wasn’t job loss; it was the risk of misinformation.
A full 62.6% of respondents flagged AI-generated misinformation as their top worry, revealing the importance of trust, accuracy, and reputation for AI-powered content.
The report also highlights the other areas of concern where marketers are experiencing limitations and inefficiencies.
Marketing decision-makers surveyed are prioritizing AI investments where value has already been proven. The report breaks down how much of that investment is across analytics, customer experience, SEO, marketing attribution, or content production, amongst other areas.
The report findings also indicate whether and how our respondents restructured to accommodate AI within their organization.
Possibly the most insightful section is where respondents gave their thoughts into what would be AI’s biggest impact on marketing over the next 12 months.
Many expect a content explosion, where the market is flooded with AI-generated assets, raising the bar for originality and quality.
Others foresee a reshaped search industry and reduced roles, with an emphasis on those who don’t embrace AI getting left behind.
But, not all forecasts are negative. Several marketers believe AI will level the playing field for small businesses, increase access to high-quality tools, and empower individuals to do the work of many.
You can find many more comments and predictions in the full report.
Right now is one of the most challenging times our industry has faced, and marketing leaders have hard decisions to make.
Hopefully, this whitepaper will help to shed light on how and where leaders can move forward.
In the report, you can find:
Download the full AI in marketing survey report to make confident decisions in your AI implementation strategy.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
LGBTQ+-focused publishers faced a tougher-than-usual Pride month this June, as ad dollars failed to materialize.
Some saw fewer new advertisers and lower ad spend this Pride month compared to last year.
Execs at four LGBTQ+-focused publishers Digiday spoke to attributed the slowdowns and pullbacks to the current social and political climate.
Some blamed the Trump administration’s pushback on diversity, equity and inclusion programs (ad budgets spent with LGBTQ+-focused publishers typically come out of multicultural marketing commitments). Others said advertisers have been more cautious with LGBTQ+ media spending since the 2023 backlash to Bud Light’s Pride campaign featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. And the current economic climate is the cherry on top, they said. Corporate Pride sponsorships overall are shrinking this year, for these same reasons.
Ad agency Burrell Communications Group is among those struggling to get brands to commit spending with LGBTQ+ publications, and has seen multicultural budgets get shaved, according to chief strategy officer God-Is-Rivera. “I am seeing this mad scramble of, ‘what can we do to keep doing this?’ Or at least, if it was 100% funded, ‘can we keep it at 50% funded?’” she said.
If a brand’s values align with LGBTQ+ publishers and their audience, it shouldn’t pull ad spend at contentious times like these, stressed God-Is Rivera. “Are you going to be someone else every four years in the U.S.?… Brand values need to be unshakable,” she said. “They need to parse through what that looks like among sentiment shifts… I’m seeing this behavior that’s unsustainable.”
While the outcome is less dire than the dwindling Pride Month brand deals for LGBTQ+ influencers, the slowdown means these publishers are grappling with less revenue than they expected so far this year.
One LGBTQ+ publishing company’s Pride Month ad revenue is about a third less than it was last year, with about 30% fewer deals year-over-year, according to its CEO, who asked not to be identified to speak candidly. Ad revenue for Revry, an LGBTQ+-focused connected TV streaming network, is flat this June year over year.
“Several brands that we had been in deep discussions with in early 2025 implied their reticence to be in an LGBTQ+ environment given the political climate — and ultimately passed. One brand in particular actually had a Pride campaign, which got pulled at the last minute,” Mark Tevis, Revry’s evp of sales & partnerships, told Digiday in an email. He declined to name names.
The anonymous CEO told Digiday their company’s advertisers sit in two buckets: one that spends with their publications throughout the year, and another that “pops up like whack-a-mole” around events like Pride. Ad spend from brands in the first bucket has remained consistent this year, they said.
But the ones in the second bucket have “declined significantly,” the CEO said. Pride Month is typically their company’s single-highest revenue month. This year, their company won’t hit its Q2 revenue goal. The publisher’s ad revenue is 95% direct sold, and the rest programmatic, according to the CEO.
But their company planned for this, once Trump was elected, they added. They’ve had to be more cautious with spending this year, cutting back on large events around Pride.
“We would’ve happily scrambled and made them bigger… with the right advertisers,” the CEO said. “But we made a guess and we were right.”
Those “pop up” advertisers standing on the sidelines this month are also a lost opportunity, the CEO said. “We might’ve been able to expand [a Pride-related campaign] into something bigger,” they said.
Because of the current economic, political and social volatility, there’s a lot of “trepidation” from advertisers, according to Rivera, who said brands need to commit to the audiences they are trying to reach, instead of being “wishy-washy.”
Rivera, who joined Burrell three months ago, is working on a framework for response strategies when sentiments change. “To watch [advertisers] cower and be still [around Pride]… that is disappointing. As a strategist, it’s my job and the job of others in my position to solve for what is best… We need to work on the solution. This idea of just pulling back and then, what happens in 2026?” Rivera said.
Tag Warner, the CEO of the U.K.-based Gay Times, said in a TikTok video that the company lost eight of its 10 advertisers in the last 12 months.
Most of Revry’s advertisers are not pulling back this month, “but we are also not seeing many new brands sign on,” Tevis said. In 2024, Revry had 23 total advertisers around Pride, with 19 new brands. This year, the company has 28 advertisers, with 18 new brands. “We have more advertisers in 2025 than in 2024, so budgets have been decreased,” Tevis said.
Going into 2025, Revry was forecasting year-over-year growth in June. With that no longer the case, Revry is figuring out how to make this up elsewhere, Tevis said. Fortunately, most of Revry’s advertisers have bought sponsorships that go beyond Pride, he added. “It is not atypical for Revry to see higher ad revenue in months outside of June,” Tevis said.
A publishing exec at another LGBTQ+ publisher – who requested to speak anonymously – said they were sold through for the month of Pride. However, last year their publication had big, splashy sponsorships from brands around Pride. This year, their publication has sold its June inventory, but not as much is centered around Pride-related content or events, they said.
“Brands are still advertising with us because they see that LGBTQ+ is part of growth marketing,” they said. “But it’s less loud and less proud.”
Even if Pride is not what it has been historically this year, execs remained optimistic.
“We lost 15 deals [in March 2020]. Everybody pulled back [because of the COVID-19 pandemic]. But that Q4 lit up,” the anonymous CEO said. “After six-to-nine months of Trump, and the tariff threats [die down], that’s a possibility for that in the back half of the year.”
Imagine walking into a retro diner tucked away in Woodstock, New York. The red vinyl booths gleam, the jukebox hums, and your milkshake arrives…except it’s flavoured with Cheez-Its.
Welcome to the Cheez-In Diner, a pop-up that took the nostalgic feel of a 1950s eatery and reimagined it with a cheesy twist. It wasn’t just about snacks. It was about stepping into the world of Cheez-It, experiencing the brand’s playful identity in a way that was memorable, tangible, and, yes, highly Instagrammable.
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This post was sponsored by InMotion Hosting. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
We’ve all felt it, that sinking feeling in your stomach when your site starts crawling instead of sprinting.
Page speed reports start flashing red. Search Console is flooding your inbox with errors.
You know it’s time for better hosting, but here’s the thing: moving a large website without tanking your SEO is like trying to change tires while your car is still moving.
We’ve seen too many migrations go sideways, which is why we put together this guide.
Let’s walk through a migration plan that works. One that’ll future-proof your site without disrupting your rankings or overburdening your team.
Before you touch a single line of code, you need benchmarks. Think of these as your “before” pictures in a website makeover.
If you skip this step, you’ll regret it later. How will you know if your migration was successful if you don’t know where you started?
Gather your current page speed numbers, uptime percentages, and server response times. These will serve as proof that the migration was worth it.
Next, let’s identify what’s working for your site and what’s holding it back. Keep a detailed record of your current setup, including your content management system (CMS), plugins, traffic patterns, and peak periods.
Large sites often have unusual, hidden connections that only reveal themselves at the worst possible moments during migrations. Trust us, documenting this now prevents those 2 AM panic attacks later.
Let’s get specific about what success looks like. Saying “we want the site to be faster” is like saying “we want more leads.” It sounds great, but how do you measure it?
Aim for concrete targets, such as:
We recommend running tests with Google Lighthouse and GTmetrix at different times of day. You’d be surprised how performance can vary between your morning coffee and afternoon slump.
Your top money-making pages deserve special attention during migration, so keep tabs on those.
Not all hosting options can handle the big leagues.
We’ve seen too many migrations fail because someone picked a hosting plan better suited for a personal blog than an enterprise website.
Let’s break down what we’ve found works best.
Managed VPS is excellent for medium-sized sites. If you’re receiving 100,000 to 500,000 monthly visitors, this might be your sweet spot. You’ll have the control you need without the overkill.
Dedicated servers are what we recommend for the major players. If you’re handling millions of visitors or running complex applications, this is for you.
What we appreciate about dedicated resources is that they eliminate the “noisy neighbor” problem, where someone else’s traffic spike can tank your performance. Enterprise sites on dedicated servers load 40-60% faster and rarely experience those resource-related outages.
WordPress-optimized hosting is ideal if you’re running WordPress. These environments come pre-tuned with built-in caching and auto-updates. Why reinvent the wheel, right?
Let’s talk about what your web hosting will need for SEO success.
NVMe SSDs are non-negotiable these days. They’re about six times faster than regular storage for database work, and you’ll feel the difference immediately.
A good CDN is essential if you want visitors from different regions to have the same snappy experience. Server-level caching makes a huge difference, as it reduces processing work and speeds up repeat visits and search crawls.
Image created by InMotion Hosting, June 2025
Staging environments aren’t optional for big migrations. They’re your safety net. Keep in mind that emergency fixes can cost significantly more than setting up staging beforehand.
And please ensure you have 24/7 migration support from actual humans. Not chatbots, real engineers who answer the phone when things go sideways at midnight.
Think about where your site is headed, not just where it is now.
Are you launching in new markets? Planning a big PR push? Your hosting should handle growth without making you migrate again six months later.
One thing that often gets overlooked: redirect limits. Many platforms cap at 50,000-100,000 redirects, which sounds like a lot until you’re migrating a massive product catalog.
Preparation separates smooth migrations from disasters. This phase makes or breaks your project.
First things first: backups, backups, backups. We’re talking complete copies of both files and databases.
Don’t dump everything into one giant folder labeled “Site Stuff.” Organizing backups by date and type. Include the entire file system, database exports, configuration files, SSL certificates, and everything else.
Here’s a common mistake we often see: not testing the restore process before migration day. A backup you can’t restore is wasted server space. Always conduct a test restore on a separate server to ensure everything works as expected.
Your new hosting environment should closely mirror your production environment. Match PHP versions, database settings, security rules, everything. This isn’t the time to upgrade seven different things at once (we’ve seen that mistake before).
Run thorough pre-launch tests on staging. Check site speed on different page types. Pull out your phone and verify that the mobile display works.
Use Google’s testing tools to confirm that your structured data remains intact. The goal is no surprises on launch day.
DNS strategy might sound boring, but it can make or break your downtime window.
Here’s what works: reduce your TTL to at least 300 seconds (5 minutes) about 48 hours before migration. This makes DNS changes propagate quickly when you flip the switch.
Have all your DNS records prepared in advance: A records, CNAMEs for subdomains, MX records for email, and TXT records for verification. Keep a checklist and highlight the mission-critical ones that would cause panic if forgotten.
This might be controversial, but we’re advocates for freezing all content and development changes for at least 48 hours before migration.
The last thing you need is someone publishing a new blog post right as you’re moving servers.
You can use this freeze time for team education. It’s a perfect moment to run workshops on technical SEO or explain how site speed affects rankings. Turn downtime into learning time.
Migration day! This is where all your planning pays off, or where you realize what you forgot.
Choose your timing carefully. You should aim for when traffic is typically lowest.
For global sites, consider the “follow-the-sun” approach. This means migrating region by region during their lowest traffic hours. While it takes longer, it dramatically reduces risk.
Clear communication is everything. Everyone should know exactly what they’re doing and when.
Define clear go/no-go decision points. Who makes the call if something looks off? What’s the threshold for rolling back vs. pushing through?
Having these conversations before you’re in the middle of a migration saves a ton of stress.
Once you flip the switch, monitoring becomes your best friend. Here are the key items to monitor:
Sudden spikes in 404 errors or drops in speed need immediate attention. They’re usually signs that something didn’t migrate correctly.
The faster you catch these issues, the less impact they’ll have on your rankings.
After launch, run through a systematic checklist:
One step people often forget: resubmitting your sitemap in Search Console as soon as possible. This helps Google discover your new setup faster.
Even with a perfect migration, most large sites take 3-6 months for complete re-indexing, so patience is key.
The migration itself is just the beginning. Post-migration tuning is where the magic happens.
Now that you’re observing real traffic patterns, you can optimize your setup.
Start by enhancing caching rules based on actual user behavior. Adjust compression settings, and optimize those database queries that seemed fine during testing but are sluggish in production.
Handling redirects at the server level, rather than through plugins or CMS settings, is faster and reduces server load.
Set up alerts for issues before they become problems. We recommend monitoring:
Automation saves you from constantly checking dashboards, allowing you to focus on improvements instead of firefighting.
Server logs tell you a lot about how well your migration went from an SEO perspective. Look for fewer crawl errors, faster Googlebot response times, and better crawl budget usage.
Improvements in crawl efficiency mean Google can discover and index your new content much faster.
Compare your post-migration performance to those baseline metrics you wisely collected.
When showing results to executives, connect each improvement to business outcomes. For example:
Pro tip: Build easy-to-read dashboards that executives can access at any time. This helps build confidence and alleviate concerns.
You don’t need more proof that hosting matters. Every slow page load and server hiccup already demonstrates it. What you need is a plan that safeguards your SEO investment while achieving tangible improvements.
This guide provides you with that playbook. You now know how to benchmark, choose the right solutions, and optimize for success.
This approach can be applied to sites of all sizes, ranging from emerging e-commerce stores to large enterprise platforms. The key lies in preparation and partnering with the right support team.
If you’re ready to take action, consider collaborating with a hosting provider that understands the complexities of large-scale migrations. Look for a team that manages substantial redirect volumes and builds infrastructure specifically for high-traffic websites. Your future rankings will thank you!
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by InMotion Hosting. Used with permission.
In-Post Image: Images by InMotion Hosting. Used with permission.
